A note on revenue structure, organisational silos, and why the best-performing B2B companies have stopped treating alignment as a goal.
The separation was the mistake.
I have sat through more sales and marketing alignment workshops than I want to admit. Shared dashboards. Joint planning sessions. New definitions of what qualifies as a real opportunity. Every year the same conversation, slightly repackaged. And every year, the same friction returns within a quarter.
After enough cycles of this, I stopped believing the problem was alignment. I started believing the problem was the separation itself.
The buyer does not see two teams
Think about it from the buyer’s side. They have a problem they are trying to solve. They start researching. They encounter a company somewhere. Eventually they are ready to talk. At no point in that process do they think I am now transitioning from the marketing-led phase to the sales-led phase of my experience. That boundary exists on the organisation’s chart. It does not exist in the buyer’s world.
But they feel it. They feel it when the tone changes between the content that attracted them and the conversation that follows. They feel it when they have to repeat context because the person on the call does not know what brought them there. They feel it in the small seam between two teams that are supposedly working together but are optimising for different numbers.
That seam is where deals leak out. Quietly. Without anyone noticing or taking responsibility. Because it is nobody’s fault. It is the structure’s fault.
The perception gap between leaders and teams
There is data that makes this uncomfortable to ignore. Forrester’s 2024 Sales and Marketing Alignment Survey found that 65 percent of sales and marketing professionals say their leaders are not aligned. In the same study, 82 percent of C-level executives believe their teams already are.
A seventeen-point perception gap between the people running the company and the people doing the work. Every leader reading this probably sits inside one of those two numbers without knowing which. The executives who are most confident that alignment is solved are the ones least likely to notice that it is not.
The market has already moved
The companies that have grown fastest in the last two years do not have this seam. Not because they aligned better. Because they stopped treating revenue as something two separate departments split between them. They built one team responsible for the full buyer experience, from the first moment someone encounters the company to the day the contract is signed and beyond.
Sometimes that team does work that looks like what we used to call marketing. Sometimes it looks like what we used to call sales. The label changes depending on what the buyer needs at that moment. The ownership does not change.
Gartner expects 75 percent of the highest-growth companies to have adopted a revenue operations model by the end of 2025. What most organisations are still debating as a future possibility is what the best-performing ones already treat as settled.
The hidden cost of running two teams
The common objection is that a single revenue function does not scale. That specialisation is necessary. That the skills in marketing and sales are too different to merge.
Maybe. But what is scaling right now is the cost of the separation. Two leadership roles. Two technology stacks. Two planning cycles. Two sets of metrics that never quite agree. And an ongoing tax of leadership energy spent mediating between them. That is the part nobody puts on a slide. The hours every week that the CEO, the CRO, and the CMO spend debating whose responsibility a particular gap was. That energy is not free. It comes directly out of time that could be spent understanding the buyer and improving the experience.
Every time I see a company arguing about whether the handoff should happen at MQL or SQL, I see a company debating where to draw a line that the buyer never asked for.
What happens when the line disappears
The buyer does not care about the line. They care about their problem. A company built around that does not need an alignment strategy, because alignment is only necessary when two things are separate by design.
Removing the design flaw is the answer that most organisations are still avoiding. It requires rethinking compensation, reporting structure, technology, and how leadership measures contribution. It is uncomfortable work. It exposes which roles were designed around the separation rather than around the outcome.
But the companies willing to do that work are the ones already ahead. They built for the buyer instead of for the org chart. And the org chart, in the end, is only a tool. When the tool gets in the way of the outcome, the right answer is to change the tool. Not to keep holding workshops about how to work around it.
Photo by Gustavo Fring: https://www.pexels.com/photo/women-with-sales-text-on-paper-5622903/
Leave a Reply