For years, business leaders have been chasing “sales and marketing alignment.” In theory, it sounds simple: marketing brings in qualified leads, sales converts them, and growth follows. In practice, most teams are still fighting the same battle. Misalignment between sales and marketing remains one of the biggest barriers to sustainable, predictable growth.
From Friction to Flow
When sales and marketing move out of sync, the cracks show fast. Marketing celebrates campaign performance while sales complains about lead quality. Prospects receive inconsistent messages, experience delayed follow-up, or slip through the cracks entirely. The result? Wasted spend, lost deals, and a customer journey that feels disconnected.
Studies suggest that misaligned organisations waste nearly a third of their marketing budgets on leads that never convert. It’s not that either team isn’t doing their job — it’s that they’re optimising for different outcomes. Marketing reports on engagement. Sales reports on revenue. Each speaks a different language. Without a shared definition of success, both teams work hard but not together.
The Modern Buyer Has Changed — Have You?
The B2B buying process has transformed. Buyers don’t wait to talk to sales anymore; they research, compare, and shortlist long before filling out a form. By the time your sales team gets involved, more than half the decision has already been made.
This new buyer behaviour demands continuity. Every touchpoint — from an ad click to a sales call — must feel connected. Yet most organisations are still structured for an earlier era, where marketing owned awareness and sales owned conversion. The seams between them are increasingly visible to the customer.
Where Misalignment Hides
Misalignment doesn’t always look like failure. Often, the numbers look “fine.” Campaigns deliver leads. Sales closes deals. But something feels off — growth is inconsistent, forecasts unpredictable, and performance hard to replicate. That’s usually a sign of friction hiding beneath the surface.
It often shows up in three places:
- In the funnel: Marketing qualifies too early, or sales follows up too late. The middle stages fall into a gap.
- In the data: CRMs and marketing tools don’t talk to each other, making reporting reactive instead of proactive.
- In the culture: Teams chase different KPIs, so collaboration feels optional rather than essential.
One Funnel, One Goal
The most successful B2B organisations think differently. They design their funnel around the buyer, not their org chart. Marketing and sales share one view of the customer journey, one set of metrics, and one definition of qualified demand. Content is built for sales conversations, not just for clicks. Feedback loops are constant — not quarterly.
When alignment becomes part of daily operations, everything accelerates. Campaigns become sharper. Forecasts become more accurate. The customer experience becomes seamless — a single, consistent story from first impression to closed deal.
Start with Clarity
If you’re unsure where your team stands, start by diagnosing. Map where handoffs happen — and where they fail. Look for gaps between marketing automation and CRM data. Review how leads are scored and followed up. The goal isn’t to assign blame; it’s to identify friction.
At Wanted.Berlin, we built the Diagnostic Tool to help teams do exactly that. It’s a structured way to measure how well your systems, data, and teams are working together — and where small adjustments can unlock big performance gains.
Alignment Is Just the Beginning
Fixing sales and marketing misalignment isn’t about another meeting or another tool. It’s about building trust, sharing ownership, and keeping the buyer at the centre of every decision. When that happens, growth stops being a guess — it becomes a system.
The companies that get this right don’t just generate more leads; they generate momentum. They replace friction with flow. And in B2B growth, that’s where real acceleration begins.