24 Questions to align your sales & marketing

If your marketing and sales teams don’t align, your growth stops.
Marketing and sales often operate in isolation despite working towards the same goal: Leads – Opportunities – Deals.

Marketing drives quality leads to your sales team. If that’s not what your marketing team is doing, then it’s just noise.

Both then work in unison to help the opportunities to closure.

Once done, both keep working together to upsell, cross-sell and retain the newly created customers.

Constantly improving the dynamic between sales and marketing increases growth (AI can support this continuous collaboration).

It’s not that easy. If it was, everyone would be hitting their revenue targets.

Here are 24 questions to help align your Sales & Marketing integration further — now with AI in mind:

1. Have you built your business and sales objectives into your marketing strategy and tactics? 
2. Do you work closely with the CEO? CRO? CFO? CIO?
3. How do you ensure your marketing and sales teams are aligned to the company's goals? 
4. Which part of marketing is impacted by positive or negative business results? Strategy? Campaigns? Budget? People? Martech? 
5. How do you look for market trends that your sales teams have not seen yet?
6. Do you have a succession plan in place for everyone in your teams? 
7. Do you have a joint individual or team dedicated to: Analytics? Predictive modelling? Data science? Artificial Intelligence?
8. Have the Customer Services, Finance, IT, HR and Product Development units assigned a business partner to sales and marketing and vice-versa?
9. What is the ratio of marketers to salespeople? Is sales productivity a metric in your arsenal?
10. What are the top three skills you are looking for when hiring
11. Which technologies do you use to have one single version of the truth? Database? SFA? CRM? Marketing Automation? 
12. Are your sales & marketing processes written?
13. How often do you review them?
14. Are your marketers Project Management Professional (PMP) certified?
15. Is your market intelligence strategy automated? 
16. Have you implemented an Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategy?
17. Is the sales and marketing infrastructure owned by IT?
18. Is your data architecture defined by IT?
19. What analytics and predictive modelling tools do you use? Are they effective? Efficient?
20. What sales and marketing metrics do you use? Are they connected to the business metrics?
21. What aspects of your sales and marketing strategy are centralised and decentralised?
22. Do you benchmark your marketing investment as a percentage of total revenue? What about sales?
23. What percentage of your campaigns are A/B tested? How about your brand message? 
24. Do you see campaigns disappearing in favour of always-on marketing? 

This list is not exhaustive — it's just a starting point.

AI plays a pivotal role in aligning B2B sales and marketing by acting as a unifying intelligence layer across teams, data, and customer touchpoints. 

It enables real-time dashboards providing both teams with a shared view of performance and progress, and helps model revenue scenarios to align marketing tactics with business objectives. 

AI enhances lead scoring, personalises outreach, and automates repetitive sales tasks, thereby boosting productivity. 

It surfaces emerging market trends through continuous analysis of external data, supports predictive forecasting for pipeline and churn, and refines campaign performance through automated A/B testing. 

In Account-Based Marketing, AI identifies high-intent accounts, tailors messages, and optimises delivery. 

AI is an always-on superpower making marketing and sales strategies dynamic by constantly adjusting your content based on live customer signals. 

It's no longer the time for sales and marketing leaders to fight, today they must collaborate with IT and data teams to ensure clean data, unified architecture, a shared ownership of AI initiatives and results. 

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