B2B marketing and sales alignment means agreeing on which buyers to pursue, what makes an enquiry worth following up and who takes the next step. A shared revenue target helps, but it does not resolve a disputed lead or tell a salesperson what a prospect has already been promised.
Start with the handoff between the teams. Make its rules visible, record the outcome and review cases where the process failed. The aim is to give buyers a coherent experience and give both teams enough information to do their work.
Find where the handoff breaks
Review a small set of recent enquiries together. Include accepted leads, rejected leads and leads that received no response. For each one, ask whether the buyer matched the intended audience, what they requested and what happened next.
Separate different problems. A relevant buyer who needs information is different from an active buying opportunity. An enquiry sent to the wrong owner is a routing problem. A missed follow-up is not evidence that the original lead was poor.
Conflicting targets can also explain the friction. If marketing is rewarded for enquiry volume while sales is judged on revenue, neither team has a reason to resolve the gap between those measures. Review both the volume and the outcome.
Agree on the working rules
Define a qualified lead
Write down the evidence needed at each handoff. If you use marketing-qualified, sales-accepted and sales-qualified labels, explain what each means in your business. A label alone tells the next person very little.
For example, a fictional software company might accept an enquiry when the organisation fits its target market, a named contact has requested a discussion and a salesperson can identify a relevant use case. That is an example to adapt, not a universal qualification standard.
Set follow-up responsibilities
Agree who receives each enquiry, when they should respond and what happens if the owner is unavailable. Record the reason when sales rejects or returns a lead. Use reasons that marketing can act on, such as an unsupported requirement or the wrong company size.
A service-level agreement can capture these commitments. Keep it short enough to use during a real handoff, and revise it when the team cannot meet a commitment.
Share the relevant customer record
Decide which system holds the agreed record and which information must pass between tools. Sales may need the original request, campaign context and previous conversations. Marketing needs to know whether an enquiry progressed and why it stopped.
Check those fields before adding more software. An integration does not solve inconsistent definitions, missing ownership or records that nobody maintains.
Plan content around buyer questions
Use recurring customer objections and questions from sales conversations to identify missing content. A buyer may need an implementation explanation, a comparison or evidence for a specific claim.
Agree who will create the material, who will check its accuracy and where sales can find the current version. Ask whether it answered the buyer’s question, rather than treating a download as proof that it influenced a sale.
Review decisions and outcomes together
Use a joint review to resolve specific problems. Discuss disputed leads, missed follow-ups and questions that existing content did not answer. Assign an owner and a next step to each decision.
Track measures with clear definitions. These might include accepted enquiries, response time, progression to a qualified opportunity and reasons for rejection. Compare like-for-like groups and make the measurement period clear. Do not attribute a revenue change to alignment alone when pricing, market conditions or the customer mix also changed.
Leadership needs to resolve conflicts that the teams cannot settle themselves. That includes incompatible targets, disputed ownership and a workload that makes the agreed response time unrealistic.
Choose one handoff to improve first
Start where the problem is visible. Agree the entry criteria, owner and follow-up action for that handoff, then review actual cases after the team has used the new rules. Expand the approach when those cases show what worked and what still needs attention.
If you need help defining the process, The Sales Arc’s consulting work can begin with the decisions and responsibilities that are unclear today.
