> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.cmoalliance.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The relationship is the strategy: A marketing leader's guide to working with sales - URL: https://www.cmoalliance.com/the-relationship-is-the-strategy-a-marketing-leaders-guide-to-working-with-sales/ - Published: 2026-09-03T06:47:34.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-03T06:47:34.000Z - Description: Broken handoffs aren't the real problem between marketing and sales, broken trust is. A marketing leader's playbook for the first 90 days and beyond. - Author: Felicitas Sommer - Tags: Sales and Marketing, Articles *Most advice about aligning marketing and sales treats it as a process problem: fix the handoff, speed up lead follow-up, and agree on what a qualified lead is. But the thing you're actually looking at is rarely a broken workflow. It's a broken relationship, and no amount of processes will fix a human problem. Here is what does, along with the weekly, monthly, and quarterly rhythm I keep to make it hold.* You can tell in the first week. You come into a new role, you sit in on your first pipeline review, and within twenty minutes you realize [marketing and sales](https://www.cmoalliance.com/marketing-ops-the-key-to-sales-and-marketing-success-2/) are describing two different companies. Marketing talks about sales in the third person. Sales, when you ask about a campaign, gives you a polite non-answer that tells you they stopped paying attention a while ago. The campaigns are polished, and the pipeline is anemic, and nobody can quite explain the gap because the two teams stopped comparing notes a *long* time ago. I've walked into this situation more than once, and the tempting instinct every time is to fix the process. Fix the lead handoff. Redraw the funnel. Get everyone to agree (finally) on what a qualified lead actually is. All of that has its place. None of it fixes the thing you're actually looking at, which is not a broken workflow. It's a broken relationship. Process problems are easy to name and comforting to solve, because they let you avoid the harder truth: two groups of people have decided the other is not really trying to help them win. You can automate the handoff and still have that. So, this is a guide to the human work *underneath*, and because good intentions evaporate without a rhythm to hold them, the specific cadence I keep to make sure the relationship gets tended when nothing is on fire. And before any of it, there's one thing worth saying plainly, because I have been on the wrong side of it. This relationship breaks in both directions, and marketing earns a real share of the distrust. We send leads that were never going to buy and call them qualified. We build campaigns that look good on a deck and do nothing for a live deal. We ask sales to [trust](https://www.cmoalliance.com/trust-is-the-product-what-the-financial-times-gets-right-and-most-cmos-miss/) our judgment while quietly assuming ours is better. If you walk into a broken relationship and your first instinct is to catalogue what sales is doing wrong, you have already misunderstood the job. The repair starts with owning marketing's half of the damage, out loud, before you ask anything of them. One distinction before we go further, because it matters. A healthy marketing and sales relationship still has *friction*. There will always be an argument about whether a lead was really an MQL and who deserves the credit. And there should be. That is two teams caring about the same outcome from different angles. A broken relationship is a different thing entirely. It's not friction. It's absence: two teams who have stopped assuming good faith and started routing around each other. The goal of everything that follows is not to remove the friction. It is to build enough trust that the friction stays productive. [The loneliness of leadership, and how to fix itLeadership can be isolating, even with a supportive team. Here’s how marketing leader Felicitas Sommer built a peer network that actually helps.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ff/09/ff09ec2c-5937-45c2-bd7e-bcc809b43924/content/images/icon/android-chrome-192x192--1--093a9092-927c-424a-ba80-16b1f1175857.png)CMO AllianceFelicitas Sommer![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ff/09/ff09ec2c-5937-45c2-bd7e-bcc809b43924/content/images/thumbnail/The-loneliness-of-leadership--and-how-to-fix-it-----Felicitas-Sommer--PriceHubble-2b3c8075-55f3-4167-a1fa-9a4518dedbaf.png)](https://www.cmoalliance.com/the-loneliness-of-leadership-how-i-built-a-peer-network-that-actually-helped/) ## **The first 90 days: earn the right before you touch the plan** The mistake I've watched many capable marketers make is arriving with a strategy before we've earned the standing to propose one. Account managers can sense distance immediately. They know whether you've ever sat on a call while a prospect went silent, or watched a deal you were sure of slip a quarter for reasons no dashboard predicted. So the first 90 days aren't for building the plan. They're for becoming someone sales is willing to [build a plan](https://www.cmoalliance.com/how-to-build-an-experiential-marketing-strategy-examples-inside/) with. That means going where the work actually happens. Sit on discovery calls, enough of them that you stop flinching at the objections. Ask an account manager to walk you through a deal they lost, and then do the hardest thing in the conversation, which is to say nothing about what marketing could have done differently. Just *listen*. ![A marketing leader's guide to working with sales](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ff/09/ff09ec2c-5937-45c2-bd7e-bcc809b43924/content/images/2026/09/Felicitas-Sommer-----sales-for-coffee----------1-.png) Here's the part that separates this from relationship theater, and the sales team can tell the difference from a mile away: they have all sat through a marketer's listening tour that changed nothing. The coffee is not the point. What you visibly do with what you hear is the point. Fix one small thing they complained about, fast, and tell them you fixed it because they said so. That single act buys you more credibility than a quarter of shiny campaigns. Credibility with sales is lent, not granted. Your title doesn't confer it, and it's withdrawn the moment you stop showing up. ## **Then: speak in their currency and build the plan together** Once you have standing, use it carefully. Every function has a native language. Marketing's is reach, engagement, share of voice. Sales speaks in named accounts, deal stages, and the distance between now and the end of the quarter. When you brief a campaign in impressions, you're handing the sales team translation work they have no reason to do. Frame the same campaign in terms of the accounts it warms and the conversations it makes easier, and you're meeting them where they already live. The best compliment I get is hearing a salesperson describe one of our campaigns as if the idea had been theirs all along. And build the plan *with* them, not for them. This is where I watch capable marketing leaders go wrong most often, and the pattern is always the same. They work from a narrow view of their own world, the marketing targets they have to hit and the way they have decided to hit them. They build the plan inside that world, without asking their own team for input and certainly without asking sales, because on some level they believe they know better. Then, they present the finished thing to sales and call it collaboration. It is not. By the time something is on a slide, the moment for real input has already passed, and sales knows it. What they're being offered is not a say; it is a briefing. The alternative is slower and far more durable. Bring sales in while the plan is still soft enough to change. Let them shape the target list, pressure-test the message, and argue with the timing. ![A marketing leader's guide to working with sales](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ff/09/ff09ec2c-5937-45c2-bd7e-bcc809b43924/content/images/2026/09/Felicitas-Sommer-----sales-for-coffee----------2---1-.png) Some of that input will complicate your tidy strategy, and that friction is exactly the value. A plan that has survived a real argument with the people who execute it is worth more than a flawless one they never touched. Ownership cannot be handed over at the end. It has to be built in from the start. ## **The rhythm that keeps it alive** Everything above decays without maintenance. A relationship is not a problem you solve once and file away. It's a practice, and practices need a cadence. This is the one I keep. The discipline of never skipping them is the whole point. ### **Weekly** - 30 minutes with the regional sales lead, with a real agenda. Not a [reporting](https://www.cmoalliance.com/voice-of-the-customer-reporting-template-framework/) agenda, which turns the meeting into a status update and quietly kills the honesty. A working one: what is stuck, what is coming, what either of us needs from the other before next week. - Clear every sales request for a one-pager or a reference before their next call, not next sprint. Speed is the message. ### **Monthly** - One coffee with an account manager you don't normally hear from. The loud ones will always find you; the quiet ones hold the insights nobody has surfaced. - Sit on at least one live sales call. Not a recording. Live, so you feel the silences. - Walk the [pipeline](https://www.cmoalliance.com/revenue-and-pipeline-ownership-sales-vs-marketing/) together and ask one question honestly: where did marketing help, and where did we just make noise? Write down the noise. - Credit sales publicly for one win the campaign supported. Recognition is the cheapest currency you have, and you probably underspend it. ### **Quarterly** - Plan the next quarter with sales in the room while it is still editable, not after. - Review what underperformed, out loud, and own marketing's share before anyone has to point at it. - Point both teams at one external target for the quarter. A competitor, a segment, a category to define. When the challenge is outside the building, the question of who gets internal credit gets much smaller. [Where AI belongs in marketing – and where it doesn’tNot a tool list. Not a framework. A real account of where AI adds value in marketing, where it doesn’t, and why that distinction is everything.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ff/09/ff09ec2c-5937-45c2-bd7e-bcc809b43924/content/images/icon/android-chrome-192x192--1--c5b6e54e-7c1c-4853-860a-812a282f7720.png)CMO AllianceFelicitas Sommer![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ff/09/ff09ec2c-5937-45c2-bd7e-bcc809b43924/content/images/thumbnail/Where-AI-belongs-in-marketing-----and-where-it-doesn-t-----Felicitas-Sommer-----PriceHubble-1-eb1e2ba0-9912-4ab4-b8c9-41b36d4fc972.png)](https://www.cmoalliance.com/where-ai-belongs-in-marketing-and-where-it-doesnt/) ## **Compete with the market, not with each other** That last item is the one that quietly does the most work, so it's worth saying plainly. Some friction between the two teams is permanent, and pretending otherwise is naive. Every company has the same running argument. Is that person an MQL or should they go straight to sales as an SQL? We had them at the booth, so marketing sourced the lead. Yes, replies the account manager, but I had already spoken to them three times, so that opportunity is mine. This tug of war over who touched the lead first will never fully end, and that is fine. It only becomes corrosive when you let it define the relationship. Because underneath it is a scarcity problem. Both teams behave as though recognition is a fixed pie, and every slice the other takes is a slice lost. The way out is not a values poster or a cleaner [attribution model](https://www.cmoalliance.com/marketing-attribution-models-explained/). It is to keep saying the thing that is actually true: at the end of the day it does not matter where the lead came from. It matters that sales sells. Attribution is a tool for learning what works, not a scoreboard for deciding who won. The moment it becomes a scoreboard, both teams start optimizing for credit instead of for revenue, and the customer is nowhere in that fight. Keep both teams pointed at the same external target, so the competition is with the market rather than with each other. You cannot decree this. But you can model it by refusing every single invitation to make it marketing against sales and redirecting the energy outward instead. Do that consistently enough and the culture shifts under you. ## **The relationship is the strategy** Get the human part right and the operational fixes become easy, because two teams who trust each other will cheerfully sort out the plumbing themselves. Get it wrong, and no process will save you, because people who do not trust each other will route around even the best-designed system. The work is not to align marketing and sales. It's to make them one team that happens to have two names, and then to keep showing up, on the weeks when nothing is broken, so it stays that way. --- ## Get help building key relationships Building trust with sales takes more than good intentions; it takes the right tools at the right moment. Our Insider membership gives you free access to the frameworks and templates that make plans like these easier to build and easier to defend. [Become an Insider for free](https://www.cmoalliance.com/insider-membership-plan/)