Uniting Sales & Marketing to Strengthen the Funnel

Challenge
At Comm-Works, misalignment between the Sales and Marketing teams was creating tension, turnover, and a broken sales funnel. Opportunities that marketing was generating were falling through the cracks, and collaboration felt more like competition.

Approach
Promoted into a dual Sales Enablement/Operations role, a big part of my role was to serve as the bridge between Sales and Marketing—leveraging my Inside Sales background and marketing insight to rebuild trust and alignment between the two teams.

I focused on creating quick wins that everyone would support, such as:

• Building Salesforce alerts and routing logic to immediately notify the right reps of new inbound leads in their territory.

• Developed dual-purpose assets that supported both marketing campaigns and active sales cycles, helping buyers self-educate and move faster through the pipeline based on common objections the sales team were seeing in their deals.

• Fostered collaboration by focusing projects around shared wins rather than siloed KPIs.
  

Result
We repaired the relationship between Sales and Marketing, leading to faster deal cycles, a healthier culture, and a smoother funnel.

This foundation allowed us to quickly pivot during COVID and successfully launch a new service offering—a cross-functional collaboration between Sales, Marketing, and Operations.

Reflection
Alignment doesn’t mean you’re best friends with each other—it’s more about sharing a vision with key objectives that get you where you’re all looking to go, and creating tools, systems, and language that both sides believe will help us along our way. When Sales and Marketing work together, you can create a brand and customer experience that feeds the flywheel and creates momentum.