11-07-2025
Why B2B Sales And Marketing Need To Stop Aligning And Start Unifying
Sarah Goodall is CEO of Tribal Impact, a data-driven social media consulting company focused on B2B employee advocacy and social selling.
For as long as I've worked in B2B, we've been talking about alignment (or lack of). Sales blames marketing for poor-quality leads and lack of brand awareness. Marketing blames sales for letting them go cold. It's a cycle that's been repeating for decades.
But so much has changed. Buyer behavior has shifted dramatically, and the tools we use to engage them have advanced at speed. What hasn't changed quickly enough is how sales and marketing work together. At this point, alignment just doesn't go far enough. If we want to meet buyers where they are today, sales and marketing need to be unified.
The Day One List Changes Everything
There's one data point I keep coming back to. Research by Google/Bain revealed that '86% of B2B buyers have a Day One List' of three to five vendors, and 92% of those will purchase off that list.
That means most buying decisions are made before a salesperson even gets a chance to speak to a customer. If you're not on that initial list, your opportunity to win the deal has already passed. And that's not something either sales or marketing can solve on their own.
Getting on the list requires visibility, relevance and trust. It takes a consistent presence across channels, a strong point of view and meaningful engagement.
Alignment Isn't Enough Anymore
When we talk about sales and marketing alignment, we usually mean both teams are heading in the same direction. But in the digital-first B2B environment we work in now, that's no longer sufficient. Buyers don't follow a linear path from awareness to purchase. They research their day one list and get 70% of the way through the selection process before inviting vendors to a conversation. You don't call them, they call you!
This new reality means sales and marketing can't afford to operate in silos. They need to work together, at the same time, on the same accounts, using the same data, insights and priorities. They need to build a strategy together. While we continue to talk about alignment, the disconnect is still visible in the data, and buyers are noticing.
The Buying Process Has Become Harder For Everyone
Nowadays, the average B2B decision involves 13 people and the average B2B purchase cycle now takes around 11.5 months. And even after all that time and all those involved in the process, 81% of B2B buyers are dissatisfied. They don't feel consulted or advised.
All of this means that sales teams are facing larger buying groups resulting in longer sales cycles. At the same time, marketing teams are under pressure to deliver more with less. Gartner found that marketing budgets as a percentage of company revenue have dropped to 7.7% in 2024, a 15% decrease from the previous year.
Add to that the growing difficulty in proving marketing's impact. Attribution is no longer straightforward. We're moving away from causation measurement to something more nuanced. Instead of 'do this, get that,' we're asking, 'We did this, what happened as a result?' This correlation-based thinking makes more sense in these complex buying environments, but it takes longer to prove and harder to communicate in QBRs.
Sales And Marketing Each Bring Strengths If We Let Them
Unification starts by recognizing the strengths both functions bring to the prospecting process. Sales bring empathy, persistence, active listening and problem solving. They're also familiar with cadences, processes and long-term relationship building.
Marketing brings depth in audience insights and digital engagement. They understand brand messaging, positioning, targeting and nurturing. Their tech stack creates a lot of data, but turning it into actionable insights isn't always easy.
Account-Based Social Selling Is Where It Comes Together
Social is one of the most effective ways to bring marketing and sales together. It pushes both teams to be more focused, targeted and intentional, and account-based social selling is where this really comes to life. I've always felt something is missing in traditional account-based marketing: sales. Marketing build great campaigns and even generate meetings, but unless sales nurtured relationships as part of the process (unified), the impact is limited.
With account-based social selling, both teams work in sync. Intent tools show which accounts are in-market, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps reps identify the right people. From there, marketing can see which accounts are already showing intent on the brand and deliver thought leadership content from experts within the company, straight into the feed through paid ads. These aren't cold leads, they already know your brand. So instead of starting from scratch, you can focus on engagement that builds trust and accelerates progress.
The importance of this shared approach becomes even clearer when you look at LinkedIn's Circles of Boom study. It found there's only a 16% overlap in the audiences targeted by marketing and sales teams, a clear sign of what happens when the two teams don't stay connected and unified around the same accounts.
The account-based social selling approach is smarter, efficient and far more effective. You're not spreading your budget thin, you're investing in the accounts that are in the market and that know your brand and where you have paths of introduction.
Unification Starts With Shared Action
If a B2B buyer is engaging with 13 pieces of content before they speak to a salesperson, then marketing should already be involved. If sales is actively pursuing an account, marketing should be supporting those efforts with paid awareness that's relevant and timely. That overlap should be closer to 100%, not 16%.
Unification means sharing priorities, building programs together and measuring success in a connected way. It means showing up for the buyer as one brand and one team. Getting on the day one list won't happen with alignment alone. It will take unified thinking, unified execution and a shared commitment to the buyer experience.
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