Sales and marketing alignment drives real revenue outcomes. When these teams coordinate on targeting, messaging, and handoffs, conversion rates improve and pipeline quality goes up.

Most sales and marketing teams work in silos. This creates misalignment on targeting, messaging, and lead quality—which directly hurts pipeline and revenue.

We spoke with revenue leaders from Drift, Terminus, and ThoughtSpot about what actually works when aligning sales and marketing teams. Their insights cover common friction points and practical fixes you can implement.

Editor's note: These tips were originally shared on the UserGems podcast, "The First 100 Days." The article has been edited for clarity.

Why is it important for sales and marketing to work together?

When sales and marketing align on targeting and messaging, conversion rates increase and teams waste less time on unqualified leads. Here’s why you should add sales and marketing alignment to the top of your to-do list.

1. It delivers a better customer experience

Recently, marketing teams looked at pipeline generation as a numbers game. They would focus on getting as many leads as possible through advertising campaigns and pass them on to their sales counterparts.

Then, the sales team would work on pushing these leads further down the pipeline to convert them into customers.

This approach fails now because lead volume requires quality to drive conversions.

Today, the only way to increase conversion rates is to ensure that you get a holistic view of the buyer’s journey and deliver a more optimized and personalized customer experience.

This requires sales and marketing to coordinate on buyer personas, content strategy, and messaging at each stage of the buyer journey.

2. It increases conversion rates

The key to improving conversion rates is to get sales and marketing teams to sit down together and strategically fashion a few key buyer personas.

By aligning on the buyer persona, marketing teams can create content that’s aligned with the buyer journey, while sales teams can better engage with prospects and win more deals.

You'll also reduce wasted ad spend by targeting accounts that match your ICP instead of casting a wide net. And improves resource efficiency by ensuring the sales team only goes after the most promising leads.

3. It improves sales and marketing productivity

Strong sales and marketing alignment increases productivity. Teams spend less time resolving handoff issues and more time on high-value activities like account research and personalized outreach.

Here's how coordinated sales and marketing teams operate:

• Sales and marketing teams come together to execute awareness campaigns and figure out what kind of customers engage with your content.

• Both teams take all the data from the previous step to identify similar companies and ideal customer profiles (ICPs).

• Sales reps are assigned specific accounts to target while the marketing team creates content to engage key decision makers.

This process ensures sales focuses on accounts showing buying signals while marketing creates content that moves those accounts through the pipeline. And, the more they work together, the faster and easier this process will be, boosting productivity and driving pipeline generation.

What causes conflicts between sales and marketing teams?

Sales and marketing both own revenue outcomes, but misalignment is common. Here are five reasons these teams clash—and what to do about it.

Here are 5 of the main reasons there may be friction between your sales and marketing teams.

1. They have different mindsets

Since sales and marketing roles require different skill sets and mindsets, there are bound to be difficulties in understanding each other, especially when it comes to customer needs.

Marketing teams tend to be analytical and process-driven, focused on campaigns and metrics. Sales teams are relationship-focused, working directly with buyers to close deals.

This creates tension. Sales sees marketing as disconnected from real buyer conversations. Marketing sees sales as focused only on this quarter's quota.

These differences lead to misalignment on target accounts, messaging, lead definitions, and pipeline goals.

2. They're competing for the same pool of funds

Sales and marketing teams prioritize different activities to achieve an organization’s revenue goals.

For instance, the sales team invests in training and incentives to increase productivity and close rates, while marketing focuses on high-quality social media campaigns and the creation of brand assets to improve awareness and supply a steady stream of leads to the sales team.

Limited budgets force trade-offs between sales enablement and marketing campaigns, creating competition instead of collaboration. This means that sales and marketing teams end up clashing instead of working together to achieve revenue targets.

3. There's a lack of communication

Most companies limit sales and marketing interaction to weekly pipeline reviews and lead handoffs. This leads to both teams falling victim to the blame game when goals aren’t met.

For example, a sales team might blame the marketing team for not providing good marketing content, while the marketing team might blame the sales team for not engaging leads properly, thus sabotaging their campaign.

Using separate tools creates data silos. Sales can't see marketing engagement data, and marketing can't track which leads convert. This makes it harder for them to easily access and exchange valuable insights across departments, meaning both teams are missing out.

Another way a conflict due to miscommunication manifests is when both teams try to implement changes without getting buy-in from the other. Megan Boone, Senior Director of Revenue at ThoughtSpot, shares an example:

“[Before Kristin, Senior Global Director of Sales Development joined] I'll say I came in hot. You know, I wrote this document with all the problems that I saw and what I wanted to do.”

Naturally, it wasn’t well-received because she didn’t mention what was wrong with the existing process and why they were changing it.

Since then, Megan has always made it a point to get everyone to pitch their opinions and get buy-in from the other team to ensure everyone’s on the same page.

4. They don't have any shared responsibilities

Given the horizontal relationship between sales and marketing teams, there are bound to be responsibility-based conflicts.

For example, consider leads obtained from e-books and webinars. They’ve opted in to receive your content but remain in the early stages of their buyer journey.

So, the question arises: who's responsible for nurturing and converting them into sales-qualified opportunities (SQOs)?

If you can’t answer this question, you’re laying the foundation for sales and marketing conflict.

Sales will get tired of chasing down leads that are unresponsive. Then marketing will get frustrated when their leads (which might appear to be great, in terms of job titles) aren’t engaged.

5. They don't have the same goals

Both sales and marketing teams have one common objective in mind: to increase the organization's revenue. But the individual goals each team has to meet that objective can vary. When teams set and define those goals separately, your sales and marketing relationships can get rocky.

Sales teams typically focus on generating revenue and meeting quotas, while marketing teams focus on creating awareness and generating leads. This can lead to tension between the two groups because they are not working towards the same objectives.

For example, the marketing team may choose click-through rate as their key performance indicator (KPI) and focus on getting more clicks, even if it doesn’t directly translate to revenue.

When those clicks fail to convert, the marketing team may feel frustrated because they may think the sales team could do more to close the sale.

3 ways to improve sales and marketing relationships

Here's how to align your sales and marketing teams around shared goals and coordinated execution. Three practices that improve sales and marketing coordination, based on how revenue teams at Drift, Terminus, and ThoughtSpot operate.

1. Encourage healthy conflict and vulnerability

Honest conversations about what's working and what's broken are uncomfortable but necessary.

These conversations prevent most sales and marketing conflicts before they escalate.

Kristin and Megan, Directors of Sales and Revenue at ThoughtSpot, host these difficult conversations in a light-hearted manner over a weekly "Tiger Team Meeting", which encourages healthy conflict and vulnerability.

"Healthy conflict is welcome. This is something that, and I'll like to give Megan all kinds of credit here that we've actually never talked about, but she's, she's really good at owning what she's great at and where we're still working on things.

“So, it creates an environment where everybody feels vulnerable enough to share that, too. We can say we're really good at this. We're really bad at this. Let's talk about these things in a cross-functional way, and that's how we're getting better," says Kristin.

When sales and marketing leaders are vulnerable and address issues upfront, and with honesty, your team members will feel more comfortable doing the same.

This helps you really dial down on what's working and what needs improvement. From there, you can discuss what you're going to do to solve the problem, including how to eliminate any existing conflicts and set responsibilities.

2. Use the right tech stack

Give both teams access to the same data and tools. When everyone can see pipeline metrics, account engagement, and conversion rates, alignment improves naturally.

Here are some of the best tools for improving sales and marketing relationships:

• Communication tools: Marketing and sales need to communicate clearly and often to build a successful relationship. Use a tool like Slack to share campaign information. Ensure that important updates and brand assets reach the right people by creating a channel for each customer.

• Pipeline generation tools: Pipeline generation determines whether your sales team has enough qualified opportunities to hit quota. The right tools automate prospecting so reps can focus on selling. With the right pipeline generation tools, sales reps can automate this step and focus on building relationships instead of wasting time manually searching for contact information. For example, UserGems tracks job changes across your customer base and surfaces buying signals when those contacts move to new companies. Our AI agents then generate personalized outreach based on the relationship history and account context. These warm relationships convert faster because the buyer already knows your product—shortening sales cycles and reducing pipeline gaps.

• ‍Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool: CRM tools centralize account data and interaction history. When integrated with pipeline generation tools like UserGems, your CRM becomes the single source of truth for account status and buyer signals. This eliminates data silos enabling sales and marketing teams to get on the same page instead of creating conflicts due to a lack of communication. For example, Account-based marketing CRMs like Salesforce connect every part of your business and give sales and marketing teams a unified view of data.

3. Build trust within your team

According to Justin, VP of Revenue Marketing at Drift, one of the biggest challenges in an ABM program is "understanding what everyone's doing. To look at where to be when they're going to get the ball passed to them. How to look at data, and how to communicate. That's the really hard stuff."

Example: Marketing sees strong event attendance and form fills. Sales sees low response rates and few qualified conversations.

If the revenue targets or monthly quotas aren't met, sales may blame their marketing counterparts, souring the sales and marketing relationships within the organization.

One way to address this is to sign Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that set clear expectations around what sales and marketing teams are responsible for. However, sustaining these agreements over six months becomes difficult.

The best way to solve this conflict between sales and marketing and avoid playing blame games is by "knowing that everyone is doing everything they can," says Justin.

“Kevin and I, we're lucky to have it. We did trust each other and knew each other were smart and had the company's best interests at heart. So we were able to kind of short circuit really difficult conversations and be like, look, we're in this together," he adds.

In short, it boils down to building trust within your team, holding each other accountable, and getting to the root of the problem without getting personal.

Building coordinated sales and marketing teams

Start by creating space for honest feedback between sales and marketing. Regular meetings where both teams discuss what's working and what's not build trust over time.

Start by setting up meetings where everyone involved with account-based revenue is in attendance. Ensure that each team knows and understands what the other is up to and what their goals are. Encourage discussions about whether either team needs help and how they can work together to meet quotas and grow revenue.

Invest in tools that give both teams visibility into buyer signals. UserGems tracks job changes and surfaces buying signals, then uses AI agents to coordinate outreach between sales and marketing based on account context and relationship history.