Why B2B Marketing and Sales Alignment Fails
Guest post on SMART Team
Osnat Lidor · August 23, 2026 · 3 min read
Most B2B companies assume marketing and sales are collaborating toward the same goal. In reality, they often operate in completely different worlds: different metrics, different pressures, and different definitions of what winning looks like.
The easy answer is to blame systems. Build a better handoff process, sync the dashboards, agree on lead scoring. But the honest answer is harder: this is a personality problem. Two departments that grew up with separate incentives, separate cultures, and separate identities are not going to align just because they share a CRM.
The fix has to start at the identity level. Marketing needs to change its understanding of its own role in the company. That is closer to a personality change than a system change.
In this guest post for SMART Team, I break down why marketing and sales alignment fails in early-stage B2B companies, what the real friction looks like, and how to rebuild marketing so it is measured on the things that actually move revenue: qualified meetings, ICP fit, and pipeline impact.
Guest post
This article was originally published on another site. Read the full version there.
Read the full postWritten by Osnat Lidor
Talk to us