McKinsey and Cohesity on Sales and Marketing Alignment

Is it getting harder for brands to stand out?

What once made market leaders stand out – According to Jennifer Stanley, partner at McKinsey, the tools that once made brands leaders have now become base level requirements.

But the marketing teams having the most success, are the ones working closely with a key internal partner: the sales team. 

“The companies pulling ahead are creating a connected experience across digital and human channels and operating core B2B marketing efforts tightly together with sales, versus separate from, so customers get the same message, the same information and the same level of expertise wherever they engage,” says Jennifer. 

This collaboration can make a significant difference to the success of the B2B sales funnel, with Carol Carpenter, Chief Marketing Officer of Cohesity, sharing that she ties marketing initiatives directly to pipeline and revenue – suggesting that a focus on performance can considerably change the relationship between the two teams. 

“We moved away from looking backwards at trends after the fact and focused on what's happening right now,” Carol says.

“That means more regular, more valuable engagement during the quarter to deliver against genuinely shared revenue performance goals.”

By bridging the gap between these two teams, organisations can build a more unified and high-performing commercial function that is able to meet the rising expectations of B2B buyers.

Creating shared targets

According to McKinsey’s 2026 B2B Pulse Survey, companies are more likely to achieve top revenue bands by introducing sales-led ownership across Account Based Marketing (ABM) activities – standing at 43%, compared to 31%. But this doesn’t mean that sales and marketing should work separately, says Jennifer. 

“Collaboration remains essential, but when accountability is diffused, decision-making slows, priorities blur and execution loses focus,” she says. “The challenge seems to be when marketing optimises more for success with classic Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) in these efforts than for what drives sales conversion and optimising for that instead.”

When sales and marketing goals are misaligned, it can create problems further down the funnel – with Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) failing to materialise. 

“The organisations pulling ahead are creating clearer ownership around priority accounts while aligning teams around shared goals,” Jennifer says.

“There is no distinction with MQL vs. SQL. There is just ‘did we grow that account or not?’” 

According to Carol, “the transparency of the shared revenue achievement target was the most positive evolution of the relationship between the teams”, with marketing becoming a  “source of actionable insight”.

“Marketing and Sales must share revenue objectives to ensure alignment, but marketing campaign activity requires multi-quarter implementation and commitment,” she says. 

“Successful CMOs are using data-driven analysis in-quarter to increase trust with sales partners and ensure that any short-term revenue challenges do not impact longer-term business transformation campaigns.”

Consistency across touchpoints 

For Jennifer, one of the biggest things she’s seen B2B buyers looking for is consistency. 

“B2B buyers increasingly move between digital and human channels, and they expect those interactions to feel connected,” she says.

“In our latest survey, buyers reported using an average of 10 channels during the purchasing journey, up from five just over six years ago.”

To deliver this consistency, she believes that marketers should be the “brand guardians,” across these different channels, by delivering persona-led messaging that can be used in multiple stages of the buying journey – saying, for instance, that customer-referral content on a website should be aligned with referral-based content sales people are using in a pitch. 

“Customers are clearly telling sellers what they want,” Jennifer says. “Inconsistent information across teams is now one of the leading reasons buyers switch suppliers. 

“Sales enablement should help ensure that the content, expertise and messages buyers encounter during self-service research are reflected in conversations with sales teams, so the experience feels seamless wherever they engage.”

Part of the challenge of building this consistency across the sales funnel is that the process has become much more dynamic – with Carol saying that sales and marketing alignment has come a long way from “agreeing on targets and reviewing results together at the end of the quarter”.

“The best teams are looking at the same customer signals in real time and making decisions together based on what they're seeing,” she advises.

“The biggest misconception is that this alignment isn’t there. It is, and in reality, marketing now plays a role throughout the entire buying journey, managing hundreds of buying signals in real-time and supporting sales to engage the right personas, with differentiated and relevant messaging, at the right time.”

Personalisation through AI 

Both Jennifer and Carol suggest that AI may be a key tool to improve alignment across sales and marketing funnels. 

“The organisations seeing the strongest results are moving beyond isolated AI pilots and embedding AI directly into buying and selling processes at a domain level, such as lead generation through to conversion,” Jennifer says.

“For marketing and sales leaders, that means focusing less on individual AI use cases and more on how AI supports end-to-end workflows.”

This can help brands scale hyper-personalised content – making it easier to tailor messages to individual B2B buyers based on their specific context and their stage in the buying journey.

Personalisation, Jennifer says, is a “major differentiator,” with McKinsey’s research finding that market leaders are four times more likely to use one-to-one personalisation than their peers. 

But, to create this highly personalised content, brands need a shared knowledge of who the customer actually is, so both marketing and sales teams understand how best to approach them.

“Organisations that are embedding AI into buying and selling processes are increasingly able to personalise engagement, support sellers more effectively and scale those capabilities across commercial functions,” says Jennifer. “Many are starting to see measurable results, which in turn drives greater uptake, confidence and investment. That allows them to scale capabilities faster, while companies that remain in pilot mode risk falling further behind.”

In her role Carol says that AI has helped transform the way sales and marketing functions work together – with the technology allowing marketing teams to offer key, timely insights to sales teams. 

“AI implementation allowed quicker analysis of the success of customer messaging and visibility campaigns, while also increasing operational scale and speed,” she says.

“Sales could see that marketing was adjusting dynamically to market feedback, which naturally built more trust and encouraged much closer day-to-day collaboration.”

Having this level of agility is particularly important in the B2B space, when marketing teams are often promoting complex products and risk-averse buyers, who may be navigating fast-changing regulatory and data security landscapes.

When sales and marketing teams are looking to adapt their approach to cater to this market, Carol says she recommends avoiding technical jargon and personalising the product to the buyer’s specific outcomes across the sales funnel. 

“Simplicity of messaging, focused on customer outcomes rather than technology complexity, is the best approach,” she concludes. “Illustrating the value of bringing in fully integrated, secure, best-of-breed suppliers to deliver complex outcomes can help ensure that risk-averse buyers have more confidence.”