Most sales and marketing alignment problems are not about who to target. Both teams can usually agree on that.
The problem that actually kills deals is harder to see. Over time, the sales team starts selling to a different problem than the one the ICP was built around. Not a different company. Not a different buyer title. A different problem. And marketing has no idea it is happening.
By the time leadership notices, marketing is messaging to the executive buyer and sales is in the field having completely different conversations. The pipeline looks healthy. The close rate tells a different story.
How the Drift Happens
It starts with a good meeting. A rep gets time with a Director of Operations or a RevOps Manager or a Sales Enablement lead. This person is not the economic buyer, but they are engaged, they understand the problem, and the conversation goes well.
The rep does what any good rep would do. They start leading with the influencer’s problem because it opens doors. Other reps see it working and start doing the same thing. Within a quarter or two, the whole team is leading with a problem that resonates with practitioners, not with the executives who actually approve the budget.
Marketing is still running campaigns built around the executive’s problem. The website speaks to the CRO or CFO. The content is written for the budget holder. Marketing is not wrong. They are working from the ICP. But the ICP the sales team is actually running has quietly moved one level down the org chart.
Why It Is Hard to Catch Early
The early signs look like progress. Meeting volume goes up. Pipeline grows. The influencer is engaged and moving things forward. Everything looks healthy in the leading indicators.
The problem shows up later. Deals stall before they close. Sales cycles get longer. Proposals die in procurement with no clear reason. What is actually happening is that the champion cannot get the internal budget approved. They were sold on their own problem, not on the business case that the executive needs to hear.
The CRO or CFO hears the pitch secondhand, from someone translating a tactical problem into business language on the fly. It does not land. The deal dies. Sales calls it a bad champion. Marketing calls it a conversion problem. Neither team connects it to the problem drift that started months earlier.
How to Find the Gap in Your Own Pipeline
You do not need a new tool or a new process to find this. Pull your last 20 closed wins and ask three questions about each one:
- Who started the conversation? Was it the economic buyer or someone below them?
- What problem was the first discovery call built around?
- What problem was in the proposal that got signed?
Then run the same questions on your last 10 late-stage losses. Compare the two. If the wins were built around the executive’s problem from the start, and the losses were built around a practitioner problem that never made it to the executive level, you have found the gap.
Then do one more check. Look at your last 90 days of outbound sequences, demo scripts, and discovery calls. Which problem is the team actually leading with? If it does not match what closed your last 20 deals, the drift is live in your current pipeline right now.
How to Fix It Without Losing the Influencer
The influencer relationship is not the problem. The influencer is often how you get into an account. The problem is when the influencer’s pain becomes the center of the deal instead of the path into the deal.
Three things need to change:
- Keep the economic buyer’s problem at the center. The influencer’s pain earns you access and builds credibility. It is not a business case. Sales needs to connect the practitioner’s problem to the executive’s outcome, and that connection needs to be made explicit in every deal, not assumed.
- Get the executive into the deal before the proposal. If the first time the CFO or CRO hears about the product is when they are asked to sign, the deal is already at risk. The economic buyer needs to be part of the problem framing conversation, not just the approval step. Build that handoff into the sales process explicitly.
- Split marketing and sales enablement into two jobs. Marketing content should speak to the executive outcome. Sales enablement material should give reps the language to connect the influencer’s pain to that outcome in a live conversation. These are different assets. Running both off the same message creates a gap somewhere.
Why This Gets Worse After Series A
At Series A, a small team can hide this problem. A few strong reps know how to navigate to the economic buyer even when the motion is built around the influencer. The company grows and assumes the process is working.
At Series B, the team is bigger. New reps learn from the top performers. They pick up the habits, including the drift. The workaround that a few good reps used to compensate for the misalignment is no longer available at scale. Close rates decline while pipeline coverage looks strong. The board starts asking questions.
The problem did not start at Series B. It started a year or two earlier when the first rep found an influencer who answered the phone and built a motion around it. Catching it early costs a fraction of what it costs to unwind it after the playbook has been built on top of it.
Where to Start
The GTM Alignment Diagnose assessment is built to find exactly this problem. Your sales and marketing leads complete the diagnostic separately. The output shows where the two teams have drifted apart on the problem being positioned and how that gap is showing up in your pipeline.
