Sales and marketing alignment is the cornerstone of high-performing B2B teams, and getting it right is easier than you think.
When sales and marketing are aligned, everyone pulls in the same direction, driving more pipeline, converting faster and maximising ROI.
But when they’re not? Leads get lost, targets are missed, and finger-pointing takes over.
This guide will explain how to align sales and marketing and why it’s crucial for your business, complete with practical strategies and best practices.
Let’s get started 👇
Marketing and sales alignment create shared goals, strategies, and communication channels across teams. This may involve sharing goals, establishing new workflows or merging teams.
It means both teams agree on:
Instead of marketing passing leads to sales and walking away, both functions work together across the entire customer journey: from initial awareness to closed-won and beyond.
This alignment between sales and marketing is essential in B2B, where buying cycles are complex, there are many stakeholders, and personalisation is key.
By joining forces, teams can create mind-blowing B2B marketing campaigns, level up sales skills, and skyrocket revenue like never before!
Smarketing (sales + marketing) is more than just a buzzword—it’s the practical embodiment of B2B marketing and sales alignment. It’s a mindset that values collaboration, transparency and accountability.
At its core, smarketing means:
When done well, smarketing ensures that marketing efforts directly support sales success, and vice versa. It replaces silos with unity.
But there’s even more to B2B sales and marketing alignment than that; let’s look at the importance of a sales and marketing collaboration 👇
When sales and marketing work together, they can create a powerful alliance that helps a company reach its revenue goals.
By leveraging both departments’ resources, B2B companies can increase their visibility in the marketplace, boost revenue, and build customer loyalty.
The benefits are clear and backed by data:
Sales and marketing alignment statistics suggest that team collaboration can increase sales win rates by 38%, while poor alignment can cost businesses at least 10% of their annual revenue.
Here’s what happens when you align:
Sales and marketing alignment can lead to up to 208% more revenue (Launch Marketing)
Who doesn’t want their business to generate more money?
Our guess? No one!
Our CMO, Alice de Courcy, believes that sales and marketing should work towards and own a revenue goal.
Essentially, marketing should chase revenue targets as your sales team does.
Not only should each team chase a revenue target, but B2B marketing and sales alignment are essential for successful lead nurturing.
Why?
According to HubSpot, a lack of alignment costs $1 trillion annually!
This all comes down to 79% of leads not converting into sales due to a lack of nurturing.
73% of those leads never get contacted; if they are, no one follows up with them.
Alice explains how Cognism combats this problem:
Need help with your sales and marketing alignment strategies? Read Alice's ‘Diary of a first-time CMO,’ for more tips👇
When both your teams feel like they’re wasting time and resources bringing in leads that go nowhere, the blame game will likely ensue.
And you definitely want to avoid that friction between sales and marketing if you aim for tighter alignment.
To bring in more hot leads, you’ll need:
Once you’ve implemented these steps, sales and marketing can target your ideal customer profile in unison. Then, they won’t waste their time on leads that go nowhere.
In line with getting more hot leads through the door, your teams will want to be on the same page about who you’re selling to.
When sales and marketing are aligned, prospects experience a seamless journey through the sales funnel. This ensures that messaging stays consistent at every touchpoint, reinforcing trust and credibility.
When building sales funnels, it’s easy for your teams to lose sight of how well they’ll work for your prospective customers.
Instead, the focus is often on how they’ll benefit your people.
Put the customer first and adopt an account based marketing strategy. This approach will give you a clearer idea of your buyer’s pains and objectives, which you can address at each stage of the customer journey.
This is where your teams should keep an eye on the type of content your potential customers are downloading.
Then, they need to meet the needs signalled.
It’s essential to ensure that your teams aren’t wasting your prospects’ time or sending them around in circles.
You can easily avoid this when sales and marketing align on the buyer journey.
This harmony shortens the sales cycle by reducing the time spent on unnecessary steps and increases the likelihood of closing deals. Businesses can enjoy faster conversions and better customer relationships by streamlining processes and ensuring that both teams share the same objectives.
Fragment reporting is one of the biggest blockers to effective decision-making in B2B organisations. When sales and marketing operate in silos, they often rely on different data sources, inconsistent definitions and separate dashboards. This leads to mismatched numbers, inaccurate attribution, and wasted spend.
But everything changes when you invest in sales and marketing alignment tools and a shared data set.
You get:
This alignment allows marketing to confidently prove their campaigns’ ROI and gives sales the insight to prioritise the highest-impact activities. It’s not just about reporting for reporting’s sake. It’s about making better decisions together.
Only 32% of marketers and 43% of salespeople believe the sales function uses marketing content completely and effectively.
These figures are surprisingly low and slightly worrying!
Both teams must emphasise the content produced, which is vital to the alignment process.
How does this work in practice?
Let’s say your customer base repeatedly asks the same questions. If sales reports this to the marketing department, they can create content addressing those questions.
This content will greatly benefit your prospects and save your sales team a lot of time.
The bottom line is:
The more helpful content you generate, the easier sales and marketing’s jobs will become!
The feedback loop between your sales and marketing teams will help them meet, beat, or miss targets entirely.
There needs to be constant communication between the two teams. You can achieve this by:
If your teams constantly relay feedback to each other while chasing their targets, they’ll surely achieve success.
Simply put, the benefits of sales and marketing alignment are too significant to ignore.
You might wonder: how do you actually align sales and marketing?
Here’s a step-by-step guide to get started:
Align around revenue, not vanity metrics. Sales and marketing should both be accountable for pipeline and closed-won revenue.
In B2B sales, your targets underpin your revenue engine.
Meaning your target determines your:
Cognism is a metrics-driven organisation, so we work off the predictable revenue model.
Cognism’s VP of Global Sales, Jonathon Ilett, explains how this works:
Each month, the marketing team is responsible for meeting its target.
Cognism made this predictable by measuring many components individually and creating a fixed conversion rate.
Jonathon elaborates on this:
Cognism also evaluates its SQOs and determines how many deals it will receive.
From these metrics, sales and marketing align by giving marketing the ultimate revenue target.
We treat these leads as golden leads. They get very clear SLAs on how quickly these inbound leads need action.
Sales and marketing are responsible for attracting and nurturing leads; the only difference is how they do this.
To effectively target and serve their markets, sales and marketing teams must collaborate to create a shared Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). This involves combining insights from both teams to shape a comprehensive customer persona based on actual data and successful sales.
This helps clarify buyer personas for both teams.
Your buyer personas need to depict your perfect clients accurately. Otherwise, your marketing and sales reps will follow the wrong paths and chase the wrong people.
How do you get your teams aligned around buyer personas? It’s simple:
Shared ownership.
If your sales and marketing teams feel they have an equal role in creating your personas, they’ll work incredibly hard to ensure accuracy.
It relates to having open lines of communication between the two teams.
Your sales reps work daily on the front line, speaking and engaging with prospects. They can give invaluable feedback to your B2B marketing team on the content that’s working or not working with your audience.
They can also share insights into what content your marketing team should create to improve lead quality and quantity. Such as:
Getting the right content in front of the right people is critical to the success of both your sales and marketing teams!
Create a clear lead qualification framework—MQL, SQL, SAL, etc.—and set SLAs for handover and follow-up.
However, when aligning sales and marketing, Alice cautions against marketing being completely reactionary to sales requests.
As your marketing team brings the plan to life, your business will see how successful they are in meeting their revenue target.
And they’ll see the value of focusing on the goal rather than being distracted by things outside it.
One of the biggest challenges in B2B marketing and sales alignment is getting a clear, accurate view of performance. When teams operate from separate systems or interpret metrics differently, it leads to confusion, misattribution and missed opportunities.
That’s why a unified CRM for sales and marketing alignment is critical.
With a shared CRM and connected tools, both teams benefit from:
A single source of truth for contact, account and activity data.
Consistent definitions of MQLs, SQLs and opportunity stages.
End-to-end visibility into the buyer journey—from first touch to closed-won.
Accurate attribution models that show which activities influence pipeline.
This clarity means marketers can confidently prove the ROI of their campaigns, and sales can focus on the most valuable leads. It also enables leadership to make faster, data-driven decisions accelerating revenue growth.
Weekly or bi-weekly catch-ups keep everyone on track, surface issues early, and encourage open feedback.
Jonathon explains how this works at Cognism:
Another great way to integrate your teams into your revenue team is through a Slack channel.
It’s a positive channel where you can share meetings booked, signed deals, and opportunities created.
This is an excellent way to connect sales and marketing and break down the traditional silos between them!
💡Tip! Discover more about aligning sales and marketing strategies with this article on inbound vs outbound marketing.
Now that you know how to achieve sales and marketing alignment, let’s examine some proven best practices for sustaining long-term success.
Targeting the right accounts with personalised messaging is easier when both teams use the same data source.
Marketing should create assets tailored to each stage of the buyer journey—from email templates to one-pagers.
By using trigger marketing techniques (e.g. buying intent signals), sales can prioritise leads who are actually in market, improving effectiveness.
Reward both teams based on shared revenue goals. This discourages lead dumping and promotes collaboration.
Run joint training sessions, attend events, and share learnings to build trust and rapport.
These best marketing and sales alignment practices might seem simple but they're effective when applied consistently.
No, sales and marketing alignment is not the same as ABM. Aligning sales and marketing teams requires both departments to work together to create a unified strategy for reaching and engaging customers. This includes ensuring everyone is on the same page regarding messaging, target markets, customer acquisition strategies, account management tactics, and more.
ABM, or account-based marketing, is a strategy for targeting specific customers and accounts. It requires a deep understanding of each customer’s unique needs and preferences to create custom campaigns that convert them into paying customers. ABM campaigns typically involve personalised content, tailored messaging, and highly targeted outreach efforts.
Evaluating how well your teams align can be done by monitoring and tracking metrics or KPIs.
Tracking customer engagement is the most crucial measure of success for sales and marketing alignment.
Knowing how customers engage with your company can help you adjust your strategies accordingly.
Another important metric to track is cost-per-acquisition (CPA). CPA measures the total cost of acquiring a customer through sales and marketing efforts. This metric helps you understand which channels are most effective and which to optimise for better results.
You should also track customer lifetime value (CLV). CLV measures each customer’s total revenue throughout their relationship with your business. This metric helps you understand how much revenue each customer generates and lets you focus on acquiring higher-value customers.
Effective collaboration between sales and marketing is essential to saving time and optimising prospecting efforts. Based on Validity’s 2024 report, 70% of the data in your CRM goes out of date every year.
Enrichment is essential to maintaining an effective sales strategy. Cognism’s Enrich enables alignment by providing quality company contact data powered by intelligent signals and intent.
How does Enrich support alignment?
Sales and marketing alignment takes the right tools, mindset and focus to succeed.
With better B2B data shared across teams, the better your conversations. And that’s just the cherry on top when it comes to using Cognism to help align sales and marketing for greater ROI.
With Cognism, you can achieve true sales and marketing alignment using one tool.
Here’s how:
See how it works. Book a demo by clicking the button below 👇