As the calendar flips to a new year, many leaders find themselves asking tough questions: Why isn’t our growth where we want it to be? Why is every department working hard, but we’re not seeing the results we need?
The answer might not be in how hard your team works but in how aligned they are.
What we'll cover in this post:
What organizational alignment means
Signs your teams could be misaligned
Why organizational alignment matters
Actionable tips to improve organizational alignment
What Does Alignment Mean?
In this context, I emphasize organizational alignment, unified teams, and working in sync. This means seamless coordination of your business’s strategy, culture, and talent, ensuring that all teams work toward shared goals and reducing friction from departmental silos. Imagine your teams collaborating with clients' business challenges at the forefront. Employees who find purpose in their work are also happier.
Misalignment, on the other hand, manifests in ways that might seem familiar:
Sales and marketing pointing fingers over the quality of leads or follow-through.
Service teams struggling to deliver on promises sales made during the pitch.
Department leaders working hard, but often at cross-purposes.
When goals aren't met, it's always someone else's fault.
All of that sounds annoying to manage, but it can be far more costly than just a few headaches after meetings.
Why Does Alignment Matter?
Alignment Drives Revenue Growth and Profitability
From an LSA Global Study, Highly aligned companies were found to grow revenue 58% faster and were 72% more profitable than their peers.
Let's envision what that looks like. Based on data from Fincent, small businesses in the U.S. experience an average annual revenue growth rate between 7% and 8%. And according to Vena Solutions, profit margins for small businesses typically range from 7% to 10%.
Applying these averages to a company with an initial Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) of $5 million and a 10% profit margin, we can project the following over a 5-year period:
Now let's look at what that company can accomplish when it aligns:
I've even seen it myself, which is why I am a champion. For 6 years, I led an aligned department within a misaligned organization. We posted an average of 27% annual increase revenue, 50% improvement in client retention, and employee tenure more than doubled. I often imagine what we could have accomplished if the CEO had led the alignment initiative. Or perhaps, as the finger-pointers suggested, maybe I was just "lucky" every year.
Misalignment Undermines Morale, Client Trust, and Revenue
Misalignment creates a fractured employee and customer experience, which is tha main reason why highly-aligned companies outperform their peers.
Metrics Tell the Story
Highly aligned companies:
Retain customers at more than twice the rate of misaligned companies.
Improve customer satisfaction by 3.2-to-1.
See employee engagement levels 16.8 times higher than their peers.
Adaptability in a Rapidly Changing Landscape
In a rapidly changing world, alignment ensures agility. Teams using a single source of truth can analyze data, make decisions, assign tasks, and act faster than those hindered by silos or conflicts. This agility distinguishes companies that thrive from those that falter in response to shifting consumer demands or economic downturns.
Alignment Starts at the Top
Achieving alignment requires top-down leadership. The CEO must recognize the need for alignment and actively champion it by discouraging infighting, unifying data across departments, and fostering collaboration. The real "business enemy" is not your co-worker but rather your competition.
Actionable Tip: Set an ambitious goal for 2025 and assign supporting goals to each department. Use a single source of truth to track progress and hold regular reviews for focus and accountability.
Signs of Misalignment
That LSA Global study uncovered misalignment on alignment itself: while employees perceived an average of 82% alignment within their companies, the actual alignment measured was only 23%. So how can you tell if you're misaligned or out of sync?
1. Sales and Marketing Friction
I list this first because, despite being complementary, sales and marketing teams often clash. Misalignment appears in various forms, typically stemming from a lack of collaboration and mutual understanding. Does this sound familiar?
Salespeople complaining about the quality or quantity of leads generated by marketing.
Marketing expressing frustration that sales doesn't follow up on their leads.
Sales teams often create their own materials when marketing content is unhelpful, leading to inefficiencies. Meanwhile, marketing may feel their efforts are unappreciated or ignored.
Or disconnected messaging, like sales teams using terminology that differs from what is on the company website.
The consequences go beyond frustration. A disjointed sales and marketing relationship wastes time on redundant efforts, such as pursuing unqualified leads or creating unused marketing assets.
Misalignment also leads to a fragmented customer experience, as prospects read one thing on your website and hear something different from sales. B2B buying is usually done by committee with one person leading the project. If your team confuses that person, they're going to see a reputation risk if they move forward with you.
Actionable tip: Hold a quarterly "no blaming" allowed session where sales shares client objections. The marketing team will then create assets to help the sales team address these common objections.
2. Sales and Service Frustration
In a misaligned organization, the handoff from sales to service lacks seamlessness, leading to unmet client expectations and misunderstandings. Service teams may be blindsided by promises made during sales that they cannot fulfill, resulting from overpromising, unclear communication, or client misinterpretation. The outcome is clients feeling deceived. In the worst case, clients may not go live and could later leave for a competitor due to distrust.
The repercussions extend beyond one complaining customer. Dissatisfied clients are more likely to leave negative online reviews or share frustrations with others. Research shows unhappy customers are ten times more likely than satisfied ones to leave unsolicited reviews, and it takes twelve positive reviews to counterbalance one negative review.
Worse, research indicates hat it can take up to 40 positive experiences for a client to get over an experience they perceive as negative. Meaning that bad experiences can linger in a client’s memory, making it difficult to regain their trust even after issues are addressed.
In misaligned teams, the service team often sides with the client and fails to investigate what sales communicated. These perceptions only deepens the divide.
Actionable Tip: Hold a quarterly Q&A session between the sales and service teams. Sales can share common questions from prospects and get answers direct from the SMEs, while Service can provide insights on FAQs during implementation questions to help Sales manage expectations.
3. Internal Blame Games
Finger-pointing is a hallmark of misalignment. Instead of collaborating to find solutions, leaders focus on blaming someone or something else. This shifts the conversation away from solutions and toward defensiveness, creating a culture of fear where people are hesitant to take risks or propose ideas.
Any of this sound familiar:
A service leader frustrated about lackluster sales suggesting that the sales team simply needs higher quotas, failing to understand the metrics behind those quotas.
A sales leader ordering specific content from marketing without understanding marketing's broader objectives.
A sales leader demanding a feature be added to the system to win a deal, failing to understand the product roadmap and what the diversion could mean to long-term progress.
A marketing leader putting the sales team on blast for not following up on the leads generated without having a full understanding of the signs shown by a sales ready prospect.
These siloed, reactionary suggestions lead to wasted effort and missed opportunities.
The culture of blame often leads employees to focus on protecting their own metrics and reputations rather than collaborating for the good of the organization. In an environment where misalignment is tolerated, individuals and departments work hard, but often at cross-purposes, perpetuating inefficiencies and fostering distrust.
Actionable Tip: Institute two rules: 1. No dictating tasks to other teams and 2. For every complaint you bring up, you have to have two potential solutions that you can do, to resolve the issue (see rule number 1).
4. Revenue plateau or Stagnation
Are you selling new logo deals consistently, but not much more than your clients losses each year? Have you ever thought that your failure to achieve your growth goals might be due to changing buyer preferences, increased competition, or market conditions?
You're not alone. And you're not wrong, at least entirely. Buyer preferences have shifted within the last 4-5 years. A lot. When times get tough, your competitors do drop their prices. And it now takes up to 20 touches just for a prospect to stop their scroll and notice you. With buying committees getting larger and sales cycles getting longer, you're not even close to a sales after those 20 touches.
But what if your teams didn't resign to the inevitability that changing conditions mean a decline in new sales? What if, instead, they banded together and figured out a way to win despite the challenges they face?
The best example I can think of is the restaurant industry in 2020 during COIVD-19 lockdowns. People couldn't gather indoors, so you obviously couldn't operate a dine-in restaurant, right? Sadly, many small restaurants closed for good during that time. And yet, others quickly pivoted (the most over-used word of 2020), adapting their business model to the times by offering meal kits people could take home and cook. In my hometown, a microbrew started making hand sanitizer in April 2020 so they could operate as an "essential business".
I feel bad for all the businesses that closed permanently; I am also inspired by the ones who didn't let market conditions or a recession put them out of business. The difference was their ability to act quickly under pressure. And that takes leaders aligned on a singular goal.
Revenue stagnation also impacts employee morale significantly. When employees see no path for their career growth, they may worry about job security or become disengaged, adopting a “what’s the point?” attitude. Growth creates opportunity - when your company is growing, employees will see opportunity for them to advance their career within your organization. No one is motivated to work hard if they think they'll have to wait for their manager to retire in order to be promoted.
An aligned organization instills confidence in its workforce by demonstrating a unified commitment to overcoming challenges. And doesn't it feel good to be part of the winning team?!? Anyone else notice a lot more Kansas City Chiefs gear in their hometown now as opposed to several years ago?
Actionable Tip: Encourage leaders and workers to always focus on what they CAN control instead of focusing on outside forces like unfavorable market conditions.
5. Cherry-Picked Data and Vanity Reporting
Misaligned organizations often have siloed data and leaders cherry-picked stats that make them and their team look good. Remember, no one wants the finger of blame pointed at them. Those vanity metrics make their teams look good in isolation but fail to address the company’s broader challenges. This creates a distorted view of performance, making it difficult to identify and address root causes of problems. If everyone is crushing it, why aren't we meeting our growth goals?
Any of this sound familiar:
Marketing reports increased website traffic without also reporting bounce rate, or conversions.
Sales reports an increased number of closed contracts this quarter, but fails to also report that contract value declined, meaning that overall new logo revenue is actually down.
Service reports high client retention rates without also acknowledging that they're including those new logo sales in their "retention" stat.
A leader gives vague statistics, doesn't share their math or formula, or doesn't always seem to report on the same stats every quarter.
This lack of a unified data source prevents leaders from making informed, strategic decisions. In contrast, aligned organizations prioritize transparency, using a single source of truth for reporting and fostering collaboration around shared metrics.
Actionable Tip: Adopt KPIs as an organization, and agree upon a data set that will be used to measure. Perhaps an unbiased source maintaining the data, such as the CEO's office or an outside CPA. And encourage people to come to meetings with action plans for underperforming areas.
6. Low Morale
I won't belabor this point, since it's been sprinkled in above, but a sign of a misaligned team is often low morale. Does your team complain, bicker, or spend a lot of time chewing on the ear of your HR person? Do they spend too much time on their cell phones? Call in sick a lot or seem like they don't want to work?
It's possible there have been some imperfect hiring decisions made. But perhaps there's a toxic manager - and how does that manager get along with other managers?
If you notice signs of low morale, go back and read the above and see if you've also go any other signs of misalignment.
Actionable Tip: This one isn't an overnight fix. Start having offsite coffee chats with your front line employees. Take notes and when you've finished meeting with them all, load the notes into a Gen AI model and ask it to summarize the main points.
Taking Action
If any of this resonates with you, the good news is that alignment is achievable, but that doesn't mean it's easy or can be accomplished overnight. It requires intention, communication, and a commitment to shared goals.
Start by reflecting on these questions:
Do all of your departments have a unified understanding of your company’s strategy?
Are your teams focused on driving customer value?
Are there consistent feedback loops between leadership and front-line employees?
Steps to Get Started with organizational alignment
Focus on Customer Value: Research shows companies that prioritize customer value outperform their peers. Alignment begins by ensuring every team understands how their role contributes to solving customer challenges. And there is significant pride associated with that kind of work.
Build Cross-Departmental Bridges: Break down silos by encouraging collaboration between departments. For example, have marketing join sales calls or bring service teams into strategy discussions. Have every new employee shadow other departments - walking a mile in someone's shoes is a great empathy builder.
Commit to Dialogue: Top-down directives don’t create alignment, dialogue does. Leaders must foster open communication and invite input from all levels of the organization. And remember - every complaint must come with two potential solutions.
What’s Next?
As you head into 2025, take a hard look at your organization. Are you working together, or are your departments working hard, but unintentionally working against each other? Alignment could be the key to unlocking your growth potential.
Check out my podcast, the next episode will cover "Overcoming Resistance to Change: Emotional Barriers to Alignment".
My online forum contains a growing library of free tools and resources and exclusive mini pods on all of the topics I talk about.
AI transparency: I used Perplexity to help me find current research and stats to support the "why alignment matters" section. I used NotebookLM to review all the articles and pull out the main points and stats. ChatGPT helped me brainstorm the idea, create the outline, and write a catchy title. And this post was looong, so I used Rytr to help me shorten some of the longer paragraphs without changing my tone too much.
Rise of Us is a practice run by Summer Poletti, specializing in revenue growth: sales, strategic partnerships, customer success, marketing alignment. We generally work with financial services and SaaS companies from $3MM - $10MM ARR and help them plan and execute for their next stage of revenue growth. We concentrate on strategy, coaching, and organizational alignment.
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