If you've ever heard a sales rep say "marketing sends us garbage leads" while marketing fires back "sales never follows up on what we give them" — congratulations, you've witnessed smarketing dysfunction in real time.
It's more common than most organizations want to admit. According to research from LinkedIn, misalignment between marketing and sales costs businesses more than $1 trillion annually in lost productivity and wasted resources. And yet, most teams treat it like a personality conflict rather than a structural problem with a real fix.
Here's the truth: misalignment isn't a people problem. It's a systems and communication problem. And the first step to fixing it is recognizing the signs before they cost you your next quarter.
If marketing is celebrating a record month for MQLs while sales is complaining about a dry pipeline, something is structurally broken.
This usually happens when each team is optimizing for its own metrics without any shared definition of what "good" looks like. Marketing chases volume. Sales chases quality. Neither is wrong — but without a shared scorecard, they're playing different games.
The fix: Build a shared SLA (Service Level Agreement) between both teams. Define what constitutes a qualified lead, how quickly sales agrees to follow up, and what feedback loop marketing gets when a lead goes cold. When both teams are accountable to the same north star — think pipeline generated, not just leads delivered — behavior starts to shift.
Marketing passes a lead to sales. Sales either ignores it, can't find it, or follows up three weeks later with zero context. The prospect, who showed real interest, has already signed with a competitor.
This is a handoff failure, and it's brutally common. It usually stems from unclear ownership, bad CRM hygiene, or a lead routing process that nobody has actually tested end-to-end.
The fix: Map your lead handoff process out loud — literally draw it on a whiteboard with both teams in the room. Find where leads fall through. Then build automated alerts in your CRM so that every MQL gets a follow-up task assigned to a specific rep within a defined window. No task, no slip.
You've built a library of case studies, one-pagers, and email templates. Sales isn't using any of it. Instead, reps are writing their own emails from scratch, using outdated decks, or just winging it on calls.
This is a sign that marketing is producing content in a vacuum — without ever asking sales what they actually need in the field.
The fix: Run a quarterly content audit with sales input. Ask reps: What objections do you hear most? What questions do prospects ask that you struggle to answer? What would make your job easier at each stage of the deal? Build content around those answers, not around what marketing thinks sounds good. Then make it easy to find — a single, organized repository in your CRM beats a Slack message linking to a Google Doc every time.
Marketing generates leads. Sales works them. But does marketing ever hear which ones converted — and which ones were a complete waste of time?
If the answer is no, you're flying blind. Marketing will keep generating the same types of leads with no signal on what's actually driving revenue. This is one of the fastest ways to burn budget.
The fix: Build a closed-loop reporting system. In HubSpot, this is largely out of the box — you can track a contact from first touch to closed-won and attribute revenue back to the campaign that sourced them. But the technology only works if sales is actually logging their activity and updating deal stages. Make that non-negotiable, and review the data together in a monthly smarketing meeting. What converted? What didn't? Why?
If the last time marketing and sales were in the same room was the holiday party, you have a problem.
Alignment doesn't happen by accident. It requires structured, regular communication — not just a shared Slack channel that nobody checks. When teams operate in silos, assumptions fill the gaps. Marketing assumes sales is lazy. Sales assumes marketing doesn't understand the real customer. Both are usually wrong, and both suffer for it.
The fix: Establish a recurring smarketing sync — weekly if you're small, bi-weekly if you're larger. Keep it tight: 30 minutes max, focused on pipeline, lead quality, and content needs. Use it to surface friction before it becomes resentment. Even a brief standup with both leads in the room can shift the culture faster than any org restructure.
Misalignment between marketing and sales isn't inevitable — it's a symptom of unclear processes, mismatched metrics, and insufficient communication. The good news is that all of those things are fixable.
Start with one sign from this list. Pick the one that resonates hardest, build a fix around it, and measure the impact over 60 days. Small structural changes compound quickly when both teams are actually rowing in the same direction.
Because when marketing and sales work together, the math gets a lot better for everyone.
Ready to get your marketing and sales teams working as one? Let's talk — book a consultation with InPhluence today.