Misalignment between sales and marketing rarely begins in meetings.
It begins in the operating environment the work has to live inside.
Inside the room, alignment feels strong. Everyone understands the goals. The plan makes sense. It feels like the team is aligned.
But what is happening in that moment is consensus, not system design.
Consensus is temporary.
A designed operating environment is durable.
When the environment is designed well, alignment holds. When it is not, the same issues return with different labels. Teams treat the symptoms. Leaders change the process. A new tool gets deployed. The problem pauses, then resurfaces.
Over time, this pattern becomes familiar enough that leaders begin to think misalignment is normal. It is not. It is structural.
The question is not whether teams want to work well together. Most people do.
The question is whether the environment they operate in makes alignment possible.
What an Operating Environment Actually Is
Culture is often treated as soft. A tagline. Something HR promotes.
In high performing revenue organizations, culture is none of those things. It is the operating environment.
The operating environment is the practical conditions that shape behavior when there is pressure, ambiguity, or risk. It determines what people believe will be rewarded or punished, regardless of what is written down.
You see it in moments like these:
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A meeting ends with agreement, but three leaders leave with three different interpretations of the decision.
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Marketing sees early signals in the market but does not escalate because the account is considered sales owned.
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Risk emerges in the pipeline, but no one raises it until late because bad news is not welcomed early.
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Teams discuss issues privately after the meeting rather than addressing them in the room.
None of these show up on a dashboard.
Yet all of them show up later in the numbers.
When the operating environment rewards caution, people play it safe.
When it rewards defending your function, people optimize for silos.
When it rewards smoothing over conflict, decisions get undone in side conversations.
Alignment is not failing because people are misbehaving.
Alignment is failing because the environment makes alternative behavior safer.
Why Leaders Miss This
In most companies, leaders have been trained to solve alignment through visible levers.
They look at:
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The handoff process
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The funnel architecture
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The communication cadence
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The tech stack
Those things matter. But they do not hold alignment. They express it.
A process is fragile inside a weak environment.
A tool is powerful inside a strong environment.
The environment comes first.
How You Know Environment Is The Issue
There are familiar patterns that appear long before revenue declines:
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Deals slow down when more than one team needs to be involved.
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Teams say yes in the meeting, then execute their own version of the plan.
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Forecast calls feel like negotiation, not shared truth.
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The same breakdowns resurface quarter after quarter in different forms.
When those patterns appear, do not inspect effort first.
Inspect environment.
Hard working, capable leaders can struggle inside a poorly designed environment. Less capable teams can outperform inside a strong one.
Alignment is not a personality issue.
It is a systemic issue.
Three Design Shifts That Make Alignment Durable
You do not need a full cultural transformation. You need to design a few conditions that make alignment easier than misalignment.
Focus on these three.
1. Make Information Move Early
Early information is the fuel of alignment. Most environments do not reward it.
People wait to share risk because they expect to be blamed. Issues emerge late. When they do, pressure rises and teams go defensive.
Design a norm that reverses it:
Bad news is raised early, even if the answer is we do not know yet. Leaders respond with clarity and support, not punishment.
Now early escalation is welcomed. Issues are solved before they become problems. The operating environment becomes safer and faster.
2. Make Decisions Stick
Alignment breaks when decisions dissolve after the meeting.
Someone has a concern they did not raise. Two leaders talk privately. A slightly different version emerges. Nobody intends to undermine the decision. The environment simply allows it.
Design a norm that prevents drift:
When we make a cross functional decision in a meeting, we do not quietly reopen it afterward. If something material changes, we bring it back to the group.
This is not about control. It is about trust.
When decisions hold, teams can execute.
Alignment becomes durable.
3. Reward Shared Outcomes Over Functional Wins
Almost every company claims customer centricity. Very few operationalize it. Metrics still sit inside functions. Budgets are still defended. Identity stays local.
People follow incentives. They protect what they believe they are judged on.
Shift the signal:
Define one shared revenue outcome that sales and marketing both own.
Make that outcome visible:
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in leadership meetings
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in operating reviews
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in planning
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in budget decisions
Then reinforce it:
When a tradeoff is made, name how it advances the shared outcome. When a function wins but the system loses, treat it as failure.
You are not aligning meetings.
You are aligning identity.
Why This Matters Now
Modern revenue is no longer an assembly line. It is a network.
Buyers move fluidly across channels, stakeholders, and expectations. The internal environment must move with them. If it does not, friction rises.
Alignment breaks in motion.
Deals slow down. Forecasts lose credibility. Leaders run more meetings to stay aligned. The meetings compensate for structural gaps the system should resolve on its own.
When the environment is designed well, the opposite happens:
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Issues surface early
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Decisions hold longer
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Execution moves faster
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Teams show up as one system to the customer
The same people, process, and tools perform differently.
Environment is the differentiator.
The Question To Ask
When alignment feels fragile, do not inspect effort.
Inspect the environment it lives inside.
What have we designed here?
Because the operating environment is doing exactly what it has been built to do, whether anyone planned it or not.
If this resonated, you are not alone. Join a growing community of revenue leaders rethinking how sales and marketing work together to drive sustainable growth.
Until next week,
Jeff
RevEngine | Built for Revenue Leaders Driving Alignment and Growth Together
