This article is based on Megan Harr’s brilliant talk at the MarOps Summit. Members can enjoy the complete recording here.

Sales and marketing alignment is a challenge many organizations struggle with, but it’s also one of the most impactful areas for growth. 

I’m Megan Harr, VP of Demand Generation at Roller, and, having worked globally in both B2B and B2C, I’ve seen firsthand how critical alignment is. According to Marketing Profs, companies with aligned teams see 38% higher sales win rates and 36% higher customer retention. 

The gap between sales and marketing is often filled with frustration – sales blames marketing for poor leads, while marketing blames sales for slow follow-ups. 

This is where marketing operations (a.k.a. MarOps) comes in. It acts as the bridge that ensures both teams are working toward the same goal: growth. 

By focusing on shared KPIs, streamlined processes, and data visibility, marketing ops creates the necessary structure for both teams to collaborate effectively and drive sustainable growth, and I’m here to show you how.

In this article, we’ll explore:

  • How marketing ops drives sales and marketing alignment
  • The importance of shared KPIs and pipeline contribution
  • How to streamline workflows and optimize the sales process
  • Real-world examples of marketing ops improving revenue growth

Let’s dive in.

The role of marketing ops in aligning sales and marketing

Marketing operations plays a pivotal role in aligning sales and marketing, acting as the central hub that connects these two teams and ensures everything functions smoothly and efficiently. 

It's not just about managing campaigns or generating reports – though both are important. The real value lies in creating an environment where sales and marketing can collaborate meaningfully toward common goals.

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Without marketing ops, marketing might focus on generating leads without having a clear handoff process, while sales could struggle to convert those leads into deals. Sales teams may chase opportunities without the insights from marketing about customer behavior and intent, making it harder to close deals. 

Marketing ops ensures both teams, despite their different roles, work toward the shared objectives of revenue growth, pipeline efficiency, and customer success. By standardizing data, automating workflows, and measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter to both teams, marketing ops can drive success.

Research from Marketo backs this up – companies with highly aligned sales and marketing teams are 67% more efficient at closing deals. And who doesn’t want their sales team to close more deals, faster? That’s where marketing ops comes in, acting as a bridge between teams to ensure everyone works toward unified revenue goals.

The key personas for sales and marketing alignment

So you can see what this looks like in practice, let’s take a peek at some personas. 

Key personas for sales and marketing alignment: Wendy Wins (GTM Lead), Ronnie Revenue (Sales), Abby Acquisition (Marketing), and Barry Bridge (Marketing Ops).

First, we have Wendy Wins, the go-to-market lead. Wendy ensures alignment across sales, marketing, and ops, providing strategic direction. Marketing ops supports her by offering data and insights that help ensure everyone is working toward the same goal.

Next is Ronnie Revenue, the sales leader. Ronnie relies on marketing ops to prioritize the right leads and to understand which are most likely to convert. With these insights, sales can focus on high-quality leads, boosting their chances of closing deals.

Abby Acquisition, the marketing leader, manages the full customer lifecycle. She uses marketing ops to track performance, automate lead handoffs, and refine her campaigns. This ensures the leads sent to sales are high-quality and ready to convert.

Finally, we have Barry Bridge, the marketing ops person. Barry ensures data flows freely between sales and marketing, automates lead handoffs, and tracks pipeline performance. He keeps the machine running smoothly, making sure the sales and marketing processes are aligned to optimize revenue-driving efforts.

Together, this team exemplifies how cross-functional collaboration, supported by marketing ops, drives higher efficiency, better conversion rates, and ultimately more revenue. It’s not just about individual performance – it's about working together to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

How marketing ops can fix your funnel: A case study

Let me give you a real example from one of the companies I’ve worked with. Sales was frustrated with the leads marketing was sending. We had tons of activity at the top of the funnel, but nothing was closing further down. 

When marketing ops stepped in, we identified a clear issue in the handoff process: there was no defined lead scoring model. 

Why is this a problem? These are just some of the consequences of not scoring your leads:

  • Misaligned expectations: Sales expects qualified, ready-to-buy leads, but marketing may send leads that are still in the research phase.
  • Inefficient use of resources: Sales spends time on unqualified leads, taking focus away from higher-value prospects.
  • Unclear lead prioritization: Without scoring, marketing doesn’t know which leads need nurturing or which are ready to close.
  • Lower conversion rates: Sales chasing unqualified leads results in wasted effort and missed opportunities.
  • Focus on quantity over quality: Marketing pushes more leads into the pipeline, but without scoring, these leads may not be the right fit, skewing metrics and making the process less effective.
  • Breakdown of trust: Sales doesn’t trust the quality of leads, and teams end up blaming each other when deals aren’t closed.

Putting a lead scoring model in place

To solve the issues we were facing, marketing ops stepped in and implemented a lead scoring model. 

This lets us assign points based on specific behaviors – things like attending a webinar, downloading a white paper, or visiting key pages on our site. For example, a visit to the pricing page signals a much higher level of intent than simply reading a blog post. These behavior-based scores helped us more accurately gauge a lead’s readiness to talk to sales.

Once we tightened up the handoff process and only passed leads above a certain threshold to sales, both teams saw the benefit. Marketing could clearly identify which leads needed more nurturing and route them into appropriate automated funnels. Sales, meanwhile, could focus on high-value prospects already in the pipeline. 

Crucially, we built this system collaboratively. Sales helped define what makes a high-quality lead, marketing adjusted nurture strategies accordingly, and ops automated the handoff and prioritization process. This team effort reduced the finger-pointing and friction that often plagues handoffs.

The result? Frustration levels dropped, close rates went up, and the entire system felt more efficient. We saw a 20% increase in lead-to-opportunity conversion rate and shaved eight days off our sales cycle. That translated to faster revenue generation and a more efficient, aligned team.