The Revenue Alignment Gap: Why 82% of Executives Think Their Teams Are Aligned — And 65% of Their Teams Disagree — Designate

You're six months into a new VP of Sales role at a $15M ARR SaaS company. You inherited a team, a CRM, and a forecast. You're accountable for a number. And something isn't adding up.

Marketing says they're delivering qualified pipeline. Your reps say the leads aren't worth calling. Customer success says deals are showing up with expectations nobody promised. Finance says the forecast missed by 30% last quarter. Everyone has data that supports their version.

According to Forrester Q2 2024 research, 82% of C-level B2B executives believe their sales and marketing teams are aligned. But 65% of sales and marketing professionals say they are not. Same organizations. Same quarter. Leadership sees one reality. The teams doing the work see another.

Source: Forrester Q2 2024, Gartner June 2024

If you're the revenue leader sitting in the middle of this, you feel it every Monday. The forecast call takes two hours. Pipeline reviews surface the same stale deals. Marketing wants credit for MQLs that never converted. Your best rep just asked why CS is onboarding a customer differently than what was sold.

The instinct is to fix the people. "We need better communication." "Let's hire a sales enablement manager." "Sales and marketing should meet weekly." So you add meetings, create Slack channels, build alignment frameworks. The org chart looks friendlier.

Nothing changes.

Because the actual problem isn't communication. It's systems.

Your CRM doesn't capture deal context in a way marketing can use. Your lead scoring doesn't map to how your reps actually qualify. Your pipeline stages don't reflect real decision-making moments — they reflect the CRM defaults someone chose three years ago. There's no system for preserving buyer intelligence across handoffs. So every team operates on partial information and fills the gaps with assumptions.

No amount of meetings fix a system design problem.

The Data Shows It's Systemic

According to Influ2's 2025 research, only 11% of companies have successfully aligned their marketing-sales audiences and created an effective handoff process. Eleven percent. That means 89% of companies are operating with design debt in their revenue systems.

The cost is quantifiable. According to IDC Research, B2B companies' inability to align sales and marketing teams costs 10% or more of revenue per year. Not a soft cost. Not "maybe." Ten percent. Minimum.

Do the math. A $10M ARR company is leaving $1M on the table. A $50M company is losing $5M annually.

And it gets worse when you scale. Organizations that achieve real alignment — people, processes, and technology aligned across revenue teams — see 36% more revenue growth and up to 28% more profitability, according to Forrester. The opposite is also true. The longer misalignment goes unfixed, the harder it becomes to scale.

The real cost: Every quarter you operate with broken systems, you're paying the misalignment tax. Leadership sees the symptoms and blames effort. Teams feel unaligned even when they're trying hard. And the only way forward looks like more process, more discipline, more meetings — when what you actually need is system design.

How Misalignment Actually Manifests

Handoff #1: Lead to Sales

Marketing generates a lead. The handoff to sales happens, but context is lost immediately. Marketing knows why the lead cared enough to click. But that signal never makes it into the CRM in a structured way. Sales gets a contact record with no intelligence.

So the rep calls and spends the first 10 minutes rediscovering what the lead already told marketing. Or they skip it and lead with their own playbook, which misses the actual buyer's intent entirely.

Marketing thinks sales is bad at following up. Sales thinks marketing sends bad leads. Neither is true. There's just no system that preserves intent across the handoff.

Handoff #2: Sales to Solutions Engineering

A deal moves past qualification. A solutions engineer gets a calendar invite and a vague CRM record. The SE has no idea what the customer actually said was important to them. What constraints exist. What they're comparing you to. What will break the deal.

So the SE demos the product, and the buyer says "That's not what we need." The SE looks unprepared. Sales says the SE didn't listen. The customer thinks both of you are confused.

Reality: There was no system designed to pass the most critical intelligence forward.

Handoff #3: Sales to Customer Success

You close a deal. Customer success is supposed to onboard them. But the deal record in your CRM captures transaction data, not promise data. CS has no idea what the customer expected to accomplish. What timeline they expected. What success looks like to them.

CS runs a generic onboarding. Six months later, the customer doesn't renew — not because your product doesn't work, but because success was defined differently by every team.

Sales says the customer was sold on quick time-to-value. CS ran a six-month implementation. The customer wanted deep customization. Nobody documented that distinction.

The pattern: At every boundary between teams, context disappears. Not because teams don't care. Not because communication is bad. Because there's no system designed to preserve it.

Why This Is Actually a Design Problem

Think about the last time you sat in a forecast call. VP of Sales asks each rep to walk through their top deals. Rep 1 says the deal is in "Negotiation" — but what they mean is the prospect hasn't said no yet. Rep 2 has a deal in "Proposal" — but the customer is still evaluating whether they have a problem worth solving. The CFO asks "What's the commit number?" and the answer requires 20 minutes of qualitative context that can't be pulled from a dashboard.

That forecast call exists because the system doesn't work. It's a human patch over a design gap. You're spending two hours a week of senior leadership time compensating for pipeline stages that don't mean anything consistent, CRM data that's incomplete, and handoff processes that lose context at every boundary.

Now multiply that across the whole revenue cycle. Marketing optimizes for lead volume because that's what their dashboard measures. Sales optimizes for close rate because that's what their comp plan rewards. CS optimizes for time-to-onboard because that's what their SLA says. Each team is performing well against their local metrics — and the customer experience is incoherent.

That's not a morale problem. It's not a communication problem. It's an architecture problem. The system was never designed to align these teams around shared outcomes. It was assembled in pieces, by different people, at different stages of company growth. Nobody stepped back and asked: does this whole thing work together?

The companies that break through this create what Forrester calls "revenue operations alignment." Not more meetings. Not better communication frameworks. Systems where:

• Data flows consistently across handoffs — what marketing knows about a buyer lives in a place sales can find it
• Process is explicit and aligned — every team has clarity on what happens at each stage and what moves things forward
• Context is preserved — the intelligence that makes a deal work doesn't get lost between systems
• Visibility is real-time — leadership sees the revenue cycle clearly enough to lead, not just react

When those systems exist, alignment becomes automatic. Teams align not because they're forced to, but because the system makes it obvious what they're moving toward.

According to SiriusDecisions and Forrester, organizations that maintain this kind of alignment focus achieve 19% faster revenue growth and 15% higher profitability.

That's the gap you're closing: From executives thinking teams are aligned while teams know they're not. To actual, system-level alignment where the whole revenue engine moves together.

What To Do Now

The first step is accurate diagnosis. Not a gut feeling. Not "we should probably align better." Real assessment of where your systems are broken and how badly.

That's why I built the Revenue Systems Health Scorecard.

20 questions across five dimensions: data foundation, process alignment, handoff integrity, reporting and visibility, and team coordination. You get a score per dimension plus a breakdown showing exactly which systems are strongest and which need work first.

No sales call. No gatekeeping. Just your score and a clear view of what's next.