Sales and marketing alignment

Sales and marketing alignment is not a shared slide or a joint meeting. It is agreement on who the account is, what counts as a qualified conversation, what happens at the handoff, and which number the company will use to judge the work.

The usual failure is polite and expensive. Marketing reports activity. Sales reports that the leads are poor. Both can be locally true while pipeline stays flat, because nobody owns the definition between them.

Fixing that is a growth-leadership job. It needs one priority, one owner, and a weekly review that connects the handoff to revenue quality. A fractional chief growth officer takes that ownership when the founder is still the only bridge. A growth consultant can force the decision when the team is able to run it afterwards.

Steven is not a fractional CFO. Alignment is not a reporting tidy-up, and it is not solved by adding another campaign.