In their report, B2B Buyers Mandate A New Chart for Marketing and Sales, Forrester Research posited that, “The misalignment between sales and marketing teams continues to be a hot topic, even after a decade of B2B firms trying to solve this problem.” And according to a study by InsideView, Marketing and Sales alignment matters. The report “The State of Sales & Marketing Alignment in 2018: How Leading B2B Companies Drive Growth by Aligning Go-to-Market Teams” states that companies that achieve or exceed revenue goals have 2.3 times higher levels of sales and marketing alignment than other companies. You would think that since this is so important, we’d have found a way to close the gap by now.

Most recommendations for improving the alignment condition revolve around how Sales and Marketing need to work together. Recommendations range from improving the lines of communication to creating service level agreements, being more buyer-centric, and promoting education. That was the premise of the Forrester B2B Marketing & Sales Forum, which explored how to calibrate marketing and sales engagement to the customer.

Marketing and Sales Alignment goal remains elusive — Despite all this work, the goal of Marketing and Sales Alignment remains elusive

We agree – Marketing and Sales should be calibrated around the customer. Many organizations have embarked on customer journey mapping with this goal in mind. Despite all this work, the goal of Marketing and Sales alignment remains elusive. We decided to look outside the world of business to find some clues for how to improve alignment.

When You Share the Mission, You’re More Easily Aligned

As we looked for examples, we landed on two organizations that provide some valuable insight: emergency response teams and the branches of the armed forces. Clearly, when these organizations operate out of sync, the results can be far worse than a missed sales forecast. As we examined their structure, a very important concept surfaced. These teams are not aligned with each other. While each branch of the US military must work together, each has a unique mission within the overall mission of U.S. security and peace; each branch serves a very specific purpose and has its own specialties, main areas of focus, and methods of operation. They are well-trained and disciplined. They are aligned with the mission. The mission is their joint focus and their joint purpose.

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As we delved into the dynamics of these teams, three takeaways emerged that any business can employ to improve alignment.

Forget aligning Marketing and Sales with each other. Instead, follow the example of emergency response teams and the armed forces and align both branches to the mission. Your business has a mission and purpose. Each function within your business, including Marketing and Sales, exists to serve this mission. Therefore, the better you align Marketing and Sales to this mission, the better each of these functions can affect the Demand variable of the equation (Supply being the other variable).I recall my early days when we were building a microcontroller business. We had a very clear mission – convert the world from 4-bit to 8-bit microcontrollers and dominate in four markets: transportation, computing, consumer electronics, and communications. Every team, regardless of function, understood the mission and its team’s purpose and role in achieving the mission.

Optimize your operations to address the external scenario. In business, the external scenario is the market and the customer. Taking an outside-in view improves alignment by shifting Marketing and Sales from focusing on activity to focusing on which market and customer segments offer the best opportunities and deserve thehighest priorities. Companies focused on activity tend to take a transactional approach to the business. This typically translates into Marketing generating qualified opportunities that Sales then brings to a close. What happens then? “More,” not “better,” becomes the mode of operating. Sales immerses itself in the latest training and engages in calling on more customers, while Marketing focuses on implementing and coordinating more campaigns and tactics. However, if you shift your view to the market and customers, the landscape changes. The perspective moves to the point of view of the customer, what they want from you, what they expect from you, and what they can count on from you. An outside-in view forces a move away from a myopic selling perspective to a broader customer relationship lifecycle perspective. The customer relationship lifecycle begins the moment a customer appears on the radar. It continues as the
3 steps any business can take to improve alignment.
The customer moves into the opportunity management funnel and emerges as a customer. Finally, it results in the customer engaging in a variety of experiences that ultimately make the customer an advocate for your company. The customer relationship lifecycle yields insight into which customers are the greatest lifetime value to your company. Taking a customer relationship lifecycle approach gives you an avenue for alignment by focusing both the Marketing and Sales organizations on the same set of outcomes – creating, keeping, and increasing the value of customers. Back to my microcontroller example, in that company, everyone knew the mission. As a result, everyone also knew who the top 10 customers were overall and for each market and what was needed to acquire, keep, and expand the footprint within each of these customers. Mobilizing around the customer relationship lifecycle made it far easier to establish a common set of priorities and customer metrics, a common customer-oriented vocabulary.

Focus on the mission plan. Emergency response teams create a mission plan from the top down to ensure that every effort is tightly linked to the success of the mission. The mission plan synchronizes efforts and sequences the related operations to achieve decisive strategic effect. Here’s an example:

The commander (CEO) determines the layout of the operational environment and provides direction, vision, and guidance to staff members and subordinates to drive planning and execution.
The commander develops a “vision” for mobilizing his organization and their interrelationships that provides a “design” for the mission.
The staff members (functional leaders) conduct the mission analysis, develop estimates, develop a strategic concept, and construct supporting plans. It is top-down. No function develops its plan without knowing the overall mission plan.

If you take a bottom-up approach to planning, both Sales and Marketing tend to develop programs and plans based on what they have done before or what they know best. As a result, these programs may be only loosely connected to the business, if at all. The metrics of success become coupled to the program rather than the broader mission. Consequently, quantifying the value of the program to the business becomes hazy. An outcome-based approach to alignment flips this problem on its head, creating a top-down perspective. Want to embrace the concept? Start with the business’s success factors and work down the ladder. This process reveals what Marketing and Sales must each do to support the business.

Everyone wins with Marketing and Sales alignment — Marketing and Sales Alignment is a win for everyone

Time to Tackle Your Marketing and Sales Alignment

Do you need to tackle alignment? To find out, first determine if the work within the Sales and Marketing functions is directly linked to the mission and business outcomes. If you find that it is not, then the most important next step is to choose a method that will visually convey the connection between the role of each function and business results and provide insight into selecting outcome-based performance metrics. Need a little more guidance in the alignment process? Check out our Pipeline Engineering for Alignment workshop.

FAQ:
(written by Penn of Sintra.ai)

Q1: Why does Marketing and Sales misalignment persist—even after years of effort?
A1: Because most fixes focus on aligning Marketing and Sales to each other (communication, SLAs, education, buyer-centricity) instead of aligning both functions to a shared, measurable mission. Without a unifying mission and outcomes, each team optimizes for its own activities, metrics, and priorities—so “more” becomes the operating mode, not “better.”

Q2: What does Forrester say about the alignment problem?
A2: Forrester Research posited that, “The misalignment between sales and marketing teams continues to be a hot topic, even after a decade of B2B firms trying to solve this problem,” reinforcing that the issue is persistent and structural—not a short-term process gap.

Q3: What does the InsideView study suggest about why alignment matters?
A3: InsideView reported that companies that achieve or exceed revenue goals have 2.3 times higher levels of sales and marketing alignment than other companies—indicating alignment is strongly associated with revenue performance.

Q4: What is the core shift you recommend to improve alignment?
A4: Stop trying to align Marketing and Sales with each other. Align both functions to the mission—the organization’s purpose, success factors, and outcomes. When the mission is the joint focus, each function can operate with distinct roles while still moving in the same direction.

Q5: What can businesses learn about alignment from emergency response teams and the armed forces?
A5: These organizations are not aligned “to each other” as a primary goal. They are aligned to the mission. Each unit has a specific purpose, discipline, and operating method, but the mission provides the shared priority system that synchronizes decisions and execution.

Q6: What is the first practical step to improving alignment using this approach?
A6: Make the mission explicit and operational: clarify what winning looks like, what must be true to succeed, and what each function’s role is in delivering that success. When the mission is clear, priorities and tradeoffs become easier—and cross-functional work becomes more coherent.

Q7: What does it mean to “optimize operations to the external scenario”?
A7: It means shifting from an inside-out, activity-based view to an outside-in view anchored in the market and the customer. Instead of measuring success by volume of campaigns or calls, you prioritize segments, accounts, and outcomes based on customer needs, expectations, and value potential.

Q8: How does a customer relationship lifecycle improve Marketing and Sales alignment?
A8: It gives both functions a shared outcomes framework: create, keep, and increase the value of customers. The lifecycle begins when a customer appears on the radar, moves through opportunity management, and extends into post-sale experiences that lead to advocacy. This creates a common vocabulary, common priorities, and customer-value metrics both teams can own.

Q9: What is a “mission plan,” and why does it matter for alignment?
A9: A mission plan is a top-down plan that synchronizes and sequences efforts to achieve decisive strategic effect. The CEO defines the operating environment and intent; functional leaders conduct analysis, develop the strategic concept, and build supporting plans. No function plans in isolation—so programs and metrics stay connected to outcomes.