A lot of B2B companies measure marketing and sales separately. Separate meetings, separate reports, separate goals. At first glance it looks like the right way to run things. But data from the past ten years shows it is one of the most expensive habits a company can have.
The gap is not in single percentage points, it is in tens of them
Aberdeen Group compared companies with high and low alignment between sales and marketing. The gap was not a couple of percentage points. Aligned companies grew 32 % year on year, while those that ignored it dropped 7 %. That is a 39 percentage point spread between companies that often sell the same thing in the same market.
In other words: two companies with the same product, the same budget and the same market can end up a third of annual growth apart, purely based on whether their marketing and sales communicate or whether each just handles its own thing.
Leaders see collaboration, the people in the teams see something else
The second number is more uncomfortable, because it is about how a company sees itself. According to Forrester, 82 % of company leaders consider their marketing and sales aligned, while 65 % of the people inside those teams say the opposite (2024).
Both groups sit in the same meetings. They just walk out with a different story. For an owner, this leads to a conclusion that is hard to hear: what you hear in the leadership meeting is probably not the full and honest picture.
They collaborate on three out of fifteen things
The third number shows where the collaboration is actually missing. Gartner (2024) mapped fifteen key commercial activities where marketing and sales meet, from defining the target customer to handing over leads. On average, marketing and sales really collaborate on only three of those fifteen.
The other twelve, each team does its own way, or nobody does at all. This is where that 39-point growth gap is buried: not in one big mistake, but in twelve small spots where work is either duplicated or falls between two teams.
Where the money leaks out
- Leads nobody works. Marketing brings them in with effort, sales does not trust them, the leads go cold and nothing happens. Paid acquisition with no return.
- Two definitions of the customer. Marketing targets one profile (ICP), sales talks to a completely different one. Campaigns bring in people the sales team does not actually need.
- Missing feedback. Sales knows why deals fell through, but marketing never hears it. Campaigns repeat mistakes a salesperson figured out long ago.
- Two acquisition engines instead of one. When sales stops trusting marketing leads, it starts sourcing its own. The company pays two teams to do the same thing.
None of these show up in the budget as a loss. They show up as slower growth, a higher cost per deal and a feeling that marketing does not work, even though the problem is not in marketing or in sales, but in the plain lack of communication between the two teams.
Why it does not fix itself
The obvious question: if the cost is this big, why do companies not deal with it? Because the fix has no owner. Marketing optimizes its numbers, sales optimizes its numbers, and the space between the teams belongs to nobody. The head of marketing has no authority over sales, the head of sales has none over marketing, and the CEO has ten other priorities and often cannot even pinpoint the core problem.
That is why the misalignment cannot be solved with another meeting about collaboration. Both teams need someone who spans both departments and whose job is to hold them as one system: one definition of a qualified lead, one funnel, one report that both sides look at. In larger companies this role is filled by a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). In smaller ones it is filled by connected leadership of marketing and sales, whether internal or external.
For what it is worth, this is the most common reason companies move to the fractional model. Not to save money, but because for the first time they have one person (or two) responsible for the whole journey from campaign to signed deal.
What to take away
If you are not sure which side of that 39 % spread your company sits on, that is an answer in itself. Companies with connected marketing and sales usually know, because they have one number both sides look at. Companies without good alignment and an understanding of both sides have two numbers, and each says something different.
We can talk through what it looks like at your company over lunch. No slides, no commitments. And how we run marketing and sales as one system, we describe on the fractional CMO and CSO service page.
