The Revenue-Ready Marketing Playbook, Part 4: How a Shared Playbook Across Sales and Marketing Unlocks Value

This is Part 4 of the Revenue-Ready Marketing Playbook, a 4-part series for mid-market CEOs who want marketing to move the needle.

You’ve got a sharp Marketing team. An experienced Sales leader. Solid product-market fit. And yet, the customer experience feels disjointed. 
 
Campaigns generate leads that go quiet after handoff. Sales calls start from scratch, even when prospects have engaged with marketing content. Messaging shifts between touchpoints and the onboarding experience doesn’t match what was sold.

It’s not because your people aren’t doing their job. It’s because no one owns the full customer experience. 

Sales and Marketing Are Aligned. Until They’re Not

Alignment is easy to say, but tougher to operate. And even harder to maintain in the heat of growth. 
 
Here’s what misalignment looks like
- MQLs that sales ignore, or don’t trust
- Decks and demos that don’t reflect real objections
- Marketing running campaigns with little sales input
- A buyer journey that feels stitched together instead of seamless 

What the best-growth teams get right 

In high-performing mid-market businesses, Sales and Marketing don’t just collaborate. 
They co-own outcomes and share definitions, language, insights, and accountability. They move in rhythm. 
 
That rhythm shows up in:
- A mutual definition of what good pipeline looks like
- A shared view of the ideal customer profile (ICP)
- Coordinated messaging from first touch to close
- Feedback loops from sales into marketing campaigns
- Joint planning calendars (not siloed activity lists)

This operational clarity removes friction for the customer and for the teams. 

Marketing Maturity Playbook

When the go-to-market motion is unified, and teams are in rhythm, you earn customers' trust faster, leading to a lift in conversion rates, repeatable revenue and a stronger internal culture. 

Use this quick test to assess how aligned your teams really are across the 3 areas that matter most. 

Checklist: Is Your Sales–Marketing Motion in Rhythm? 

For an enterprise GTM project, I worked closely with a commercial leadership team that was eager to launch an Account Based Marketing (ABM) campaign but frustrated that early attempts hadn’t landed. Campaigns were going out, but sales weren’t engaging with them. 
 
So we started from zero. First, we aligned on the target accounts and who influenced decisions within them. Then we mapped buying group behavior - what people searched for, what content they used, what triggered real conversations. 
 
Next came joint messaging: what pain were we solving? What language would land well. We built a shared GTM plan, with a content track, sales plays, reporting rhythm, and real feedback loops. 
 
The result: better signals, better outreach, and better conversion. But more importantly, the customer experience finally felt coherent because the internal engine was finally working together. 
 
Account Based Marketing isn’t a campaign. It’s a co-owned discipline. And it only works when marketing and sales move as one. 

If your customer experience feels fractured, you don’t need more tools. You need marketing and sales to move in rhythm. We help leadership teams build shared GTM engines that drive results and retention. 

*This is Part 4 of the Revenue-Ready Marketing Playbook, a 4-part series for mid-market CEOs who want marketing to move the needle.

Catch up on the full series:

• The Revenue-Ready Marketing Playbook: Why Your Brand Is Your Most Powerful Compounding Asset
• The Revenue-Ready Marketing Playbook, Part 2: In a Noisy Market, Make Clarity Your Competitive Edge
• The Revenue-Ready Marketing Playbook, Part 3: How Marketing Can Deliver Predictable Outcomes
• The Revenue-Ready Marketing Playbook, Part 4: How a Shared Playbook Across Sales and Marketing Unlocks Value