Why Your Marketing and Sales Teams Don’t Get Along (And How to Fix It)

In the fast-moving world of the automotive aftermarket, where relationships, product knowledge, and timing drive revenue, it’s no secret that sales and marketing teams often don’t see eye to eye. And while this friction isn’t unique to our industry, it can be especially damaging when your competitors are fighting for the same distributors, shops, and installers.

At the core, marketing and sales want the same thing—growth. But how they see the path to get there is often completely different. The good news? The disconnect isn’t inevitable. In fact, with a few key shifts, you can turn these two teams into your business’s biggest power couple.

The Top 4 Reasons Marketing and Sales Clash

1. Different Definitions of a “Good Lead”

Marketing works to generate leads—through campaigns, trade shows, digital efforts, and more. But sales often complains that the leads they get aren’t qualified or ready to buy.

• Marketing says: “We delivered 500 leads from our latest campaign.”

• Sales says: “Only five of them were worth calling.”

This misalignment is often the result of a lack of shared criteria for what makes a lead valuable. If marketing measures success by volume, while sales measures it by conversion potential, you’ll always have friction.

2. Competing Timelines and Pressures

Marketing tends to play the long game—building awareness, nurturing relationships, and crafting campaigns to move prospects through a pipeline. Sales, on the other hand, is under pressure to close deals today. This tension between brand-building and immediate revenue generation creates frustration when the teams aren’t working from a shared roadmap.

3. Silos (and Sometimes, Straight-Up Turf Wars)

In too many companies, sales and marketing operate like separate businesses. They attend different meetings, track different metrics, and rarely sit down together to talk strategy. The result? Marketing feels undervalued, sales feels unsupported, and both teams think the other “just doesn’t get it.”

4. A Lack of Real-World Feedback Loops

Marketing teams often rely on data from campaigns, but they rarely hear the on-the-ground insights from the sales team talking directly to customers every day. Without that feedback, marketing’s messaging can miss the mark, and sales loses confidence in the materials and campaigns designed to support them.

The Fix: 5 Ways to Build a Better Sales & Marketing Partnership

1. Define Shared Goals—Together

Start with a collaborative planning session that brings sales and marketing together to define:

• What counts as a qualified lead?

• What revenue targets are we working toward?

• How will we measure success for both teams?

When both sides have skin in the game, they’re far more likely to work as partners instead of opponents.

2. Set Up Regular Cross-Team Check-Ins

Don’t wait until there’s a problem to get sales and marketing in the same room. Schedule monthly or quarterly “alignment sessions” to review performance, troubleshoot issues, and identify new opportunities. Bonus: these meetings also help build trust and relationships between the teams—something no tech platform can replace.

3. Create a Real-Time Feedback Loop

Marketing shouldn’t be guessing what’s happening in the field. Set up a simple system for sales to provide feedback on lead quality, messaging effectiveness, and customer objections. This can be as basic as a shared document or as advanced as a feedback form in your CRM—but it only works if both teams actually use it.

4. Build Campaigns Sales Can Get Behind

Too often, marketing creates campaigns in a vacuum, only looping in sales after the creative is locked and loaded. Flip the script.

• Ask sales to weigh in on messaging.

• Gather input on which customer pain points need addressing.

• Co-create materials that sales will actually use in the field.

When sales feels ownership, they’re more likely to use and advocate for marketing materials.

5. Align Incentives Where Possible

If marketing is rewarded for leads and sales is rewarded for deals, you’re unintentionally setting up a system where each team optimizes for different outcomes. Where it makes sense, tie part of marketing’s compensation or performance reviews to revenue goals—not just lead counts. When marketing’s success depends on what happens after the handoff, they’ll naturally become more invested in the quality (not just quantity) of leads.

Final Thought: It’s Not Marketing vs. Sales—It’s Marketing AND Sales

In the automotive aftermarket, you can’t afford to let internal turf wars stall your growth.

Whether you’re selling performance parts, accessories, tools, or technology, the companies that win are the ones where marketing and sales function as a single, strategic growth engine.

The Moody Blueprint helps companies break down silos, align strategies, and build growth plans that work in the real world—not just the conference room.

Want to see how we do it? Let’s talk.