Why Your Sales Team Is Underperforming and Why Marketing Is the Fix

Most founders I talk to think they have a sales problem. They want to hire another rep, build a bigger outbound sequence, or find someone with a better network.

What they actually have is an alignment problem.

Only 8% of companies successfully align their sales and marketing functions. The other 92% are leaving an estimated 10% of annual revenue on the table. Not because their salespeople are bad, but because marketing isn't doing its job of warming up the market before sales shows up.

I've seen both sides of this firsthand. A few years ago, I was selling a brand new product category into one of the most skeptical, relationship-driven industries on the planet. Cold calls and emails weren't moving the needle. The breakthrough came when we built a marketing engine that educated the market, created awareness, and warmed prospects up before sales ever made contact. Suddenly the conversations changed. Instead of explaining what we were, we were talking about why it mattered. Sales cycles shortened. Win rates climbed.

That's what sales and marketing alignment actually does.

What the Data Says

Companies that align sales and marketing achieve 19% faster revenue growth and 15% higher profitability. They report 36% higher customer retention rates and 38% higher sales win rates.

Here's why those numbers make sense: 73% of B2B buyers engage with marketing content before they ever talk to a salesperson. They consume an average of three to five pieces of content first. By the time your sales rep picks up the phone, the buyer has already formed an opinion about your company, either because your marketing shaped it, or because your competitor's did.

The companies winning today understand that marketing isn't a support function for sales. It's the first half of the same conversation.

Why Most Companies Get This Wrong

The disconnect usually comes down to three things.

Sales and marketing have different goals. Marketing is thinking about brand and awareness. Sales is thinking about this quarter's number. Neither is wrong, but without alignment they're pulling in different directions.

They don't talk enough. When sales hears the same objections over and over and marketing never finds out, the content that could neutralize those objections never gets created.

They use different tools and sit on different data. Fragmented systems mean fragmented strategy. Sales doesn't know what content a prospect just engaged with. Marketing doesn't know which leads actually closed.

How to Actually Fix It

Map the buyer's journey and assign ownership at each stage

Every prospect moves through awareness, consideration, and decision. Marketing owns the first two: building awareness of the problem and educating buyers about the solution. But marketing can also move the needle in the decision stage with case studies, ROI calculators, and competitive comparison content that gives the sales team something concrete to use in final conversations.

Know what needs to happen at each stage and by whom. Don't leave it to chance.

Increase your touchpoints with the right message

Research shows that a prospect needs to encounter your message at least seven times before taking action. That's seven touchpoints across phone, email, social, content, and events, not seven cold calls. When marketing is building awareness in parallel with sales outreach, you're compressing the timeline and increasing the probability that when a prospect is ready to buy, you're the first name they think of.

Create a feedback loop between sales and marketing

This is the highest leverage thing most companies never do. Sales hears objections every day: pricing concerns, competitor comparisons, trust barriers, timing issues. Every one of those objections is a content brief. When marketing builds content that directly addresses what sales is hearing in the field, conversion rates go up and sales cycles go down.

Set up a simple weekly or biweekly sync between sales and marketing. What objections came up this week? What content would have helped? What did prospects respond to? That conversation is worth more than any campaign.

Use automation to manage the touchpoints you can't do manually

Tools like Outplay and Gong can automate outreach sequences and track which content prospects are engaging with. Set up workflows that notify sales when a target is actively reading your marketing content -- that's a signal they're in consideration mode and the timing for outreach just improved significantly.

The Bottom Line

If your pipeline is thin and your sales team is grinding without traction, the answer probably isn't another sales hire. It's figuring out why marketing isn't making their job easier.

The companies that get this right don't just close more deals. They close faster, retain longer, and spend less doing it. That's what happens when sales and marketing stop operating in separate silos and start working as one team with one goal.

Most of the founders I work with don't have a sales problem -- they have a messaging and alignment problem. If your pipeline isn't reflecting the quality of your product, let's talk about why.