From Clicks to Contracts: 3 Practical Ways to Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams

Bridging the gap between marketing and sales is essential for growth. At Mansfield Sales & Marketing, this alignment is the core of what we do as B2B Sales Enablement experts.  It’s about transforming marketing efforts from generating clicks into a powerful engine that helps sales secure contracts.

Here are three practical, actionable strategies to unify your teams and drive results that affect your bottom line.

1. Create a Feedback Loop for Lead Quality

The single most common point of friction is lead quality. Marketing generates a lead and hands it off, often with little insight into what happens next. Did the prospect answer the phone? Were they a good fit? Did they become a customer? Without answers, marketing is flying blind, unable to refine its strategy to attract better prospects.

The Solution:

Establish a formal, consistent communication channel dedicated to lead quality. This goes beyond sharing a spreadsheet. Schedule bi-weekly or monthly meetings where sales can provide specific, qualitative feedback on the leads they’ve worked.

• Discuss the Wins: Which leads converted? What were their job titles? What specific pain points did they mention during the sales call? What content did they engage with before reaching out?
• Analyze the Losses: Which leads went nowhere? Were they from the wrong industry? Were they not the decision-makers? Was their budget completely out of line?

This feedback is gold. It allows the marketing team to move beyond vanity metrics and refine its campaigns to target the right people. This is a core component of the "Awareness" phase of our FADA® Marketing Framework—precisely targeting professional attributes to reach the right decision-makers. The goal isn't just to increase the volume of inquiries, but the quality.

2. Establish Shared Goals and Metrics

Silos form when teams have conflicting goals. If marketing is measured solely on generating a certain number of leads and sales is measured only on revenue, they are not on the same team. Marketing can hit its target with a thousand low-quality leads that never convert, leaving the sales team frustrated and the company with no new revenue.

The Solution:

Unify both teams under shared, revenue-focused Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The ultimate goal for both marketing and sales should be the same: increasing sales conversions.

Instead of tracking Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) separately, focus on metrics that matter to the business, such as:

• Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rate
• Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA)
• Revenue Growth from Marketing-Generated Leads

When both teams are responsible for the final number, their perspective shifts. Marketing is incentivized to find higher-quality prospects who are more likely to close, and sales is more invested in nurturing the leads marketing provides. This is the difference between a process-driven approach and the results-oriented strategy guided by our FADA® framework, where the final, most important step is inspiring "Action."

3. Collaborate on Creating Sales Collateral

Marketing creates a beautiful new brochure. It’s well-designed, the messaging is on-brand, and it's full of great information. The problem? It sits in a box, unused by the sales team because it doesn’t address the specific questions, objections, and competitive pressures they face in the real world.

The Solution:

Involve the sales team directly in the creation of all sales collateral.  Your salespeople are on the front lines; they know the customer’s pain points better than anyone. Before creating a white paper, case study, or presentation deck, marketing should ask the sales team:

• What are the top five questions you hear on every sales call?
• What is the single biggest objection we need to overcome?
• Which competitor is mentioned most often by prospects?
• What "aha!" moment most often helps a prospect understand our value?

This collaboration ensures that the materials—from infographics and online comparison calculators to gated content and print leave-behinds—are not just marketing pieces, but true sales enablement tools. This empowers the sales team to distinguish your business from the competition and compete on unique value, not just on price.

From Division to Dominance

Aligning your sales and marketing teams turns a disjointed process into a unified revenue engine. By creating feedback loops, sharing revenue-focused goals, and collaborating on tools that empower your sales team, you can stop the internal friction and start seeing real growth.

If you’re ready to bridge the gap between your marketing and sales teams, contact Mansfield today for a free evaluation.  We can help you implement a strategy that drives qualified leads and empowers your team to close more deals.