❝ In the industrial world, it’s not that sales and marketing are broken—it’s that they’re misfiring in different directions – and the cost is higher than you think. ❞
A Hidden Threat to Growth
Industrial B2B companies often face a silent problem that undermines their growth: marketing and sales are out of sync. This misalignment is a quiet crisis – not as dramatic as a factory shutdown, but just as dangerous to revenue and growth.
Consider a common scenario: Marketing proudly delivers a list of leads from a trade show, only for sales to shrug and say, “These are useless.”
Sales reps create their own ad-hoc product sheets because they don’t trust the official marketing brochures.
Each team operates in a silo, unintentionally working against the other.
If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone – in one survey, 96% of sales and marketing professionals admitted their departments don’t even measure success by the same metrics.
The costs of this disconnect are real. Research by Harvard Business Review estimated that companies lose $1 trillion each year from sales and marketing misalignment.
Opportunities are missed or mishandled, and precious marketing dollars go to waste.
Sales teams complain about “junk leads,” while marketing laments “lazy follow-up.” Meanwhile, potential customers slip through the cracks. Internally, morale suffers as each side grows frustrated—marketing feels undervalued, and sales feels unsupported. It’s no surprise that only about 30% of sales and marketing professionals rate their teams as “strongly aligned.” The remaining 70% know things could be much better, but many industrial firms simply live with the tension, treating it as “business as usual”.
Why is this crisis quiet, especially in industrial sectors?
In many manufacturing and engineering-driven companies, sales has traditionally been king while marketing played a smaller, supporting role. Culturally, the two functions didn’t (historically) collaborate closely. Think of the veteran sales rep who closes deals through personal relationships, versus the marketer focusing on trade show booths, brochures, and the company website. They speak different languages and use different yardsticks to measure success. Over time, this gap widens – and unlike a dramatic failure, misalignment doesn’t cause an immediate explosion; it leads to a slow bleed of mediocre results.
It’s “quiet” because it often goes unaddressed publicly, even as it sucks the life out of potential growth behind the scenes. But in today’s industrial buying environment, this status quo is untenable.
Modern B2B buyers have changed the game. More than half of a typical B2B buyer’s journey is now completed before the buyer ever talks to sales, as decision-makers turn to online research, content, and peer recommendations.
By the time a prospect contacts your sales team, they may have formed opinions based on your marketing content (or lack thereof). At the same time, industrial purchases usually involve multiple stakeholders – an engineering manager, a procurement officer, a production supervisor, a financial executive, and more. In fact, the average B2B buying decision now involves 6 to 10 people on the customer’s side, each armed with their own research and concerns.
If marketing and sales aren’t tightly aligned in how they address these stakeholders at each stage of the journey, it’s easy to lose momentum. Misalignment leads to inconsistent messages: the technical buyer hears one thing, the CFO hears another, and doubts multiply.
The good news is that this is a solvable problem.
Sales and marketing can (and should) work as a cohesive unit; when they do, the payoff is enormous! Companies with strong sales-marketing alignment see higher win rates and revenue growth; one study famously found that aligned teams are 67% better at closing deals. In industrial sectors, where each deal can be large and complex, that advantage is game-changing.
The following sections outline some practical moves to assist you in bridging the divide. These recommendations aren’t academic theory; they’re drawn from hard-won experience in the industrial B2B trenches. Each comes with real scenarios I’ve encountered (either personally or through my firm’s engagements) and tangible steps you can take. Think of it as advice from a seasoned industrial marketing advisor who’s seen what actually works. Let’s turn down the blame volume, break the silos, and get sales and marketing playing from the same sheet of music.
Practical Moves That Create Alignment
Bridging the gap between marketing and sales requires deliberate action on multiple fronts. It won’t happen by wishful thinking or a one-time team-building exercise. The key is to attack the misalignment from all angles – strategy, process, technology, and culture. Here are five practical moves, each illustrated with real-world examples, to create true sales-marketing alignment:
1. Unite Around Shared Goals, Metrics, and Definitions
Misalignment often starts at the top. A ship’s captain is responsible for selecting the intended destination so that their seasoned crew can chart a course and make adequate preparations.
If marketing and sales chase different goals and are measured on conflicting metrics, they will never truly align. The first move is to establish shared targets and definitions backed by leadership support. This might sound basic, but it’s astonishing how often it’s neglected – 62% of teams define a “qualified lead” differently between sales and marketing, which leads to endless squabbling over lead quality. Stopping the quiet crisis begins with ensuring everyone is on the same page about what success looks like.
In practice, this means the VP of Sales and the VP of Marketing (or equivalent leaders) must literally sit down together–with the CEO’s blessing–and hash out a joint plan.
Define your “North Star” metrics together.
For instance, agree that “X new customers generating $Y in revenue” is the primary goal for the year, and that marketing’s and sales’ efforts will both be judged by their contribution to that goal. If marketing has traditionally been measured on things like website traffic or number of leads, and sales only on closed deals, you need to create a bridge metric, such as sales-qualified leads (SQLs) or pipeline revenue that both sides commit to. It is also essential to agree upon and set values for the intangible benefits so that the whole team is on the same page. Increasing brand awareness throughout a buyer’s journey may not create an immediate lead, but it has value in increasing engagement and opportunity.
One industrial components manufacturer I worked with made this shift: they moved from marketing bragging about hundreds of trade show leads (regardless of quality) and sales focusing only on their quarterly quota, to a shared KPI of “marketing-sourced revenue.” Marketing was tasked with delivering a pipeline worth a certain dollar value, and sales committed to a follow-up timeframe and conversion rate on those opportunities. This immediately changed the conversation – it was no longer about “your leads” vs “our sales,” but a joint accountability for revenue outcomes.
Executive sponsorship is critical here. In the above case, the company’s President publicly announced these shared targets and made it clear that bonuses for both teams would tie to the combined results. That sent a powerful message: alignment isn’t optional. When top leadership treats marketing and sales as two sides of the same coin, the teams are far more likely to cooperate.
In another scenario, at a mid-sized machinery OEM, the CEO realized that without alignment, growth goals would be impossible. She convened a quarterly meeting with the Sales Director and Marketing Director to review progress on unified goals. Early on, these meetings revealed disconnects – for example, marketing was counting “leads” including webinar sign-ups that sales didn’t consider viable. By agreeing on a tighter lead definition (e.g. only count leads that meet certain firmographic criteria and requested a sales interaction) and tracking that, they removed a major source of friction. Marketing stopped celebrating vanity metrics, and sales stopped dismissing every marketing lead/data point, because now a lead was defined by both parties’ input. Over time, trust grew as both teams saw that when they aimed at the same target, they actually started hitting it.
A shared definition framework might include:
What constitutes a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)?
What elevates an MQL to a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)?
How quickly will sales contact an SQL, and how will they report back on the outcome?
Document these in an alignment agreement or SLA (Service Level Agreement) between sales and marketing. It might specify, for example, “Marketing will only pass leads that have: a valid business email, company size > X, and indicated project interest within 6 months. Sales will call those leads within 2 business days and update the status in CRM within a week.” It may feel formal, but clarity here prevents loads of misunderstanding. When both teams work to a common scorecard, there’s far less room for the quiet crisis to fester. As a bonus, celebrating shared wins becomes possible – imagine your Head of Sales and Head of Marketing standing together in front of the executive team, explaining how a joint campaign brought in $2 million of new business. That’s the power of alignment!
2. Tear Down Data Silos by Integrating Systems (CRM, ERP, etc.)
Technical and data barriers often feed misalignment. It’s hard to align if each team is looking at different information or if critical insights live in disconnected systems. A second practical move is to integrate your systems – especially CRM, marketing automation, and even ERP – to create a single source of truth about customers and leads. Nearly 79% of organizations have critical misalignment between sales and marketing data (e.g., different reports, inconsistent customer info) according to Forrester research. In industrial firms, this is frequently the case: perhaps sales lives out of an ERP or a legacy CRM, while marketing uses an email automation tool or spreadsheet. The result is fragmented data – marketing can’t see which leads turned into customers, and sales lack context on what marketing engagements a lead had before the sales call.
One field example: my team consulted for an industrial pumps distributor where marketing was generating a lot of leads via online webinars and contact forms. But unbeknownst to marketing, many of these leads were already in the company’s ERP as existing customers or active prospects being handled by sales. The marketing database wasn’t synced with the sales CRM or ERP, so marketing would pass these “new” leads to the sales team – essentially telling the reps to chase accounts they were already working on.
You can imagine the eye-rolling from sales. It made marketing look out of touch, and sales started to ignore the marketing lead reports entirely.
To fix this, we helped integrate their systems: we connected the marketing automation platform with the CRM, which in turn was tied into the ERP customer records. Immediately, duplicate leads and customer entries were flagged before being handed over. Marketing could see if a contact was an existing customer or already assigned to a rep, and they adjusted their nurturing accordingly.
Sales, on the other hand, gained visibility into marketing touchpoints – they could see that a prospect had attended last week’s webinar or downloaded a technical guide from the website, which armed the sales rep with valuable context for follow-up.
This relatively simple data integration eliminated a source of friction and prevented embarrassing missteps. It turned out many of the “junk leads” weren’t junk at all – they just weren’t new. With a unified view, marketing refocused on truly new prospects, and sales started valuing the marketing intel on their accounts.
Another scenario highlighting technical misfires: a precision parts manufacturer ran an email marketing campaign promoting a specific high-margin product line. The marketing team crafted a great message and generated interest, but there was a catch – they didn’t realize the product was back-ordered for 8 weeks due to supply chain issues noted in the ERP. Sales was blindsided when customers they contacted responded with “we already tried to order this, and your team told us it’s not available for two months!”
Marketing had unwittingly driven demand that the company couldn’t immediately fulfill, irritating customers and sales alike. The root cause was, again, a lack of integration: marketing’s systems weren’t pulling inventory or production data from the ERP.
The lesson learned was to connect backend systems with front-end campaigns. After this incident, the company set up a dashboard (accessible to both marketing and sales) that pulled key ERP data like inventory levels and lead times for promoted products. Marketing also implemented a rule in their campaign planning: always check product availability with operations/ERP data before launching promotions. By linking these data sources, they avoided future misfires where marketing might drum up interest that the business couldn’t capitalize on. Sales appreciated the change – it saved them from tough conversations and built confidence that marketing’s efforts were actually aligned with ground reality.
Integrating systems can sound like a daunting IT project, but it doesn’t have to happen all at once. Start with your CRM (Customer Relationship Management software) and MAS (Marketing Automation Solution) – make sure both marketing and sales are using the same systems or at least that the marketing system feeds data into the sales CRM. 78% of sales leaders say that a well-utilized CRM improves alignment between sales and marketing, precisely because it creates a common window into the pipeline. If you’re in a smaller industrial firm without a fancy CRM, even establishing a shared spreadsheet or database is better than nothing.
The goal is to eliminate the “two versions of the truth” syndrome.
Ideally, integrate your marketing automation solution, CRM, and ERP so that customer status, deal progress, and marketing touches are all visible. This might involve some upfront investment in tools or consulting, but the payoff is huge: you’ll enable closed-loop reporting (marketing can see which campaigns led to actual sales, and sales can see which leads have been nurtured and how), and you’ll foster data-driven trust. When both teams derive insights from the same data pool, it naturally aligns their decisions.
For example, if a particular campaign generated 50 leads and the CRM shows 10 became opportunities and 3 closed deals, marketing and sales can jointly analyze why those 3 succeeded (what was done right?) and why others did not – rather than finger-pointing, it becomes a shared investigation. In short, integrating systems breaks down one of the most pernicious silos fueling the quiet crisis. It shines a light on the entire revenue pipeline, so marketing and sales can actually see each other’s contributions and work in tandem.
3. Map the Full Buying Journey Together – Including Every Stakeholder
Industrial sales are rarely one-call closes. They involve long buying cycles, detailed evaluations, and, as mentioned, multiple stakeholders with different priorities. A common misalignment pitfall is when marketing and sales each focus on only a piece of that puzzle. Marketing might concentrate on generating initial awareness and assume their job ends once a lead is handed off, while sales deals with the later-stage decision makers and thinks marketing’s early content was too superficial or missed key concerns. To align effectively, both teams need to collaboratively map out the entire buying journey and identify all the players involved. This shared understanding ensures that marketing’s efforts align with sales’ reality at every stage, and that no important stakeholder or question is overlooked.
In practice, building unified buyer personas and journey maps is an excellent alignment exercise. I once facilitated a workshop for an industrial automation firm where we literally got marketing and sales people in a room (with a whiteboard, a ton of Post-It notes, and plenty of coffee) to sketch the typical customer journey. The marketing team started by outlining the stages as they saw them – e.g. Awareness (prospect learns about our solutions via a blog or trade pub) → Consideration (they download a spec sheet or attend a webinar) → Evaluation (there’s a meeting or demo with sales) → Purchase (they ask for a quote, negotiate and close). Not a bad outline…
But then the sales folks chimed in with on-the-ground reality: “Actually, after that webinar, usually an engineering manager and a procurement analyst are doing research in parallel. And there’s often a hidden stage where our champion is trying to convince their internal finance person. By the time we’re doing a formal demo, we might already be on a vendor shortlist without knowing it.”
It was eye-opening for marketing.
We added those nuances to the map: an influencer engineer who initiates contact after consuming technical content, a procurement officer who quietly runs a cost comparison behind the scenes, and a CFO who only shows up at the final approval stage with an eye on ROI.
Crucially, we listed the key questions or concerns of each stage and stakeholder.
For example, the design engineer cares about technical compatibility and performance specs – “Will this component integrate with our existing system? Is it built to our quality standards?”
The procurement person cares about cost, supplier reliability, and delivery – “Are we getting a good price? Can this vendor guarantee lead times? What about post-sale support?”
The CFO cares about financial impact – “What’s the total cost of ownership? What ROI or payback can we expect?”
Sales had learned these through countless conversations, while marketing had some insights from market research. By sharing and documenting them together, we formed a holistic view of the buyer’s world.
This collaborative mapping was a game changer. Marketing realized that some of their content was only speaking to the engineers’ concerns (e.g., product feature brochures) and not to the others. Sales realized that marketing actually had created certain materials (like a whitepaper on efficiency gains) that they weren’t using but would perfectly address the CFO’s questions, simply because they hadn’t been aware of it. We ended up with a unified buying journey matrix: stages across the top, personas down the side, with key questions and required content at each intersection.
For instance, at the “consideration/research” stage, the engineer persona needs a deep technical datasheet or CAD drawing, the procurement persona might need a general spec sheet plus an explanation of ROI, and the finance persona isn’t involved yet. At the “evaluation” stage, the engineer wants to see a demo or test data, procurement wants references and warranty info, and finance might start looking at a business case. We filled in these gaps and identified where we had content and where we didn’t.
The act of mapping the journey together does two things. First, it educates marketing and sales about each other’s perspectives. Marketing gains respect for the complexity sales navigate in later stages, and sales appreciates the groundwork marketing lays in the early stages. Second, it highlights concrete alignment opportunities, which leads us to the next move: co-creating content and messaging for those stakeholders. Before moving on, though, note that maintaining a shared buyer journey map is not a one-time exercise. Industrial markets evolve (new stakeholders emerge, buying processes change slightly), so make it a living document. Revisit it periodically in joint meetings (semi-annually at least). When a big deal is won or lost, go back to the map: did we properly address each persona? This keeps both teams aligned around the customer, which is the ultimate point. As the saying goes, “focus on the customer and everything else will align.” By mapping the journey together, you ensure both marketing and sales are jointly focusing on that customer’s path, not just their own piece of it.
4. Co-Create Content and Messaging to Tackle Multi-Stakeholder Objections
Once you understand the full buying journey and who’s involved, the next move is to jointly develop content and messaging that arms your team to win over every stakeholder. Misalignment often becomes glaring in the content arena: marketing might churn out brochures or blog posts that sales never use, while sales might promise things or use messaging in the field that marketing isn’t aware of.
This disconnect not only wastes time and effort but can also confuse customers. In fact, an industry study found that 97% of sales and marketing professionals feel that marketing creates content without sales input, often overly product-focused and not helpful to the buyer’s real needs. We need to flip that script!
A powerful way to align is for marketing and sales to collaborate on content creation, from big-picture messaging down to specific sales enablement tools. Let me illustrate with a true-to-life example. An OEM supplier of industrial control systems (PLCs) was struggling to gain traction against a competitor. The sales team complained that even when they got leads, the deals would stall out. We discovered a pattern: in most target accounts, our sales reps were initially engaging with an engineering manager (interested in the technical capabilities of the control system). Marketing’s content was actually pretty good for this audience – things like detailed spec sheets, CAD drawings, and engineering webinars were available and attracted those technical leads. The problem was what happened next. As the deal progressed, that engineering manager had to convince a broader committee: a procurement manager who would scrutinize cost and supplier viability, the operations director who cared about compatibility, integration, and uptime, and a CFO who had to sign off on the capital expense. Our marketing team had given sales almost nothing to help persuade those other people. The sales reps were basically on their own, creating custom slide decks or emailing paragraphs of explanation to answer finance’s concerns one week, then hunting for ROI figures to satisfy procurement the next. It was inefficient and inconsistent.
Our solution was alignment through co-creation. We formed a small team with a couple of sales reps, a product manager, and two marketing content folks. They dissected the stalled deals and each stakeholder’s objections. Then, piece by piece, they built a content toolkit together to systematically address these objections. Marketing led the creation of the content assets, but sales provided crucial input and review.
For the engineers (early-stage), we refined the technical whitepaper and added an FAQ that directly answered tough technical questions sales had encountered in the field. For the procurement folks (mid-stage), we created a cost-of-downtime calculator and a one-page vendor qualification sheet that listed things like our on-time delivery rate, support resources, and client testimonials – information a procurement manager or plant manager would need to justify choosing us. For the CFO (late-stage), we co-developed an ROI case study highlighting how a similar client achieved payback in under 24 months using our control system(s). The salespeople shared exactly what financial execs had grilled them on, and marketing turned those facts into a polished yet straightforward case study with charts and numbers that CFOs care about. Finally, we produced a unified sales presentation deck that integrated all these elements, so that whether a sales rep was presenting to a room of engineers or a mixed committee, they had slides and data to speak to each persona’s interests, all consistent with marketing’s official messaging and branding.
The impact was immediate. In the next big proposal, the sales rep was ready when the CFO predictably asked about ROI – he pulled out the new case study (which the CFO later said was instrumental in getting her comfortable with the investment). When procurement questioned long-term support, the rep provided the one-pager with our support stats and client list, heading off a potential concern about supplier risk.
By aligning on content, the company overcame the multi-stakeholder objections that had been derailing deals. Marketing learned to anticipate these needs rather than just pushing product features, and sales felt much more confident that they had the right tool for the job at each step. Importantly, this process also fostered mutual respect: the sales team saw the value of marketing’s storytelling and polish, and the marketing team gained a deep appreciation for what sales faces in the trenches. They started to function as one cohesive unit, addressing the customer, rather than a relay team dropping the baton.
For your organization, co-creating content can take many forms. Sales enablement materials are a great place to start: work together on things like case studies, playbooks, proposal templates, email templates for follow-ups, and cheat sheets that compare your solution to competitors. Invite veteran sales reps to brainstorm content ideas with marketing – you’ll uncover gold like “Our buyers always ask how this integrates with their legacy system,” which could spark a valuable blog post or video tutorial. Conversely, have marketing brief sales on upcoming campaigns and content releases. For example, if marketing is publishing a new engineering e-book or launching a LinkedIn advertising campaign, sales should know about it and perhaps contribute insight before it’s finalized. This way, messaging stays consistent across all touchpoints – a prospect who downloads a guide from marketing and later talks to a salesperson shouldn’t feel like they’re hearing about two different companies.
A side benefit: involving sales in content creation also makes them more likely to use it. People support what they help build. I’ve seen cases where simply including a couple of sales reps in a content planning meeting led to higher adoption of the final content piece across the whole sales team, because the reps felt represented and spread the word that “this brochure actually answers what customers ask.” On the flip side, marketers who spend a day shadowing sales calls or visiting clients with reps often gain inspiration for content topics and develop a keener sense of the customer’s language.
In sum, content should be a team sport between marketing and sales. When done right, your marketing materials become an extra “salesperson” that works 24/7, and your sales team becomes an extension of marketing by reinforcing the same story during one-on-one interactions. That synergy can significantly shorten sales cycles and increase win rates, especially in complex industrial deals where education and trust-building are paramount.
5. Establish Regular Communication and Feedback Loops
Last but certainly not least, alignment flourishes with ongoing communication. Marketing and sales can’t just set and forget an alignment strategy – it requires real, human dialogue on a consistent basis. The fifth practical move is to institute regular forums for collaboration: meetings, stand-ups, joint reviews – whatever fits your culture – and to encourage an open feedback loop daily, not just at annual planning. The idea is to create a rhythm where marketing and sales share insights, celebrate wins, and address issues together before they fester into resentment. This move sounds simple, but it’s often the hardest because it involves changing habits and sometimes easing longstanding tensions. However, I’ve seen it single-handedly transform fractured teams into a unified force.
At one of the clients described above, initially, the only time marketing and sales really talked was when there was a blow-up, like sales leadership complaining about lead quality in a quarterly business review, or marketing griping that sales ignored a big campaign. We helped institute a monthly sales-marketing huddle. It was set for 90 minutes, once a month, involving the marketing manager, the sales manager, and a few rotating reps and marketers (so different voices could be heard). The rule was that the meeting agenda had to be balanced: marketing would share something, and so would sales.
For example, marketing would present results from the past month’s campaigns: number of leads, which content drew interest, and upcoming marketing plans. Then sales would report on pipeline status: which marketing leads converted, feedback from prospects, and any gaps they’re seeing.
Early on, these meetings were a bit tense. In the first meeting, a sales rep bluntly said, “Most of the leads from the website last month were junk – half had no budget or were students doing research.” The marketing team could have gotten defensive, but because we structured this as a problem-solving forum, they dug in to understand.
It turned out the inquiry form on the website wasn’t asking a qualifying question that the sales team desperately needed (timeline and project scope related). Marketing agreed to tweak the form and also to implement a lead scoring filter so that students downloading a free catalog wouldn’t be immediately passed to sales.
In the same meeting, marketing asked, “We noticed a lot of visitors from the power generation industry on our site, but none of those became leads. Any idea why?”
A salesperson mentioned that our case studies and examples were all for automotive and aerospace, so power industry folks probably didn’t see their use case and lost interest. This was a light bulb moment for marketing – they decided to create one or two pieces of content specific to the power sector and see if that improved conversions. This kind of two-way feedback is gold, and it only surfaces when you create a consistent channel for it.
Importantly, these meetings weren’t just gripe sessions; we also celebrated joint successes. For instance, in one huddle, the sales manager brought up a recent big win and specifically credited a whitepaper that marketing produced: “The customer told us our whitepaper helped convince their engineering team. Kudos to marketing for that piece.” You could feel the positivity and trust blooming in the room. Marketing, in turn, showed data that a certain blog post was getting tons of hits from a key account segment, and sales chimed in that they’d started sending that post via email to prospects who ask about that topic. These moments reinforce aligned behavior – everyone sees the tangible benefits of working together, which motivates more cooperation. Over a few months, what had been a cold, distant relationship between departments warmed considerably. I recall a sales rep casually walking over to a marketer’s desk saying, “Hey, I got an email from a prospect asking about [X]. Do we have anything I can send them?” In the past, he might not have bothered to ask (or even known who to ask); now he had a go-to contact in marketing. That small interaction – one of many – signaled cultural change. The teams began to see themselves as parts of the same revenue team rather than rival camps.
In addition to structured meetings, encourage day-to-day interactions. It can be as simple as having marketing folks join the sales team’s pipeline review calls occasionally, or vice versa, inviting a salesperson to a marketing campaign planning session. Even physically seating teams near each other (if in an office) or using shared Slack/Teams channels helps break down the “us vs them” barrier. One effective tactic is to pair individuals for specific initiatives: say, a marketer is assigned as a liaison for the automotive industry vertical with the corresponding sales account manager. They meet one-on-one to discuss strategy for that segment. This not only produces better targeted campaigns, it also humanizes the relationship – it’s harder to be siloed when you have a real working partnership with someone on the other side.
Finally, close the feedback loop on every lead and every deal. This ties back to system integration but is also a process habit. Marketing should know what happened to the leads they generated:
Did they convert?
If not, why?
Sales should share reasons (e.g., “not a fit, wrong timing, already using competitor X”).
That data is incredibly useful for marketing to refine targeting or nurturing.
Conversely, when sales closes a deal that had significant marketing touches, marketing should be informed so they can attribute what worked and double down on it. Some companies formalize this with a quarterly “win/loss analysis” meeting involving both teams. For example, take a couple of won deals and a couple of lost deals from the last quarter and dissect them together:
How did the prospect first hear of us?
What content did they engage with?
|What did sales do?
Why did we win or lose?
These conversations are rich with insight and help with continuous alignment refinement.
In essence, regular communication ensures alignment isn’t a one-time project that fades, but an ongoing way of doing business. Just like any good relationship, the sales-marketing partnership needs communication to thrive. By making it routine and safe to share feedback, you prevent the little misunderstandings or frustrations from accumulating into that quiet crisis we described. Instead, issues are aired and solved in real time.
Over time, both teams begin to internalize the others’ mindset – marketers start thinking more like salespeople (“Who is this content actually helping to close deals?”) and salespeople start thinking more like marketers (“How can I nurture this lead further with content or insights?”). That’s when you know you’ve achieved true alignment: when the line between sales and marketing starts to blur in a positive way, with everyone simply functioning as one cohesive growth team.
Turning a Crisis into Competitive Advantage
The misalignment of sales and marketing in industrial businesses may be a quiet crisis, but it’s one that executives and teams can decisively address. In fact, tackling this challenge head-on can become a massive competitive advantage. Many of your competitors are likely still stuck in the old, siloed mindset, leaving money on the table. By implementing the practical moves outlined above – from unifying goals, integrating data systems, and co-planning the buyer’s journey to collaborating on content and maintaining open communication loops – you create a smoother, smarter revenue engine. Marketing’s efforts amplify sales’ effectiveness, and sales’ insights make marketing more targeted and powerful. Instead of a dysfunctional duo, you get a force multiplier effect where 1+1 equals 3 in terms of results.
It’s important to recognize that alignment isn’t a one-time fix. It’s a strategic initiative and a cultural shift. Early wins will build momentum – perhaps a joint campaign that lands a big contract, or the first time a salesperson excitedly tells the marketing team, “That lead you gave me was great, let’s get more like that!” Celebrate those moments. They are signs of the tide turning. Also, keep an eye on data: as alignment improves, you should see tangible metrics move in the right direction – faster sales cycles, higher conversion rates from lead to opportunity, better customer retention (since a well-aligned message sets proper expectations). Companies where sales and marketing are highly aligned achieve 19% faster revenue growth and 15% higher profitability on average, according to Forrester. Those are numbers worth pursuing.
For industrial executives, the role of leadership is to nurture this alignment. Set the expectation that sales and marketing win together. Break any ties to old-school thinking that one team “owns” the customer more than the other – the customer is on a journey that involves both. Provide the tools (maybe that CRM upgrade or a data integration project) and the mandate (perhaps even tie part of compensation to shared objectives) to reinforce the behavior changes. And lead by example: when you discuss business performance, always talk about marketing and sales in the same breath, as a unified front contributing to growth.
In closing, the gap between marketing and sales doesn’t have to remain a nagging source of inefficiency. Industrial businesses thrive on efficiency and continuous improvement in their operations; apply that same mindset to your commercial teams. By treating misalignment not as an inevitable fact of life but as a solvable problem, you can transform that quiet crisis into a story of collaboration and success. When marketing and sales march in lockstep, guided by a common strategy and mutual respect, the results will speak loudly – in the language every business understands: more leads, more wins, and more revenue. And perhaps just as importantly, you’ll foster a healthier internal culture. Instead of pointing fingers, people will be pointing to shared victories. In the complex world of industrial B2B sales, that alignment might just be your secret weapon that competitors struggle to replicate. It’s time to turn the volume up on alignment and watch the quiet crisis fade away, replaced by a clear, focused chorus of teamwork and growth.
Sources:
- Misalignment prevalence and cost – Harvard Business Review & industry surveys
- Impact of alignment on win rates and revenue – HubSpot Sales Trends 2024, Marketo report
- Data silo issues – Forrester Research on sales/marketing data misalignment
- CRM as an alignment tool – HubSpot Research 2023 (78% of sales leaders on CRM)
- Average B2B buying group size – Gartner research (6–10 stakeholders)
- Majority of buyer’s journey done before sales – CEB (now Gartner) stat
- Marketing content often lacking sales input – Industry alignment study
- Shared definitions and metrics lacking – LinkedIn & Forrester surveys
