[Case study] Breaking marketing and sales silos and misalignment
Here is how Cardata's team went from "aligned on paper" to generating enterprise pipeline through a 8-week ABM pilot.
In this case study we’ll cover:
Why sales and marketing alignment fails even when everyone agrees it’s important
The exact pilot framework that got sales to commit a full-time BDR to marketing’s ABM program
How to balance awareness vs. activation when sales wants 99% activation and marketing needs long-term pipeline building
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Stop chasing MQLs that don’t convert. Start building an enterprise pipeline that sales actually thanks you for: without massive budgets, organizational overhauls, or waiting for perfect conditions.
Built from 50+ enterprise ABM programs across companies from $10M to $1B+ ARR, this book gives you the systematic approach that helped dozens of B2B marketing leaders:
Fix the broken GTM playbook and drive millions of revenue from new programs developed and tested over a couple of quarters
Quickly provie impact of new marketing programs with 90-day pilots to earn runway for longer-term brand and demand programs
Create repeatable playbooks that work within the constraints most B2B CMOs face: long sales cycles, skeptical executives, misaligned incentives with sales, and quarterly pressure to hit pipeline targets
Get leadership buy-in for changing marketing playbooks without asking for additional budget or resources
Deploy AI to refine and accelerate proven playbooks, not just “do more with less”
Align marketing and sales around revenue and pipeline generation (not leads)to stop working in silos
Scale proven playbooks (what works) across the organization
Systematically move strategic accounts through the buyer journey:from unaware to sales opportunities
No matter where you are:
running on a ‘quarterly MQL hamster wheel’, unsuccessfully trying to optimize within impossible constraints,
dealing with frustrated sales teams,
fighting attribution battles with leadership,
or simply knowing your GTM playbook is broken but not being sure how to fix it
this book gives you the blueprint to transform your marketing function without internal revolution, starting from today.
What led Cardata to ABM
Cardata is a vehicle reimbursement software selling to Fortune 500 and mid-market enterprises. Their target buyers are senior HRs while power users are mobility and field teams frequently on the road.
Despite having a great marketing and sales teams, they were dealing with a default B2B challenge: being aligned on papers, but working in silos in practice.
“We are aligned with sales on paper but we don’t really do a lot of things together”, said Divash Basnet, Cardata’s VP of Marketing.
It wasn’t from lack of trying. There are three factors that fostered the silos:
1. Misaligned incentives.
Sales teams are incentivized to hit meetings targets TODAY. To hit revenue targets THIS QUARTER.
Marketing teams know that nothing actually works today, next week, or even this quarter. You’re building for 2-3 months down the line or next quarter.
“Everyone who’s worked for marketing knows that nothing really works today or even next week or this quarter. Whatever you’re doing you’re doing it for two three months down the line or next quarter. So there’s this inherent tension between short-term and medium-term focus.” - Divash said.
2. Misaligned KPIs.
Different teams look at different sections of the go-to-market funnel. Nobody looks at the ENTIRE journey from awareness to closed-won.
The BDR team only tracks meetings booked (their quota). Marketing only tracks MQLs (their target). Sales only tracks closed deals.
The result: “You can have a situation where the meetings booked target is being hit, the MQL target is being hit, and you have BDRs and marketing celebrating—and then you have the sales team saying ‘what’s going on guys, there’s no revenue.’”
3. Misaligned view on the root challenges.
“Does sales and marketing agree on the same problems? Because if sales team thinks the problem is something else and the marketing team thinks it’s broad awareness then the solutions will be completely different. That forces everybody into silos.” - mentioned Lee Adams, the VP of product.
The result? Inefficient and unpredictable growth.
Why ABM
Divash was Cardata’s first go-to-market hire. He’d built the initial BDR team, revenue ops team, and marketing team. This gave him both historical context and credibility to push for change.
“The impedance for me to do this was to actually get sustainable and efficient growth,” he explained. “Sustainable meaning you’re thinking of pipeline today but also focusing on future pipeline... and efficient obviously means your CAC payback period—for every dollar spent in sales and marketing how many dollars are you getting back in revenue. The more you break the silos the better that ratio is.”
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Getting sales buy-in
We wrote here why ABM with and without dedicated sales rep generates drastically different results. But, often, this is the biggest bottleneck for the ABM leads. Here is approach Divash took to get a dedicated account-based sales rep.
Step 1: Align on shared problems
“Every executive or even every person has a job to be done—they have targets to hit, they have projects to complete. If your project aligns with their goals they’re more likely to agree.”
Both Divash and Sarah (VP of Sales) were responsible for the same top-line numbers. Divash interviewed Sarah about the sales team challenges and made ABM program about solving them.
Step 2: Present a clear process
Divash came to sales with:
A list of specific problems they want solving
The exact process they would use
Defined leading and lagging indicators
Clear success metrics
Realistic timeline expectations
Step 3: Removing revenue targets for the SDR involved in ABM.
The major contribution to the pilot success was VP of Sales agreement to remove the revenue quota targets from the BDR andl guarantee the OTE for the first three months of the pilot.
This took the pressure off the BDR and completely removed the short-term mentality to force meeting bookings.
The BDR was able to execute the account engagement process properly, focusing on constant nurturing and engagement instead of pitch-slapping.
Setting up cross-functional team to break the silos
The pilot ABM team included the core execution team and supportive team.
Core execution team:
1 BDR: account research, account engagement and development
1 content writer – Thought leadership content, business cases, personalized account content
1 ABM lead – Program management, thought leadership, content creation support, webinar presentation
Supporting team:
Tech assistance: Webinar set up
VP of Marketing – Strategy and stakeholder alignment
Revenue Operations – Account qualification, intent and engagement data tracking
The tech stack
HubSpot - CRM and marketing automation
Demandbase - Intent signals, engagement tracking, account scoring
LinkedIn Sales Navigator - List building, engagement tracking, outreach
ZoomInfo - Contact data verification
One of the biggest concerns was how a lean team could handle ABM alongside everything else.
Instead of running a completely new program, Cardata reviewed always-on programs and campaigns, and integrated ABM. Here is how Lee Adams describes it:
“Everything that we did on the marketing side was related to ABM. The events that we ran, the content we created — everything was created (or repurposed) with a focus on specific use case and set of accounts to which this use case was relevant. We made a pretty clear expectation that if there’s always any conflict between doing ABM tasks vs other things, you do ABM first and then you prioritize the rest.”
7 alignment pillars
PILLAR 1: SMALL, FOCUSED ACCOUNT LIST
Instead of spray-and-pray to hundreds of accounts, Cardata selected a specific use case, and defined strict qualification criteria. All account were prioritized by:
Revenue potential
Level of existing relationship
Level of awareness
Evidence of product need
They ended up having about 60 accounts in the pilot program.
PILLAR 2: GENUINE PERSONALIZATION.
To be able to personalize engagement with the buying committee groups of target accounts, Cardata’s ABM team worked together on what they absolutely must know about target accounts.
They created a standardized account research and then defined how they collect different data points:
Desk research
LinkedIn engagement
Webinar sing up forms and polls
Content co-creation with the target buyers
Here is how Lee describes it: “We actually had a really great collaborative session where we sat together and talked about everything and talked about data and talked about what we’ve seen, talked about our customers, talked about the customers we want. That gave us a lot of trust in each other and insights into different points of view.”
For every prioritized account, they defined how to use each data point for the personalized engagement.
“Personalization is more than just using somebody’s company name or their industry or some sort of personalized token. It’s really about being intentional about the accounts you’re working on and understanding everything there is to know about them. Looking at the target campaign group we were able to really break down what level of personalization makes the most sense for these clients, where are the intersection between their issues or their problems or their pain points, where are areas that we need to segment it down even further.” - says Divash.
PILLAR 3: CONTENT REPURPOSING STRATEGY
The lean team didn’t create content from scratch constantly. They:
Repurposed webinar about target use case into infographics and thought leadership content
Adapted general content for primary buyer persona
“You don’t always have to be coming up with content from scratch,” Lee notes. “Use what you already have.”
PILLAR 4: RELATIONSHIP BUILDING OVER PITCHING
“It was really all about building relationships. We weren’t just asking for meetings right away with people we had never talked to before—which, sad to say, was something we’ve definitely done in the past. We tried to engage buyers to create awareness and genuine relationship, which later generated inbound opportunities for us. For example, we had a conversation with a target buyer asking for feedback on one of our posts Three months later, that account requested a demo.’
PILLAR 5: ALIGNMENT ON THE CORE METRICS.
To avoid random acts of marketing and tracking the program progress alongside the long sales cycle, the team defined 3 core group of metrics: Weekly KPIs as leading indicators, lagging intermediate indicators to track the campaign efficiency, and the pipeline metrics. Here is the breakdown.
Weekly KPIs
They tracked four core engagement activities:
Fully researched accounts with buying committee mapped
Personalized connection requests to buying committee members
1-on-1 non-sales touchpoints (thoughtful comments, content sharing, event invites)
Content collaborations with target accounts
Personalized offers created for the engaged accounts
Lagging indicators:
Account engagement: “Are our target buyers interacting with our content? Are they responding? Are we having conversations?”
Account development: “Are we moving up in awareness among target accounts? Are they visiting high-intent pages on our website? Are they showing intent signals?”
“If we can say: hey, we have 17 engaged accounts, we have 24 LinkedIn connections, we got a message from this person, somebody commented on LinkedIn post—those are early indicators that the program works. Then you can say: okay, the next logical step is that we’ll get meetings booked and deals created.” - shared Lee.
Pipeline metrics:
Meetings booked
Qualified pipeline created
Revenue
6. The dynamic list management.
Instead of a static targeting, RevOps constantly tracked intent and engagement data, and brought insights to the weekly program review meetings. For new accounts, RevOps used a qualification framework from step 1 and pre-qualified them. For the 60 “Future Pipeline” accounts, RevOps tracked intent and engagement data, and brought these insights for the ABM team.
The team then decided which accounts to engage this week, which accounts should be moved to the Active Focus list, and what should be the next activation steps.
7. Weekly program review and planning meetings.
To avoid the siloed work and keep the momentum, the team scheduled regular program review and planning meetings. They reviewed:
What went right?
What can be done better?
What are the bottlenecks slowing down velocity?
What content should we publish next?
What accounts should we research and engage?
What can we do to facilitate opportunity generation with engaged accounts?
“Having effective meetings every week where you’re coming together and you’re actually talking about what’s going on, you’re talking about what’s needed, having open dialogue and a really solid comfortable team that trusts each other to move forward, helped us to break the silos and misalignment”, shares Lee.
The weekly meetings also helped to mitigate inevitable questions about revenue results.
“Running the pilot program for two+ months—it’s not a short-term campaign, it’s long-term. But people want short-term results. Just because we agreed two, eight weeks back or six weeks back on a timeline does not mean that questions aren’t asked. Somewhere along week six to seven people start getting a bit fidgety. We needed to bring them back, review our leading indicators and wins we had so far to keep the momentum and show the progress.” - Divash reflected.
TLDR;
Cardata’s transformation from “paper alignment” to actual cross-functional execution required:
Acknowledging and fixing three core misalignment areas: incentives, KPIs and a shared view of the root reasons of GTM challenges
Building a lean 3-person core ABM team supported by RevOps, product and VP of sales.
Agreeing on saving full OTE for the SDR added to the pilot ABM team to change the incentives and KPIs.
Running weekly review and planning sprints
Tracking leading and lagging indicators to keep the momentum and track program efficiency
The result: Sales leadership allocated another BDR to ABM. They started two more ABM programs to move from a pilot to go to market.
Drive pipeline THIS quarter with full-funnel ABM programs.
If any of these challenges sound familiar:
You are aligned in theory with sales but don’t do anything in practice aside from receiving wish lists from sales and sharing with them your marketing plan. In reality, you work in silos and miss the revenue targets and are being pressured by your executives.
You understand that your marketing and sales playbook is broken (mqls, gated content) but despite many attempts you don’t know how to fix it
Your outbound, paid ads and organic pipeline drastically decreased while CAC increased mostly because most of your market is problem unaware and not buying.
You lack brand awareness among target accounts and sales can’t get even a reply.
You clearly see that you’re already behind your revenue targets
We can help.
We’ll develop a custom full-funnel ABM strategy aligned with your resources, budget and stack and execute it together to drive results THIS quarter.