Almost every company says marketing and sales alignment is a priority. Almost none of them have actually solved it. On the latest episode of Performance Delivered, host Steffen Horst talked with Gerardo A. Dada, CMO at Catchpoint and former marketing leader at Microsoft, SolarWinds, Rackspace, and Motorola about why alignment breaks down and what it actually takes to fix it.

Gerardo's central argument: alignment isn't a communication problem. It's a systems problem.

The Real Source of Misalignment

Companies tend to respond to sales-marketing friction with more meetings, shared Slack channels, or vague appeals to "culture." Gerardo says that misses the point. The real issue is that marketing and sales are usually built on different systems entirely — different goals, different metrics, different definitions of success.

Attribution disputes are the clearest symptom. Was a deal "marketing sourced" or "sales sourced"? Gerardo argues the question itself is close to meaningless: roughly 70% of the B2B buying process now happens before a prospect ever talks to a salesperson, invisible to the company. Deciding whether marketing or sales gets credit is, in his words, "basically guessing in the best case scenario," and it's a reliable source of internal conflict.

Why Measuring Marketing on Leads Backfires

The deeper structural problem: marketing is typically measured on leads, while sales is measured on revenue. As long as that gap exists, the incentives will pull the two teams apart.

Gerardo shared a story from earlier in his career. A CEO pressured a CMO to increase product-qualified leads (PQLs) — measured by product downloads — threatening the CMO's job if the number didn't move. The team's response: they created five branded t-shirt designs and offered them as a reward for downloading the product. IT buyers who wanted all five shirts created five email addresses and downloaded the product five times. The download numbers hit target. There was a celebration.

The email addresses didn't exist. There was no real buying intent. And the sales team spent the next quarter chasing dead leads, with the worst sales results of the year to show for it.

"Every human does that," Gerardo said. "We do whatever the incentive tells us to do." The fix isn't better discipline, it's better incentives. In every CMO role he's held, Gerardo says marketing's core metric has been the same one sales is measured on: revenue, or new customer acquisition. Leads, MQLs, and SQLs are leading indicators, not the goal.

Where to Start: Define the Customer Before the Funnel

For companies that recognize the problem but don't know where to begin, Gerardo's advice is to start before the funnel  with a joint definition of the customer:

• Ideal customer profile (ICP): company size, industry, revenue, region
• Buyer persona: are you selling to a C-level executive, a mid-level manager, or an individual buyer?
• Product-market entry points: which of your products should lead, and which come later as cross-sell or upsell?
• True buying-stage gates: defined jointly by marketing and sales, based on the customer's actual behavior and mindset — not on internal qualification checkboxes

At Catchpoint, Gerardo's team built a list of the Global 5,000 companies they wanted to target, refined it by revenue, industry, and region, and narrowed it to a top 150 account list — jointly with sales. After that, event success wasn't measured by lead count. It was measured by how many attendees came from the target account list.

Handling Long Sales Cycles

For B2B companies with six-to-eighteen-month sales cycles, waiting for closed deals to validate marketing tactics doesn't work. Gerardo's approach: agree in advance on early-stage signals that indicate real buying intent, borrowing from the "three whys" framework in Force Management — why do anything, why now, why with you. If a deal has real urgency and a clear product fit, marketing and sales can agree the opportunity has legs long before it closes, without waiting on lagging revenue data.

Should Marketing and Sales Report to the Same Leader?

Gerardo pushed back on a structural fix that's gained popularity: merging marketing and sales under a single leader. In his experience, that leader inevitably leans toward their original discipline — sales-minded or marketing-minded — and the other function ends up neglected. His view: marketing is the company's growth engine and should report to the CEO, with alignment built through shared metrics and joint accountability, not an org chart change.

Keeping the Narrative Consistent

A related failure point: sales reps building their own decks because marketing's materials don't hold up in the room. Gerardo's fix is to hold marketing accountable for a small set of high-quality, continuously improved core assets, rather than a high volume of AI-generated content nobody has time to vet — and to validate regularly with sales whether that content is actually landing with customers.

The Bottom Line

Gerardo's advice for leaders: make company targets transparent, and make sure every function, not just sales, is accountable to the same number. "If marketing is only held accountable for MQLs, that's their only job description," he said. Once revenue is the shared goal, the tactics — joint budget decisions, deal reviews, QBRs, and messaging — become much easier to work out.

Episode Transcript

‍

Steffen Horst (00:01.378)

Welcome back to Performance Delivered, insider secrets to marketing success, the podcast where we explore what's actually driving growth and performance in today's complex marketing landscape. I'm your host Stefan Horst and today we're talking or we're tackling a challenge that almost every organization talks about, but very fruitfully solve the alignment between marketing and sales. Now, when these two teams operate in silos, the consequences go far beyond missed targets. It impacts pipeline quality.

Customer experience and ultimately revenue growth. Joining me today is Gerardo Dada, a seasoned marketing executive and strategist with decades of experience shaping markets, launching products and building differentiated growth strategies for technology driven companies. Gerardo has served as chief marketing officer at companies like Catchpoint and has held leadership roles at Microsoft, SolarWinds, Rackspace and Motorola. He also is the author behind the adaptive marketer and is about to release a new book on competitive strategy and differentiation at Outposition. Today, we'll unpack what it really takes to align marketing and sales from strategy to execution and how organizations can create a unified approach that actually drives revenue. Welcome to the show, Gerardo.

Gerardo A. Dada (01:21.608)

Thank you, Steffen. It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Steffen Horst (01:24.95)

Now, before we dive into frameworks and best practices, I'd love to start with the big picture. Why is misalignment between marketing and sales such a persistent problem? mean, everyone talks about it. And I would say every sales leader, every marketing leader is aware of the challenge. But I am in too many conversations with clients where I'm like, why are you not aligned? So what is it?

Gerardo A. Dada (01:52.136)

Yeah, I think the problem is that people think that the answer is going to be setting up more meetings, shared Slack channels, more joint efforts or culture. And it's not the case. think the fundamental problems are problems systems. When your systems are misaligned, there's a lot of finger pointing, right? There's challenges about attribution. Like is this marketing source or sales source? And for me, there's no sale that happens without the help of both marketing and sales. really that distinction is almost arbitrary, especially if we consider that 70 % of the buying process happens without interacting with the sellers and the company, right? It's invisible to the company. So deciding that a deal is a true to sales or marketing is basically guessing in the best case scenario and just a source of a lot of conflict.

Steffen Horst (02:45.634)

Yeah. Yeah.

Gerardo A. Dada (02:47.282)

There's also a lot of focus on activity instead of results when there's no alignment. And there are some fundamental problems like, you know, companies are now in B2B, especially focus on qualification. And because once a deal passes from marketing to sales, then the next meeting is about qualifying the customer, which is horrible because for as a customer, you're almost being challenged as a, well, we want to see if you're worthy of our time, right? You are qualifying me as a customer.

Steffen Horst (03:15.327)

Yeah

Gerardo A. Dada (03:17.212)

And if you meet the requirements that a company has, then we'll have you talk to a solution engineer. We'll take you to the next step. It's almost like a test, right? So all those problems are fundamentally that the reason why it exists is because they are designed on different systems and because there's a lot of momentum and trying to continue working the way that marketing and sales have worked for decades now.

Steffen Horst (03:41.326)

Now, what are the real consequences when these teams don't work in sync?

Gerardo A. Dada (03:48.244)

Well, like you mentioned, at the end of the day, it's lost revenue, right? Because if marketing and sales are not working together, then first there's a lot of discussion and wasted energy on, well, we're giving you all these leads and sales is not doing anything about it, right? That's typically marketing is complaining about that. And if you talk to sales, sales will say, well, yeah, we get all these leads from marketing, but they're terrible. They're not useful. They're not really qualified. They're a waste of time.

So on one side, have a marketing engine that is wasting a lot of money, time and effort creating leads that the sales team is not receiving. And then the sales team is not really being successful in converting leads, effective leads to revenue, right? That's at the end of the day, what happens more. It's like, you know, the movie, Glenn Gary, Glenn Rose, like here, the magical leads, everybody's waiting for those magical leads to happen, but it's very difficult to produce those.

Steffen Horst (04:43.49)

interesting that you just mentioned that we just brought on a new lead for outbound sales. And as part of our discussions, that movie came up almost every day when we talk about things, you you talk with the sales people and say, these leads are not good. It's like, you got to work the leads, you know, you've got to call them a couple times. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But coming back to what we talked about,

Gerardo A. Dada (05:02.478)

be mandatory watching for every marketer so they understand the ecology of sales.

Steffen Horst (05:13.118)

So where does all the problem originate from? It sounds a lot like there is no proper communication between marketing and sales. And for me on the bottom line is like, so what is an MQL or an SQL accepted lead? I mean, for me, that would be the starting point from a discussion perspective, right? So that there is no argument about, go ahead.

Gerardo A. Dada (05:35.412)

I think the problem is...

Yeah, sorry. think the problem is that when you focus on those definitions, there's necessarily a handoff between one part of the other. And yeah, I can see how it can improve it. But fundamental problem is that marketing is working on leads and Celsius is measured on revenue. So as long as there's that discrepancy, then there's going to be potential for misalignment. That's why I say it's a problem of systems. You need to have aligned definitions like two point what is an MQL, what is an SQL, alignment on metrics and incentives as well. Right. So yes, marketing needs to focus more on the long-term, but at the end of the day, in my, when every time I've been a CMO, the marketing goal has been revenue. That is it. Right. Or in some cases, new customer acquisition, new logo wins. In the case of expansion could be revenue as well, or number of products per customer, but it needs to be the exact same metric as a sales team.

And just like the sales team is going to have a pipeline that is leading indicators for marketing, your leads, your MQLs, your SQLs, those are leading indicators only. The moment that your marketing team is solely or principally measure on MQLs, then companies tend to do things that are unnatural or artificially inflate the number of MQLs to, know, because that's what you're incentivized on. every human does that, right? Like we will, we'll do whatever the incentives indicators to do. was in a company that I probably shouldn't name, but the organization was pressuring the CMO at the time to bring more PQLs, product qualified, these downloads, right? And that was a metric. That was a number. And the CEO was very clear. If the PQLs don't go up, the downloads don't go up, you're not going to be here in a couple months. We're going to need a new person. So the person offered, since we sold to technology people that love t-shirts, free t-shirt if you download a product.

Gerardo A. Dada (07:32.948)

And they created five beautiful versions of the t-shirt we were selling to IT. So IT people who wanted to have those five t-shirts created five different email accounts, downloaded the product, and they got their five t-shirts, marketing all the downloads they needed. They threw a party, there was cake. But obviously those downloads were not even real people because those email addresses didn't exist anymore. There was no real intent to buy. Sales was now busier than ever trying to pursue those five emails per customer that were nonexistent and trying to call numbers and wasting a lot of time and sales for that quarter were terrible, right? So that's what happens when you have that misalignment. But if you align marketing saying, look, your only goal is revenue. I think the job description for marketing is growth, right? If your goal is revenue and yeah, leads on pipeline and just reading indicators, it just changes the game because we're now working together to make things happen.

It's about designing a system where both teams succeed or fail on the same outcomes.

Steffen Horst (08:34.99)

I think the second ago you said leads are just kind of an input. It's kind of a stage in the process of starting a conversation in the hope of turning that person into a customer at some point. But a lot of these things you can game, as you just said, with this product qualified leads. The gaming is, hey, you know what? I set up five email addresses. And I don't care if it is five times Stefan. I got five leads. Perfect.

Gerardo A. Dada (08:49.425)

Exactly.

Steffen Horst (09:04.044)

the end result, the revenue you can't gain because that's kind of, you know, it's the money in a bank account in the end. That's a hard number that both teams can and should work through. The challenge that I quite often see with that, Giotto, is that it requires from a sales perspective to feedback information into marketing because you as marketing need to understand how far do leads go in the pipeline.

Gerardo A. Dada (09:32.532)

100 %

Steffen Horst (09:33.078)

Because you want to use those signals to get more of the qualified leads versus the ones that don't even pass MQL or SQL.

Gerardo A. Dada (09:37.065)

Sure.

Gerardo A. Dada (09:43.22)

Right. So I think to your point, there's multiple ways that marketing can bribe customers to pretend to act like leads, right? Like $100 if you take a demo, even though you have no interest, or we'll give you a nice jacket. And yeah, they look like a lead, but they're not really a lead. And so I think before you get to that point, you need to start with the basics. We need to work with your sales leader and agree on what is the right ICP.

What are the right use cases? What are the buyer person that we're going after? Are we going after a C level executive, mid-level manager or individual buyer? What is the ASP? What's the sweet spot in the company? What are the right buying stages and the behaviors that are true gates and indicators of intent that really tell us as a business that this person is more likely to buy? So it should be one continuous revenue engine with shared ownership and accountability, less focus on activity, more focus on actually buying intent, not interest, but real intent. And not intent like a lot of ABM companies call interest intent. Intent means that somebody that has a problem and has a real interest in evaluating multiple products and buy a solution. But to your point, the best practice that I've used in my career is that marketing and sales work together to even decide what marketing activities should happen. For example, we wanted to do some of those in-person events, right? That they bring 30 CIOs to a meeting and you have an opportunity to present. So we tried a few of them. We discussed with our CRO, hey, we have these five opportunities. What do you think? We jointly made a decision. We tried one test event. And at the end of that test event, we got together not as here are the leads, good luck, we want you to close them, but

Gerardo A. Dada (11:37.32)

Hey, what was the result? Was this the right audience? Did we have the opportunity to talk about the value of our brand? Did we get enough interest and people that are really interested in buying our product? Is this the right investment? Also, is this the right investment from a cost of opportunity? Because every time you do an event, you don't do another event, you don't do other things. So it became basically a joint review of the marketing activity and the success where the goal was not to review the numbers or, you know, typically marketing reports and numbers in a quarter review, in sales report the numbers and there's no connection. This was on an activity by activity basis. We were jointly trying to understand reality, not to assign blame, just to find solutions and decide what is the best way for both of us to meet our goal of achieving revenue, right?

Steffen Horst (12:25.73)

Yeah. Now taking a small step back for companies that recognize the problem, but don't know where to begin. What, know, especially taking someone from, from thinking about leads, although I quite often start with companies talking about, let's talk about quality leads, leads that actually move down the funnel, you know, how would you recommend them starting that conversation? Because it's different, It's not about leads. It's not about more leads for sure. Because as you said, more leads just means the salespeople have more work. You might need more salespeople because it looks like, wow, all of a sudden we have an influx in inquiries. But in reality, the conversion rate might be worse because of how you gamed the system, basically, or how the system was gamed.

So where do you start a conversation internally across sales and marketing to switch the mindset and get them on the road to accepting a different metrics as the as kind of the goal.

Gerardo A. Dada (13:29.78)

Well, first, it's typically difficult for marketing to accept a goal of revenue because it's outside of your control, right? You're now dependent on the sales team. But I think it's a good commitment because it not only forces you as a marketer to think about what leads are going to work, but also to become a partner and to give them the right training and the right resources to close, the right collateral and other materials to close businesses, right?

But I think to question how do you begin is well, first marketing and sales need to have the same metrics, but then we need to have a conversation about what is our buyer? Who's our ideal customer profile from a company perspective, from a buyer title perspective, where do we find them and what are the right products that we want them to buy from us? Because most companies nowadays have three, four, five products. Some companies have dozens.

And agree on, you know, these are the parts we're going to lead with because we think that those are the ones we have the best opportunity as entry points into becoming customers. And from what that point we can maybe cross-sell, upsell afterwards. Once you define that, you need to really understand the buying process, not from a sales perspective, but from the customer perspective. Right. A lot of people, we think about our qualification and our gates versus what is in the mind of the customer is a customer researching.

Is the customer committed to doing something? Is the customer now fairly confident they want to do business with you and they just need to fine tune and get some assurances, right? Like a proof of concept. And I think to the extent that marketing ourselves agree on what is the customer behavior and customer mindset in those stages, then they can decide what are the right stages from the sales process and buying process. And when you get

I don't know, you go to a conference and you get a list of all the attendees, you know where to put that versus somebody who you bribe with $100. Well, then, yeah, you can do that. Maybe it works if your product is really good, but don't put it in this stage. Put it in an early stage, even if you're already doing a demo, which is, again, selfish, you're just exploring a conversation with a customer you don't even know they really have an intent to buy anything or a need for that matter. So that alignment on

Gerardo A. Dada (15:50.982)

on the customer profile and the gates is I think foundational so that then you can have the ongoing conversation on those activities and on what's working, what's not working.

Steffen Horst (16:04.526)

It kind of leads me right on my next question, ongoing alignment, because it's not a one-time fix, right? You've got to work on it continuously. Now, what are some best practices for maintaining consistent, productive conversations between marketing and sales?

Gerardo A. Dada (16:18.28)

I think the first one is having marketing inviting the sales leadership and the sales teams to participate and be joint decision makers on the marketing budget, right? So it becomes an adaptive dynamic budget allocation based on what really works. And this could be made as you're making decisions on where to invest dollars from a marketing perspective. But also I love doing reverse forensics, right? So you win a big deal.

Typically, there's an email that goes to everybody in the company. Okay, let's explore that deal in detail. How did the prospect progress? What were the things that we did well and the things that allow us to have conversation with the customer that move them forward? Can we find more customers using the same tactics, right? So that conversation about deal analysis, opportunity reviews and follow up needs to be an ongoing conversation every two weeks or every month between sales and marketing were there because they have the same objective of revenue, right? Then when we were achieved this, our presentations to the board were joint marketing and sales. It was not like, let's talk at the marketing section, how we're doing marketing leads. Now let's switch, maybe coffee break and then let's have the sales team talk about their revenue. No, it was one conversation about how we are influencing the market and growing as a company. And that goes to the board, QBRs, and weekly reviews, every type of reporting is jointly because it's joint accountability, right? So that requires like ongoing work between the two teams.

Steffen Horst (17:50.446)

Yeah.

Steffen Horst (17:55.855)

When you sell a product that has a really long sales cycle, sometimes it's really hard to get signals in between. If it is...six, nine plus month. It's really hard to wait until we get a lot of sales in to then see what worked really well and feed that back into marketing and then buy more of that and less of that that didn't work. How do you approach that? How does sales and marketing need to work together in those instances? Because in many cases, especially in the B2B space, sales don't happen the next day. There is time between the first touch and the yes or the signature on the contract.

Gerardo A. Dada (18:40.404)

That's a great question. I've been in companies where a sell cycle has been anywhere between six months to a year and a half. I remember posting a deal with a bank that where the paperwork only took us a year. And I think this goes back to that agreement on definitions. If you say, we did an event, you want to react quickly. So if you said, hey, we did an event, we ended up with 100 leads. Is that a good event? Yeah, 100 sounds a good number. That is very shallow and not enough to make actual business decisions. If you have the agreement on the ideal customer profile, which surprisingly many companies don't know what's the ideal customer profile, right? So what we did, so into the global 5,000 at Catchpoint, we actually made a list of the 5,000 companies we wanted to go after. We reviewed every single one of those companies, excluded some, added some that were not technically in the global 5,000 by region, by revenue, by industry.

And then we made a list of our top 150 accounts that we really wanted to go after. This was done jointly between sales and marketing. So when we do an event, then it's not how many leads you got, how many people on the right titles from those 5,000 companies did you get? How many from the 150 did you get? And then if you understand those buying cycles, that buying process, there's some jointly agreed gates that where you can decide, even if you know the deal still has many months to go.

If the customer has expressed that they have a problem you can solve, I believe in the force management, why do anything, why now, and why with you? So the three whys of qualification, for example, those can be achieved early on in a deal. So if you agree that there's a problem, there's some sense of urgency, or there's an economic benefit that is clear for the customer to take an action, and there is a clear fit between what you offer and the problem the customer has, then early on that process, you can agree with sales that that opportunity has legs and is likely to close at certain percentage.

Steffen Horst (20:44.876)

Yeah. Now, I don't know over the last one, two, maybe three years, I've seen and I've heard a lot of conversations around that marketing and sales should report into one leader. Do you think restructuring the marketing and sales organization into one solves the problem or does alignment requires something beyond fork charts?

Gerardo A. Dada (21:14.078)

think that is an interesting solution that some people propose because they think it's again a matter of meeting or joint leadership or something like that. But the fundamental problem is that sales and marketing are very different. Even though at the core they're about engaging with customers and explain the value of what you do, sales is inherently more short term. I've owned sales for a little while in this company. I owned a new logo sales for about six months.

And it was difficult for me, not intellectually difficult, but from a habit perspective, managing pipeline, coaching salespeople, doing deal reviews. That's something that is not my core competency, is not my nature as a marketer. The same way when you have a salesperson running marketing, they tend to look at more in the short term and look at something that's more objective, more deal-centric. So invariably, when I've seen companies that have a sales and marketing leader reporting to, I don't know, president of GTN, that person tends to be either sales oriented or marketing oriented. And then the other leader feels neglected and is misunderstood and it ends up being a missed opportunity. If you agree that marketing is the growth engine of the company, it should report to the CEO. needs to be important enough to work with everybody in the company across functions. so having joined a single boss between sales and marketing is not gonna solve the problem. The problem is solved with the system that you build and the partnership that's based on those joint metrics.

Steffen Horst (22:50.636)

Yeah. Now, one of the biggest challenges is ensuring that marketing messaging and sales conversations tell the same story. How can organizations create and maintain a consistent narrative across both teams, especially at their scale?

Gerardo A. Dada (23:10.324)

It is a similar problem when then with leads, right? Sometimes marketing creates a lot of PowerPoints and then ship them to sales and expect salespeople to use them. And then they go to a deal and they find that a salesperson is using a non approved PowerPoint. that oftentimes I find that salespeople is not that they like creating the raw PowerPoints. They're not getting the information and the quality they expect from our.

So if you're in sales and your paycheck is going to be based on the quality of your presentation and the slides you're getting from marketing are not going to do the job, you end up creating yours. So I would say that in that case, marketing has to be first held accountable to deliver valuable, useful, high quality, easy to find content. Oftentimes, teams now are focused on producing quantity of content, right? Especially with AI, can produce white papers, data sheets, PowerPoints, a dozen a day. Nobody can consume that. It's better to have a core set of, these are our 10 top marketing materials. We're going to invest a ton to continuously improve them. And in those meetings with sales, validate that actually they're doing the job with marketing, with sales, Validate with sales. Was this material effective? What other points were you trying to make when you meet with customers that we can help you do them in a way that is more effective?

Steffen Horst (24:08.558)

Yeah.

Gerardo A. Dada (24:33.618)

So first, holding marketing accountable for the insights that prepare the sale, and then teaching sales how to continue that same narrative so that it becomes more effective to the customer. And so by responding to insight and reframing, not just relationships or pretty PowerPoints. teaching customers something new before pitching a product is very effective. It's basically the foundation behind the challenger sale. I find that that's very, very powerful.

Steffen Horst (24:39.587)

Mm-hmm.

Steffen Horst (24:46.168)

the meeting.

Gerardo A. Dada (25:02.672)

But requires that partnership between sales and marketing to deliver high quality content that is being tested in the market and that has that feedback loop to make it better all the time.

Steffen Horst (25:13.102)

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. At a more tactical level, how can individual account executives and marketing team members work better together? What does effective cooperation actually looks like on a day-to-day basis?

Gerardo A. Dada (25:29.428)

I think it requires marketers to be curious and to be really committed to revenue. you have as a marketing leader, when I have a team that is really committed, then they will ask for that feedback and that continuous optimization all the time. When the marketing team produces high quality content, then the sales team is, rather than creating their own slides and their own narratives, are going to come back to the marketing team and ask us for better quality content or for more information.

So agreeing that marketing has the responsibility to become the central repository of customer knowledge and have that appetite to always be smarter about customers, about their buying behaviors, about the competition, and always improve the quality of the content you give in sales, that results in usually in marketing being invited to come to events, marketing coming to customer meetings.

And when you're a product marketing manager that built a presentation and you're in the meeting with a customer and see how it resonates, what works, what doesn't work. Maybe a slide was too long. You know, there's some points that the customer really valued that we're not expressing continuously where there's an opportunity to create content that creates like a very personal, direct feedback mechanism from customers to marketing and a true partnership from the marketer and the sales team.

Steffen Horst (26:47.79)

Yeah.

Gerardo A. Dada (26:52.542)

to jointly find the best solutions to do marketing for collateral, for jointly finding that success and growing the business.

Steffen Horst (27:03.02)

Now, before coming to the end, Gerardo, looking back on your career, what lessons have shaped your perspective on sales and marketing alignment? And what advice would you give to leaders trying to build a more unified revenue engine today?

Gerardo A. Dada (27:17.908)

Well, I started as an entrepreneur, right? So I had my own business and I did both sales and marketing. So for me, that idea of having one metric is natural. I think for leaders, I mean, if you're a CEO and you're trying to improve the relationship between sales and marketing, I think the transparency on data and explaining what are the goals for the company and making sure that everybody's accountable for those numbers is critical, right? Because

As a CEO, have quarterly targets that you need to hit, whether you're private or public. And if marketing is only held accountable for MQLs and that's their only job description, then it leads to the problems that we talked at the beginning. Right. I think the more transparent that the company is about the numbers and the more that creates a culture where sales and marketing and other parts of the business are there to help the company grow.

So it's not a departmental objective, but it's a company objective. That creates a foundation and the partnership between the executive team to achieve that growth that is necessary. And everything else derives from that, right? Because that's the foundation. Then the tactics and what works and the meetings and the cadence and the details are much easier to develop, to borrow from other people or to develop or test on the fly.

Steffen Horst (28:35.48)

Yeah, yeah. Well, Gerardo, thank you so much for joining me on the Performance Award podcast and sharing your perspective on one of the most critical and often misunderstood challenges in modern marketing. Aligning marketing and sales isn't just about structure, it's about strategy, communication, ultimately delivering a better experience for customers. So for listeners who want to learn more about your work, your writing or your upcoming book, where can they connect with you?

Gerardo A. Dada (29:03.592)

Well, you can find me on LinkedIn. have a blog called the adaptive marketer.com and the book I'm expecting to publish sometime in June is called Outposition. So the website is outpositionbook.com.

Steffen Horst (29:19.534)

Perfect. Now, thanks everyone for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode of Performance Award, please subscribe and leave us a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast application. To learn more about Symphonic Digital, visit us at symphonicdigital.com or follow us on X at Symphonic HQ. See you next time.

Gerardo A. Dada (29:38.91)

Thank you, Stefan, and thanks everybody for listening.

‍