Search for “sales and marketing alignment” and you’ll find dozens of articles offering the same prescription: schedule regular sync meetings, create a shared dashboard, write an SLA that defines when a lead is ready for sales, and review it quarterly. All reasonable advice, and all built on the assumption that sales and marketing are two separate departments that need to be stitched together through process and discipline.
For most SME+ B2B companies, that assumption is already wrong. And because it’s wrong, the solution doesn’t land either. This article covers what alignment actually looks like in account based marketing for SME(+)’s, why the standard playbook misdiagnoses the problem for smaller companies, and what we do differently.
The standard alignment playbook
It’s worth understanding the conventional model before explaining where it falls short, because the underlying problem it tries to solve is real.
In most B2B organizations, marketing and sales operate on different timelines and different metrics. Marketing is measured on lead volume: how many MQLs did the campaign generate, what’s the cost per lead, how much traffic came in. Sales is measured on revenue: how many deals closed, at what value, in what timeframe. The two metrics don’t naturally connect, and the gap between them is where the friction lives.
The standard fix is a set of alignment mechanisms designed to bridge that gap. Define what counts as a marketing qualified lead. Agree on how quickly sales must follow up. Share a dashboard so both teams see the same numbers. Meet regularly to review pipeline and adjust targeting. Create a formal SLA (Service Level Agreement) between the two departments that specifies each side’s commitments.
These mechanisms genuinely help in large organizations where marketing and sales sit in separate buildings, report to different executives, and have never agreed on a shared definition of anything. Research backs this up: organizations with aligned sales and marketing report 24% faster revenue growth and 27% faster profit growth over three years (Forrester/SiriusDecisions).
The question is whether that same fix applies when your “marketing department” is one or two people and your “sales team” is three account managers who also do their own prospecting.
Why the standard model doesn’t fit most SME+ companies
The alignment problem at a typical SME+ B2B company doesn’t look like what the textbooks describe. It’s not two large departments with competing budgets and political turf wars. It’s something quieter and more structural.
Most SME+ companies in traditional B2B sectors, think manufacturing, industrial, automotive, logistics, have a deeply ingrained sales-driven culture. Growth has always come from trade shows, existing networks, referrals, and direct outreach. Sales is the revenue engine, and everyone knows it. Marketing, in this context, is seen as a support function: the team that organizes the trade show booth, places ads in trade magazines, and maintains the website. A necessary cost, not a revenue contributor.
This isn’t hostility. It’s experience. Sales has never seen marketing generate a concrete, traceable pipeline of qualified opportunities. When a prospect calls because they’ve seen an ad or visited the website, sales attributes that to the company’s general reputation, a referral from a client, or their own networking, not to a marketing campaign. And from sales’ perspective, they’re usually right: nothing marketing has done in the past was structured to deliver a specific account to a specific salesperson with a specific reason to call.
The result is that sales pulls its own plan and doesn’t expect much from marketing. Marketing, in turn, keeps doing what it’s always done without a direct line to revenue. Both sides are frustrated, but neither side is wrong given how things have always worked.
Writing an SLA between these two groups doesn’t fix anything. The problem isn’t that they disagree on lead definitions. The problem is that there’s no shared process that makes marketing’s contribution to a specific deal visible and measurable. Without that, alignment is just a word on a slide.
A less common version of the problem
At some SME+ companies, the dynamic is sharper. Marketing actively resists changes that would make their contribution measurable, not out of laziness, but because visibility cuts both ways. If marketing’s impact on pipeline becomes trackable, so does the lack of it. In organizations where marketing has operated without that accountability, a methodology that makes everything visible can feel like a threat rather than an opportunity.
We’ve seen this play out concretely. At a client in the automotive sector, the marketing team of two to three people initially treated our involvement with suspicion, as if we were implying they weren’t doing their job well enough. Their skepticism wasn’t directed at their sales colleagues, it was directed at us, and at the process itself. What they were really reacting to was the prospect of their work becoming measurable against pipeline outcomes for the first time.
This is worth naming because it’s absent from every alignment article in the search results. The standard narrative is always “sales won’t cooperate.” In our experience with SME+ companies, sales tends to get on board faster than marketing, for a reason we’ll come back to shortly.
How Account Based Marketing changes the alignment equation
The conventional alignment model tries to improve the connection between two separate workflows: marketing generates leads, sales follows up, and the SLA governs the handoff between them. Account based marketing, done properly, eliminates the handoff entirely by eliminating the separation it depends on.
The Business Development Team
In our model, sales and marketing don’t operate as two departments that need to be “aligned.” They operate as one team, which we call the Business Development Team, or BDT. This team is formed at the very start of a program, before the first campaign goes live, and it includes sales, marketing, and typically someone from management or ownership.
This isn’t a standing meeting or a Slack channel. It’s a team structure. The BDT works together through every step: building the Ideal Customer Profile, assembling the Target Account List, deciding which accounts to activate, mapping the Decision Making Unit once intent appears, determining when a lead qualifies as sales-ready, and executing the nurturing itself.
The critical detail is that last part. In a traditional lead-based model, marketing runs the campaign, generates the lead, and hands it to sales. The handoff is the entire alignment problem compressed into one moment. In the BDT model, sales is already inside the campaign. Once an account moves to the nurturing track, every action, a physical mailer, a LinkedIn connection request, an event invitation, goes out in the name of the salesperson who will eventually have the conversation. Sales isn’t receiving a lead. Sales is part of building it.
What gets defined before the campaign Starts
A major source of misalignment in traditional setups is that definitions get made after the fact. Marketing decides what counts as a lead, generates a batch, and sales discovers what that definition actually meant when the leads land in their inbox. By then it’s too late to course-correct, and both sides blame the other for the next quarter.
In the BDT model, the definition of “sales qualified” is agreed upon before anything launches. The team decides together: which accounts go on the Target Account List, what level of engagement constitutes real intent, which touchpoints signal that an account is ready for personal follow-up, and what a salesperson can expect to know about an account before they make that first call. None of these decisions are made by marketing and then presented to sales, or vice versa. They’re made by the same people sitting in the same room.
Why sales gets on board faster than you’d expect
The standard alignment narrative assumes sales is the resistant party. In our experience with SME+ companies, the opposite tends to be true, and understanding why tells you something important about what makes ABM work at this scale.
For a salesperson in a traditional B2B company, ABM doesn’t actually feel like a radical change. Yes, there’s a significant online component, new technology, and different tactics. But at its core, ABM is about getting in front of the right people at the right companies, building a relationship, and earning the conversation. That’s what sales has been doing for years. The tools change, the principle doesn’t. Once the program gets concrete enough that salespeople see actual names of actual people at companies they recognize, connected to real potential order sizes, they tend to engage fast. It stops being abstract marketing theory and starts being a better version of what they already do.
We saw this clearly with an automotive client. Sales was initially skeptical, assigned to the program by management rather than volunteering. But as the work progressed from market definition to target account list to concrete DMU mapping with named individuals, their engagement shifted noticeably. They recognized the companies, they could estimate the deal sizes, and they could see exactly who they’d be talking to. By the time nurturing was underway, sales was fully invested.
The results confirmed it. Out of 95 accounts on the Target Account List, the program generated 20 sales appointments and ultimately 5 new clients. But the number that mattered most to the sales team wasn’t the conversion rate, it was the quality of the conversations. When they followed up by phone, roughly six out of ten accounts received them warmly, they were “naturally welcome for coffee.” These weren’t cold calls. The brand was already familiar, the relevance was already established, and the conversation started further along than any cold outreach could. Sales told us they’d rather call accounts from this program than any other list they had. That’s alignment expressed not as a process metric, but as a preference.
The marketing side of the story
Marketing’s journey was different, and more instructive. In the same automotive project, the marketing team remained skeptical well after sales had come around. Their skepticism wasn’t about ABM as a concept, it was about what our involvement implied for their role. Once the results landed and the sales team was visibly enthusiastic, marketing shifted. Not grudgingly, but genuinely: they subsequently launched their own account based marketing campaign for a different target market, using the methodology and knowledge they’d picked up during the program. They went from viewing us as a threat to running the approach independently. We consider that the strongest possible validation, not just of the method, but of the alignment it creates.
What “aligned” actually looks like day to day
Alignment at the BDT level isn’t a quarterly review or a shared dashboard, although both exist. It’s a set of practical, recurring decisions made by one team rather than negotiated between two.
Every two weeks, the BDT reviews the Sqrl dashboard together: which accounts are showing intent, which touchpoints have been recorded at the account and person level, and which accounts are ready to move from the always-on awareness track into focused nurturing. The decision to make an account a focus account is made jointly, not by marketing flagging it and hoping sales agrees. Sales brings context that data alone can’t provide: whether they already know someone at the company, whether the timing makes sense given what they know about the account’s contract situation, whether the account has been approached before and how that went.
This joint decision-making extends through the nurturing itself. Which buying personas to approach first, what kind of touchpoint to use (a physical mailer, a LinkedIn message, an event invitation), and when to escalate to a direct call, these aren’t marketing decisions that sales executes. They’re team decisions that the salesperson involved often has the sharpest view on, because they’re the ones who’ll be in the room.
The measurement follows the same principle. Touchpoints are tracked at the account and person level in the Sqrl software, visible to everyone in the BDT. There’s no separate marketing report and sales report. There’s one view of what’s happening at each target account, and the whole team reads it.
Why this matters more for SME+ than for enterprise
At an enterprise company, alignment between sales and marketing is genuinely a coordination challenge: dozens of people, multiple regions, separate P&Ls, different reporting lines. The SLA/meeting/dashboard approach makes sense there because the scale demands formal mechanisms.
At an SME+ company, the team is small enough that those mechanisms are overkill, but the informality that replaces them is usually no mechanism at all. Sales and marketing “talk when they need to,” which means they don’t talk until something goes wrong. The BDT model fills that gap without adding bureaucratic overhead: it’s not more meetings, it’s one team instead of two. For a company where the marketing function is one or two people and sales is a handful, that’s a genuinely different operating model, not just a rebranded weekly standup.
The alignment nobody writes about
Every article on sales and marketing alignment in ABM assumes the problem is getting two departments to cooperate. For most SME+ companies, that framing is already wrong. The departments aren’t large enough to be siloed in the traditional sense. The real problem is that marketing has never had a way to contribute concretely and visibly to a specific deal, so sales learned to work without them. ABM, structured as one team from day one with shared decisions and shared visibility, doesn’t repair that relationship. It replaces the structure that broke it.
That’s the difference between alignment as a practice you maintain, regular meetings, shared KPIs, formal handoffs, and alignment as a design decision you make once. The first requires ongoing effort to keep from drifting apart. The second doesn’t drift, because there’s nothing to drift apart from. The team is one team. It always was.
If you want to see how this fits into the broader methodology, it’s part of our complete account based marketing approach.
