Revenue is on the line—and most teams don’t even realize it. 

The culprit? Misalignment between marketing and sales is silently killing productivity, pipeline velocity, and revenue growth. In fact, more than half of B2B sales professionals say lost sales and revenue is the most significant impact of misalignment. 

Marketing and sales alignment enables tighter communication, smarter content strategy, and stronger buyer engagement. It’s also one of the most powerful ways to boost sales productivity across the board—empowering the team most directly tied to revenue.

82% of C-level B2B executives believe their teams are aligned, 65% of sales and marketing professionals say otherwise.—Forrester

But there’s a gap between perception and reality. Forrester’s 2024 Priorities Survey revealed that while 82% of C-level B2B executives believe their teams are aligned, 65% of sales and marketing professionals say otherwise.

If you’re one of the many companies that knows alignment matters but isn’t sure how to make it happen, good news: you’re in the right place.

Let’s start by breaking down what marketing and sales alignment really means—and why it’s a game-changer for revenue teams. 

What Is Marketing and Sales Alignment? 

Marketing and sales alignment is the strategic coordination of your marketing and sales teams to achieve shared goals, deliver a consistent customer experience, and drive revenue growth. When these teams collaborate effectively, they create a seamless journey—from first touch to loyal customer. 

True alignment involves:

• Breaking down silos with open, ongoing communication
• Sharing data and insights on prospects and customers
• Establishing and working toward common goals
• Crafting unified, buyer-centric messaging
• Creating feedback loops to continually refine content and strategy

At its core, marketing and sales alignment is about putting the customer first. When your teams work in sync, you can deliver the experience modern buyers expect—personalized, cohesive, and trustworthy. The result? A revenue-positive cycle that looks like this:

• Attract the right prospects
• Engage them quickly and meaningfully
• Build long-term loyalty
• Turn satisfied customers into brand advocates

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What separates sales teams that hit targets from those who don’t? The State of Sales Enablement Report 2025 reveals the strategies, tools, and alignment tactics driving results for high-growth teams. Get the report.

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Why Marketing and Sales Alignment Matters More than Ever

Alignment isn’t just another corporate buzzword—it’s a revenue imperative.

When sales and marketing teams operate in sync, they function as a unified growth engine. Shared goals, data, and messaging create a seamless buyer experience that builds trust and drives performance. In today’s B2B landscape, that kind of coordination is no longer optional. It’s a competitive advantage.

Modern buying behavior reinforces this need:

• More brand touchpoints: Buyers engage with your company across websites, webinars, social platforms, and third-party content. Consistency across those touchpoints builds credibility—and only happens when teams are aligned.
• Rep-free research: According to recent Gartner data, 75% of buyers prefer a rep-free experience. That means your content must do more heavy lifting, and it only can when it’s guided by sales insights and jointly owned by both teams.
• Longer, more complex sales cycles: With the average B2B cycle at 2.1 months, any inconsistency in communication or targeting increases friction—and risk of loss.
• High expectations for personalization: Buyers now expect tailored experiences based on their role, industry, and behavior. That level of precision requires tight coordination between marketing and sales to deliver relevant, timely content.

When marketing and sales alignment is done right, the impact ripples across the organization:

• Consistent, on-brand messaging that supports pipeline generation and conversion.
• Stronger interdepartmental collaboration that eliminates silos and accelerates execution.
• Revenue growth driven by better sales efficiency, higher win rates, and improved retention.

In fact, 87% of sales and marketing leaders agree: Alignment is essential to driving business growth. Simply put, companies that prioritize marketing and sales alignment are better positioned to meet modern buyer demands and scale revenue faster.

The Impact of Marketing and Sales Alignment on Sales Productivity

One of the clearest benefits of marketing and sales alignment is its effect on sales productivity—a critical metric for any revenue leader.

Sales productivity is a function of two factors: efficacy (how much revenue a rep generates) and efficiency (how many hours and dollars it takes to generate that revenue). When alignment improves, both inputs strengthen.

Aligned teams drive productivity by:

• Shortening the sales cycle and reducing time to close.
• Improving lead quality with better targeting and qualification. (Only 9.1% of sales reps currently rate their leads from marketing as “very high quality.”)
• Eliminating process friction that distracts reps from selling.

Consider this: the average salesperson spends 70% of their time on non-selling activities. That’s time lost to searching for content, qualifying leads that aren’t a fit, or correcting messaging missteps. Alignment addresses these inefficiencies—freeing up more time for meaningful prospect engagement.

With better alignment, sales teams can:

• Focus on higher-quality leads
• Run more effective discovery calls
• Improve close rates through better-informed conversations

The result? A more productive, motivated sales team—and a stronger bottom line. 

5 Practical Ways Sales and Marketing Collaboration Boosts Sales Efficiency (and Productivity) 

It’s easy to say you want marketing and sales alignment—but much harder to put it into practice. Here are five actionable tactics to help your teams get there.

1. Shared Buyer Personas and Journey Maps

Everyone must be on the same page about buyer personas (the ideal, most-likely-to-buy prospects) and buyer journey maps (the stages a prospect goes through—from cold prospect to loyal brand advocate, including touchpoints, challenges, emotions, and actions). 

In a siloed system, marketing develops these pieces of collateral in isolation and delivers them to sales. In aligned organizations, sales and marketing co-create them, using shared insights—research, customer data, branding, and positioning. As a result, you get messaging and campaigns that are relevant, resonant, consistent, and effective. This shared foundation is a critical first step in building lasting marketing and sales alignment.

2. Sales Enablement through Joint Content Strategy

What if someone told you over half the content you’re paying a marketing team to create is irrelevant? You’d want to make some changes to your processes. Yesterday.

But this is what’s quietly happening in most content teams. According to Forrester, 65% of marketing assets sit unused because they simply aren’t relevant to the sales process. 

65% of marketing assets sit unused because they aren’t relevant to the sales process.—Forrester

Misalignment is the root cause. Marketing often doesn’t understand how sales teams engage with buyers. So, they create content—often lots of it—that doesn’t support real-world selling scenarios. 

With marketing and sales alignment, the two teams create a strong content strategy and an intuitive, easy-to-use system for managing and accessing sales content. 

For sales reps, this delivers real benefits:

• On-demand, just-in-time access to content
• Sales content aligned with real customer conversations
• Less time spent searching for content—or building materials from scratch

3. Closed-Loop Feedback + Collaboration Mindset = Sales Enablement

The foundation of effective marketing and sales alignment is communication. These teams shouldn’t think of themselves as separate units. They’re strategic partners, and they should collaborate regularly.

Achieving this comes from two things: cultivating a collaborative mindset and building systems and processes that support continuous feedback. This allows sales to share insight from the field: what messaging resonates with buyers, what content gains traction, and where gaps exist. Marketing can then refine messaging, improve assets, and update their campaigns based on this in-the-trenches data. 

This type of closed-loop feedback system allows everyone to continually adjust and refine based on what actually works.

4. Unified Technology Stack

Once sales and marketing have the same collaboration mindset, the next step is ensuring the teams have the tools and processes to help them.  

A unified technology stack ensures the teams work, learn, and collaborate in the same environment. Whether it’s a customer relationship management (CRM) tool or a sales enablement platform, your tech stack should:

• Align workflows
• Enable seamless data sharing
• Improve visibility
• Support real-time collaboration and coaching

 5. Shared Goals and Metrics

 If your marketing and sales teams are navigating toward different goals, they won’t reach the same destination.

Shared goals, metrics, and key performance indicators (KPIs) keep your teams moving in the same direction. 

Maybe your KPIs are sales-qualified leads (SQLs). Or pipeline velocity. Or win rates. Whatever they are, it’s critical that marketing and sales are aligned on them. Doing so ensures everyone knows what’s expected and what success looks like. Finger-pointing disappears because everyone is working off the same established, agreed-on, measurable outcomes—and performance improves.

Building a Culture of Alignment  

Collaboration doesn’t magically happen. It takes deliberate effort to shift old habits and build new processes, systems and mindsets that drive marketing and sales alignment—and ultimately revenue growth. 

Strong, consistent, communication-focused leadership drives this alignment. When leaders model cross-team collaboration and build trust between the teams, the organization follows.

To build a culture of alignment, focus on these three key practices:

• Hold regular joint meetings between marketing, sales, and customer success to normalize collaboration and break down silos.
• Establish shared objectives and key results (OKRs) and KPIs so everyone works toward the same goals and measurable outcomes.
• Promote open communication by encouraging teams to share ideas, data, and revenue-impact wins across functions.

As you implement these strategies, look to your sales enablement leaders. They can facilitate the transition, spot and bridge strategy gaps, and demonstrate the kind of collaboration you want to see throughout the departments.

Remember: Buy-in starts at the top, but revenue talks. As aligned efforts deliver wins, momentum builds—and alignment becomes part of your culture, not just an initiative.

How Technology Supports Sales Enablement, Alignment, and Productivity

Once your teams buy into the mindset of marketing and sales alignment, the next step is to make sure they have the tools to deliver on that vision. Here are three categories of tools that make a measurable impact:

• Communication tools. Invest in platforms that allow cross-team sharing and collaboration—in real time or asynchronously. This removes barriers to discussing strategy, working together, and sharing updates.
• Analytics and reporting. Having one source of truth ensures everyone operates from the same data. Shared dashboards give marketing and sales the same visibility into performance, helping teams identify gaps and areas of improvement, as well as measure success and make collaborative data-driven decisions.
• Revenue enablement platforms. These comprehensive solutions bring together content management, onboarding, just-in-time coaching, and training, and collaboration in one place. In addition to supporting marketing and sales alignment, these platforms also enable self-paced learning and consistent execution—key drivers of productivity and retention. 

When integrated properly, these tools don’t just support productivity—they help operationalize marketing and sales alignment at scale.

What Would Improved Sales Productivity Mean for Your Company?

If you could increase your sales team’s win rate by 10%, think about the practical effects. More revenue. Higher job satisfaction. Improved forecasting accuracy. Now consider this: The alignment of sales and marketing teams can lead to 38% higher win rates. 

The alignment of sales and marketing teams can lead to 38% higher win rates.—Marketo

Is there a cost to investing in marketing and sales alignment? Absolutely. 

But buyer preferences are evolving. The selling and content landscape is becoming more complex. Companies that do nothing to adapt are choosing inaction, and there’s a cost to that, as well. 

Creating a fully aligned, functioning sales enablement game plan requires time, strategy, and funds. But the payoff is clear: higher close rates, more efficient sales teams, improved revenue-generating strategies. Those make the investment look small.

The cost of doing nothing? That gets more expensive each year.

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About the author: Erik Fowler is Chief Revenue and Operating Officer of Allego where he is responsible for the company’s customer acquisition and sales goals. He has 20 years of sales leadership experience, focused on maximizing sales opportunities through strategic planning, streamlined sales processes, and strong marketing and sales alignment.

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Discover What Top-Performing Teams Do Differently

What separates sales teams that hit targets from those who don’t? The State of Sales Enablement Report 2025 reveals the strategies, tools, and alignment tactics driving results for high-growth teams. Get the report.