Sales and marketing misalignment is not a people problem
It is a design problem.
How to diagnose where misalignment lives, redesign the system producing it, and embed alignment into how the business runs.
Built for revenue leaders at mid-market B2B companies in established industries, with long sales cycles, large buying committees, relationship-driven pipeline, and no dedicated operations team behind them.
About the book
Your teams are working harder than ever and revenue is not responding.
Sales and marketing were built independently, optimized in isolation, and then expected to produce a single revenue outcome. They cannot, because the system connecting them was never designed to do that. You see it in pipeline marketing built and sales does not trust, handoffs that lose context, and quarterly reviews that argue about whose numbers are right.
Most fixes target behavior. Better meetings, shared dashboards, more communication. They do not last, because the problem is structural.
Most organizations pay that cost without ever naming it. Misalignment debt is the accumulated charge for a revenue system that was never designed to be aligned, and it compounds. Delay does not keep the balance flat.
The Alignment Operating SystemTM is the complete model for fixing it. Drawing on more than twenty years across sales, marketing, and revenue leadership from early-stage startups to the Fortune 100, Jeff Davis gives revenue leaders a phased approach to diagnose where misalignment lives, redesign the system producing it, and embed the alignment infrastructure that holds it in place.
Who this book is for
Revenue leaders at mid-market B2B companies in established industries: manufacturing, industrial distribution, logistics, transportation, professional services, and engineering services. Businesses with long sales cycles, large buying committees, and pipeline that depends on relationships your team has built over years. It does not assume a dedicated operations team, an unlimited budget, or a modern tech stack, because most of the organizations that need this work do not have them.
What you will learn
- Diagnose where misalignment is draining revenue, so you can put a number on the cost instead of describing the symptoms.
- Secure executive commitment by making the business case in the language your CEO, CRO, and CFO each use to evaluate it.
- Define how sales and marketing make decisions together, so agreements survive the quarter they were signed in.
- Build the process and tools infrastructure that turns alignment into what happens on a normal Tuesday, not what happens after an offsite.
- Embed alignment into structure and incentives so it holds when the number is at risk and does not depend on who is in the room.
Foreword and praise
What revenue leaders are saying.
CEO, Roderick Jefferson & Associates
Author of Sales Enablement 3.0: The Blueprint to Sales Enablement Excellence
Clinical Professor of Marketing, Kellogg School of Management
Clinical Professor of Marketing, Kellogg School of Management
Clinical Professor of Marketing, Kellogg School of Management
bout the author
Jeff Davis
Jeff Davis has spent more than twenty years in sales, marketing, and business development, at organizations ranging from early-stage startups to the Fortune 100. His perspective comes from an uncommon career progression, from mechanical engineer to top-performing seller to marketing leader. He holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University and an MBA from Chicago Booth. He is the author of Create Togetherness and The Alignment Operating System.