Why sales + marketing + customer teams must work together from day one
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"How did it get like this? We’re already turning over £20 million."
This was the question that stopped me in my tracks during a recent conversation. I was talking to a client who, despite impressive revenue figures, was struggling with something that should have been sorted years ago: their sales, marketing, and customer teams weren't talking to each other.
It's a scenario I see repeatedly across tech scale ups. Companies grow despite themselves, hit impressive revenue milestones, yet remain frustratingly inefficient because they've built their commercial engine in silos.
The conversation that changed everything
What struck me was how often we see the same fundamental problem from different angles:
"None of them are working together. There's no joined up process for what happens to a customer at every stage of your business."
I approach it from marketing - audience research, positioning, go-to-market strategy. But the common underlying issue can’t be ignored: to scale effectively, sales, marketing and customer teams need to be aligned with common goals and regular communication.
The real cost of commercial silos
When sales, marketing, and customer success operate independently, the damage compounds:
Revenue inefficiency
- Marketing generates leads that sales can't convert because the messaging doesn't align with sales conversations
- Sales promises things that customer success can't deliver
- Customer feedback never makes it back to influence marketing messaging or sales positioning
Wasted investment
- Marketing spend on campaigns that don't translate to pipeline
- Sales time spent on unqualified leads
- Customer success firefighting instead of expanding accounts
Growth ceiling
Without a joined-up approach, companies hit a wall. They can't scale efficiently because every new hire increases complexity rather than capability.
The symptoms every founder should recognise
From my conversation with the sales specialist and my own client work, here are the warning signs:
- Different value propositions: your sales team is pitching differently to how marketing positions you
- Handoff chaos: leads get lost between marketing and sales, new customers aren't properly onboarded
- Blame culture: teams point fingers when targets aren't met rather than solving problems together
- Repetitive problems: customer issues keep recurring because insights aren't shared across teams
- Founder dependency: you're still personally involved in closing deals or solving customer problems
Why this happens (and why it's harder to fix later)
Early stage survival mode in the beginning, everyone does everything. The founder is the marketing team, the sales team, and customer success. It works because it's one person with complete context.
The hiring trap as you grow, you hire specialists. A marketer to handle campaigns. A salesperson to close deals. A customer success manager to keep people happy. Each brings expertise but loses the full picture.
The integration gap the bigger you get, the harder it becomes to create alignment. People have established ways of working, systems that don't talk to each other, and KPIs that don't encourage collaboration.
The joined-up alternative
The companies that scale efficiently treat commercial functions as one interconnected system:
Shared foundation
- One clear value proposition that everyone uses
- Unified view of ideal customer profile
- Common understanding of the customer journey
Connected processes
- Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are defined based on what sales can actually convert
- Sales conversations inform marketing messaging
- Customer feedback drives both sales positioning and marketing campaigns
Aligned metrics
- Revenue targets that everyone contributes to
- Customer lifetime value that spans all teams
- Pipeline health that marketing and sales share responsibility for
The framework that works
Based on my experience working across dozens of start ups and scale ups, here's what successful integration looks like:
- Start with strategy (before tactics)
Don't jump straight into campaigns or sales processes. Begin with:
- Clear value proposition work
- Deep customer research
- Shared go-to-market strategy
- Map the full journey
Document every touchpoint from first awareness to customer advocacy. Identify:
- Where handoffs happen
- What information needs to pass between teams
- How success is measured at each stage
- Create feedback loops
- Weekly alignment meetings between teams
- Shared reporting dashboards
- Regular customer feedback sessions with all teams present
- Measure what matters
Track metrics that encourage collaboration:
- Pipeline conversion rates (not just leads generated)
- Customer lifetime value (not just initial deal size)
- Revenue retention rates (shared responsibility)
The price of waiting
If you don't do it now, you will never grow. You will never sell. You will never be worth anything.
It sounds dramatic, but the data backs it up. Businesses that don’t allign* see:
- Up to 10% of annual revenue lost
- £790 billion in the UK and $1 trillion globally lost each year in productivity and wasted spend
- Lower growth, profitability, and customer retention compared to aligned competitors
Getting started (without burning everything down)
You don't need to restructure your entire organisation overnight. Start with:
- One shared project: pick a specific campaign or product launch where all teams collaborate from the beginning
- One shared goal: this is for me is the clincher. Everyone needs to be driving to the same result
- Regular alignment sessions: weekly 30-minute meetings where teams share insights and challenges
- Customer voice integration: ensure customer feedback reaches all teams in a digestible way, not just customer success
- Shared definitions: agree on what constitutes a qualified lead, successful customer, and expansion opportunity
The competitive advantage
While your competitors struggle with silos, integrated commercial teams become a genuine competitive advantage. You move faster, waste less, and create better customer experiences.
Most importantly, you build a business that can scale without breaking. One that potential acquirers see as systematically valuable, not dependent on heroic individual efforts.
It's not just good practice. In today's competitive landscape, it's survival.
What warning signs are you seeing in your own organisation? Drop me an email and I’ll see how I can help!
*These stats come from the following articles: winsavvy report; the demandgen report and the lxa hub
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