Sales and marketing alignment is essential for slick lead generation at B2B and SaaS businesses.

According to Hubspot’s 2025 State of Sales report, 41% of salespeople say sales and marketing alignment improves lead quality, while 29% say it can increase revenue and improve customer experience. 

But it’s not easy to get both teams on the same page, even in 2026. A third of sales teams say they need better sales enablement content and higher quality leads from their marketing teams, with 41% citing ineffective communication between teams.

So what can we do to bridge the gap between sales and marketing? To find out, we caught up with B2B marketer, speaker, and author Pam Didner on the Paid Media Lab podcast.

In this episode, Pam talks about how marketing metrics determine lead quality, how to make marketing content more sales-friendly, and how to adapt your paid media strategy to capitalize on top-of-funnel opportunities as well as bottom-of-funnel conversions.

Plus, get bonus insights into how to optimize your content for AI in this episode of the Paid Media Lab:

Timestamps:

0:00 - Coming up
0:10 - Intro
02:15 - How does Pam rank so highly in LLMs? (Icebreaker question)
11:34 - Why is there a disconnect between marketing and sales?
13:50 - Key Sales/Marketing alignment mistakes
17:13 - How Marketing can help Sales use content
19:52 - Structuring paid media to speak to top/mid funnel
24:24 - What should count as an MQL?
26:24 - Should you automate lead vetting?
31:19 - Marketing’s role after the initial sale
36:23 - The key ABM mistakes
40:22 - How many companies should you target with ABM?
43:56 - Final thoughts

Why is it so hard to align sales and marketing teams?

Aligning sales and marketing teams in SaaS and B2B companies isn’t a new problem. In fact, it’s been talked about so long it’s almost a cliché at this point. So why can’t we solve it?

Pam says it comes down to the difference in mindset between the two teams:

“Marketing tends to focus on the top of the funnel and sales is the bottom of the funnel. Marketing is really about brand awareness and sales is about closure. Marketing is about nurturing the prospects.

Salespeople are hunters. They move on to the next target very quickly because they have a sales quota to meet. So my perspective is they have different mindsets. Even though they actually have the same overarching business goals, they approach outreach of the prospect a little bit differently.”

It’s not easy to reconcile these different perspectives, especially when the sales cycle is so long. Sales teams are laser-focused on bottom-of-funnel activity that clinches sales, while marketing teams need to keep refilling the funnel from the top. 

Changing how you measure success can make a big difference to sales and marketing alignment. But it requires buy-in from c-suite execs as well as both teams.

Defining and driving marketing-qualified leads 

According to Pam, changing the metrics that determine marketing success from quantity- to quality-based performance indicators can pull sales and marketing teams into better alignment:

“Many marketers' behaviors are driven by how they are being measured. If they are measured by quantity, they're going to chase quantity. If they are measured by quality, they will be very diligent and think through lead quality.

So this is one thing for all the marketers out there. If you are doing next year's plan, you need to think about your MQLs. Rather than thinking about the number of leads, think about reducing that and focusing on the quality.

But if you do that, you need to be able to explain that, and articulate why you’ve reduced the MQL target. And you need to have data to back that up.”

Not all form submissions are qualified leads, even when they’re from real users. And with bots becoming more prevalent, many B2B and SaaS businesses are seeing an uptick in fake and spam leads. So marketers must weed out low quality leads before they reach your sales team. 

Moving away from lead quantity to lead quality gives the marketing team license to find and nurture leads that are ultimately more likely to convert, which is a massive benefit to the sales team. But as Pam notes, your CMO will probably ask questions about why the lead target is being reduced, so it’s important to have answers prepared.

Should you use AI to help assess lead quality?

Determining when an MQL becomes an SQL is tricky, so can you leave it up to AI? If your lead volumes are low enough, Pam believes there’s a lot of value in manually vetting your leads:

“Inbound leads are just inbound leads. They are not MQLs. The marketing team should vet them: does the inbound lead match with your ICP (ideal customer profile)?

But it’s not just about matching. You also have to take into account the intent. If they are literally just browsing, you should not pass that to the sales team. But with the intent data that you gather, you can gauge whether they are evaluating. Then maybe you can pass it to sales. But you can also wait, because they are evaluating.

I encourage marketers to vet leads manually. If your volume is not very big, you should definitely do that manually because it gives you a sense of how you can better gauge the prospect. To me, that's very important.”

That said, Pam advocates the use of automation and AI if you’re dealing with a high volume of leads. At this point, it’s unrealistic to manually vet each inbound lead:

“I personally love manual vetting. I do. However, if you have hundreds and thousands of leads, you cannot do that. This is where AI can come into play. You can create an Excel file with hundreds of prospects, add the intent data, and add additional data enrichment fields. Then you upload it to the chatbot and have the chatbot do the analysis for you.

If you are sophisticated enough, you can work with your data analysts to create a predictive model. You write a certain kind of selection criteria, then build a model and see if the model can give you a recommendation on potentially high quality prospects for sales to go after. That's the holy grail.”

Creating sales-friendly marketing content

Great sales and marketing alignment relies on a shared content strategy. Almost a third of salespeople (30%) feel they lack visibility into marketing activities, and a similar proportion (33%) say they want better sales enablement content.

Pam believes that breaking marketing content down into sales stages is key to achieving content alignment between teams:

“I think there's a different expectation in terms of how we should communicate. If you just share a list of marketing content with sales without explaining how it needs to be used in the context of sales stages, salespeople will be crumbling down.

I hate saying this, but it's marketing's job to classify your marketing content in a way salespeople can understand. Because from my perspective, they don't have time to figure that out.”

Understanding the difference between the marketing funnel and sales funnel is key to classifying content in a way that’s useful for salespeople:

Source: coupler.io

While there’s some crossover, they’re not directly comparable. Leads at the top of a B2B marketing funnel are normally much less qualified than those at the top of the sales funnel. So not all top-of-funnel marketing content is suitable for distributing to top-of-funnel sales leads. 

Marketers need to understand how the funnels differ, and where their content fits into both. Pam explains:

“Say you have 10 pieces of content: what are some of the content pieces that are actually good for prospecting? So you list those content pieces out. What are some of the content pieces that are actually good for qualifying? And then so on and so on.

It's based on the sales stages. Salespeople want that in a proper cheat sheet so have something they can reference. It's on one slide and it's easy for them to comprehend.”

When your marketing content is more accessible to salespeople, they’re more likely to use it, adding more value to your marketing assets.

Mapping paid media activity to the sales funnel

Mapping your organic content to the sales funnel should be fairly simple (although it might take some time). But paid media activity isn’t always as easy to map, especially because many businesses focus on bottom-of-funnel content in their paid media campaigns. This makes sense; it’s generally harder to prove ROI or get fast results when you’re putting money directly into top-of-funnel campaigns.

So should you diversify your paid media strategy and start targeting top-of-funnel users? Pam says yes — but it’s important to track the right metrics so you can prove the value of doing this:

“Look at the options in terms of tracking the top of the funnel down to the middle of the funnel conversion. A lot of people track inbound traffic, but that's not tangible enough to report to management.

If you are really looking for broader brand awareness — like how many people actually see the brand and the number of impressions, all those things — you have to spend a certain amount of money over 12 to 24 months at a time. That's a huge amount of money, so your CEO or founder must truly understand that the top of the funnel is a long play. Most of the time, C-suite execs can’t take that heat.

Instead, I would focus on the conversion rate of MQLs to SQLs. Bring that media from the very broad top-of-funnel down a little bit, and then focus on your media spend a little bit tighter. Tie your ads to some sort of tangible metrics that the management feels comfortable about.”

Moving the goalposts away from broad metrics like impressions and reach to advertising KPIs like MQL to SQL conversion rate helps you create campaigns with a tighter focus. B2B companies with longer sales cycles can use paid media strategies to move prospects through the marketing funnel and qualify them for sales, giving you a tangible return on your ad spend.

Boosting sales, retention and renewal with account-based marketing

Account-based marketing (ABM) has been around for a long time, but it’s still super relevant in 2026. In fact, as more customers seek highly personalised experiences, ABM could be a key differentiator between brands. 

So what is ABM, and how can B2B and SaaS brands use it to bring sales and marketing teams together? Here’s Pam’s take:

“I want people to understand ABM is still marketing. Because it’s marketing targeted to specific accounts, there can be multiple different types of marketing outreach. Paid media is one option. Or you could do paid media plus invitation-only events plus email outreach plus a dynamic website. You can add it all together to target a specific account.

The biggest misconception I feel marketers have at this time is that account-based marketing is only paid media. You need to think in a very holistic way. If we want to reach that specific strategic account with sales collectively, what are the different marketing channels we need to dial up to help our salespeople to win that specific account?”

So while performance marketing is a critical ABM tool in 2026, it’s important not to neglect your other channels. Targeting specific accounts holistically lets you reach decision makers wherever they are, so you can build awareness and trust in your brand. 

ABM strategies can help with customer retention as well as winning new business. Pam calls ABM campaigns specifically focused on renewal and retention ‘win-back campaigns’ and they’re designed to work alongside the customer success team’s renewal efforts:

“Marketing can do paid targeted campaigns. These are very helpful because you know who [the customer is] already, you know where they usually are. Sometimes people think ads ‘following them’ is a little bit creepy, so you need to be very strategic about it.

Or you can do very genuine email outreach. You have to work pretty hard on your copy. You basically fall on your sword and say, ‘I'm here to help you. Tell me, what can I do?’ I personally think there is a play to it. You need to work very, very closely with your customer success team and then create a very, very customized outreach.”

ABM is a great way to create an aligned strategy between sales, marketing, and customer support teams, creating slick but genuine messaging that resonates with key accounts at all stages of the buyer journey.

Top tips for sales and marketing alignment

Here’s a round-up of Pam’s top tips for getting your sales and marketing teams on the same page:

• Enable continuous dialogue between marketing and sales leaders. This helps them understand each other’s perspectives and find effective ways to communicate.
• Map each piece of content to the marketing and sales funnels, and mark it clearly and concisely. This helps everyone know how and when to use the content.
• Consider using paid media strategies across the whole funnel. Make sure you’re measuring success with clear, tangible metrics that prove value and return.
• Evaluate lead quality and intent before passing them to sales. Manual vetting is ideal, but automation tools can help if you’re working with high lead volumes.
• Use a combination of holistic ABM strategies — including paid media, events, and targeted outreach campaigns — to help win new business and encourage customer renewals.

Win more business with better sales and marketing alignment

Harmony between your sales and marketing teams can result in better leads, happier customers, and more revenue. So even though it’s an age-old problem, it’s well worth doing what you can to bring your teams together.

Putting Pam’s recommendations into practice can pave the way for a more communicative, strategic approach to sales and marketing alignment. A big thank you to Pam for sharing her insights on the Paid Media Lab podcast — for more B2B sales, marketing, and AI tips, make sure to follow Pam on LinkedIn.

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