You’re paying your sales and marketing teams to sabotage each other

I recently spoke with a prospect who knew they had a problem. Sales were slowing, retention was slipping and lifetime value barely stretched past six months. On paper, the near-term numbers looked fine — but only because they’d been manipulated to hide the decline.

When I asked what they were doing about it, they said, “We think if we improve the product, we’ll fix retention.” On the surface, that sounds reasonable — most executives reach for product first. But it told me exactly how stuck they were. They were hacking at the branches while the roots kept growing.

The truth was, the product wasn’t the real issue (though it did need work). It was 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’ll keep muscling growth, patching the product and fighting to hold on to customers.

Running in opposite directions

That definitely wasn’t what they wanted to hear. “How can they be working against each other? They’re on the same team.” Which is true — but teams are defined more by incentives than org charts or jersey colors. Just look at Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. They were on the same team, but that didn’t stop Harding.

When incentives align, we move together. When they conflict, teams pull in opposite directions and go nowhere. When they’re tangential, there’s no connection at all.

For many sales and marketing teams — particularly in SaaS — incentives are unknowingly in competition. Marketing is rewarded for lead volume, sales for deal quality and retention. The result is predictable: 

• Marketing celebrates hitting lead targets.
• Sales complains those leads are unqualified.
• Leadership wonders why growth targets stay stubbornly out of reach despite a full pipeline.

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

Marketing may hand over 300 names of people who’ve said, “Tell me more.” Sales calls 20 of them qualified. Both sides think they’re right. Both are frustrated.

Leadership responds by pressuring sales to close more, which temporarily boosts volume, but the root cause — conflicting incentives — stays in place. Low-quality wins churn quickly and blame cycles between sales, product and marketing. Meanwhile, CAC balloons, LTV shrinks and board conversations get uncomfortable.

Dig deeper: How to align sales and marketing for revenue growth

The tool most leaders misuse

What’s striking is that everyone is doing exactly what they’re paid to do. Nobody is incentivized to fix the problem. It won’t be solved with more meetings or dashboards. Misaligned incentives don’t get untangled in a conference room or over a Zoom call — they’re baked into the system.

Now, here we are: a company with a high-churn problem that nobody can solve because no one has the time or purview. When companies reach this impasse, what can they do?

In my experience, most executives reach for the same tool — incentives. They treat them like my 8-year-old son uses a claw hammer: every problem looks like something to hammer, without understanding how the tool actually works or when to use it.

The real solution isn’t more incentives. It’s better incentives — the kind that get sales and marketing rowing in the same direction and compounding revenue together. When that happens, every marketing win makes sales stronger and every sales win makes marketing more effective.

Regaining alignment

Here’s what better incentives look like in action.

Shared metrics

Instead of marketing celebrating lead volume while sales celebrates close rates, tie both teams to something like pipeline velocity — how fast leads move from first touch to closed deal. This kills the MQL vs. SQL blame game instantly.

An evergreen content flywheel

Sales can strengthen marketing in two key ways. First, when a deal closes, sales sees exactly how customers use the product and the wins they achieve. That data should flow straight to marketing for copy and case studies. Second, they can plug customer behavior and product data into marketing to fuel 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 lots of people just like them have created the outcome they’re looking for. In other words, aggregate product usage outcomes become category-level authority messaging. 

For example, “Customers who adopt feature X in the first 30 days have two times higher retention.” Marketing can use that data to build onboarding campaigns, nurture emails and retargeting ads that push new customers toward feature X adoption. 

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

Dig deeper: How shared goals and incentives improve marketing results

Ground-level feedback loops

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

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

Unified 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 tracks close rates — and both miss the bigger picture. Sometimes the data one team needs lives on the other’s dashboard. A unified view forces everyone to look at the same numbers, focus on shared goals and search in the right place.

Row in the same direction

Companies spend thousands on tools and processes while sales and marketing quietly work against each other. Real success comes when every part of the business rows in the same direction.

The fix isn’t more technology or better communication. It’s a system where incentives don’t just align — they compound. Every marketing win makes sales stronger. Every sales win makes marketing more effective.

Until that happens, sales will keep dismissing leads as garbage, marketing will feel undercut and leadership will keep wondering why growth never matches the effort.

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