“Marketing doesn’t understand our customers.” “Sales never follows up on our leads properly.” I’ve heard these complaints in every environment I’ve worked in, and frankly, they’re both usually right. The challenge isn’t the people, it’s the relationship structure that’s completely broken.

The Problem Nobody Wants to Admit

Marketing has become sales’ personal content creation service. Sales wants more leads, marketing dutifully generates them. Sales wants different messaging, marketing obediently changes it. Sales needs a last-minute pitch deck, marketing drops everything to create it.

I’ve seen this dynamic destroy revenue potential time and time again. It makes marketing look tactical, sales become entitled rather than collaborative and leadership treats marketing like expensive order-takers with PowerPoint skills.

Most importantly, nobody’s solving the real business problems that drive sustainable revenue growth. We’re all just polishing deck chairs on the Titanic, but with better fonts.

So here’s how to systematically transform marketing from tactical order-takers to strategic revenue drivers.

Strategic Foundation: Reset How Marketing Is Perceived

Lead with Revenue Language from Day One

If you’re the new marketing leader walking into this mess, your first 90 days are critical for resetting expectations. The sales team has likely been used to seeing marketing as the “make it pretty” department that occasionally provides leads of questionable quality.

Get in front of every new seller during onboarding. Don’t let them inherit the previous dysfunction. Set your stall out early: “We don’t do marketing theatre here. Everything we do is designed to help you sell more, faster.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth – if you want to be treated strategically, you need to act strategically from day one. Stop talking about leads, impressions, and engagement rates that make marketers feel better about themselves but mean nothing to people you’re trying to influence.

Start talking about pipeline impact, deal velocity, revenue attribution, and broader business outcomes. When you focus conversations on revenue and business impact rather than marketing metrics, everything changes. This builds trust and credibility with the people who matter most to your success. Sales leaders start seeing marketing as part of their extended team rather than a separate function that occasionally sends them things they don’t want.

Now Claim Your Seat At The Table

This early positioning sets your team up for future success. Leadership includes marketing in strategic planning because you’re speaking the language of business impact, not marketing theatre. You’re establishing yourself as a revenue partner, not a service provider.

Being at the table breaks the reactive cycle. You become part of the decision-making process rather than finding out about changes after they’ve been made. You can influence resource allocation, territory decisions, and strategic direction before they impact your ability to deliver. Nothing should be a surprise now… well, that’s the theory anyway.

Operational Changes: Build the Foundation for Partnership

Demand Involvement in Territory Planning

Ever been asked to support a new seller in a region you’ve never researched, with no budget adjustment and a “make it work” attitude?

Most sales leaders don’t understand why marketing should be involved in territory planning. They see it as administrative work rather than strategic advantage. This creates expensive problems nobody anticipates.

I’ve seen this play out multiple times – we agree on a plan and resource allocation, only to discover we’ve hired a seller in a region that wasn’t part of the original strategy. Then come the inevitable requests for support that weren’t planned and frankly, can’t be supported from a resource perspective.

This creates impossible situations. The new seller needs marketing support to be successful, but those resources are already committed to planned territories. Marketing either fails the new seller by not supporting them, or fails existing territories by diluting resources. The new seller struggles, existing territories suffer, and trust erodes faster than Scottish resolve during a heatwave.

Territory planning and sales hiring decisions can’t happen in isolation – it takes a village to succeed in a new region. You can’t drop a new seller into a new territory without the proper support and infrastructure – it’s a costly mistake that will take years to undo. Marketing brings insights about competitive landscape, market dynamics, and what it takes to scale successfully. Sales leaders, don’t try to be the hero – big TAM doesn’t mean we should enter a market…yet. Let marketing help you get it right from the start.

Define Clear Ownership Boundaries

Most sales-marketing friction comes from unclear funnel ownership and definitions. Ambiguity kills productivity – make it crystal clear and get agreement. Don’t assume people know what to do, be prescriptive:

• Marketing owns: Lead generation, initial qualification, and nurturing until sales-ready
• Sales owns: Opportunity progression, deal negotiation, and closure
• Both teams need shared agreement on: Stage definitions, handoff criteria, lead quality standards, conversion rates and KPIs – this is the handshake.

Document it. Share it. Reinforce it. This allows all teams to execute without getting embroiled in internal selling. No more arguments about lead quality, follow-up responsibility, or performance measurement. No more finger-pointing that makes everyone’s working life unnecessarily miserable.

Work Backwards from Revenue Targets Together

Once ownership is clear, do the reverse funnel modeling together. Start with the revenue target and work backwards to understand exactly what’s required at each stage – deals needed, opportunities required, leads to generate, conversion rates to hit. This shared exercise drives clarity and predictability across the entire GTM function.

When both teams build the model together, there’s no arguing about whether marketing delivered enough leads or sales converted effectively. Everyone understands the math and their role in making it work.

Tactical Execution: Prove Your Value Daily

Get in the Trenches

Offer to join sales calls and actually listen to real conversations. What objections are they hearing? Where do deals stall? What questions keep coming up? This isn’t about checking up on sales – it’s about understanding their reality so you can solve actual problems rather than assumed ones.

I make it a point to join sales and SDRs calls, not to interfere but to understand what prospects are actually saying versus what marketing assumes based on website behaviour or email clicks. The conversations prospects have with sales are often completely different from what marketing thinks is happening.

Join pipeline calls as an active participant, not an observer. If you aren’t invited, push to be on the call. Ask questions – the best marketers are curious ones. Contribute insights about what’s working, where deals are stalling, and what resources would help move conversations forward.

Select Your Internal Champions

Identify sellers who are already using marketing support effectively and get them to share their success with peers. Sellers trust other sellers more than they trust marketers pushing something that inevitably gets deleted or buried in their inbox.

Celebrate strong sales engagement publicly. When a seller uses marketing materials to close a deal, converts a lead properly, or adheres to best practices, make sure sales leadership knows about it. When marketing support helps accelerate a deal, share that story in sales meetings

Sound familiar, sellers? Yes, it’s selling! Turns out we marketers need to do this too, rather than assuming our brilliant work will magically sell itself.

Present as a United Front

When presenting to your respective teams, do it together. Demonstrate alignment and model the collaborative behaviour you expect from others. If marketing is launching a campaign, have sales leadership explain how it supports their goals. If sales is implementing new processes, help communicate how marketing will support the changes.

This visible partnership signals that alignment isn’t optional – it’s how the business operates. Teams follow leadership behaviour more than leadership instructions, so model what you want to see. Simple but effective. It might be through gritted teeth sometimes, but suck it up and get it done.

Measurement & Iteration: Protect Your Strategic Position

Use Attribution to Optimise, Not Compete

Let’s be clear about why attribution matters – it’s not about claiming credit. Remember, marketing does not get commission for closed deals! Attribution helps us understand what’s working so we can do more of it to support sales success.

The biggest problem arises when organisations create “Marketing-sourced” versus “Sales-sourced” deal categories that pit teams against each other. This creates competitive dynamics when we should be operating as one team focused on the same revenue goals.

Use attribution data to optimise what’s working and eliminate what isn’t, not to fight over credit. When we understand which marketing activities actually influence deals that close, we can invest more in those approaches and less in activities that look impressive but don’t drive results.

Read the Room

Don’t celebrate lead generation metrics when the company is struggling to hit revenue targets. I’ve seen marketing teams celebrate brand initiatives whilst the business faces quarterly pressure – it’s tone deaf and will annoy sales while missing the mark completely.

Strike a balance to acknowledge great work within your team, but remember our goal is to drive revenue, not feel good about marketing activities that may or may not contribute to business success.

Communicate marketing value in business terms, especially during difficult periods. “This campaign generated qualified opportunities worth £X” rather than “increased brand awareness by Y%.” Revenue-focused language demonstrates that marketing understands business priorities.

Know When to Push Back

When marketing gets a request that contradicts agreed strategy, you must push back professionally. Saying no can be a superpower – empower your team to do it respectfully using strategy and data points.

“This doesn’t align with our agreed strategy because…” removes emotion and makes it about business outcomes rather than personal preferences or departmental politics.

You’ve done all the hard work to this point – don’t fall into the trap by being reactive here. We need to be agile, but doing something with no clear business case will just reset us back to zero and undo all the progress. Position yourself as an equal partner in strategic decisions, not just an execution function that adapts to every change leadership decides to implement

The Results When It Works

When marketing and sales operate as genuine partners rather than separate functions competing for credit, the business results are substantial. Properly aligned teams consistently achieve shorter sales cycles, higher win rates, and more predictable revenue forecasting.

More importantly, they create better customer experiences because prospects receive consistent messaging throughout their journey rather than conflicting signals that make your company seem disorganised.

The cultural benefits matter just as much. When teams trust each other, both spend less time on internal politics and more time on activities that actually drive revenue growth. And people actually showing up to work instead of dealing with toxic dysfunction.

Making It Stick

This systematic approach transforms marketing from order-taker to strategic partner. Start with strategic foundation – reset perceptions and speak revenue language. Build operational changes that create true partnership. Execute tactical activities that prove daily value. Measure and iterate to protect your strategic position.

Each phase builds on the previous one. You can’t execute tactics effectively without operational foundation, and you can’t build operations without strategic positioning. But when you follow this progression, you create sustainable alignment that drives revenue growth rather than just better communication between departments that still optimise for different outcomes.

Stop being the order-taker. Start being the revenue partner your business actually needs.

Godspeed.