The Complete Guide to a Sales and Marketing Alignment Audit (with Template)

Picture this: your sales team is sprinting north while marketing charges south, and in the end, neither reaches the winning destination. A sales and marketing alignment audit can change this storyline, ensuring both teams are in perfect sync and turbocharging your growth. In this article, we’re diving into what this audit is all about and how it can spotlight misalignments that might be costing you.

With HubSpot’s Frictionless Selling Framework backing us up, we’ll explore how alignment is not just about everyone rowing in the same direction; it’s about transforming and enabling your teams for seamless collaboration. We’ll guide you through a comprehensive audit, equipping you with the tools to tackle misalignment with precision and clarity.

What Is a Sales and Marketing Alignment Audit?

Ever felt like your sales and marketing teams belong to two different planets? If yes, it’s time for a sales and marketing alignment audit. This handy tool is a game-changer. It’s all about ensuring your sales and marketing teams aren’t just two departments but a unified revenue team working toward the same common goal. So, what’s the difference between them? Well, while your marketing team is busy creating strategies to attract potential customers, the sales team is closing those deals. Alignment matters because it streamlines the two teams’ efforts, boosts ROI, and leads to better revenue and customer experiences. So, if you’re aiming for improvements that tick all these boxes, a sales and marketing alignment audit is just what you need.

The Hidden Costs of Misalignment

Misalignment among your revenue team is a revenue killer. When your sales and marketing team are out of sync, it leads to missed revenue and lead slippage. Misalignment also creates poor attribution—and the dreaded finger-pointing. “The leads were bad,” says the sales department. “Our campaigns are on point,” counters the marketing team. But who’s checking the buyer experience in all this?

Disconnection and inconsistency push potential customers away. And therein lies the hidden costs. Ensuring alignment eliminates these obstacles, paving the road for collaborative success and, ultimately, revenue growth! In fact companies that prioritize aligning their sales and marketing teams grow 32% faster than their counterparts that live with siloed departments.

The Strategic Foundation: HubSpot’s Frictionless Selling Framework

HubSpot’s Frictionless Selling Framework is the underlying structure for boosting sales teams’ productivity and staying competitive in the fast-paced world of sales and marketing. This framework is designed to ensure that every step in the sales process is seamless, aligning the marketing efforts with the overarching revenue goals. By addressing the common goal of increasing qualified leads and nurturing them through the sales funnel, this framework can transform how marketing departments and sales leaders approach their daily functions.

Enable, Align, and Transform

At the heart of HubSpot’s Frictionless Selling Framework lies the mantra: Enable, Align, and Transform. Each element plays a critical role in harmonizing sales and marketing strategies.

• Enable: Enabling your teams means providing them with the necessary marketing automation tools and resources to streamline their efforts. For sales professionals, this might involve access to real-time data about potential customers, allowing for more informed sales calls.
• Align: Alignment refers to the strategic synchronization of both departments to pursue a common goal. This involves regular meetings, sometimes called “Smarketing Meetings” where sales and marketing leaders collaborate on shared objectives and key performance indicators.
• Transform: Transformation focuses on re-evaluating existing processes and workflows. By analyzing sales and marketing alignment and diagnosing any misalignment, companies can refine their approach to ensure consistent revenue growth. Only companies that consistently prioritize aligning their sales and marketing teams reach the transformation phase, where they focus on continuous improvement driven by data-informed decision-making.

How to Conduct a Full Sales and Marketing Alignment Audit

Ready to bridge the gap between your sales and marketing teams? A full sales and marketing alignment audit is the best way to start. This process will identify roadblocks, optimize workflows, and ensure everyone is moving toward the same common goal: converting potential customers and boosting revenue growth. Stick with us as we explore the ins and outs of conducting a thorough audit for optimal marketing and sales alignment.

Part 1 – The Sales Enablement Audit

Let’s dive into the first part of our audit: the sales enablement audit. This process will help you recalibrate your sales team and evaluate the tools and processes they need to be successful. It starts with analyzing current practices and tools, such as CRM systems and marketing automation tools.

Some questions you may ask in a Sales Enablement audit could include:

1. Are sales reps getting the qualified leads they need from marketing?
2. Are the sales processes currently in place efficient in converting these leads?
3. Are sales activities, tasks, and follow-ups consistently logged in a CRM?

Next, check in on your key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate whether your sales calls, cycles, and follow-ups are effectively contributing to revenue goals. Examine how well your sales funnel is facilitating an ideal customer profile journey—and where bottlenecks may be slowing progress.

At the end of this audit, you should walk away with a clear list of both opportunities and weaknesses in your current sales infrastructure. These might include missing automation workflows, underutilized CRM features, or gaps in sales enablement content. This list serves as your action plan, giving your team a focused path toward streamlining operations and accelerating pipeline performance.

Part 2 – The Marketing Audit

Now, onto the second part of the audit: exploring the world of marketing strategies! This audit examines whether your marketing efforts are effectively supporting your sales team. Start by reviewing content and campaigns to ensure they align with sales efforts and that messaging actually resonates with the intended audience—that is, sales qualified leads or SQLs!

Scrutinize the marketing department’s workflow and processes for any kinks; a smooth workflow means everyone can enjoy the benefits of seamless collaboration. Analyze how well your ideal customer profile is defined and whether it’s being targeted efficiently. Finally, drill down into any marketing misalignment areas by assessing campaign performance. This analysis is key for process optimization and can lead to more cohesive marketing functions and happy sales reps.

Here are a few questions that should be included in a Marketing Audit:

1. Is new marketing content aligned to specific stages of the buyer’s journey?
2. Are buyer personas clearly defined and actively used in campaigns?
3. Is marketing regularly reviewing lead quality feedback from the sales team?

By the end of your marketing audit, you should have a clear list of strengths to leverage and gaps to close–spanning messaging, content, and campaign performance.

Part 3 – The Alignment Audit (The Most Important Part)

Now it’s time to bring everything together in the final phase: the Alignment audit. This part synthesizes your findings from both the sales enablement and marketing audits to diagnose any existing misalignments.

Audit Areas

Evaluating sales and marketing alignment starts with examining shared definitions and performance metrics. Both teams must speak the same language when it comes to defining a “lead,” agreeing on lead qualification criteria, and aligning around the KPIs that drive revenue growth. This ensures that what marketing deems a qualified lead matches sales’ expectations—and that accountability is shared across the funnel.

From there, assess the feedback loops between teams. Is there a structured process for sales to share insights on lead quality, conversion barriers, or content gaps? Consistent communication is critical to refining both marketing campaigns and sales approaches.

Next, review how marketing and sales collaborate on campaign planning and performance analysis. Joint planning sessions, shared retrospectives, and co-owned reporting dashboards promote alignment from the start of a campaign through to closed-won deals.

Finally, examine your technology stack. CRM and marketing automation platforms must be properly integrated to support visibility, lead tracking, and timely follow-up. Without this technical alignment, even well-aligned strategies can break down at execution.

Sample Questions

Conducting the sales enablement audit isn’t just about numbers; it’s also about asking the right questions to unearth how well your teams are synced. Some questions you may ask in this audit include:

1. Do sales and marketing agree on the definition of a qualified lead?
2. Are both teams aligned on shared revenue and performance KPIs?
3. Is there a documented process for handing off leads from marketing to sales?
4. Are sales regularly providing feedback on lead quality and campaign effectiveness?
5. Do both teams collaborate on campaign planning and post-campaign analysis?
6. Are your CRM and marketing automation platforms fully integrated and accessible to both teams?

Red Flags to Watch For

As you evaluate alignment between sales and marketing, pay close attention to these common breakdowns—they often signal deeper operational gaps:

• Sales isn’t using marketing-generated content. This may indicate that the content doesn’t support real conversations in the field or hasn’t been properly introduced and integrated into the sales process.
• Marketing lacks visibility into what happens after lead handoff. If the team doesn’t know which leads convert—or why—there’s a serious gap in feedback that stunts campaign optimization and lead quality improvements.
• There’s no shared definition of a qualified lead. If marketing is optimizing for MQLs that sales doesn’t pursue, you’re wasting resources and undermining pipeline efficiency.
• Dashboards and reporting are siloed. When each team operates from different data sets or KPIs, decisions become reactive, not strategic, and neither side sees the full picture.
• Joint planning and retrospectives are inconsistent or missing. Without intentional collaboration, campaigns launch without sales input and close without marketing insight.

These red flags are your starting point for improvement. Identifying just one or two of them is enough to justify an internal workshop or external audit, and correcting them can unlock significant revenue potential.

What Happens After the Audit?

So, you’ve completed your sales and marketing alignment audit—high fives all around! But what’s next? How do you transform a list of inefficiencies and growth opportunities into a practical action plan?

Prioritize Action Items

Examine your audit results and classify them based on impact and urgency. Use a simple rating system such as poor, fair, or good. You could also assign each item a score from 1 to 3, where 1 indicates the highest priority and 3 the lowest. However you do it, opt for a scoring method that ensures the tasks with the greatest impact and lowest effort are addressed first and consistently apply this scoring method across all items for accuracy and fairness.

Next, create a 30-60-90 day plan to address these issues to set clear timelines for each improvement area. Communicate your findings, action items, and timeline with your sales and marketing teams and appoint champions to help you drive execution. Given that alignment is the goal, involving your teams from the outset of this journey can help create some buy-in for these changes.

Below is a simple roadmap you can customize based on your audit findings.

Measure and Optimize Continuously

Marketing and sales alignment isn’t a one-and-done thing—it’s an ongoing process that requires consistent attention and iteration. As both teams evolve, adopt new tools, and adjust to shifting buyer behaviors, misalignment can slowly creep back in. That’s why it’s important to revisit your alignment audit on a regular basis. Doing so allows you to evaluate whether recent improvements have been successfully implemented, identify any breakdowns in process adoption, and uncover fresh opportunities for collaboration. This regular check-in helps ensure your teams stay connected around shared goals, KPIs, and messaging, so that your go-to-market strategy remains agile, effective, and consistently optimized for growth.

Alignment Isn’t Optional—It’s Your Growth Engine

Is your business gearing up for revenue growth? Then alignment between your sales and marketing teams isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s absolutely essential. It’ll be the finely-tuned engine powering your entire organization.

Download the Free Audit Template

Download our Sales and Marketing Alignment Audit Template to uncover gaps, identify opportunities, and drive cross-functional growth. It’s practical, customizable, and designed to help you take immediate action.

Talk to an Alignment Expert

If you’re ready to go deeper, Farotech is here to help. Schedule a discovery call with a Sales and Marketing Alignment Expert today. We’ll walk through your unique challenges, identify areas for improvement, and help you develop a strategy to supercharge collaboration, efficiency, and revenue growth. Together, we can ensure your alignment becomes the driving force behind achieving your revenue goals. 🚀