Sales and marketing misalignment is a perennial problem in the B2B tech industry.

As this Harvard Business Review article points out – “Marketing and sales departments often set their strategies, and goals, separately from each other.” The root cause of the malignment of Sales and Marketing is that they often operate at cross purposes.

Sales & Marketing misalignment – causes

One example of this is when the Marketing department runs a self-service ecommerce business. This may compete with the Sales group. Marketing gets “credit” for any customers that book orders through the website. This takes away potential revenue that the Sales group may have otherwise been able to book. In essence, Marketing and Sales are competing against each other.

Here is another example of Sales and Marketing operating at cross purposes. When a company has a clear delineation between different type of leads. There are ‘SQLs’ for sales qualified leads. Separately, there are ‘MQLs’ for marketing qualified leads. When Marketing generates an ‘MQL’, Sales needs to ‘accept’ it to turn it into an ‘SQL’. I can tell you from first hand experience that this process is fraught with silly politics. It is not usual for Marketing departments in this type of environment to inflate MQLs.  It look like Sales is underperforming and not converting enough MQLs into SQLs. Should Marketing consider it a lead if a low-level employee downloads a whitepaper?”

Fundamentally, Sales tends to have a short-term transactional focus. (Take a look at this cartoon as an example.) Especially in public companies in which quarterly sales results impact stock price performance. Marketing has a more long-term focus and possesses nebulous KPIs. How easy is it to measure the improvement in brand affinity? The misalignment will always exist. Unless you track Sales and Marketing with the same KPIs .

Do this instead

Sales is the driver of some tech companies. Some tech companies are Marketing driven. Customer-focused companies are the best. I think there is a simple way to avoid Sales and Marketing misalignment. Do what is right for customers.