Published: 1 January 2026 | Last Updated: 1 January 2026
Aligning sales and marketing teams requires establishing shared goals, creating formal Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that define lead quality and handoff protocols, fostering leadership buy-in, implementing consistent communication rhythms, and deploying sales enablement content. Companies with aligned teams achieve 103% higher goal attainment and 38% higher sales win rates, according to HubSpot and SiriusDecisions research. Whitehat's HubSpot sales onboarding service helps UK businesses implement these frameworks to transform siloed departments into unified revenue engines.
This comprehensive guide provides a proven six-step framework for sales-marketing alignment, HubSpot-specific implementation guidance, and the strategic evolution from "smarketing" to full Revenue Operations (RevOps). Whether you're a RevOps Manager wrestling with data discrepancies between HubSpot and Salesforce, or a Marketing Director trying to prove pipeline contribution, this article delivers actionable strategies backed by current industry data and practitioner expertise from Whitehat's work with hundreds of UK B2B companies.
Sales-marketing misalignment costs B2B companies over 10% of revenue annually, according to research compiled by IDC and ZoomInfo. For a £5 million business, that's £500,000 vanishing into organisational friction—wasted ad spend targeting the wrong prospects, qualified leads dying in handoff limbo, and sales reps chasing unqualified contacts whilst marketing-generated opportunities go cold.
The symptoms are familiar to anyone who's sat in a tense quarterly review: Marketing claims they delivered 300 leads; Sales insists only 20 were worth pursuing. Attribution reports show "Direct/Unknown" as the top source. Nobody knows which campaigns actually drive revenue. Meanwhile, 79% of marketing leads never convert to sales—not because they're bad leads, but because the handoff process lacks structure, follow-up discipline, and shared quality definitions.
This dysfunction has a name: smarketing. Coined by HubSpot's Dan Tyre and Mike Volpe in 2007, the term deliberately smashes "sales" and "marketing" together to represent a fundamental truth: these departments are not separate functions but interconnected parts of a single revenue system. As Tyre explains, "What we were trying to convey is that sales and marketing as separate silos has been around for 50 years, and it doesn't work anymore. Those teams should be an amalgam working together with SLAs between them."
For organisations working with Whitehat's inbound marketing services, smarketing isn't theory—it's the operational framework that connects content strategy, lead generation, and sales conversion into a measurable system. The companies that get this right don't just avoid the £500,000 cost; they unlock the inverse: accelerated growth, higher win rates, and genuine alignment between what marketing promises and what sales delivers.
Building a genuinely aligned sales and marketing function requires more than good intentions and monthly meetings. It demands structural changes to how teams operate, communicate, and measure success. These six components form the foundation of effective smarketing, drawn from frameworks developed at HubSpot and refined through implementation with hundreds of B2B organisations.
HubSpot's internal "M-spot" framework structures alignment conversations around five elements: Mission (what we're trying to accomplish this quarter), Strategy (our approach to the market), Plays (specific campaigns and initiatives), Targets (quantified goals both teams own), and Omissions (what we're deliberately not doing). This structure forces specificity beyond vague statements like "we need more leads."
Targets must be revenue-attributed, not activity-based. Instead of "marketing will generate 500 leads," the aligned goal becomes "marketing will generate £250,000 in qualified pipeline, with sales committing to contact all Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) within 24 hours." When 85% of marketers with formal SLAs rate their strategy as effective, according to HubSpot research, the common factor is this level of specificity.
Former HubSpot Chief Revenue Officer Mark Roberge provides the simplest SLA framework: calculate the value of a marketing-generated lead using three inputs—lead-to-opportunity conversion rate, opportunity-to-close rate, and average deal value. If 10% of leads become opportunities, 30% of opportunities close, and average deal value is £50,000, then each marketing lead is worth £1,500 (0.10 × 0.30 × £50,000).
With lead value established, the SLA defines reciprocal commitments: Marketing commits to delivering X qualified leads per month at the defined quality threshold. Sales commits to contacting every qualified lead within Y hours and working each lead for Z touches before disqualification. The agreement includes consequences—if marketing misses volume, sales targets adjust proportionally; if sales fails to follow up, leads remain marketing's responsibility for nurturing.
Whitehat's HubSpot Sales Hub deployment guide walks through configuring these SLA parameters directly in HubSpot properties and workflows, creating automated tracking of whether both teams honour their commitments.
The most common source of sales-marketing friction is disagreement over what constitutes a "qualified lead." Marketing declares victory when someone downloads a guide; Sales sees an unresponsive contact who downloaded content for a university assignment. Resolution requires explicit criteria: What firmographic attributes must a contact have (company size, industry, location)? What behavioural signals indicate buying intent (pricing page views, demo requests, email engagement)?
HubSpot's lead scoring system quantifies this by assigning positive points for desirable attributes (job title "Director" = +10 points, email opened three times = +5 points) and negative points for disqualifiers (personal email domain = -20 points, job title "Student" = -30 points). When a contact reaches the threshold (typically 50-100 points), they automatically become an MQL and enter the sales handoff workflow. This removes subjectivity: both teams agreed on the criteria, and the system enforces consistent application.
Alignment fails without executive sponsorship because it threatens established fiefdoms. Marketing leaders protect their budget and headcount by claiming credit for pipeline; Sales leaders dismiss marketing contribution to justify larger commissions. Breaking this pattern requires CEO-level clarity that the teams will be evaluated on shared revenue metrics, not departmental activity.
Peter Caputa, former HubSpot VP and current CEO of Databox, advocates for radical honesty in assessing current alignment: "If I'm being honest, the answer was 'sorta'... Companies will say 'we're building this product, this marketing, this sales' instead of collaborating on a handful of objectives." The first step is admitting misalignment exists, which requires leadership to create psychological safety for that admission. Present the cost of misalignment (10%+ revenue), show competitor success stories, and propose a 90-day pilot with specific KPIs that both teams commit to hitting together.
Aligned teams don't communicate more—they communicate better. Weekly "smarketing meetings" follow a structured agenda: review pipeline contribution (how much marketing-sourced pipeline moved forward this week), discuss lead quality feedback (specific examples of good and bad leads), adjust scoring criteria based on conversion data, and align on next week's priorities. These meetings last 30 minutes maximum and focus on data, not opinions.
HubSpot dashboards create a "single version of truth" both teams reference during these meetings. When disagreements arise, the dashboard settles them: Did marketing hit their MQL target? Yes or no. Did sales contact 100% of MQLs within 24 hours? Yes or no. This transparency eliminates the "he said, she said" dynamic that characterises misaligned organisations.
Marketing creates content; Sales ignores it. This pattern breaks when marketing shifts from "content for content's sake" to "content sales actually needs for specific deal stages." Battle cards for competitive comparisons, ROI calculators prospects can manipulate, case studies from recognisable customers in the prospect's industry—these assets directly support sales conversations.
The key is involving sales in content creation: Ask reps which objections they hear repeatedly, which questions prospects ask most often, which competitors they lose to most frequently. Marketing then produces assets addressing those exact needs. Track usage in HubSpot: which content gets shared in emails, which gets attached to deals, which correlates with won opportunities. Double down on what works; kill what doesn't. This approach connects marketing's content expertise with sales's frontline intelligence, creating assets that genuinely advance deals rather than gathering digital dust.
Theory becomes reality when translated into HubSpot configurations. Here's the practical implementation of the Mark Roberge SLA framework using HubSpot's native tools, suitable for any organisation with Marketing Hub Professional or above and Sales Hub Professional or above.
Step 1: Calculate Lead Value
Open HubSpot's Reports dashboard and create a custom report showing: (1) Marketing Qualified Leads (contacts with Lifecycle Stage = MQL), (2) those who became Sales Qualified Leads (Lifecycle Stage = SQL), (3) those who became Customers (Lifecycle Stage = Customer), and (4) the sum of Deal Amount for those customers. Divide total customer value by total MQLs to get average lead value. For example: 1,000 MQLs → 100 SQLs (10% conversion) → 30 Customers (30% close rate) generating £1.5M revenue = £1,500 per MQL.
Step 2: Configure Lifecycle Stages
Navigate to Settings → Properties → Contact Properties → Lifecycle Stage. Ensure stages are defined as: Subscriber (opted in but not engaged) → Lead (showed initial interest) → Marketing Qualified Lead (scored above threshold) → Sales Qualified Lead (accepted by sales) → Opportunity (active deal created) → Customer (deal closed-won). Set automation rules so contacts can only move forward through stages, never backwards, creating a reliable funnel metric.
Step 3: Build Lead Handoff Workflow
Create a workflow triggered when "Lifecycle Stage changes to MQL." The workflow should: (1) Assign contact to appropriate sales rep based on territory or round-robin, (2) Create task for rep to "Contact new MQL within 24 hours" with high priority, (3) Send internal Slack notification to sales channel, (4) If not contacted within 24 hours, escalate to sales manager. This automation enforces the sales side of the SLA—every MQL gets timely attention.
Step 4: Create Shared Dashboard
Build a dashboard both teams review weekly showing: MQLs generated (marketing's target), MQL-to-SQL conversion rate (shared accountability), sales contact rate within 24 hours (sales's commitment), and marketing-sourced pipeline value. The dashboard makes performance transparent—no hiding, no excuses, just data showing who's holding up their end of the agreement.
Organisations working with Whitehat's HubSpot onboarding services receive these configurations as part of the implementation, along with quarterly reviews to refine scoring criteria and SLA parameters based on conversion data. The beauty of a HubSpot-based SLA is that it's self-enforcing: the system tracks compliance automatically, surfacing issues before they become departmental conflicts.
Smarketing addresses the sales-marketing divide, but as organisations mature, a more fundamental question emerges: why are we organising teams around internal functions rather than customer outcomes? Revenue Operations (RevOps) answers this by unifying sales, marketing, and customer success under a single operational framework with shared data, processes, and metrics.
Research shows 48% of companies now have a dedicated RevOps function, up 15% year-over-year. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 75% of high-growth companies will deploy a RevOps model. The difference between smarketing and RevOps lies in scope and ambition: smarketing fixes the handoff problem between two departments; RevOps reimagines the entire go-to-market system around revenue generation and customer lifetime value.
When smarketing is sufficient: You're a 50-200 person company with straightforward B2B sales, relatively short sales cycles (under 90 days), and customer success is primarily reactive support. Your challenge is getting sales and marketing to stop fighting and start collaborating. An SLA and regular smarketing meetings solve 80% of your problems.
When RevOps becomes necessary: You're experiencing one or more of these symptoms—sales and customer success operate from different systems with conflicting data; expansion revenue and upsells matter as much as new customer acquisition; attribution is so complex across touchpoints that nobody trusts the reports; customer success identifies churn risk but lacks mechanisms to trigger marketing or sales intervention; you're running 10+ tools that don't integrate properly, creating data silos everywhere.
RevOps doesn't replace smarketing—it scales it. The SLA framework expands to include customer success (marketing generates MQLs, sales converts to customers, customer success delivers retention and expansion targets). The shared dashboard grows to show full customer lifecycle metrics. The weekly smarketing meeting becomes a revenue operations sync covering acquisition, retention, and growth.
For UK B2B companies considering this evolution, the practical path forward involves appointing a RevOps leader (often elevated from sales operations or marketing operations), centralising all customer data in a single source of truth (typically HubSpot CRM with integrations), and standardising processes for lead management, opportunity management, and customer health scoring across all revenue-touching teams.
Modern B2B buyers conduct 70% of their research independently before ever speaking with sales. Gartner's research shows 75% of B2B buyers prefer a representative-free sales experience until they're nearly ready to purchase. This shift makes lead intelligence—knowing what prospects researched, which content they consumed, and which competitors they're evaluating—more valuable than ever.
HubSpot's Sales Hub surfaces this intelligence directly in the contact record: every email opened, every page viewed, every document downloaded, every form submitted. When a rep receives an MQL notification, they're not calling blind—they can see the prospect viewed the pricing page three times yesterday, downloaded the implementation guide, and spent eight minutes reading the case study from a competitor in their industry. This transforms the first call from "I'm following up on your download" to "I noticed you're researching implementation timelines—we typically see companies in [their industry] complete HubSpot onboarding in 6-8 weeks with the right partner."
AI-powered lead scoring has evolved beyond simple points for attributes. Modern systems use predictive scoring that analyses thousands of data points—not just "did they open the email?" but "does their engagement pattern match the behaviour of previous customers right before they bought?" HubSpot's predictive lead scoring (available in Enterprise tiers) identifies which MQLs are most likely to close based on historical conversion patterns, helping sales prioritise their limited time on contacts with genuine buying intent.
The impact shows in conversion data: organisations where marketing actively helps sales convert prospects see 65% more leads progress into pipeline, according to Influ2's 2025 State of Sales & Marketing Alignment research. That improvement doesn't come from marketing generating more leads—it comes from providing sales with intelligence that makes every conversation more relevant, more timely, and more likely to advance the deal.
Whitehat's approach to lead nurturing and pipeline management connects content strategy directly to these intelligence systems, ensuring every piece of content serves dual purposes: educating prospects whilst simultaneously revealing buying intent signals that sales can act on.
Traditional B2B organisations evaluate marketing on "leads generated" and sales on "revenue closed." This creates perverse incentives: marketing optimises for volume regardless of quality, and sales cherry-picks the best leads whilst blaming marketing for everything else. Aligned organisations measure both teams on shared revenue metrics that neither can game individually.
Marketing-Sourced Pipeline: The total value of opportunities where marketing activities played a documented role. This moves beyond "first touch" or "last touch" attribution to give marketing credit for the entire nurture journey. If a prospect attended a webinar six months ago, engaged with three email campaigns, and eventually requested a demo, marketing influenced that pipeline even if sales made the final call. HubSpot's multi-touch attribution models calculate this automatically, showing which campaigns contribute most to pipeline value.
Lead Velocity Rate (LVR): The month-over-month growth in qualified leads. If you're generating 100 MQLs per month now and 110 next month, your LVR is 10%. This forward-looking metric predicts revenue 3-6 months out, giving both teams early warning when pipeline will be healthy or when it's time to increase marketing investment. Companies with tightly aligned teams achieve 24% faster three-year revenue growth, according to SiriusDecisions research at Forrester—LVR is the metric that reveals this growth trajectory early.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Total sales and marketing expenses divided by new customers acquired. Both departments contribute to CAC—marketing through campaign spend and salaries, sales through compensation and overhead. By making CAC a shared metric, you incentivise both teams to improve efficiency: marketing focuses on higher-quality leads that convert faster (lowering sales cost per win), whilst sales provides feedback that helps marketing stop wasting budget on channels that attract poor-fit prospects.
MQL-to-Customer Conversion Rate: The percentage of marketing-qualified leads that eventually become customers. This metric holds both teams accountable for the entire funnel: marketing for lead quality (garbage in, garbage out), and sales for conversion effectiveness (great leads wasted by poor follow-up). When this rate improves, everyone wins; when it declines, the shared dashboard forces a diagnostic conversation about where the breakdown occurred.
Organisations implementing these metrics as part of Whitehat's inbound marketing blueprint typically see shared accountability emerge naturally: when marketing and sales both own pipeline contribution, finger-pointing stops because both teams recognise they're rowing the same boat. The conversation shifts from "whose fault is it?" to "how do we fix it together?"
Smarketing focuses specifically on aligning sales and marketing teams through shared goals, SLAs, and communication frameworks. Revenue Operations (RevOps) expands this concept to include customer success, unifying all revenue-touching teams under centralised data governance, standardised processes, and shared accountability for the entire customer lifecycle from acquisition through retention and expansion. Smarketing is often the first step toward full RevOps transformation.
Calculate average lead value using historical conversion data (MQL-to-SQL rate × SQL-to-customer rate × average deal value). Configure lifecycle stage properties to track progression. Build automated workflows that trigger when contacts become MQLs, assigning them to sales reps with 24-hour contact tasks. Create shared dashboards showing MQL volume, contact compliance, and conversion rates that both teams review weekly to ensure SLA adherence.
Both teams should own revenue-attributed metrics: marketing-sourced pipeline value, lead velocity rate (month-over-month MQL growth), customer acquisition cost (total sales and marketing spend divided by new customers), and MQL-to-customer conversion rate. These shared metrics create joint accountability for revenue outcomes rather than departmental activity, eliminating the "us versus them" dynamic that characterises misaligned organisations.
Basic SLA establishment and process alignment typically requires 30-60 days: two weeks for agreement negotiation, two weeks for HubSpot configuration, and two to four weeks for initial testing and refinement. Full cultural transformation with deeply embedded RevOps practices takes 6-12 months, as teams learn to operate collaboratively, scoring criteria get refined based on conversion data, and genuine trust replaces historical friction.
Common symptoms include persistent lead quality complaints from sales, low lead follow-up rates (under 50% contacted within 48 hours), attribution reports showing "Direct" or "Unknown" as top sources, inconsistent messaging between marketing materials and sales conversations, finger-pointing when pipeline or revenue targets are missed, and marketing celebrating lead volume whilst sales complains about lead quality. These indicate lack of shared definitions, accountability, and communication frameworks.
Present the quantified cost of misalignment (typically 10%+ of annual revenue), show benchmark data demonstrating that aligned companies achieve 38% higher win rates and 24% faster revenue growth, identify specific recent examples where misalignment cost deals, and propose a 90-day pilot with clear success metrics both teams commit to achieving together. Frame alignment as revenue opportunity, not just operational efficiency.
HubSpot's CRM provides unified contact records visible to both teams. Marketing Hub's lead scoring and lifecycle stages define quality thresholds. Sales Hub's sequences, tasks, and activity tracking ensure follow-up compliance. Shared dashboards create transparency around SLA performance. Workflow automation handles lead handoffs and escalations. The Operations Hub (for Enterprise tiers) provides RevOps-specific tools like field-level permissions, custom objects for complex data models, and programmable automation for sophisticated routing rules.
Sales-marketing alignment isn't a one-time project with a completion date—it's an ongoing optimisation process requiring quarterly refinement as markets shift, buyer behaviour evolves, and your organisation matures. The companies that sustain alignment treat it as a competitive advantage worth protecting, not a problem that's "solved" and forgotten.
Start with the SLA: calculate lead value, agree on quality definitions, configure HubSpot to automate handoffs, and create the shared dashboard that makes performance transparent. Run this for 90 days, measure results rigorously, and iterate quarterly based on conversion data. What seemed like the right lead scoring criteria in January may prove wrong by April as you learn which attributes actually predict closed deals.
The technology enables alignment, but culture sustains it. Weekly smarketing meetings, shared celebrations when targets are hit, and joint problem-solving when they're missed—these rituals gradually replace the adversarial relationship with genuine partnership. When marketing cheers for sales wins and sales provides testimonials for marketing case studies, you've achieved something more valuable than better metrics: you've built a unified revenue team.
AI and automation tools will continue accelerating what's possible: predictive lead scoring that surfaces buying intent before humans could spot it, conversational intelligence that analyses sales calls to identify which messaging resonates, and attribution models sophisticated enough to give fair credit across complex multi-touch journeys. But these tools amplify existing alignment—or existing dysfunction. Without the foundational SLA, shared metrics, and communication cadence, automation just makes misalignment faster and more expensive.
Ready to align your sales and marketing teams with HubSpot? Whitehat's certified implementation specialists help UK B2B companies transform departmental silos into unified revenue engines through strategic HubSpot sales onboarding, SLA configuration, and RevOps consulting. As a HubSpot Diamond Solutions Partner and leaders of the world's largest HubSpot User Group, we've guided hundreds of organisations through this transformation. Book a free alignment assessment to discover where your revenue leakage is hiding and how to fix it.
Whitehat is a London-based full-service inbound marketing agency and HubSpot Diamond Solutions Partner. Founded in 2011, we help B2B and B2C organisations increase online visibility, generate qualified leads, and understand marketing ROI through services spanning SEO, content strategy, HubSpot integration, and revenue operations consulting.
We lead the world's largest HubSpot User Group (London HUG), bringing together marketing and sales professionals to share best practices and accelerate growth. Our values-driven culture—help first, do the right thing, and always be learning—supports clients across the UK, Europe, the US, and beyond.