Your Sales and Marketing Teams Are Working Against Each Other

A company struggling with slowing sales and slipping customer retention often discovers the core issue isn’t product quality but a fundamental disconnect between its sales and marketing departments. This internal friction, where teams operate with conflicting goals, silently sabotages growth and profitability. Leaders may initially blame external factors or product shortcomings, yet the real culprit frequently lies in misaligned incentives that push these critical functions in opposite directions.

The executive I spoke with believed product improvements would solve their retention challenges. While product refinement matters, it merely addresses symptoms. The deeper problem was a systemic clash between how sales and marketing were measured and rewarded. Marketing teams celebrated generating high volumes of leads, while sales teams were judged on closing high-quality deals that stuck. Both groups performed exactly as their compensation structures encouraged, yet their successes didn’t complement each other. Marketing felt proud hitting lead targets, while sales complained those leads were largely unqualified. Leadership grew frustrated watching full pipelines fail to translate into consistent revenue growth.

Incentive structures often unintentionally set departments at odds. Marketing defines a qualified lead as anyone expressing interest, whereas sales expects prospects to have a clear budget, timeline, and decision-making authority. This mismatch means marketing might deliver hundreds of names, but sales only considers a small fraction truly viable. Tensions rise, and leadership typically responds by pressuring sales to close more deals. While this may temporarily boost numbers, it ignores the underlying incentive conflict. Low-quality wins lead to rapid customer churn, and blame cycles between sales, marketing, and product teams intensify. Customer acquisition costs climb, lifetime value declines, and board-level discussions become increasingly tense.

Many leaders mistakenly believe layering on additional incentives will resolve the conflict. However, simply adding more motivational tools without redesigning them is like using a hammer for every job, it might make noise but rarely fixes the core issue. The solution isn’t more incentives, but smarter ones that encourage collaboration and shared success. When sales and marketing share common objectives, each team’s victories strengthen the other, creating a compounding effect on revenue.

Implementing shared metrics represents a powerful first step. Rather than marketing celebrating lead volume and sales focusing solely on close rates, both teams should be evaluated on pipeline velocity, the speed at which leads progress from initial contact to closed deal. This shift immediately reduces the “marketing qualified lead” versus “sales qualified lead” blame game and aligns both groups around accelerating revenue.

Establishing an evergreen content flywheel further bridges the gap. Sales teams gain invaluable insights during the closing process, observing how customers use the product and what outcomes they achieve. This information should flow directly to marketing for crafting compelling case studies and targeted messaging. For instance, discovering that “customers adopting Feature X within 30 days demonstrate twice the retention” allows marketing to develop onboarding campaigns and nurture sequences that guide new users toward that specific feature. Similarly, data showing “average time-to-value decreased by 27% across 212 companies” becomes powerful social proof in marketing materials.

Creating ground-level feedback loops ensures continuous improvement. Sales should provide marketing with detailed feedback on lead quality within 48 hours, including reasons why deals were lost. Marketing then refines targeting and messaging to generate higher-quality prospects in subsequent campaigns. When marketing’s lead-quality predictions align with sales outcomes, both teams earn rewards. This cyclical process makes each department more effective over time, marketing focuses on attracting high-lifetime-value customers, while sales concentrates on delivering outcomes the product can genuinely provide.

Unified dashboards prevent teams from optimizing only what they can easily see. Separate reporting systems often mean marketing tracks lead metrics while sales monitors close rates, causing both to miss the bigger picture. A consolidated view ensures everyone examines the same data, focuses on shared goals, and collectively works toward common objectives.

Organizations invest heavily in tools and processes while sales and marketing quietly work at cross-purposes. True success emerges when every part of the business rows in the same direction. The remedy isn’t better technology or improved communication alone, it’s designing a system where incentives don’t just align but actively reinforce one another. Each marketing achievement should make sales more effective, and every sales victory should enhance marketing’s impact. Without this synergy, sales will continue dismissing leads as inadequate, marketing will feel undermined, and leadership will remain puzzled about why growth never matches the effort expended.

(Source: MarTech)