Key Takeaways From HexaGroups 2026 Energy Marketing Report

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Learn how to trigger outreach off real buying signals so you reach buyers while they're in-market. Use AI to qualify leads on fit and intent before outreach, so reps only work accounts likely to buy. Marketing met with the sales reps each week to find out what their prospects were asking about. Persson said that startups also need to use the help of contractors and small agencies which specialize in certain industries and types of marketing, as well as deploying apps and marketing operations to automate nearly every part of the process and track the results from different campaigns. With startups often founded by engineering and product teams, inadequate sales and marketing skills are major contributors to the 90% startup failure rate, while in corporate America sales and marketing often don’t work well together. Explore Agentforce Sales from accounts and contacts, to leads and opportunities.

Both teams must agree on the target account list and coordinate outreach so buyers do not get conflicting messages. When sales and marketing are misaligned, buyers hear one story from marketing and a different pitch from sales. When marketing knows what sales needs, they build campaigns that attract buyers who match your ideal customer profile. Aligned teams close more deals faster because they stop wasting time on the wrong leads and start focusing on accounts that actually convert. Marketing is not building audiences from one database while sales prospects from another. Marketing is not building campaigns for a broad audience while sales is targeting a narrow vertical.

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• Marketing builds long-term systems.
• Joint forecasting accuracy measures how close your combined marketing and sales forecasts come to actual results.
• See which accounts are active and who’s involved, so sellers can focus outreach on the opportunities most likely to close.
• While there is progress on quantifying impact, only 42% say their approach is very effective.
• Sales email statistics measure how buyers engage with email outreach across metrics such as open rates, reply rates, and click-through behavior throughout the sales process.

Without alignment between sales and marketing teams, revenue stalls. Research from Forrester reveals a dangerous ‘perception gap.’ While 82% of leaders confidently claim their teams are aligned, 65% of marketing and sales professionals disagree, citing a fundamental lack of trust and communication. She has 20+ years of experience in technology marketing, ranging from large-scale enterprises like Microsoft to high-growth IPO companies like Qualtrics to innovative startups like BlueOcean AI and Highspot. To help sales and marketing teams work in lockstep, you must have centralized comms and a regular distribution cadence. Complacency with current processes, strategies, or systems is the fastest way to lose your competitive edge. Also, document how you expect sales and marketing teams to interact.

Turns out, sales professionals spend 60% of their time on nonselling activities. Open your calendar for the week and count the hours you actually spend selling and communicating with prospects. A consistent naming convention for campaigns and required CRM fields will get you 80 percent of the value quickly. Over time, this loop reduces the hidden drain of rework and missed opportunities that can compound into lost productivity. Minute mini-workshop to set shared targets, reduce guesswork, and create simple decision rules that keep marketing and sales moving as one.

This disconnect frustrates prospects, slows down deals, and ultimately costs organizations revenue they should be capturing. Apply these sales and marketing best practices to improve your smarketing strategy, and you’ll see an exponential growth in conversion rate, revenue, and customer retention. Aligning your sales and marketing team helps both teams reach their goals and boost company revenue. Check out this list of fun corporate team-building ideas — from improv workshops to karaoke. This location is a great place to also host your campaign calendar, links to relevant offers, and specific content for a market or persona.

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Ninety-six percent of sales and marketing professionals agree that disparate reporting structures, separate KPIs, and separate goals and objectives cause some alignment issues among sales and marketing teams. Aligned sales and marketing teams speak the same language, share goals and objectives, and keep the lines of communication open. Eliminating the friction between sales and marketing is essential for seamless business growth, and a CRO is key to success.

Persson Lays the Marketing Foundation

The best AI tools to research accounts before you reach out in 2026. Compare Unify, Clay, Outreach & Apollo on research and outreach The best AI tools to turn buyer signals into outreach in 2026.

Require both teams to log their activity there. If sales keeps their own spreadsheets or marketing runs campaigns outside the CRM, you lose visibility. See how ZoomInfo's AI GTM Platform gives sales and marketing a shared intelligence layer, request a demo. GTM Studio gives marketers and RevOps teams the ability to build audiences, launch plays, and orchestrate campaigns without engineering dependencies. ZoomInfo is an all-in-one AI GTM Platform that gives sales and marketing a shared intelligence foundation.

Why sales and marketing alignment is so important for B2B companies today

Finally, gather regular feedback from both teams about what’s working and where friction exists. The platform’s no-code approach means teams can set up integrations without IT support. Native integration capabilities in solutions like monday CRM support connections with marketing platforms, email systems, and other tools both teams use. Integrate CRM and marketing automation systems to ensure seamless data flow. These meetings need clear agendas and defined outcomes to ensure discussions translate into improvements. Weekly or bi-weekly alignment sales marketing alignment meetings should cover pipeline reviews, campaign performance, lead quality feedback, and upcoming initiatives.

Bridge the gap by running joint strategy sessions to co-create campaign briefs plus quarterly role-swap sprints where marketers shadow sales calls and reps shape campaigns. Have someone experienced manage your account, someone who has years of experience in sales and marketing, to bridge the gap and bring these two elements together. It’s all about orchestrating the buyer journey and working together to make it frictionless for the customer. This feedback loop ensures campaigns aren’t just focused on just the creative. Marketing builds long-term systems.

Sales and marketing alignment specifically addresses coordination between both departments to create one unified revenue function. Do not run account-based marketing if sales is not ready to co-own accounts. Match your alignment approach to how you actually go to market. Both teams must jointly select accounts, plan engagement, and execute coordinated plays. Alignment focuses on lead quality and handoff speed.

When your business enters the phase of rapid growth, it can be easy for valuable leads to fall through the cracks — after all, friction is a natural result of business growth. CRMs are powerful tools that help you expedite business growth while eliminating friction, improving cross-team collaboration, managing your contact records, syncing data, automating daily tasks, and more. Together, the team will focus on strengthening existing partnerships while developing new opportunities aimed at delivering value to members. Now, I can activate my notes directly from any application on my computer, effortlessly translating my thoughts into writing.