🕵🏻♂️ Misalignment despite best intent
How to fix marketing and sales misalignment with Account-Based Marketing.
The most common challenge we heard in the first half of 2025 was:
“We are aligned on papers, but actually don’t do anything together. When we try, everything fails”.
In this newsletter we’ll cover:
The 3 root reasons marketing and sales remain misaligned despite best intentions
Why different time horizons create fundamental conflicts between teams
How to fix misalignment using a strategic pilot ABM approach
Operationalizing ABM in 2025: How ABM is made possible with a small team & AI Agents.
We’ve partnered with SalesCaptain to write a detailed guide on orchestrating and operationalizing an ABM program, including:
How to define ICP and account qualification criteria for ABM
How to orchestrate an ABM program
How to automate ABM Ops with Clay, Lemlist, Zappier + AI
How marketing and sales alignment usually happens
Whenever marketing team describes me the process they used to fix misalignment with sales, I immediately recall this scene from the “Godfather” movie.
Marketing is either under pressure to drive pipeline and revenue. Or, a new leader comes with the best intent to fix the silos and misalignment.
Sales say: "Fine, let's do it."
But here is what happens next.
Sales throws over a wishlist of hundreds of enterprise accounts companies (aka “nice to have logos”) with no buying intent, no vendor awareness, and no indication they're in the market.
Marketing team looks at the list, realizes they already have a full plate, and doesn’t have capacity to run 1:few and 1:1 programs. The only thing they're able to do is running 1:many program via programmatic display ads or LinkedIn ads, promoting vertical landing pages or gated PDFs to generate MQLs, but from strategic accounts.
The result?
Marketing treats all accounts the same way, tracks the engagement and MQLs, and transfer them to sales. Personalization doesn't go beyond programmatic "FIRST NAME" and "TITLE" with AI-discovered accountchallenges.
This ABM program fails fast because it's not really different from lead generation. You can, of course, call it account-based because you have a joit list of accounts with sales, but it's far from what real account-based marketing looks like.
Read our guide on why ABM fails bellow:
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.
Why Sales and Marketing Think Different
The fundamental misalignment comes down to three core issues:
miscommunication
different goals and KPIs
different time horizons.
But if I would summarize everything with one word, I would call it silos—this is the most common root problem of all challenges, not only ABM-related.
Different Time Horizons Create Different Priorities
Sales operates on:
Days: What meetings do I have today?
Weeks: How do I push these deals this week?
Quarters: Do I have enough pipeline to hit my goals?
Marketing operates on:
Months: I've been planning webinar content all month
Quarters: I have quarterly program launch objectives
Years: I'm thinking about the eventual rebrand in 2027
This creates a fundamental tension.
When a salesperson looks at an empty calendar, they think: "I won't be able to feed my family."
When a marketer sees an empty calendar, they think: "Great, time to create and build things."
What Marketing Does vs. What Sales Values
Marketing typically works on 20+ activities: organic social, email, events, paid search, webinars, SEO, partnerships, brand building, and more.
From sales' perspective, only about 4-5 of these directly contribute to their goals:
Email (if it converts into a meeting immediately)
Events (if pre-event outreach generates meetings)
Sales enablement
Website management (if it answers all prospect questions)
Outbound support
Everything else feels like "nice to have" because sales operates in days, weeks, and quarters—not years.
At this moment you’d immediately say: “But we need to think long-term!” and you’ll be absolutely right.
Marketing needs to think long-term, but the long-term doesn't get here if we don't deliver in the short-term. You can do whatever you want if the pipeline is full, but if you don't have meetings today, you don't get there.
GET ACCESS TO A NEW FULL-FUNNEL ABM 2.0 COURSE
What's included with the course access:
12 modules covering step-by-step ABM strategy development: goal decomposition, ICP, account list building, ABM team, warm-up and activation playbooks, reporting, scaling ABM and building a cohesive ABM & demand gen function.
Short explanation videos and "how to" examples. We believe it's better one time to see a practical example then listen to the theory hundreds of times.
5 orchestrated and ready-to-use ABM playbooks and a detailed explanation
Report dashboard for 4 types of ABM programs: new revenue, pipeline acceleration, expansion and churn prevention
Live case studies and examples of the campaigns we implemented with the clients of Fullfunnel.io in the past few years
17 templates to simplify your ABM strategy launch: ICP, revenue analysis, intent data tracking, account warm-up cadence, customer research, account scoring and prioritization, ABM budget planning and forecasting, account planning, reports, personalized offers, and many more.
Planning & Presenting a Pilot ABM Program to Execs and Sales Framework
Minimal viable stack recommendation and guidelines on how to use it to avoid ramping up budget and being pressured to show ROI for the purchased $50k software
How to Fix Misalignment with ABM: The 7-Step Approach.
1. Find Your Allies and Co-Create the Program
You need to find your allies inside your company and form a change management team. You can't just come to sales and leadership saying "from today we change the way how we work, and this is what we are going ." That never works because change should be evolution for a team, not revolution. Nobody likes revolutions.
Find people who are willing to challenge the existing status quo:
Sales: Someone who understands the current process isn't efficient enough
Subject Matter Expert: Someone who deeply understands your buyer persona
Marketing: ABM lead who can coordinate strategy
The key here is to co-create the program together. You need to move past conversations and build the program together in a way that makes it visual. When you cover the ways everyone learns, everyone can understand and align.
Before anything else, do the math together:
Do you know how your sellers make their commissions?
Have you done the math on how much money they could make working with you?
Does the math actually work compared to other programs?
It's easy to get sales buy-in when you can show them the money. If the math doesn't work, why would you expect them to work with you?
2. Audit Your GTM Through Full-Funnel Lenses.
To understand what should be improved, holistically review your GTM together with sales. This will help to identify areas for improvement and the lowest-hanging fruits for short wins.
*The complete questionnaire is here:
3. Define focus segment or use case.
To have success with your pilot ABM program, you must focus on areas where you already have some proof points rather than trying to crack completely new markets.
How do revenue metrics look across different segments, and clusters (use cases)?
What are your win rates, sales cycle lengths, and average contract values by segments/use cases?
What are the top 5 deals by revenue and the top 5 fastest deals in this cluster?What were the channels and programs that generated them?
What are the firmographics, technographics and use cases of these accounts? Can we update our ICP based on these insights?
4. Define Key Improvement Areas and ABM Requirements
Based on your GTM analysis, define what specifically needs to be improved, why it needs to change, and how you'll measure progress. Create requirements for your ABM program including:
1.What should be improved.
For example, "Improve personalization & tailored outreach" or "Develop cross-functional collaboration between marketing and sales"
2.Why it needs to improve (reasoning to explain why do you need to change it now).
Example: Marketing needs to generate higher inbound leads, sales struggle with lead conversion due to lack of tailored outreach. Broad campaigns fail to engage high-value accounts in a meaningful way.
3.How you'll measure the improvement (the success criteria).
Number of discovery calls booked with target accounts selected for ABM program
Joint dashboards and reports showing ABM-sourced pipeline
Without reasoning, your program likely won't be approved. Sales leadership will ask how this helps them hit revenue and pipeline targets—you need clear answers backed by data.
5. Co-Create ABM Program Using the 6A Framework
Remember: ABM shouldn't be a revolution, but an evolution of how you work.
You need to be realistic about what you can do because you already have a full plate. Hence, you need to leverage your current marketing mix, but tailor it to strategic accounts with clear collaboration with sales.
You're going to run a webinar?
Think about how to make it account-based. Think about how to bring the target accounts you've selected together with sales to this webinar.
What should be the pre-webinar engagement?
What should be the post-webinar engagement?
Don't try to create a completely separate siloed program—you already have silos in the organization, don't make it even more siloed.
Here are the 6 pillars of the ABM program you need to co-create with sales and SME. Each of them contains links to the relevant resources.
Account Selection: Don't apply opportunistic or wishlist building approach. Analyze your best deals and define the patterns—what makes them a good fit? What would be the disqualification criteria? Make it tangible and avoid any ambiguity.
Account Segmentation: Segment all accounts by Tiers, Vendor Awareness, Relationship and Product-Need Evidence signals:
Cluster ICP: Not aware of us & product need is unknown
Future Pipeline: Aware of us & product need is unknown
Active Focus: Aware of us and product need is known
Account Research: Define information you absolutely must know about an account to create a personalized offer. This shouldn't be just pulling the website URL and asking ChatGPT—that's commodity information everyone can access. Sit down with sales and identify what critical questions you must know to create fully personalized offers.
Account Awareness: Define core activities and content to create awareness among buying committee members. Pro tip: display ads and programmatic ads are not awareness channels.
Account Development: Define key activities to engage buying committee members and build relationships with them through meaningful non-sales touchpoints.
Account Activation: Personalize your offer and define bridge activities to book discovery meetings—not just standard product demos.
6. Explain & Agree on Sales & Marketing Responsibilities in the Pilot.
When you co-create this program, explain and agree on sales responsibilities in the future pilot. Make sure they clearly understand what they're supposed to do, and in ideal scenario, run a prototype of these activities.
If they're supposed to invite target accounts to the webinar, what would be the script? What channels will be used—email or LinkedIn? How should that be personalized? What data do you need for this? Who are you going to reach out to?
Make sure you're all aligned on these responsibilities and activities. Avoid any surprises in the future. Create clear documentation of who does what, when, and how success will be measured.
This ensures you have real cross-functional collaboration, not just marketing-led activities with sales support.
7. Adjust Pilot Team KPIs and Align with Leadership on Expectations.
Move away from MQLs, cost per acquisition, and activity metrics. Instead, track KPIs aligned with account progression stages:
For Cluster ICP accounts: Thoughtful comments, nurturing posts, personalized connection requests
For Future Pipeline accounts: Buying committee members enrolled, fully researched accounts, insights collected from conversations
For Active Focus accounts: Fully personalized solution offerings, signal-based engagement, booked bridge activities
When approaching leadership, use this strategic script:
Lead with empathy and authority: "I know we need pipeline right now. Marketing has been primarily focused on brand building. We can do things that fill pipeline right now.
Here's my hesitation: We risk damaged brand reputation, weakening audience trust, and short-term success that creates long-term pipeline volatility.
But if we're aligned on doing short-term programs to build pipeline, here's what I recommend..."
What you need:
A consistent pipeline goal for the next 18 months
Permission to dedicate 60-70% of marketing's time to sales activation playbooks for 6 months
Always-on, programmatic playbooks that prioritize outreach for sales
The transition plan: Once activation playbooks are running, rebalance to 60% brand building and 40% sales activation. Sales owns and optimizes their playbooks while marketing builds educational programs that position the brand as the solution.
*Learn how to measure ABM here:
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Academy includes:
All our B2B marketing courses including ABM playbook, Demand Gen Playbook, LinkedIn Allbound marketing playbook and 11 more courses that aren't available publicly + all upcoming courses.
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Learn more and join the academy here.
TLDR
Most marketing and sales teams are misaligned despite best intentions because they work in silos, operate on different time horizons, and have different definitions of success.
A pilot ABM program helps you to fix it.
The goal is simple: prove that marketing and sales working together generates more revenue than working in silos.
Once you have that proof, you can scale the approach and rebalance toward sustainable, long-term growth.
Listen to Full-Funnel Live - Misaligned Despite Our Best Intention. How to fix the marketing and sales silos with ABM.
*If you want to attend the next live episode, sign up here to receive an invite. Usually, we host them every Wednesday at 4 pm CET (Central Europe) - 11 am ET (Eastern Time).
In this episode of Fullfunnel Live, we co-hosted with Mason Cosby a webinar: Misaligned Despite Our Best Intention. How to fix the marketing and sales silos with ABM
Tune in to learn:
Why Are We Misaligned? – The root causes of disconnect between marketing and sales.
What Does Sales Really Want? – Key insights into sales team priorities and how marketing can better support them.
Balancing Brand Building & Sales Activation – How to drive both long-term growth and short-term revenue without sacrificing one for the other.
How to Operationalize the Partnership – Practical steps to foster collaboration, streamline processes, and align KPIs.
Sales Compensation & Incentives – Structuring rewards to encourage behaviors that benefit both teams.
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