The brutal truth about why sales and marketing alignment is still broken in 2025—and what you can actually do about it.
From the latest Revenue Marketing Raw episode, where Jeff and Debbie tackle the uncomfortable truths about why this problem still exists after 20+ years.
It's 2025, and we're still talking about sales and marketing alignment.
If that doesn't make you want to scream into the void, you haven't been paying attention. After decades of "revolutionary" CRM systems, RevOps initiatives, and endless alignment workshops, the fundamental truth remains unchanged: Most sales teams still think marketing is useless.
And here's the kicker—they're not entirely wrong.
If the CRO in your organization does not believe that marketing is instrumental in helping to drive revenue, there is no power on earth that is going to get that sales and marketing team aligned.
Lip service isn't enough.
The problem isn't process—it's credibility. When marketing teams spend their time chasing vanity metrics like MQLs while sales teams are grinding to hit actual revenue numbers, is it any wonder there's disconnect?
Here's the brutal reality: Marketing has gotten so desperate to prove themselves that they're falling all over themselves with different kinds of attribution models just to concretely prove that they actually did what they were supposed to do.
Here's what's actually happening in most organizations:
Sound familiar?
Sales budgets don't get cut when revenue is down—marketing budgets do. Sales quotas don't change based on marketing performance—but marketing metrics are constantly under scrutiny.
When you have different scorecards, you're not playing the same game.
Want to know the fastest way to build credibility with sales? Spend time in their world.
Here are three game-changing KPIs every marketer should track:
Imagine if every marketing person on your team had to spend X amount of time listening to sales calls, going on sales calls, understanding the world of sales. How much better informed would that marketing team be?
Stop trying to convince sales with presentations. Show them results.
Start small:
If you have a salesperson who actually gets leads and actually closes business from something that marketing gave them, that is the spark that ignites everything.
The most successful sales and marketing relationships happen when leadership sets shared revenue objectives from day one.
Real example from the show: One company required sales to accept every lead marketing provided and follow up within 24 hours. You could hear the team screaming all the way from Atlanta to Seattle. But did it change behavior? Yes—it forced sales and marketing to actually start talking to each other.
Here's a sobering reality check we discussed: A global company spent millions on digital loan origination systems, then couldn't figure out why adoption was low.
The reason? Sales compensation was still tied to sending customers to physical branches.
Your fancy new processes won't work if incentives aren't aligned.
The companies that get this right don't have "sales teams" and "marketing teams"—they have revenue teams.
We once worked with a CMO who perfectly captured this mindset: "Sales and marketing IS the revenue team in our organization." That gave us chills—because that's exactly the way it should be.
When you stop thinking about separate departments and start thinking about one unified revenue engine, everything changes.
Stop doing this:
Start doing this:
Marketing will continue to be seen as "useless" until it starts acting like a revenue function instead of a lead generation function.
The solution isn't more technology, better attribution, or shinier dashboards. It's fundamentally changing how marketing thinks about its role in the business.
Bottom line: It's not just about generating leads. It's about generating actionable pipeline—all the way through.
This is exactly the kind of unfiltered, revenue-focused truth Jeff Pedowitz and Dr. Debbie Qaqish deliver every week on Revenue Marketing Raw—where snark meets strategy and there are absolutely no safe takes.
Want more high-voltage insights that actually move the revenue needle?
🎭 Watch the full unfiltered conversation and get weekly doses of revenue marketing reality at www.pedowitzgroup.com/revenue-marketing-raw
Because if you're still playing the same old marketing games in 2025, you're not just useless to sales—you're useless to your business.
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Revenue Marketing Raw: All signal, no noise. No safe takes. Every Wednesday.