How To Unite Marketing And Sales: 16 Expert Tips

Ideally, sales and marketing work in harmony in a virtuous cycle: Businesses with symbiotic sales and marketing teams see stronger campaigns, faster growth and high profitability. However, these teams often operate in isolation, creating misalignment and missing opportunities.

With the right approach, organizations can bridge the divide, improve collaboration and boost shared accountability across departments to increase conversions. Below, Forbes Agency Council members discuss strategies for better connecting sales and marketing teams so that both sides can help drive exponentially better results together.

1. Align Teams Around Shared KPIs And ICPs

One effective way to bridge the gap is to align both teams around shared key performance indicators and customer insights. When marketing and sales collaborate on ideal customer profiles and feedback loops, campaigns become more targeted and conversions improve. Regular joint meetings keep both sides informed and accountable. – Boris Dzhingarov, ESBO Ltd

2. Gather Firsthand Insights Directly From Sales

Strong campaigns start with direct input from the people closest to the customer. Sales knows the hurdles, where the journey breaks and what never lands. That intel shouldn’t be filtered or summarized—it should be witnessed through interviews, one-on-ones and ride-alongs. Ask better questions, listen without a script. When strategy comes from a lived context, it works. It earns traction and builds enduring trust. – Shanna Apitz, Hunt Adkins

3. Address The Gap At The Business Model Level

While feedback between sales and marketing is essential, the gap between them appears at the business model level. When the business model defines a clear, scalable unit, it sets the foundation for effective marketing and sales. Marketing understands who to attract and at what maximum lead cost; sales teams understand the pain points and how to close. – Oksana Matviichuk, OM Strategic Forecasting

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4. Hold Regular Reviews To Sharpen Campaigns

Have both teams meet regularly to review what’s working and what’s not. When sales share ground-level insights and marketing brings fresh ideas, campaigns get sharper. – David Ispiryan, Effeect

5. Understand The Buyer’s Psyche To Bridge The Gap

Sales wants immediate wins. Marketing builds long-term systems. The gap forms when neither understands how the other thinks. Agencies can bridge this gap by deeply understanding the buyer’s psyche and helping both teams create repeatable ways to reach that audience on the platforms where real decisions are made. – Kyle Arteaga, The Bulleit Group

6. Embed Marketers Into The Sales Journey

Our company bridges the gap by embedding marketers into the sales journey. Our team listens to real sales calls, analyzes objections and then builds assets with sales input. This feedback loop ensures campaigns aren’t just focused on just the creative. They’re built to convert and are ultimately aligned to sales revenue, not vanity metrics. – Don Dodds, M16 Marketing

7. Organize Roles Around The Buyer’s Journey

Each player, whether in marketing or sales, has a specific role, but it’s the buying journey, not departmental functions, that should determine who does what and when. Focusing on who owns each step of moving the buyer forward—not just on generating leads—is what bridges the gap. It’s all about orchestrating the buyer journey and working together to make it frictionless for the customer. – Paula Chiocchi, Outward Media, Inc.

8. Appoint A Leader With Sales And Marketing Experience

Have someone experienced manage your account, someone who has years of experience in sales and marketing, to bridge the gap and bring these two elements together. You can’t have one without the other. To avoid failure, have someone who has both a sales and a marketing mindset spearhead your activities. – Adrian Falk, Believe Advertising & PR

9. Run Joint Strategy Sessions And Role-Swap Sprints

Bridge the gap by running joint strategy sessions to co-create campaign briefs plus quarterly role-swap sprints where marketers shadow sales calls and reps shape campaigns. This immersive exchange builds empathy, refines messaging around real objections and creates a continuous feedback loop—aligning tactics, sharing ownership and driving measurable revenue growth. – Lars Voedisch, PRecious Communications

10. Create A Continuous Cycle Of Feedback And Refinement

Sales and marketing should work together in a continuous cycle of assessment, adjustment and execution. In our marketing engagements, we prefer to have a single point of contact from sales involved in the campaign. This enables consistent feedback on lead quality. If leads aren’t converting into the funnel, we refine our marketing strategies to ensure more effective outcomes and stronger alignment between teams. – Prashanthi Kolluru, KLOUDPORTAL

11. Have A Partner Facilitate Direct Collaboration

In most organizations, sales and marketing don’t talk. Because we are outside the client organization, agencies are in a unique place to bridge the gap between these (often warring) factions in the organizations we work with. Asking good questions, fostering interaction and even getting the two groups to sit down together are hugely valuable services that good agencies deliver every day. – Mike Maynard, Napier Partnership Limited

12. Build Campaigns Around Clear, Shared Goals

Start with a clear goal—revenue, sales or client engagement—and build marketing campaigns that support it. When sales insights inform strategy, campaigns become more effective, driving both results and brand growth while aligning teams around shared success. – Jessica Hawthorne-Castro, Hawthorne Advertising

13. Make Revenue A Shared Responsibility

We’ve seen the best results when marketing engages with sales to own revenue, not just awareness. That means real collaboration: Sales shares objections, insights and patterns, and marketing builds campaigns around them. It’s not just for alignment, but also for shared accountability. That’s when the feedback loop becomes a growth loop. – Anthony Chiaravallo, Vallo Media

14. Host Quarterly Workshops To Surface Buyer Objections

Host quarterly live workshops where marketers and salespeople collaborate on answer briefs drawn from recent deals; this surfaces real buyer objections and arms marketing with on-the-ground insights to sculpt resonant campaigns. Over successive sessions, this live feedback loop becomes the agency’s secret weapon for seamless pipeline growth. – Vaibhav Kakkar, Digital Web Solutions

15. Share KPIs And Insights To Shorten Sales Cycles

Team collaboration, shared KPIs and accurate revenue attribution across marketing tactics are all critical variables in creating a symbiotic relationship between sales and marketing. Equally important is building an operational model focused on sharing buyer insights, optimizing strategies to address market dynamics and fostering collaboration to shorten sales cycles. – Jennifer Friese, Protiviti

16. Use Field Insights To Guide Marketing Strategy

I’ve seen too many agencies treat sales and marketing like they’re on separate planets. I bridge the gap by aligning both teams around the buyer’s journey, not their own KPIs. When sales teams share real insights from the field, including who they’re dealing with and the questions they’re being asked—the client’s pain points—marketing can stop guessing and start converting. – George Arabian, NVISION