The real issue between sales and marketing is primarily strategic - Interview with Mélanie Roth

In a nutshell

• Sales-marketing alignment rarely fails because of tools or execution. It mostly fails when teams don't share the same understanding of the market, the customer and growth priorities.

• It's not numbers that motivate teams, it's clarity that does.

• Growing SMEs have more to gain from optimizing their existing accounts than from chasing after new prospects.

Mélanie Roth has been at the intersection of sales, marketing and data for over 25 years. Founder of Melanie Roth & Co, a company offering on-demand CMO/CRO services, she has assembled a team of seasoned sales, marketing and growth leaders to help SMEs structure their growth without having to build a full executive team in-house.

The approach combines strategic leadership and execution capability, with direct involvement in management teams to better align sales, marketing, operations and performance.

In this interview, she shares her vision of sales-marketing alignment, the strategic blind spots that impede growth, and the importance of reconnecting teams to market reality.

You act as a bridge between the founders and the operational teams.

In your experience, what's the biggest blind spot that companies forget to address when trying to align their sales and marketing?

In my opinion, the majority of problems between sales and marketing are not execution problems. They are first and foremost problems of strategy and alignment.

The first blind spot is KPI definition and segmentation. Sales and marketing often work with different definitions of the "right customer", different priorities or different perceptions of the market. And when this basis isn't clear, the pipeline quickly becomes a debate of opinions rather than a driver of growth.

For me, it all starts with a clear definition of the ideal customer:

• who the company really wants to target,
• in what geography,
• and which segments are the most profitable.

The second element is the importance of marketing staying connected to the field. Marketing becomes ineffective as soon as it stops listening to customers.

The best marketing teams I've seen are those who participate in sales pitches, listen to sales calls, attend events and talk directly to customers. This is often where we understand the real pain points, the language customers use and the objections that keep coming up.

Particularly in B2B, many successful companies are in factsales led, marketing supported. Marketing then becomes a strategic lever to support credibility, accelerate the sales cycle and structure the message, rather than a simple volume driver.

Finally, the human element remains fundamental. A company can have an excellent strategy and the best tools, but if the sales and marketing leaders don't collaborate well or share a common vision, alignment becomes extremely difficult.

That's probably why I'm often able to play this bridging role in organizations. I've worked in both sales and marketing environments, which enables me to understand the realities and objectives of both sides, and above all to help teams move in the same direction.

How do you manage to reconcile analytical rigor with the human mobilization of teams, so that figures become a motivating force rather than a source of pressure?

I think numbers become problematic when they're only used to monitor performance rather than to help teams better understand what's working.

Numbers don't mobilize teams, but clarity does.

When data becomes a tool to better prioritize, collaborate and make better decisions, teams embrace it much more readily.

My approach is therefore to simplify the reading of performance. I seek to identify the few indicators that have a real impact on growth, rather than multiplying dashboards and KPIs that nobody really uses.

Above all, I pay close attention to the context behind the figures. Data alone never tells the whole story. You have to understand the reality on the ground, the operations, the maturity of the business and the frictions that slow down execution.

I also believe that a team becomes successful when it understands how its actions concretely influence the company's growth. When objectives are clear and teams can really see their impact, numbers become much less a source of pressure and much more a tool for alignment.

And frankly, the best performance cultures I've seen aren't the ones with the most KPIs. They're the ones where teams clearly understand what they need to act on to make a real impact.

For a company that feels its growth is stagnating, and is struggling with incomplete data, what would be your first piece of advice to help it see more clearly, and really regain control of its strategy?

The first piece of advice would probably be not to fall into the reflex of doing more too quickly.

Many companies try to solve a clarity problem with more execution: more campaigns, more tools, more initiatives. But adding more actions to a poorly understood strategy rarely accelerates growth. It mostly accelerates complexity.

Before accelerating, we need to take a step back.

I often start by going back to very simple questions:

• Where does growth really come from?
• Which segments are the most profitable?
• Where are opportunities being lost?
• What important signals are not being followed today?
• And above all: are we really exploiting the potential of existing customers?

The opportunity for upsell or growth in existing accounts is still hugely underestimated. Many companies focus their efforts almost exclusively on acquiring new customers, whereas there is often much faster and more profitable growth potential in established relationships.

I also think you have to accept that you'll never have all the perfect information from the outset. An important part of strategy is to formulate intelligent hypotheses, then test them quickly on a small scale before investing further.

After working in a number of different industries and growth contexts, you quickly come to recognize certain patterns: the signals that indicate that a strategy is plateauing, that positioning is unclear, or that teams are no longer really working in the same direction.

In the end, the aim is not to have a perfect strategy on paper. It's about creating enough clarity and agility to make better decisions faster.

You wrote that "a good strategy starts with an honest understanding of the data we have...but also of the data we don't have". What's the phantom KPI you're systematically looking for, but that many CRMs still don't track properly?

When I wrote that, the "data we don't have" was mostly referring to making sure we're looking at the right KPIs and, above all, that we really understand what they're telling us.

Many organizations have an enormous amount of data, but the indicators are often analyzed individually rather than as a whole. On paper, many figures may look very positive, when in reality, the growth model is not necessarily healthy or scalable.

I often give a concrete example: for one customer, the figures seemed excellent at first glance. There were lots of inbound leads, sales were increasing, and commercial activity was strong. But when we started to connect certain KPIs together, we realized that the conversion rate between leads and sales was very low.

So the problem wasn't volume. The problem was the quality of the leads.

We then completely reoriented our strategy to better qualify upstream opportunities:

• better targeting,
• better segmentation,
• more precise messages,
• clearer qualification criteria between sales and marketing.

And that's what enabled us to really accelerate growth.

For me, the phantom KPI is often the one that connects the data together to understand the real quality of growth, not just the volume of activity.

Because at the end of the day, a company can have lots of leads, lots of activity, and even growing sales... But if the model isn't efficient or scalable, the numbers don't tell the right story.

Finally, what kind of company has the most to gain from using your services, and how does working with Melanie Roth & Coconcretely make an immediate impact on management?

The companies with which our approach works best are often SMEs that have always managed to grow, but are reaching a point where they feel that growth is slowing down or becoming much harder to sustain.

Executives understand that they need to better structure their growth, sales, marketing and data to get to the next level, but don't necessarily have the budget to hire a full-time sales/marketing executive. And often, they also realize that a more junior or highly specialized resource alone won't provide the necessary strategic vision, alignment and prioritization capability.

It was precisely to address this reality that I developed an on-demand CMO/CRO approach.

Over time, I have gathered around me a team of seasoned leaders in sales, marketing and growth, combined with a highly versatile execution team capable of rapidly deploying the necessary initiatives.

The aim is to offer the best of both worlds:

• senior strategic leadership,
• real execution capability,
• a multidisciplinary team,
• and a much more competitive cost structure.

We become a real stakeholder in the organization, being directly involved in the management team, just like the other executive members of the company. The aim is to help the organization regain clarity, structure growth, align priorities and accelerate decision-making.

And frankly, the quickest impact is often at management level. When leaders regain better visibility of their growth and feel that their teams are finally moving in the same direction, decisions become much simpler and much more effective.

Whether you're structuring your pipeline, reconciling your teams around a shared vision or simply trying to understand why your growth is plateauing, Mélanie's approach offers a concrete framework for regaining control.

LinkedIn of Mélanie Roth.