Insights: The state of B2B marketing: Key trends and transformations
Chapter 4.
Strategic Marketing-Sales Alignment: Building Revenue Engines
In today's complex B2B environment, the traditional boundaries between marketing and sales are blurring. Leading organizations are creating integrated revenue teams with shared goals, coordinated processes, and collaborative technologies that enable smooth handoffs and collective accountability for business outcomes.
This alignment begins with shared metrics and accountability. Derek Weeks from Katalon emphasizes this foundation: "With only about half of companies having agreement between the CEO, CFO, and CMO on the top three metrics that marketing should provide, this misalignment can create major challenges in demonstrating marketing's value to the organization."
Andrea Hayton from Baxter Planning describes their complete approach: "We operate as a fully integrated go-to-market team, with marketing and sales working hand-in-hand to generate, accelerate, and win deals. We've implemented a tiered account strategy where we segment our SOM prospects into three levels: Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3. We have also defined and agreed upon roles and responsibilities across marketing, business development, and sales for each tier."
The importance of this alignment extends beyond organizational structure to create tangible business impact. Steve Greene from Finexio shares concrete results: "Our partners' marketing-sourced opportunities consistently close deals that are 2.2 times larger than those self-sourced by their sales team. This isn't coincidental; it's because we maintain strict discipline in pursuing only the most valuable opportunities that align perfectly with our ICP criteria and we guide our partners to do the same."
This alignment requires both structural and cultural changes. Gloria Zhu from Wizehire explains: "The transition to a sales-led model has been important for our organization. This shift has been successful largely due to strong alignment across departments. Our CEO emphasizes that 'sales is the sun, and we all revolve around sales,' which has created a unified mission to support sales in closing deals. What's particularly effective is that our head of sales recognizes that being sales-led means acknowledging the power of all supporting functions."
Several marketing leaders emphasized the importance of regular, structured communication in maintaining alignment. Matt Taylor from Hawk Ridge Systems shares their approach: "We've found great value in qualitative data and direct conversations. For instance, when analyzing our CRM data, we noticed 'status quo' frequently appeared as a reason for lost opportunities. By engaging directly with sales reps and their managers about what lies behind that designation, we've uncovered insights that drive meaningful changes in our approach."
Sanjana Chappalli from Revinate highlights the value of shared metrics: "At Revinate, we don't view revenue generation as either sales-led or marketing-led – it's fully collaborative. We have shared metrics for success, with marketing having a stake in both pipeline generation and closed deals. Our CMO's background as a former Chief Revenue Officer gives her unique insight into sales team needs and perspectives."
The evolution toward unified revenue teams is accelerating as organizations recognize the inefficiency of traditional handoffs and siloed approaches. Dylan Max from AmplifAI notes: "For 2025, we're moving away from traditional separate sales and marketing teams, instead establishing a unified revenue team where both functions exist within a larger framework. This structural change reflects our belief in the interdependence of sales and marketing in driving revenue growth."
Ashley Levesque from Fuel50 reinforces this trend: "One of the most important trends I'm seeing is that marketing and sales are converging more closely, particularly as BDR and SDR roles disappear at many organizations. There's still a need for outreach, but it's increasingly unclear where this responsibility falls. This shift is creating a more unified revenue function where marketers are now doing outreach, and traditional closers are now hunting."
This alignment extends to how organizations approach target accounts. Moréa Pollet from InfluxData explains: "We've adopted a revenue-led approach rather than strictly sales or marketing-led, operating through two distinct funnels - one product-led and a sales-led. This unified approach has greatly improved our conversion metrics and team collaboration."
Our survey reveals that joint KPIs and success metrics rank as the most critical aspect of sales-marketing alignment, with 54% of respondents identifying this as their top priority.
The key to success lies in establishing:
- Clear joint accountability measures
- Shared technology infrastructure
- Regular collaboration frameworks
- Unified planning processes
- Consistent measurement approaches
Key Insights Recap
The traditional separation between sales and marketing is being replaced by unified revenue teams with shared goals, integrated processes, and collective accountability. Organizations that align these functions around common metrics and frameworks achieve considerably higher conversion rates, larger deal sizes, and more efficient revenue growth.
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About 6sense
6sense is on a mission to revolutionise the way B2B organisations create revenue by predicting customers most likely to buy and recommending the best course of action to engage anonymous buying teams. 6sense Revenue AI is the only sales and marketing platform to unlock the ability to create, manage and convert high-quality pipeline to revenue. Customers report 2X increases in average contract value, 4X increases in win rate and 20-40% reduction in time to close deals. Know everything, do anything, with 6sense.