Alignment That Scales: How to Build High-Performing Sales & Marketing Teams
Tidemark Venture Partner and former CMO at Toast, Kevin Hamilton, shares the five components that help founders stop managing tension between teams — and start scaling momentum across them.
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Sales and marketing misalignment is expensive. It can set you back months — or kill your business entirely.
On the journey from product to platform, if you're fortunate enough to reach $10M in ARR and scale beyond it, you encounter an entirely new set of problems as your organization grows beyond a handful of early employees.
So, how does this work in practice? What should you do as a founder to bring these two teams together, hold each department accountable, and build a culture where sales and marketing work well together?
I've been fortunate to work for and lead GTM teams at three high-growth companies, each with different customer segments, ACVs ($5K to $750K), and go-to-market motions:
- Corporate Executive Board: As an early sales executive, I saw firsthand how a data-driven sales organization scaled ARR from $40M to well over $750M.
- Opower: Working in both sales and marketing leadership roles, I helped scale the business from $10M to over $150M in ARR in four years, leading to a successful IPO in 2014 and subsequent acquisition by Oracle.
- Toast: Partnered closely with Aman Narang, Jonathan Vassil, and the team to build a culture and operating system that scaled the business from $40M to over $1.2B in ARR in just over 6 years.
Different markets, different teams, but five traits were consistent across all three companies.
1. Relentless Focus on Talent and Process
Great GTM teams understand what separates good from great in their organizations. They actively test for it during hiring and model it in their GTM process.
What impressed me most about my time at Corporate Executive Board - and later Toast - was a deep understanding of what set our top performers apart from others and a desire to scale those behavioral and operational characteristics across the company.
At Corporate Executive Board — under the leadership of our CRO at the time — there was an intense focus on rep-level performance to understand how we could hire similar talent and nurture similar behavior via a Model Sales Process across the team. As an example, the RevOps leader in sales was constantly analyzing rep-level close rates and diving deep into the behaviors and activities of top-performing reps to create training and tools that were used to lift the performance of the rest of the team. The resulting “Model Sales Process” was the foundation for training, activity levels, and sales assets.
At Toast, we applied this approach across both the sales and marketing teams. I’d argue that no one did a better job applying this rigor than Jonathan Vassil has done as CRO at Toast. By hiring for talent and operationalizing against a Model Sales Process, the team has essentially built a manufacturing facility that is hyper-focused on turning demo requests into live Toast customers. This starts with an intensive training process when onboarding begins, an aggressive ramping period, and building a marketing motion that reps can “plug into” in order to hit quota faster.
2. Aligning Against Shared Outcomes
Carrying the manufacturing analogy a bit further, you can’t truly build an efficient factory until you’ve aligned on what you’re building.
For sales and marketing teams to operate in alignment, they have to focus on shared outcomes. Today, the best GTM teams are not dividing the funnel between top of funnel and bottom of funnel; instead, they’re aligning against the buying journey and working together from top to bottom. They’re also holding each other accountable via shared metrics.
As a recovering sales leader and ex-CMO, nothing hurts my soul more than a team where marketing is focused on leads and sales is focused on deals. While growing the funnel is obviously important for both teams, it can’t be at the expense of quality and conversion.
At Toast, we quickly pivoted the marketing team to focus on leads and quality by signing the team up for a hard deals target that held marketing accountable for both a percentage of the total funnel and a specific number of booked deals every single month. We supported this with simple-to-understand attribution rules and a time frame that made sense for the business. As a result, a significant portion of the marketing team’s bonus was tied to bookings performance for the company as opposed to a lead goal.
The result was a marketing organization that partnered deeply with the sales team. Channel leaders in marketing were closer to funnel quality, marketing team members were embedded with the SDR team, and product marketing worked closely with AEs and DMs to monitor down-funnel performance.
3. Managing to Input and Output Metrics
To support a focus on shared outcomes, we trained teams to focus on input and output metrics to drive accountability.
This is especially important where marketing and sales intersect. It is way too easy for a sales team to say “these leads are crap” or for a marketing team to say “sales isn’t working leads hard enough.” It’s better to hold teams responsible for input metrics that contribute to an output metric.
A simple example is where marketing and sales development intersect.
In a sales-led funnel, the marketing team is likely accountable for generating demo requests, and the SDR team may be accountable for converting demo requests to opportunities. To keep teams aligned, you might have an SLA focused on the conversion rate from demo request to opportunity rate for which they’re both accountable — this is your output metric. To then drive alignment, you might set targets for input metrics as follows:
- SDR Team: Targets for Time to First Touch (TTFT) and Touches per demo request (Touch Count) to make sure leads are worked quickly and deeply
- Marketing Team: Channel-specific conversion rate targets to hold a high bar on quality
If you miss conversion rate targets, you can diagnose the issue. Missing TTFT and Touch Count targets means focus on the SDR motion. Missing in a specific channel means it's a marketing issue.
4. Building a Funnel Operating System
All the metrics in the world won't help without a joint operating system to push the funnel forward.
Importantly, building a shared operating system cross-trains your GTM leadership team in both sales and marketing. Over time, sales and marketing develop a better understanding of each other's functions, a shared language, and more efficient collaboration.
At Toast, we managed the business to monthly bookings goals. We believed that running the business on these shorter sprints allowed us to be more agile and avoid big quarterly swings in performance. This meant we ran our funnel on a week-to-week basis.
Every week at the same time, members of sales and marketing leadership would get together to look at funnel performance across the board - TOFU, MOFU, BOFU, ACV, etc. We broke these funnel segments out by primary channel as well and compared them to our month-to-date pacing targets to understand if we were pacing to our monthly plan.
But not every funnel is high velocity.
While this approach may work well in a high-velocity and lower ACV environment, it likely won’t be the most effective model in a high ACV environment with a slower sales cycle.
At Opower, where the ACVs could easily start at $500k and the sales cycles were 10+ months, we still met frequently on the funnel but with a very different focus. Similar to the motion above, we set pipeline generation targets across inbound and outbound. We combined this with a focus on pipeline coverage multiples and a “rifle model” that highlighted target net-new accounts. If a metric was off by more than 10% that team would run a “Red to Green” — a focused sprint to bring that specific metric or channel back to plan. This intense focus can feel like overkill initially, but it drives accountability across teams over time.
This kept both teams hyper-focused on the net-new accounts that our data signaled were most likely to convert.
5. Shared Planning Cycles
Sales and marketing naturally operate on different time horizons. Sales focuses on this quarter's number. Marketing often looks two or three quarters ahead, building new channels, exploring new TAM, and enabling future product launches.
That disconnect is normal, but dangerous if left unchecked.
The solution is a shared planning process. One that aligns near-term execution and long-term bets.
At both Opower and Toast, we ran quarterly planning cycles where GTM leaders from both sides came together to:
- Review performance vs. plan
- Prioritize new initiatives
- Lock in shared goals and metrics
We also used OKRs to create cross-functional alignment. These weren’t top-down mandates. They were a forcing function — helping us decide, “What are the two to three things we’re doing together this quarter that will actually move the needle?”
We also looked further out.
Once or twice a year, we ran Growth Plays — structured brainstorming sessions designed to generate and prioritize non-linear growth bets such as:
- Unlocking new TAM
- Increasing ARPU
- Reducing CAC in a specific segment
These weren’t theoretical. Each play ended with mid-level sales and marketing leaders forming a joint working group, scoping the play, and reporting back with recommendations.
This dual-track model — quarterly coordination plus annual horizon scanning — kept the team aligned both in the weeds and on the whiteboard.
Build Momentum, Reduce Tension
Sales and marketing alignment is one of those forever problems — especially in Vertical SaaS, where motions are often hybrid, segments are complex, and teams scale unevenly.
But it’s not unsolvable. In fact, it’s predictable.
If you want sales and marketing to stay aligned as you grow, you need five things:
- A clear definition of top talent—and systems to hire, coach, and scale it.
- Shared outcomes — not just shared dashboards.
- Accountability for input and output metrics.
- A weekly joint funnel operating system to spot and solve problems early.
- A shared planning process that connects the urgent to the important.
Do that, and you’ll stop managing tension between teams—and start scaling momentum across them.
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