
Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams
I founded What Great Looks Like to address a problem that plagues many B2B SaaS companies: the toxic relationship between sales and marketing teams. Too often, these departments operate in silos, pointing fingers at one another when targets aren’t hit. Sales blames marketing for not generating enough leads, and marketing accuses sales of failing to close those leads. This blame game not only creates a dysfunctional environment but also hinders business growth. Align your sales and marketing teams is critical to crush your sales targets.
My mission is to eliminate that toxicity by building aligned go-to-market (GTM) teams that collaborate effectively and consistently hit their sales targets.
The Toxic Trap
Years ago, I interviewed with a SaaS company where the CEO made a casual but telling comment: “Marketing is just leads.” That statement set off alarm bells. The relationship between sales and marketing at that company would likely have been toxic, with constant finger-pointing and no shared ownership of the sales process. Unfortunately, this mindset is common in many organizations, where sales and marketing teams work in isolation, pursuing their own goals instead of collaborating on the bigger picture.
This disconnect is exactly what What Great Looks Like is designed to fix. It’s not enough for marketing to generate leads and hand them off to sales, hoping they’ll close the deal. True success comes from building a collaborative team where both sales and marketing share responsibility for the outcome. When these teams are aligned, they can work together to drive growth and scale, hitting the sales targets that matter most.
Building Aligned Teams
Over the years, I’ve worked with companies that have successfully broken down silos and built what I call “jamming” GTM teams. These are teams that don’t just function — they collaborate, innovate, and are laser-focused on predictable revenue. The secret to their success isn’t just about employing the right marketing tactics or having skilled salespeople. It’s about creating a shared sense of ownership over business goals and fostering open communication between departments.
An aligned team doesn’t just hit its targets — it crushes them. When sales and marketing are on the same page, they can deliver a seamless customer journey, from lead generation to deal closing. This alignment ensures that every activity, from a marketing campaign to a sales call, is geared toward achieving the same overarching objective: revenue growth.
Sales Velocity Aligns Marketing and Sales
Sales Velocity is a powerful tool that can help organizations align their sales and marketing activities to drive higher revenue.
At its core, sales velocity measures how quickly revenue moves through the sales pipeline. The formula is simple:
Sales Velocity = (Number of Opportunities x Average Deal Size x Conversion Rate) / Sales Cycle Length
Maximizing your sales velocity requires focusing on both the numerator (the number of opportunities, deal size, and conversion rate) and the denominator (the length of your sales cycle). Here’s a breakdown:
- Number of Opportunities: Sales and marketing need to work together to fill the pipeline with qualified opportunities — deals that sales has accepted and entered into the CRM.
- Average Deal Size: Positioning your product effectively and delivering benefit-led value propositions can help increase deal sizes.
- Conversion Rate: Both teams play a role in nurturing leads and closing deals. Tight collaboration between marketing and sales throughout the opportunity funnel is crucial.
- Sales Cycle Length: The faster opportunities move through the funnel, the faster you hit and exceed your revenue targets. Speeding up the sales cycle has a disproportionate impact on Sales Velocity
A Real-World Example of Misalignment
In one instance, I worked with a SaaS company that was struggling to hit its sales targets. Their pipeline had loads of opportunities, but most of them sat in the early stages of the sales funnel. After digging deeper, we discovered the root of the problem: they needed to align their sales and marketing teams.
Marketing was tasked with generating as many leads as possible, but sales wasn’t closing them at the expected rate. Worse, sales believed that once marketing handed off the opportunities, marketing’s job was done. Sales wanted to move the deals through the funnel all alone. This building of silos — and the lack of collaboration — led to poor results.
The What Great Looks Like Origin Story
At its heart, What Great Looks Like is about creating alignment between sales and marketing. It’s about building teams that aren’t just meeting their numbers but working together to exceed them. The gap between failure and success often lies in how well your GTM teams collaborate. By eliminating silos, creating alignment on and shared ownership of targets, and building trust and clear communication, you can transform a dysfunctional team into a jamming one.
I’ve seen how powerful aligning sales and marketing teams is. It’s not just about hitting this quarter’s targets — it’s about creating a scalable, repeatable process that drives long-term revenue growth.
Key Takeaways
To sum up, here are three critical takeaways from our approach at What Great Looks Like:
- Alignment is essential. Align your sales and marketing teams toward shared goals to consistently hit their sales targets.
- Sales velocity is a valuable tool. It provides a clear framework for prioritizing tasks that drive revenue growth, but it’s not the sole focus — collaboration is the key.
- Great teams break down silos. The best-performing companies have sales and marketing teams that own the entire sales process together, from lead generation to closing deals.
At What Great Looks Like, our mission is to help you build aligned, high-performing GTM teams that not only hit targets but create predictable and scalable revenue.
Check out our podcast on YouTube at https://youtube.com/@what-great-looks-like.