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July 3, 2025 | Blog

Joined at the hip: Why shared pipeline targets are the only path to go-to-market unity

How Shared Financial Targets Build Go-To-Market Unity

Sales and marketing often operate in parallel rather than in sync. Even when both teams are hitting their numbers, the business can still fall short. That disconnect usually comes down to misaligned incentives and fragmented accountability.

As Lisa Cole, CMO and Head of AI Center of Excellence at 2X, explained on Renegade Marketers Unite, true alignment begins with shared responsibility for financial outcomes. Marketing leaders who want real traction must anchor their teams to pipeline, conversion, and velocity, just like their sales counterparts. 

When sales and marketing operate from different scorecards, collaboration becomes conditional. When they co-own the pipeline, alignment becomes operational. 

What goes wrong when metrics don’t match

In too many organizations, marketing is measured by lead volume while sales is judged on bookings. On paper, everyone looks productive. In practice, the revenue engine stalls. 

That kind of misalignment leads to: 

  • Finger-pointing over lead quality and timing 
  • Frustration with attribution reporting 
  • Confusion for finance, who see activity without clear return 

Modern B2B buying is nonlinear. There’s no sale without marketing influence and no close without sales execution. Separating the funnel into “marketing’s job” and “sales’ job” misrepresents how deals get done. 

A shared pipeline reframes the goal

The shift to shared financial targets changes the dynamic. Instead of debating influence, teams focus on impact. Campaigns are planned for downstream conversion. Forecasts improve. Teams speak the same language. 

This kind of alignment doesn’t just improve internal trust, it makes it easier to justify investments to the CFO and report progress to the board

As Dave Bornmann, CMO at Higher Logic, put it, when revenue targets are being hit, attribution debates fade into the background. 

What shared accountability looks like in practice

Strategic alignment only works if it’s operationalized. High-performing teams hardwire it into their workflows and systems. These are the practices that make it real: 

1. Define pipeline criteria together 

Align on lead qualification, handoff points, and opportunity stages. Remove ambiguity early to avoid friction later. 

2. Build financial targets collaboratively 

Use revenue goals to work backward into pipeline needs like volume, quality, and timing. Then agree on how each function contributes. 

3. Revisit expectations quarterly 

Establish mutual SLAs between sales and marketing, then adjust them as market conditions shift. These agreements are living documents, not static handbooks. 

4. Share a single dashboard 

A co-owned pipeline dashboard is one of the fastest ways to drive accountability. It eliminates confusion, enables joint planning, and sends a strong signal to the rest of the executive team. 

Alignment lives in daily execution

Building alignment focuses on how teams operate week to week, when they: 

  • Join revenue forecast calls, not just marketing standups 
  • Show up at QBRs, not just campaign reviews 
  • Embed team-level collaboration across sales, product, enablement, and customer success 
  • Coach teams to understand each other’s workflows, not just their own 

Leaders who treat these as rituals, not one-off meetings, tend to see alignment stick. 

It also helps to ask the hard questions. In new roles, Lisa runs an anonymous cross-functional survey to assess how marketing and sales perceive the relationship. The goal: uncover where expectations, definitions, and trust need to be rebuilt and track progress over time. 

Alignment you can prove

There’s a reason the best-performing CMOs tie their metrics to pipeline and revenue: it earns influence. Shared pipeline ownership clarifies priorities, streamlines decision-making, and positions marketing as an equal contributor to growth. 

The question isn’t whether alignment matters. It’s whether you can measure it, manage it, and make it last. 

For a closer look at how leaders are building this discipline inside their orgs, listen to the Renegade Marketers Unite episode featuring Lisa Cole, Dave Bornmann, and Marshall Poindexter (yorCMO). 

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