The battle between sales and marketing is a constant in many businesses. Marketing generates leads, only for sales to claim they are unqualified. In turn, marketing accuses sales of not following up on perfectly good opportunities. This classic conflict is a frequent topic on The Go-to-Market Podcast, highlighting a persistent disconnect at the heart of many organizations.
According to Justin Rashidi, a Forbes 30-Under-30 honoree and Co-Founder/Chief Strategy Officer of SeedX, the solution isn’t found in more complex funnels or the latest AI. He argues that in the rush for new technology, leaders are overlooking the foundational principles that truly drive revenue.
The path to alignment isn’t about buying new software; it’s about marketing leaders developing a deep, empathetic understanding of the sales process. This article breaks down a back-to-basics framework designed to bridge the gap and turn departmental tension into measurable revenue growth.
Why Most CMOs Don’t Truly Understand Their Sales Process
The core of the alignment problem, according to Justin Rashidi, is an operational and psychological gap between marketing and sales leadership.
“Most CMOs don’t understand their sales process,” he states directly. This isn’t an accusation of incompetence but an observation of a systemic blind spot. Marketing leaders are often so focused on their own domain that they fail to develop a granular understanding of what happens after their team hands off a lead.
Marketing leaders often lack a granular, empathetic understanding of the sales team’s day-to-day reality, creating a blind spot that fuels misalignment.
The Problem With an Over-Reliance on Attribution
A primary source of this disconnect is marketing’s fixation on top-of-funnel metrics.
Rashidi notes that marketing teams are often “so obsessed with attribution” that they lose sight of the bigger picture. They celebrate MQLs and clicks but have little visibility or appreciation for what constitutes a “worked” lead or how that lead actually navigates the sales pipeline toward a closed deal.
This narrow focus creates a world where marketing and sales operate with entirely different definitions of success. Marketing hits its lead-gen targets, while sales struggles with low-quality conversations, creating the tension that arises from competing marketing-sourced vs sales-sourced quotas. Until marketing’s success is tied to revenue outcomes, not just initial engagement, the chasm will remain.
“Most CMOs don’t understand their sales process.”
Justin Rashidi, Co-Founder of SeedX
How Vague Processes Fuel Inter-Departmental Tension
This lack of shared understanding is amplified by ambiguous processes and unclear ownership. Rashidi emphasizes the need for crystal-clear definitions, which requires marketing leaders to move beyond their department and ask tough, operational questions:
- Do you know the exact job description of your SDRs and BDRs?
- What is the specific, agreed-upon handoff process from marketing to sales?
- Who is responsible for each stage of lead nurturing once the sales team engages a lead?
- Does your sales team want a raw lead, or do they expect marketing to “work” it first?
Without concrete answers, friction is inevitable. Solving this requires a holistic view of the revenue engine, demanding strong sales and RevOps alignment to ensure every stage is defined, owned, and optimized.
Why the CMO Role Has the Highest Turnover Rate
This operational disconnect directly contributes to the notoriously high turnover rate for CMOs. When other leaders perceive marketing as a cost center focused on vanity metrics, Rashidi explains, they often view it as “secondary to sales.”
In this dynamic, the CRO’s voice carries more weight in the boardroom because their impact on revenue seems more direct.
This puts CMOs in a vulnerable position. To prove their value and earn their influence, they must demonstrate impact across the entire pipeline. They cannot simply generate demand; they must show how their investments influence deal velocity, win rates, and ultimately, closed-won revenue.
Funneling Online Leads Into Real-World Relationships
Shifting from diagnosis to solution, Rashidi outlines a practical, relationship-focused framework for creating a seamless customer acquisition process. His approach prioritizes human connection and fundamental principles over unnecessary complexity.
Instead of building complex funnels, focus on a simple strategy: use digital marketing to create opportunities for in-person conversations.
From Clicks to Conversations
Rashidi advocates for using online channels not just for lead capture, but as a deliberate path toward in-person interaction. “Everything that we do from an online lead generation standpoint, we try to funnel into in-person behaviors,” he says.
This strategy transforms digital touchpoints into opportunities for genuine relationship building. Actionable tactics include:
- Using LinkedIn and Google ads to promote attendance at conferences or regional events.
- Transitioning a successful product demo into an invitation for a dinner meeting.
- Building conference strategies around a target list of key prospects to facilitate face-to-face conversations.
By strategically targeting prospects for these events, teams can maximize their efforts in high-potential areas, effectively bridging sales and marketing gaps in territory planning.
Master Your Message Before You Master Your Funnel
Rashidi firmly believes that fundamentals trump complexity. Before investing in an elaborate, multi-touch funnel, leaders must first perfect their core message. “The things that do work are good messaging, good value props, and good offers,” he insists.
A clear and compelling value proposition is the bedrock of any successful GTM strategy. It is what captures attention, communicates differentiation, and persuades a prospect to engage. This strong messaging is also foundational to a modern sales qualification framework, ensuring that the leads marketing generates are the ones sales can actually close. No amount of automation can fix a weak or confusing offer.
How CMOs Can Become Best Friends With Their CRO
The ultimate key to alignment is for marketing leaders to immerse themselves in the sales world. This requires humility, curiosity, and a genuine desire to understand their counterparts’ challenges and objectives. To bridge the gap, CMOs should:
- Shadow sales calls: Listen firsthand to prospect objections, questions, and pain points.
- Co-create lead scoring criteria: Work with sales to define what a “qualified” lead truly means.
- Walk the pipeline: Sit with sales leadership and review the entire process, from initial contact to close, to understand every stage from their perspective.
By taking these steps, CMOs can gain invaluable insights, build trust, and begin operating as true partners. For an inside look at how sales leaders think, watching a discussion on aligning sales strategy can offer an invaluable window into their world.
Using Technology and Data as an Enabler, Not a Crutch
While Rashidi champions a back-to-basics approach, he sees a clear and powerful role for technology and data. The key is to use these tools as instruments to support and scale a fundamentally sound, human-centric strategy, not as a replacement for one.
Use technology to automate repetitive tasks and generate revenue-focused data, freeing up your team to build relationships and prove its impact.
Automate Outreach, Not Relationships
Everyone talks about AI reshaping sales, but Rashidi points to a specific, practical shift at the top of the funnel. He argues that AI is poised to “take over more of the SDR role,” particularly for repetitive, low-level tasks.
“The idea of someone reaching out and doing these simple outreaches should be automated,” he suggests.
This isn’t about eliminating human roles but elevating them. AI only frees up your team’s time for more valuable activities: building rapport on calls, personalizing follow-ups, and facilitating the in-person meetings that forge strong business relationships.
Justify Your Budget by Proving Full-Funnel Impact
In a climate where B2B leaders are often “allergic to spending money,” marketing must justify every dollar with a clear line to revenue. The solution is to move beyond top-of-funnel metrics and demonstrate how marketing spend impacts the entire customer journey.
From MQLs to Deal Health: Speaking Sales’ Language With Data
To earn credibility and become a strategic partner, CMOs must learn to speak the language of sales. This means adopting and reporting on sales-centric metrics like deal health and pipeline velocity. Understanding the nuances between deal health vs pipeline health allows marketing leaders to demonstrate a practical command of the sales process.
This shared language and data set allows marketing to contribute directly to more accurate forecasting and pipeline management. Tools like Fullcast Revenue Intelligence are crucial for connecting marketing activities to revenue outcomes, providing the deep insights needed to manage pipeline risk and prove marketing’s contribution to every closed deal.
The path to ending the friction between sales and marketing is not paved with more software. As Justin Rashidi makes clear, enduring alignment is built on a foundation of mutual understanding and a respect for fundamental principles. Technology is a powerful amplifier, but it cannot fix a broken process or a fractured relationship. The real work lies in marketing leaders immersing themselves in the sales world, speaking their language, and sharing their goals.
This week, take one tangible step to understand the sales process better by shadowing a demo, reviewing a call script, or joining a pipeline review with your CRO.
This single act of empathy is more powerful than any dashboard.
True go-to-market excellence happens when planning and execution are perfectly aligned. To see how top performers are structuring their GTM plans for success, download the 2025 Benchmarks Report – State of GTM in 2025 H1.
