When I headed up sales for my previous company, ion interactive, you could say I was pretty close to the marketing department, since my husband was our CMO.

There were many benefits to having sales and marketing so, ahem, close. When both are connected by wedding rings, one hand always knows what the other hand is doing. Strategic and tactical initiatives are almost always decided together, and challenges are solved in unison. We ran our company ran like we ran our marriage, with sales and marketing truly and totally aligned.

Or so I thought.

Imagine my surprise when our promoted-from-within director of sales sat in his first executive leadership meeting and identified sales and marketing alignment as the number one challenge he wanted to solve in the first 90 days of his new role.

Yep, that really happened.

Once I got past the obvious embarrassment of not being aligned with the department my husband leads, it was time to get serious. According to Aberdeen Group, companies that optimize the marketing/sales relationship grow 32% faster, while companies who fail to nurture that relationship actually see their business decline.

I realized that I might have been overlooking some of the key elements that make for a beneficial relationship between marketing and sales. Here are a few relationship tips for fostering a better bond between the teams.

Communication is key for sales & marketing alignment

Before we ultimately shifted our strategy, sales and marketing alignment simply meant that both teams knew what the other was doing and were generally in agreement about the best way to move forward. The average exchange between my team and theirs sounded something like this:

Marketing: “I’d like to do another email drop with Acme Advertising Solutions. Seems like we got a good cost per assigned lead last time, and we opened up some solid pipeline from that campaign.”

Sales: “Great, yes, we love those campaigns with Acme! We get lots of fresh leads, and they generally respond to our outreach. Go for it! We’re so happy and supportive of what you are doing! Rainbows! Puppy dogs! Glitter!”

Or, just as commonly:

Sales: “Please give us a new asset so we can address this objection we are hearing.”

Marketing: “Here you go! Presto! Abracadabra! Your wish is our command.”

And that vague communication style wasn’t unique to us. A recent study by Demand Gen found that 49% of respondents on both marketing and sales teams reported that communication was their biggest challenge to alignment. Simply passing off materials between teams without doing a deep dive into what’s working (and what’s not) isn’t necessarily the best way to achieve real alignment, no matter how well your teams get along.

Relationships require teamwork

Which is not to say marketing and sales weren’t working well independently of one another. We were a smart, data-driven organization. Marketing kept tabs on a wide-range of key data and tracked cost per lead, cost per-assigned lead, pipeline generated by campaign source, cost per customer acquisition, and everything in between. In sales, we tracked deal velocity, average sales cycle, closed/lost analysis, closed/won percentages, and every other pipeline stage percentage. Plus lots more. We were swimming in great, useful data.

Of course, you might know the punchline by now. We both had data that was great for running our departments,