Understand why sales pipelines fail and how alignment fixes them. Bill Dwoinen explains how shared customers, clean handoffs, and data drive revenue.
Summary: Misalignment between sales and marketing is a problem affecting many companies, the internal frustrations causing delays and costing revenue. Curing a sick sales pipeline requires aligning on ideal customers, seamless processes, and high-quality data.
The sales pipeline is the backbone of all for-profit organisations, a direct line to revenue and growth Yet, a silent crisis is unfolding within go-to-market teams across the globe. A recent study revealed that 85 percent of teams responsible for bringing a product to market, including sales, marketing, and customer success, are often working towards different, and sometimes conflicting, goals. This pervasive misalignment is the root cause of the chronically sick sales pipeline – one clogged with low-quality leads, plagued by inaccurate data, and ultimately, failing to deliver on its promise.
The disconnect is more than just fuel for the age-old friction between marketing and sales; it’s costing businesses time, resources, and prevents teams from creating meaningful customer experiences that drive growth. The reality is that marketing and sales are fundamentally codependent. Without a steady stream of qualified prospects from marketing, the sales team starves. And without a clear, consistent feedback loop from sales, marketing continues to invest in strategies that miss the mark. When targeting is off, the entire process is ineffective, causing teams to invest time in leads who are either not the right fit for the product or simply not ready to buy.
These costly repercussions have shown time and again that the only effective antidote is full team alignment. A united front between sales and marketing can transform a struggling pipeline into a high-performance engine for growth. So, what does this alignment look like in practice, and how can organisations bridge this critical gap? Well, it begins with agreeing on three foundational pillars.
Defining the ideal customer
The first and most crucial step is for the entire organisation to agree on a single, crystal-clear definition of the ideal customer. This is the focal point that guides all subsequent activities. The widespread misalignment seen across industries is often a direct symptom of teams operating with different customer profiles in mind. Marketing might be chasing leads based on broad engagement metrics, while the sales team needs prospects who are truly ready to buy – those with the right budget, decision-making power, and a clear need.
This goes far beyond basic demographics. A truly robust ideal customer profile includes company size, industry, and revenue, the current tech stack of the prospect, and crucially, the goals, challenges, and motivations of the key decision-makers. When marketing and sales are perfectly aligned on this detailed profile, they can co-create targeted campaigns that attract high-quality leads.
If a lead doesn’t match the agreed-upon criteria, it shouldn’t be handed off to sales. This requires a disciplined, data-driven approach, but it’s the only way to stop wasting resources and ensure the sales team is spending their time on opportunities that have a genuine chance of success.
Streamlining the handoff
Once a qualified lead is identified, the transition from marketing to sales must be comprehensive, immediate, and transparent. This is where many pipelines break down. It’s a common paradox that while sophisticated collaboration software is available, many individual contributors still revert to using massive legacy spreadsheets to manage their processes. This manual approach is a recipe for disaster in the handoff process. Leads fall in between the cracks, follow-up is delayed, and valuable context is lost between departments.
A seamless handoff requires a fully mapped out process that’s agreed upon by both teams, with unambiguous ownership at every stage. Next, teams need a centralised system that supports cross-functional collaboration that is purpose-built to address the challenges they’re experiencing. Using this shared platform, teams can collaboratively map the entire customer journey, from the first touchpoint to the final sale. This roadmap then acts as a single source of truth, clarifying roles, responsibilities, and clear agreements for follow-up. It eliminates vital messages being lost in translation and replaces them with shared understanding and mutual accountability, ensuring no lead is left behind.
Committing to quality data
Accurate, accessible, and actionable data is the lifeblood of a healthy sales pipeline. When things go wrong, it’s telling that decision-makers are more likely to attribute misalignment to “poor strategy” than to the foundational issues that cause it. However,
any go-to-market strategy is only as good as the data it’s built on. Without a unified approach to data collection and management, the strategy lacks a firm foundation.
Both marketing and sales must be rigorously committed to maintaining high-quality data at every touchpoint. This includes not just retaining contact information but also a complete, chronological record of every interaction, the content they’ve engaged with, their specific pain points, and their stated needs. This rich data context is what transforms an impersonal handoff into an informed conversation.
Properly contextualised, high-quality data is essential for improving lead quality over time, as it creates a powerful feedback loop. By analysing which customer profiles are converting at the highest rate, marketing can continuously refine its targeting and messaging, while sales can tailor their approach based on proven successes, moving from assumptions to data-driven decisions.By anchoring their efforts in a unified ideal customer profile, engineering a seamless handoff process, and committing to impeccable data hygiene, businesses have the power to cure their sick sales pipelines and resolve cross-departmental conflicts that hinder growth. Bridging the alignment gap means moving from a state of internal friction to one of collaborative growth, paving the way for predictable and continued success.
For more expert articles and industry updates, follow Martech News
Bill Dwoinen, Chief Revenue Officer at Mural
Bill Dwoinen is the Chief Revenue Officer at Mural, the leading visual work platform, where he oversees the company’s global sales and customer success strategy. He brings over two decades of award-winning sales and sales leadership experience at large sales organisations including Slack, Salesforce, and LinkedIn.
