Sales and Marketing Alignment: How to Fix the Silos

TL;DR 

• Sales and marketing silos are a structural problem, and they last as long as marketing is measured on activity while sales is measured on revenue. 
• Mel Animalla, marketing manager at HeatMaster, inherited a scorecard that tracked lead volume and cost per lead with no connection to the company’s revenue target. 
• The turning point came when marketing stopped treating a delivered lead as the finish line and started treating it as the starting point of its revenue impact. 
• Rebuilding the scorecard around leads sent to dealers, lead quality, and touchpoints to qualify gave the CEO and the sales manager a shared view of what marketing contributes. 
• Working backwards from the revenue target, rather than receiving one, let marketing and sales build the plan together. 
• The self-check Mel now runs on every quarterly number: are we forecasting, or are we hopecasting? 

The Two Versions of B2B Marketing

There is a version of marketing that runs campaigns, attends trade shows, posts on LinkedIn, and hopes something sticks. There is a second version that operates inside a revenue factory, a company that has built systems to produce predictable revenue growth. That version of marketing has a number, a scorecard, a seat at the planning table, and accountability to pipeline. Most B2B companies only know the first version. They have never seen the second.

The difference between the two comes down to mindset, and to whether the marketing function understands that every dollar spent, every campaign launched, and every lead generated has one job: to feed the revenue engine. Before the revenue factory, marketing is looked at as a cost center. After the revenue factory, marketing is a growth driver. 

Mel Animalla has lived on both sides of that line. He is the marketing manager at HeatMaster, a B2B manufacturer selling outdoor heating solutions through a dealer network across North America. He went from running marketing in isolation, with no scorecard tied to revenue and no seat at the revenue table, to helping build the revenue plan and supporting the leadership of the revenue team, including a sales resource that reports to him. 

It took a rebuilt scorecard and a willingness to ask his CEO where the numbers came from to get there. 

What Sales and Marketing Silos Look Like Inside a B2B Manufacturer 

Mel came to HeatMaster from a purchasing manager role at a local foundry. When he started, marketing had a scorecard. It tracked how many leads were coming in and what each one cost. 

The problem was what the scorecard left out. 

“It was just numbers on a piece of paper in an Excel document that we had,” Mel says. “But there weren’t really any connective activities to outcomes.” 

Nothing on that scorecard pointed back to how marketing generated revenue for the company. Nothing tied it to the annual revenue target, or to the three-year and five-year projections the business was working toward. Marketing could report a full quarter of activity and still leave the leadership team without an answer to the only question that counted: how much of this turned into revenue? 

Silos form at exactly that point. Marketing measures its own activity, sales measures its own results, and no shared math connects the two. Both teams can perform well against their own numbers while the company misses its target. 

Why Lead Volume and Cost Per Lead Do Not Prove Marketing Is Working 

The disconnect became visible to Mel in 2022, right after the lockdowns ended and demand for alternative heating climbed. Volume was high. Leads were coming in faster than the business had seen before. 

And the math still failed. 

“I started asking the questions,” Mel says. “Okay, we do have X amount of leads, so why aren’t we capitalizing on it? The math didn’t make sense as to what we were bringing in and as to why we weren’t hitting the targets that we wanted to hit.” 

Marketing was busy. Being busy and being connected to revenue are two different things. 

“Being busy is good, and a lot of vanity metrics look really good,” Mel says. “But if it doesn’t support the bottom revenue dollar, it just, to me, doesn’t make sense.” 

Lead volume, cost per lead, and impressions describe the work marketing is doing. They do not describe the effect that work has on the business. A marketing manager needs the first set of numbers to run the department. The leadership team needs the second set to run the company. 

What Changes When the Lead Becomes the Starting Point 

Plenty of marketing managers hear “you need to be accountable to revenue” and feel exposed, because they do not control the close. Mel had sales experience in his background, and he came at it from the opposite direction. 

“It wasn’t like, well, we just bring in leads, and that’s where our job ends, because that’s not a metric that helps propel the company forward,” he says. “It’s not always someone else’s responsibility for us to close. Sometimes it is our responsibility to take that next step and be like, how can we help you close?” 

So he started asking what happened after the handoff. He asked the business development rep what the nurture sequence looked like and how inbound leads were being handled once they arrived. He found that the CRM had not been built to support accountability, so he built out pipelines inside it, which gave the sales department a visual of where leads and open deals sat. 

That single change produced pipeline visibility, and pipeline visibility produced pipeline math. 

The mindset underneath it is the part worth copying.  

“That whole mindset change from saying, well, we did our job to bring in the lead and our job is finished, that was the turning point for us,” Mel says. “Okay, we brought in the lead. Perfect. That’s just the starting point on what we need to do to impact the revenue number.” 

How Do You Build a Marketing Scorecard Tied to Pipeline? 

The push to formalize it came from HeatMaster’s CEO, who asked the question every CEO eventually asks: the marketing budget is this much, so what return is it producing? 

There is a long-running joke in this industry about marketing being held to ROI numbers it has no control over. Mel’s answer to the joke was to take the premise seriously. 

“Sure, I might not have control over it now, but I am a big part of what happens with the leads and the money that we’re spending,” he says. “So, then I decided that our scorecard needs to level up, because that’s the number one truth where our CEO can go look, our sales manager can go look.” 

He split the scorecard in two. The original metrics stayed, because cost per lead and volume are useful to a manager running a department. Then he layered in the measures that connect marketing to the revenue number: 

• How many leads marketing sends to the dealer network 
• The quality of those leads 
• How many touch points it takes to qualify a lead before it reaches a dealer 

Every one of those measures exists to make it easier for a dealer to sell a furnace. That is the test for any scorecard line: does this number describe something that moves a deal closer to closing? 

Watch how the vocabulary changes once a scorecard is built this way. Before, the conversation was about impressions and leads generated. After, it was about pipeline stages, follow-up counts, and conversion rates. The vocabulary changes because the math changed. 

Working Backwards From the Revenue Number 

For most of Mel’s career, revenue planning worked one way. A number arrived from above, and the team was told to go hit it. 

“In the past, it was always working with, okay, this is the number you have to hit; now you tell me how we’re going to get there,” he says. 

What changed at HeatMaster is that marketing was brought into the conversation before the number was set. HeatMaster's CEO weighed market conditions and set a target he believed the company could reach. Mel and the sales manager then took that target and worked backwards from it: the revenue number determined how many deals had to be in the pipeline, the deal count determined how many leads had to be generated, and the conversion rates connecting them were becoming more accurate as the pipeline data improved. 

“Instead of us doing it the other way, where we just got a number tossed at us, and we had to carve the path as we went, we actually work backwards to lay the foundation for us to walk on,” Mel says. “There were still tweaks and things like that we have to do along the way, but it was a lot easier working backwards.” 

This is the mechanical difference between a revenue plan and a revenue target. A target states the destination. A plan states the volume of activity required to reach it, and it can be checked, corrected, and defended while the year is still in progress. 

Are You Forecasting or Hopecasting? 

I asked Mel what he would tell himself three years ago, before any of this took hold. His answer was to ask better questions, sooner, about where the numbers come from and why they are set where they are. 

“One of the biggest things that, if I could go back to myself when I first started here, is I ask the question: are we forecasting or are we hopecasting? And I ask myself this every day now. These metrics that we’re setting on a quarterly basis, are they a hopecast, or are they an actual forecast?” 

Run that test on your own quarterly numbers this week. A forecast is built from conversion rates you can point to, volumes you have measured, and cycle times you have observed. A hopecast is optimism formatted to look like a forecast. The two look the same when you set the target. They look very different when you report on it. 

How Marketing Managers Earn a Seat at the Revenue Table 

Here is what I want every CEO and VP of Sales to take from Mel’s story. Marketing and sales silos are a structural problem, and structure is something you can fix. Start here: 

1. Give marketing a scorecard that the CEO and the sales manager both read. 
2. Bring marketing into building the revenue plan instead of handing down the result. 
3. Hold marketing accountable to pipeline. 

Do those three things and you get a co-owner in the revenue engine. 

For the marketing managers reading this who recognize themselves in the before, Mel's advice is to ask the tough questions: 

• Why is this the number? 
• How did we get here? 
• What is the business trying to achieve, and how do those goals serve the person buying from us? 

Mel did not wait for permission. He stepped into accountability. That is the move. Stop waiting to be invited to the revenue table. Learn the math. Ask for a number. Build your plan.  

The seat is yours if you want to take it. 

Ready to Build Your Revenue Factory? 

Download the Revenue Factory Toolkit for the mathematical models and framework behind a working Go-To-Market system, including the ratios that turn a revenue target into a pipeline plan. 

Want to know where your Go-To-Market system stands today? Take the Go-To-Market Readiness Index and get benchmarked against your peers. 

Benchmark Your Metrics 

The Go-To-Market Readiness Index scores you on the Metrics and Forecasting side of your business, and it asks the same questions this article does. Do you model your pipeline coverage? Do you measure the efficiency of each motion separately? Do you know how many accounts you have to land this year? You will see how you score against your peers, and you get a one-on-one review of the results. It is free, and it takes very little time.