The opportunity nobody was asking for

In 2025, the crisis of trust persists in our economies. This crisis of trust makes acquiring new customers a long, complex, and uncertain process. As in every crisis cycle of a system based on the continuous growth of sales of goods and services.

In too many French companies, the pattern repeats: Marketing generates leads at scale, but Sales doesn’t want them (“not qualified enough”, “not mature”). On their side, Sales has difficulty closing, due to a lack of relevant information or a missed timing. Result:

• poorly used leads, a lengthened sales cycle, and a fragmented customer experience
  
• opaque marketing ROI, hard to defend at the COMEX
  
• growing disengagement of both teams
  

And yet, Sales/Marketing alignment is a direct lever for revenue growth. The most aligned companies observe (source: Forrester):

• +38 % customer conversion
  
• +208 % revenue generation through marketing
  
• +67 % closing efficiency 

The challenge? Turning a juxtaposition of teams into a unified Revenue strategy.
If the crisis reveals—while intensifying—pre-existing problems, it also creates an opportunity to question the processes in place. 

In this article, I offer you an operational framework for CMO teams struggling with ROI, to understand how to reconcile marketing acquisition and commercial performance, plus a new key role: the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO).

Why are Sales and Marketing so often misaligned?

From my experience since the 1990s, the misalignment is systemic. Team Marketing or Team Sales—your objectives aren’t aligned: different KPIs, different timelines, different tools. 

For example, salespeople have 3 months to figure out how to hit their fiscal year quota and are recognized based solely on the figure signed in their territory (geographic or named accounts). Their business and action reporting tool is the CRM.

Marketing leaders will set up events throughout the year, are recognized based on the number of leads generated regardless of where they come from and what the potential closing timeline is. They use lead generation solutions and campaign automation.  

Sales & Marketing alignment is therefore not a concept (nor an option): it’s a key lever of the Revenue strategy.

CRM + Marketing Automation: the double effect Kiss Cool®

To create real team alignment, you need at minimum a shared data foundation (CRM) and a synchronized action logic (Marketing Automation). The CRM & Marketing Automation duo aligns teams around real-time data and clear rules of the game:

• A single view of the customer journey (source, scoring, maturity)
• Shared qualification rules (MQL, SQL, SAL)
• Automated workflows between marketing triggers and sales follow-ups

Four workstreams to sustainably align Sales with Marketing

Now that you have the tools, you’re going to align the processes between the Sales team and the Marketing team.
First, let’s use the same terminology by building a Funnel (sales funnel) that includes shared definitions:

• Define together exactly what an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead), an SQL (Sales Qualified Lead), and a SAL (Sales Accepted Lead) represent,
• Clarify and spell out the steps lead > opportunity > closing with examples,
• Formalize an SLA for salespeople with the leads assigned to them, including at minimum an acceptable follow-up time, and the way feedback is provided to the marketing teams. 

Next, let’s define a shared, dynamic scoring model based on CRM data and unique visitor behavior (clicks, page views). This way, you agree that salespeople only follow up with the “hot” leads that match their quantified goals, territorial targets, and timeframes. Algeco scores leads “On Fire, Hot, Warm, Cold” and calls “On Fire” leads within 2 hours, optimizing conversion (BtoB Leaders).
Then, build workflows that automate nurturing (and therefore remove follow-up tasks and/or strengthen the follow-up agenda). By validating the content co-built with salespeople, you’ll naturally equip Sales with multichannel sequences (email + LinkedIn + calls) that you can iterate on in a lean continuous improvement mode. For example, when someone downloads a resource, the CRM labels them as “Warm Lead”, creates a sales task within 48 hours, and sends an adapted script. 

And finally, measuring ROI and attributing leads via your CRM allows you to correlate marketing KPIs with closing results. This is essential to improve processes in a lean way, but also to communicate internally and bring Sales and Marketing teams together. Algeco links each contact (email, ads, phone) to the generated revenue. Result: 2.63 times more conversion on scored leads, and €800,000 in revenue across 11 new contracts after each recommendation campaign (BtoB Leaders). 

Your KPI benchmark to achieve

CMO: 3 questions to take action

1. Is my CRM central to my Revenue strategy?
   If your salespeople don’t use it, or if your marketers manually enter contacts into it from an Excel sheet… then the answer is no.
   
2. Do I have a clear framework for judging lead quality?
   If “hot” means “they opened 2 emails”: that’s not enough.
   
3. Is my marketing ROI visible in real revenue?
   If you can’t link a campaign to a euro earned, automation is your top lever.

Alignment isn’t a luxury—it’s a growth lever embodied by the CRO

Sales & Marketing alignment isn’t a fad: it’s a performance foundation for any company that wants to control its customer acquisition cost, accelerate its sales cycle, and maximize its ROI. The CRM and Marketing Automation, as long as they’re designed together, are the pillars of this Revenue strategy.

At Webmecanik, the RevOps model—embodied by the CRO role (Sophie Panot, our Chief Revenue Officer is also our Chair/CEO)—is taking shape. And it starts with aligning on the following topics:  

• Centralize prospect, customer, and partner data
• Synchronize marketing actions correlated to sales goals
• Run global performance by connecting every campaign
• Trigger the right actions at the right point in the sales cycle
• Measure marketing ROI in euros (or dollars), not in vanity metrics

By drawing inspiration from concrete cases like Axys, Welink, or Algeco, CMO teams can become architects of Revenue—not just lead generators.