You pay your sales and marketing teams to sabotage each other | MarTech

I recently spoke with a prospect who knew he had a problem. Sales slowed, retention declined, and lifetime value barely extended beyond six months. On paper, the short-term numbers looked fine, but only because they were manipulated to hide the decline.

When I asked what they were doing about it, they said, “We think if we improve the product, we can solve the retention problem.” On the surface, that sounds reasonable: most executives turn to the product first. But it told me exactly how stuck they were. They chopped at the branches as the roots continued to grow.

The truth was that the product wasn’t the real problem (although it did need work). It was a systemic misalignment between sales and marketing. I see the same three root causes over and over again, and this was no different.

I told him, “You’re playing your sales and marketing teams against each other – and you don’t even realize it.”

Unless they fix this now, they will continue to grow, patch the product and fight to retain customers.

Running in opposite directions

That was definitely not what they wanted to hear. “How can they antagonize each other? They’re on the same team.” That’s true, but teams are defined more by incentives than by organizational charts or jersey colors. Just look at Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. They were on the same team, but that didn’t stop Harding.

If the incentives are aligned, we move forward together. When they come into conflict, teams pull in opposite directions and go nowhere. If they are tangential, there is no connection at all.

For many sales and marketing teams – especially in SaaS – incentives are unconsciously in competition with each other. Marketing is rewarded for lead volume, sales for deal quality and retention. The result is predictable:

• Marketing celebrates achieving lead targets.
• Sales complains that these leads are not qualified.
• Leadership wonders why growth targets remain stubbornly out of reach, despite a full pipeline.

The misalignment quickly becomes expensive. Marketing defines a qualified lead as anyone who raises a hand and shows interest. Sales defines “qualified” as someone with a recognized problem, a clear timeline, an approved budget, and the ability to say “yes.”

Marketing can hand over 300 names of people who said, “Tell me more.” Sales calls of which 20 were eligible. Both sides think they are right. Both are frustrated.

Leadership responds by putting pressure on sales to close more, temporarily increasing volume, but the root cause – conflicting incentives – remains. Low quality wins happen quickly and cause cycles between sales, product and marketing. Meanwhile, the CAC is shrinking, the LTV is shrinking and board discussions are becoming uncomfortable.

Dig Deeper: How to Align Sales and Marketing for Revenue Growth

What is striking is that everyone does exactly what he or she is paid to do. No one is incentivized to solve the problem. More meetings or dashboards won’t solve it. Misaligned incentives don’t get caught in a conference room or on a Zoom call: they get baked into the system.

Now here we are: a company with a major churn problem that no one can solve because no one has the time or the authority. What can companies do if they find themselves in this impasse?

My experience is that most managers use the same tool: incentives. They treat them like my 8 year old son is using a claw hammer: every problem seems like something to hammer on, without understanding how the tool actually works or when to use it.

The real solution is not more incentives. They’re better incentives – the kind that keep sales and marketing moving in the same direction and revenues coming together. When that happens, every marketing win makes sales stronger and every sales win makes marketing more effective.

Regaining the alignment

Here’s what better incentives look like in action.

Shared statistics

Instead of marketing celebrating lead volume while sales celebrates close rates, tie both teams to something like pipeline velocity: how quickly leads move from first contact to closed deal. This ends the MQL vs SQL blame game immediately.

An evergreen flywheel

Sales can enhance marketing in two important ways. First, when a deal is closed, the sales department sees exactly how customers use the product and what profits they make. That data should go directly to marketing for copy and case studies. Second, they can integrate customer behavior and product data into marketing to drive growth loops by showing how your solution has helped people at scale.

Product usage becomes campaign data and copy that shows leads and prospects how many people like them have created the results they are looking for. In other words, the aggregated outcomes of product use become authority messages at the category level.

For example: “Customers who adopt feature X in the first 30 days have 2X higher retention.” Marketing can use that data to create onboarding campaigns, deliver emails, and retarget ads that drive new customers to use Feature X.

Another: “Across the 212 companies that used our service, average time-to-value fell 27% in the first 90 days.”

Dig Deeper: How Shared Goals and Incentives Improve Marketing Results

Ground level feedback loops

Sales is typically incentivized to close deals, while marketing gets bonuses for leads. In this setup, sales should help marketing by providing detailed feedback on lead quality, including “why we lost” insights, within 48 hours. Marketing then updates the targeting and messaging to create stronger leads in the next round.

Marketing earns bonuses when lead quality predictions match sales results. Each cycle makes both teams smarter and more effective. Marketing focuses on high LTV customers, while sales sells the results the product can actually deliver. The result is greater improvement and more high-quality deals.

Uniform dashboards

Teams optimize what they can see, not what matters. It’s the classic streetlight effect: searching under the light where it’s easy, not where the answer actually is. Separate dashboards create the same blindness. Marketing tracks lead metrics, sales metrics track close rate – and both miss the bigger picture. Sometimes the data one team needs is on the other team’s dashboard. A unified view forces everyone to look at the same numbers, focus on shared goals and look in the right places.

Drive in the same direction

Companies spend thousands of money on tools and processes, while sales and marketing quietly work against each other. Real success comes when all parts of the company are moving in the same direction.

The solution is not more technology or better communication. It is a system in which incentives are not only aligned, but also reinforce them. Every marketing win makes sales stronger. Every sales gain makes marketing more effective.

Until that happens, sales will continue to dismiss leads as nonsense, marketing will feel undermined, and leadership will continue to wonder why growth never matches the effort.

Dig deeper: 6 marketing team silos you need to break down, and how to do it