Most revenue leaders don’t realize they’re paying for misalignment every single day.
But they are—just not in ways that show up on a financial statement.
When pipeline slows, deals stall, or marketing campaigns underperform, the instinct is to fix what’s visible: refresh the messaging, restructure the team, change the handoff. Sometimes it works—for a while.
But over time, the same issues resurface. And the cost compounds.
What most teams fail to see is that these problems aren’t isolated. They’re systemic.
The root issue isn’t a bad campaign or a missed forecast.
It’s the misalignment embedded in the operating system of the business itself.
The Misalignment Tax Is Real—Even If It’s Invisible
Every revenue team pays a price when alignment breaks down.
But unlike budget overruns or churn rates, the Misalignment Tax hides in the friction between teams:
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Handoffs that drop the buyer
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Conflicting definitions of a qualified lead
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Sales chasing accounts that marketing deprioritized
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Campaigns that launch without field feedback
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Reps frustrated by unclear ICPs or changing priorities
These issues don’t just slow things down.
They erode trust.
They kill momentum.
They create a system where people stop believing the process works—and start building their own.
That’s when the real tax sets in:
Wasted time, missed revenue, and top performers quietly burning out.
The System You Scale On Matters More Than You Think
What makes this even more dangerous is that most companies don’t notice the tax until the cost is too high to ignore.
And by then, they’re scaling on top of a fragile system.
Misalignment isn’t usually the result of bad intent or poor execution.
It’s the outcome of a system that was never deliberately designed to align in the first place.
In the absence of a clear operating model, most teams default to:
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Speed over clarity
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Silos over shared ownership
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Short-term wins over long-term cohesion
That’s not a strategy. It’s survival mode.
And it’s the reason even high-growth companies can stall without warning.
Fixing the Surface Won’t Remove the Tax
The truth is: you can’t fix a broken system by swapping out tactics.
You have to start by asking a different question.
Not, “What campaign should we run next?”
But, “What’s causing the friction in how our system operates?”
Because alignment isn’t a marketing initiative.
It’s the infrastructure layer that determines how your entire GTM engine performs.
If that layer is fractured, no amount of enablement or tooling will fix the real problem.
Until next week,
Jeff
RevEngine™ | Built for Revenue Leaders Driving Alignment and Growth—Together
