You can feel when a revenue team is off long before you can prove it.
The forecast meeting runs longer than it should. A simple question about pipeline health generates three different answers. Everyone is working, but nobody seems fully confident in what is really happening. On paper, the plan was clear. In motion, it feels heavier than it should.
Most leaders trace this back to effort, talent, or process. If we tighten follow up, tune the handoffs, or improve the dashboard, things will loosen up.
The real explanation sits upstream. It is the operating environment your strategy has to run inside.
The invisible force inside your revenue engine
Every revenue engine runs inside an environment made up of norms, incentives, unwritten rules, and expectations. It shapes how people behave under pressure, how decisions are made, and what happens when different teams need to move together.
The problem is that most operating environments are not designed. They are inherited. Decisions made years ago about structure, ownership, tools, and leadership style quietly harden into “how things work here.” New strategies are layered on top of that foundation without ever questioning it.
You see the effects when:
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sales and marketing can align in the room but drift once they are back with their teams
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risk shows up late because people are not sure how it will land
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leaders spend more time reconciling numbers than deciding what to do about them
None of these look like cultural issues at first glance. They look like normal execution noise. But they are all signals from the environment.
Why alignment always looks stronger in the meeting
In the meeting, alignment feels real. Goals are agreed, priorities are clarified, and everyone can repeat the strategy. It is easy to assume that this means the work will move.
The test comes later.
As soon as more than one function has to execute together, the operating environment takes over. If old incentives reward local wins, each team optimizes its own plan. If people have been burned for raising bad news early, risk gets managed in private. If meetings have a history of being revisited, decisions do not hold once people leave the room.
The plan did not change. The environment simply pulled it back toward the status quo.
This is why alignment efforts that look strong in workshops often stall within a quarter. The decks change, but the environment does not.
How the operating environment shows up in motion
You do not need a cultural survey to see your environment. You can observe it in a few specific moments.
Watch what happens when:
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a big opportunity needs marketing support, sales coverage, and product input at the same time
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a deal that looked certain starts to wobble
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a quarter is at risk and tradeoffs need to be made
In a healthy environment, those moments feel coordinated. People raise concerns early, decisions are made once, and teams move in the same direction even when the answer is hard.
In an unhealthy environment, you see a different pattern:
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side meetings to “clarify” what was decided
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multiple versions of the plan circulating in different decks
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scope changes with customers that other teams hear about later
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more meetings scheduled just to stay aligned
The numbers may not have moved yet, but the environment is already telling you what the next few quarters will feel like.
Three questions that reveal the environment you have
You can get a quick read on your operating environment by asking three simple questions:
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What happens to the first hard trade off?
When two functions cannot both get what they want, do you see a decision anchored to shared revenue outcomes, or a compromise that keeps everyone comfortable but slows the business? -
How is bad news handled?
Do frontline leaders feel safe surfacing risk early, with clear next steps, or do they wait and hope it resolves itself before they have to bring it up? -
How are cross functional conflicts resolved?
When sales and marketing see a deal differently, do they work through it together using agreed norms, or retreat to their corners and escalate separately?
If the honest answers make you uncomfortable, the issue is not that your teams lack alignment skills. It is that the environment makes alignment difficult to sustain once the work begins.
What a healthy operating environment looks like
Healthy environments are not defined by slogans. They are defined by a small set of clear expectations that show up in real behavior.
Most high performing revenue teams share three conditions:
Shared purpose.
Sales, marketing, and success are anchored to the same definition of winning. They may own different parts of the journey, but they are accountable for one revenue engine, not parallel agendas.
Defined behavior in flashpoints.
Moments that usually break alignment handoffs, conflicting priorities, bad news are not handled ad hoc. Teams have agreed on how they will act when those situations arise, and leaders reinforce those expectations consistently.
Rhythms that reinforce alignment.
Existing forums pipeline reviews, forecast calls, QBRs are used to reinforce shared commitments, not just report activity. Leaders call out aligned behavior, revisit norms when deals are at risk, and insist that decisions made in the room hold outside it.
None of this requires a new reorg or a heavy program. It requires naming the environment and designing it with the same discipline you bring to strategy and process.
What this means for leaders
If alignment feels fragile in your organization, it is easy to blame collaboration, communication, or individual leaders. Those are simpler stories because they seem fixable with training or tools.
The harder truth is that your teams are behaving rationally inside the environment you have given them. If the environment rewards local wins, rewards polish over candor, or tolerates decisions being revisited, you will continue to see the same patterns no matter how many alignment initiatives you launch.
The good news is that environments are design problems, not personality problems. You can define the expectations, incentives, and rhythms that make alignment the default instead of the exception.
Strategy, process, and tools will always matter. But they only work at their full potential when the operating environment beneath them is built to carry shared alignment through real-world pressure.
If you want alignment that lasts longer than the workshop, start by redesigning the environment your revenue engine runs on.
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
