🎙️ This free edition of MKT1 newsletter covers Season 1, Episode 5 of “Dear Marketers with Emily Kramer & Friends” podcast, brought to you by Typeform, Framer & Brand24. Listen or watch the full version of the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. Plus read the full newsletter below for an even deeper dive on the topic.
This episode’s question: “Dear marketers, I’m Kira Luscher, Head of Marketing and Growth at Valence. We’re a Series A SaaS company, building an AI coach for enterprise. My question is about how sales and marketing can work best together. We have a lot changing in go-to-market at Valence. We are transitioning to an ABX model. We’re bringing in a ton of new tools like Clay and other software to help us scale out outbound, and bringing in new teams across both rev ops, marketing and sales.
Given this, I’m wondering how sales and marketing can better stay aligned? And my second question is, do you think all of these changes at Valence and across the go-to-market function in general are making it harder or easier for sales and marketing to stay aligned?
Answer: Dear Kira and Marketers,
Sales and marketing alignment has always been a complex “thing.” But we agree that lately, the sources of these relationship challenges have changed a bit. AI, outbound automation, account-driven GTM, and team structure changes due to the aforementioned AI and tech developments have fundamentally reshaped how GTM works. And yet…most teams are still trying to align like it’s 15 years ago. A whole lot has changed since then, and not just between marketing and sales, but across entire B2B orgs. And we think this question is so timely, universal, and big that we’ll answer it over 2 podcast episodes, not 1.
“We’re shipping and iterating on how go-to-market works so much right now, but we’re not shipping and iterating on how to make the [sales and marketing] relationship better.” – Kramer in Episode 5 of Dear Marketers
In this newsletter & podcast episode:
Devon, Grace, Jaleh, and I discuss:
A brief(ish) 15-year history of GTM: How self-serve, PLG, hybrid motions, AI, and account-driven GTM blurred the lines between marketing, sales, and product over time.
Where sales & marketing alignment stands today: Reports from Mutiny and Typeform show just how misaligned teams still are—and why.
How to fix sales & marketing alignment: Advice on how to fix misaligned mindsets, undefined ownership, broken systems, role confusion, and outdated team structures.
Expert advice from my long-time friend Jaleh Rezaei, CEO & Co-founder at Mutiny, in our second Dear Marketers “Phone-a-friend” segment.
Paid subscribers: Template for defining strategic & tactical rules of engagement
Thanks to our Dear Marketers sponsors:
I vet each partner personally and these are genuine recommendations (even though yes, we do get paid for this).
Typeform: Thanks to our season-long presenting sponsor. Create delightful branded forms for collecting leads, feedback, and research. We even use a branded Typeform to get questions for each episode of Dear Marketers.
🎁 Offer: Use code MKT1 to get 20% off their annual growth plan.
—
Framer: Framer is a no-code website-building tool for teams to launch sites quickly. It looks and feels like a design tool and is becoming the go-to-choice for marketers (like me!)
🎁 Offer: Get 25% off for a Basic, Pro, Startup or Scaleup site with code MKT1
—
Brand24: We’ve all been asked: "How do you measure brand?" To measure brand awareness over time, I recommend Brand24, a social listening tool that tracks mentions and sentiment for your brand and even competitors’ brands.
🎁 Offer: MKT1 subscribers get 10% off on any plan for 3 months with code 10MKT1 (code valid for 90 days).
Listen or watch the full version of the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.
Newsletter: Our best sales & marketing alignment tips
This is a great pre-read before listening to Episode 5, and this newsletter is meant to augment the podcast, not just recap it. Go to Episode 6 for Part 2 of this Pod & newsletter (we had a lot to say on this topic)!
A 15-year history of GTM
The evolution of marketing and sales
I’m going to take you on a trip through GTM-time, not just because it’s a fun journey down memory lane for me. This history explains why the sales-marketing (and product) relationship feels so complicated today—and why it’s high time to rethink how we align.
~2010–2013: The beginning of self-serve
Dropbox, Atlassian, and early SaaS pioneers prove that freemium can scale.
“Growth” and “Growth hacking” teams emerge as a blurry hybrid of product, data, and marketing functions.
2014–2016: PLG becomes an increasingly popular strategy, paid inbound rises
Slack, Zoom, Asana, etc. further popularize network-effect & viral loop-driven, freemium GTM models driven by inbound.
Inbound is the default way to grow—and paid marketing spending gets a bit out of control due to Facebook and Google ads becoming very efficient, increased SaaS competitiveness, and free-flowing VC money.
“Growth marketing” and “product growth” roles show up—nobody agrees on definitions—they still don’t 10 years later.
Product and growth marketing ownership confusion for things like onboarding flows, in-product nudges, and usage-based emails further blurs the lines between product, UX, post-sales, and marketing functions.
2017–2019: Rise of sales-assisted PLG + hybrid GTM motions, requiring both inbound and outbound
Hybrid GTM models take over SaaS: PLG companies layer in sales to go upmarket. Sales-led companies layer in self-serve to meet buyers’ expectations.
Revenue responsibility further blurs across product, marketing, and sales.
Marketers now need to think in terms of funnels and flywheels—and build multiple GTM strategies to accommodate these different motions.
Inbound still reigns. But simultaneously, startups with sales-led motions add (way too many) SDRs, scaling headcount very quickly. Outbound becomes spammy.
Still ZIRP-ish times and easy-money behavior prevalent throughout startup-land.
2020–2021: The pandemic reshapes buyer behavior & team sizes
ZIRP (zero-interest rate policy) returns.
Yet, GTM teams shrink due to economic changes, especially marketing teams. Skeleton crews are expected to do more, with less.
Marketers driving inbound and SDRs running outbound becomes the default way to grow.
By 2022, ZIRP ends, and efficiency is the name of the game.
2022–2024: The rise of AI, automation, and GTM blur
AI and no-code tools shift GTM team responsibilities—less manual, more automation.
We hope this saves the day for the smaller marketing teams (who haven’t grown due to ZIRP ending in 2022)—can you now actually get it all done with a skeleton marketing crew? But it doesn’t really…
Teams also start to regain some budget in 2024, and very quickly SDRs, marketers, RevOps, and product all start stepping on each other’s toes
2025: Multiple GTM strategies across segments, account-driven foundation
Many/most B2B startups run multi-strategy GTM: PLG + sales-led + inbound + outbound + events strategies to drive pipeline.
The once fairly simple breakdown of marketing owning 1:many and sales owning 1:1 communication is not so simple anymore. Marketing can now deliver 1:1, personalized experiences “at scale” too.
Account-driven GTM becomes the foundation for growth, with enriched data and intent signals rapidly becoming table stakes.
Meanwhile inbound and search traffic is driving less volume and outbound is increasingly saturated.
The teams really standing out are doubling down on ecosystem marketing (growing through partners, influencers, customer, communities), blurring lines with partnership and customer success teams too!
The most successful org charts start looking more like a GTM pod than a traditional function-based team.
→ Example: Clay coins the term GTM Engineer, which has come to mean a combined technical-ish role, that’s a hybrid of SDRs, sales engineering, RevOps, and growth marketing.
Ownership blurs across revenue, accounts, and journeys—just as startups are getting skittish about overspending again.
→ But at the same time, I do not believe the main responsibility of marketing has changed: Marketing should serve as connective tissue across the whole go-to-market machine—including product.
Where does this leave the sales & marketing relationship today?
The good news is I brought in Jaleh Rezaei, CEO & Co-founder at Mutiny, for this podcast. I met her in the 2014–2017 era when we were both leaning into PLG strategies, with Jaleh leading marketing at Gusto and me at Asana.
But I reached out to her for the pod to talk about a report Mutiny did on Sales & Marketing alignment, based on a survey of 250 marketing leaders and 250 sales leaders—and her advice for fixing these challenges.
Let’s start with the numbers…
97% of respondents acknowledge that better sales-marketing collaboration would boost revenue
81% fantasize about replacing their counterparts
66% of respondents tell us they do not feel positive after meeting with their counterparts
Teams that report they are completely aligned are 2.3x more likely to exceed their revenue target
Despite 70% saying they‘re “mostly or completely aligned” on goals, the data indicates a deeper disconnect in day-to-day execution and trust and an underlying operational friction. « I think we’ve all felt this underlying friction!
More reports on sales & marketing relationship
Typeform’s “Sales and marketing (mis)alignment report” also had an interesting stat. They also found that the real issue between sales and marketing isn’t working together—it‘s fragmented data and customer knowledge. Case in point: 78% of marketers report a good understanding of the customer journey; only 49% of salespeople report the same level of understanding.
And if case studies are a source of debate with your sales team, check out this report from UserEvidence. Hint: 67% of buyers say the most important thing they need is a compelling, statistically-backed business case for ROI.
Speaking of Typeform surveys…
MKT1 & Typeform: MarTech stack survey
I’m running a survey with Typeform to find out what tools you are obsessed with right now, what you can’t wait to try, what the most important tools in your tech stack are, and more.
This will inform a newsletter this summer.
Bonus: If you fill the whole thing out (takes 3-4 minutes), you’ll get a free month of MKT1’s paid newsletter subscription for yourself or a marketing friend.
So what can you actually do to fix marketing and sales alignment?
Episodes 5 and 6 of Dear Marketers podcast dive deep here. Let me cover some of the highlights and things you should consider doing right away.
Sales cares about their quota, don’t forget that
🚧 Problem:
“Sales has more of a singular goal [than marketing]: Hit the number. And that creates more resistance to change.” — Grace
“Sales often thinks of marketing as just another channel that might or might not deliver pipeline.” — Devon
This is funny because marketing sees sales as another channel in their toolkit. We can’t even agree on what a “channel” is. Note: My definition—a channel is an engine for reaching your audience.
Sellers are often more resistant to change because hitting this quarter’s quota means getting a “suitcase of money” or not getting it (I’m talking about commission here).
Marketing can often afford to be a bit more experimental because they (in an ideal world) have short- and long-term goals, project and KPI goals. Plus they usually don’t get variable comp (more on that in episode 6).
Jaleh’s take:
“Sales doesn’t feel like marketing is aware of the conversations that they’re having with customers. So marketing campaigns and messaging is not reflective of what’s happening right now with customers.”
“Sales thinks about the world as very personalized, very one-to-one. And when marketing isn’t doing that, they see a big disconnect.”
🔑 Solution:
To get better alignment, marketers need to meet sales halfway—and that starts with understanding their world. When sales sees marketing as a true partner in hitting quota, alignment gets a lot easier.
“Most people in sales want to have more pipeline and they want to close more deals and do it faster. So if you can show that marketing helps them do that, they’ll use it.” – Jaleh
Focus on these things when communicating with sales:
Tie your work directly to pipeline and revenue whenever possible. If you want buy-in from sales, show how your campaigns, content, and programs drive their quota attainment—not just MQLs.
Frame marketing updates in sales’ language. Sales cares about accounts, meetings booked, pipeline created, and deals closed. Anchor your conversations and reporting to sales around those outcomes, not impressions, open rates, or brand metrics.
Don’t give up longer-term marketing big bets, this is an essential part of marketing, but you do need to clearly connect your work to how they’ll help hit this quarter’s number and next quarter’s too.
“Sales has a suitcase of money tied to hitting their number this quarter. Marketing should have a bigger mix of short-term and long-term goals.” — Kramer
Clear rules of engagement—and not just the tactical version
“Rules of engagement need to exist on two levels: the tactical handoffs between teams, but also strategic ownership—who’s accountable for what parts of pipeline generation and conversion.” — Kramer
🚧 Problem:
Most teams think “rules of engagement” just mean deciding when a lead passes from marketing to sales.
But confusion actually starts earlier—with gaps in who owns strategy. Who owns which accounts? Who owns driving awareness vs. creating pipeline vs. accelerating deals?
If you don’t define ownership clearly upfront, your tactical handoffs will break down later anyway.
🔑 Solution:
That said, this isn’t an either/or situation. You need to define who owns, who supports, and who executes—both at the strategic (big picture ownership) and tactical (day to day mechanics) levels.
Define who owns what by KPI, account tier, lead/contact or account stage, and ICP fit—not just who owns the “engine,” but also who owns the “fuel” (messaging, content creation, copy).
Also, clearly define the stages themselves—both for accounts and contacts—and document which tools are used at each step and who owns them (more on tools in a minute).
Areas teams tend to get stuck on when doing this:
Who owns outbound—across account tiers and at what stage of account and prospect engagement?
Who writes the copy in outbound emails? Who makes the sequences or templates? SDRs or marketing? And who on marketing? or a combo?
What are the SLAs for handoffs between stages? i.e. 24 hours for sales to follow up with a new engaged account, at 24 hours backup nurture emails are triggered.
Who is responsible for adding all the account and contact data to your CRM using enrichment tools? How do you avoid adding dupes?
Here’s a hypothetical example—don’t copy this exactly, but adapt it for your startup. Also, don’t just do this at the highest level, remember to do versions for each account tier and/or ICP, depending on how much your rules vary.
Rule of engagement template
For a more complete guide to setting rules of engagement, we have a Google Sheet template to help you define what’s happening at the strategic and tactical level, by account tier, for paid subscribers.
Fixing these processes and systems helps fix your relationships too
Fixing systems might seem like a tactical step, but trust me, it’s usually more useful than an SKO (sales kickoff) in a hotel banquet room.
“It’s easy to blame sales or marketing for not working well together, but a lot of the time the friction isn’t personal—it’s operational. Different data, different systems, different views of the customer.” — Jaleh
Crossing the chasm: Marketing & sales relationship version
“You don’t need every single salesperson to trust marketing on day one. Start small—partner with one rep, show them wins, and build from there.” — Jaleh
🚧 Problem:
When sales and marketing relationships are nascent or strained, trying to align the entire team all at once usually backfires.
Sales teams are skeptical by default—and if you push too hard, you risk reinforcing the divide. People just have too much history of sales and marketing getting along—after all, most people have “fantasized about replacing their counterpart,” to quote Mutiny’s report.
You need early adopters first: reps who are open to collaboration and willing to experiment. Then you can build momentum.
🔑 Solution:
If you cant get sales buy-in, start with one seller first. Find one who wants to collaborate on an outbound sequence, iterate on sales enablement content, or talk through why your qualification rules are crappy.
Then, cross the chasm. Move from the “early adopters of marketing stuff” to the rest of the team.
Jaleh and I spent a few minutes on this in the podcast (and if you listen, it will make more sense why I mention dogs here):
“Pick the [sales and marketing alignment area] you feel the most empowered to fix and make an OKR to go fix that in the next three months. And then if that works, then pick the next one and just kind of keep going.” – Jaleh
“Just become best friends with one salesperson. It doesn‘t need to be the leader. It doesn‘t need to be all of them. Find the one you have the most connections with. Maybe you both like dogs a whole lot. Go and walk your dogs.*
They‘re going to give you the intel on like what sales actually needs. They‘re going to give you the honest truth on the things that you‘re creating and handing over to them. And they‘re going to have Intel on the rest of the sales team. And you‘re going to have intel on the rest of the marketing team and you can help the team come together.” – Emily*Listen to the episode for
moretoo many dog & cat references
Stay nimble as an overall GTM team
“If you think of your marketing and your content as a product, your relationship with sales is also sort of a product you want to ship and iterate on.” – Devon
“We’re shipping and iterating on how go-to-market works so much right now, but we’re not shipping and iterating on how to make the relationship better.” – Emily
🚧 Problem:
There are actually two big problems here:
Structural problem: GTM roles are blurring without clear redefinition
Cultural problem: Marketing is still seen as a service function
Most GTM teams are still organized around outdated departmental swim lanes: marketing over here, sales over there, customer success somewhere else, and RevOps stuck in the messy middle.
And even though roles have blurred (as we covered earlier in this newsletter), the mindset inside many companies hasn’t caught up.
Marketing is still treated like a service org—build the deck, run the paid ads, fill the funnel—not as a partner responsible for revenue.
“One of the saddest things for me is when organizations treat marketing like a service organization to sales or like a channel feeding sales. That just starts this problem.” — Emily
To which Devon responded:
“There’s something about just understanding that and recognizing that maybe [your sales team does] come into it thinking that way, right? And then build from that and shift their perception of what marketing is and can do for them.” — Devon
To be straight up, which I always aim to be, when marketing is seen purely as a service org to sales, alignment becomes nearly impossible. If you don’t rethink both your GTM team structure and your working relationship, you end up with:
Teams stepping on each other’s toes
Buyers getting a disjointed or just plain crappy experience
Marketers stuck in order-taking roles—limiting their impact on long-term growth, efficiency, brand awareness, and conversion
Marketing talent leaving—especially leaders on the team.
🔑 Solution:
“The teams that are scaling pipeline effectively are not just organized by traditional departments anymore. They’re a lot more cross-functional.” - Emily
You don’t have to blow up your org chart—but you do need to redefine roles intentionally and stay nimble as GTM keeps evolving.
Warning: I think the evolution of GTM teams is just beginning.
What to do:
Move from function-based to account or journey-based thinking.
Think about what the buyer needs at each stage—not just what each department “owns.” Think about what’s going to make that work the best, not just what people on your team want personally.
Build a GTM function that works for your business.
Maybe that means a combined RevOps team for all of GTM with SDRs on it, too. Or maybe it means giving marketing variable comp. Or maybe it means have a CRO or VP of Revenue with a marketing background (like our very own cohost Grace!). More in Episode 6 of the pod (which is a continuation of this episode).
Revisit and update your rules of engagement often.
Every time you shift a role, create a new motion, or add a tool, redefine who owns what (strategically and tactically).
Speak sales’ language.
Things like win stories customer by customer highlighting their journey often work better than confusing attribution reports. Learn these nuances!
Educate on what marketing can actually do.
Everyone thinks they understand marketing, but so few people outside of marketing truly get it. Share what marketing is focused on, how it connects to growth, and why it matters. More tips:
Apply what you know about marketing externally and do that internally.
Educate on what marketing actually does and how it drives growth.
Share marketing’s priorities proactively to avoid random always urgent and requests.
Tailor your internal communication like you do externally: Focus on what matters to each audience.
Find common ground, which often can be as simple as: We both care about revenue and company growth above all else.
More on internal marketing in this newsletter and this podcast.
To be continued…
In part 2 of this newsletter & podcast episode
Does it seem like sales and marketing alignment is getting both easier and harder at the same time? We agree.
On paper, it should be easier than ever for sales and marketing teams to align. We have better tools, better data, and a better understanding of what buyers want.
But in reality? Alignment is harder in new ways, not because of a lack of technology, but because the pace of tech adoption is outpacing the pace of process, communication, and relationship-building.
And we are going to break down all the nuances in Episode 6, which is a continuation of this podcast, answering the second part of Kira’s question: “Do you think all of these changes at Valence and across the go-to-market function in general are making it harder or easier for sales and marketing to stay aligned?”
Help or hurt?
In episode 6 we’ll talk about how each of these things helps and/or hurts sales and marketing alignment:
SDRs reporting to marketing vs. sales vs. RevOps—we kicked off this discussion in episode 5, so you can hear this part now!
Marketing ops reporting to marketing vs. RevOps
Tracking and reporting on MQLs
To be continued…in episode 6
In the meantime, check out the full episode 5 podcast: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. And if you like it, tell someone—whether they are in marketing, sales, or neither.
More from MKT1 & Dear Marketers
🙏 Thanks again to our sponsors: Typeform, Framer & Brand24.
🎁 Please fill out our MKT1 & Typeform State of Martech 2025 survey to get 1 FREe month of a paid MKT1 subscription.
⁉️ Want to ask a question in a future episode? We have a Typeform for that.
⭐ Please rate us or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube
✂️ Templates, discounts & tool recommendations for paid subscribers: Rules of engagement template + 50 more available in our resources library for paid subscribers only | Active discount list here »
📚 Additional reading and reports:
🧑🚀 Job board: Jobs from the MKT1 community
🎙️ Next podcast: Dear Marketers Episode 6, which is part 2 of this podcast is out in ~1 week.
📰 Next newsletter: I’ll be writing about my own content strategy and lessons learned in the next 2 weeks—brief delay due to illness over here!
Share this post