Marketing 2025: Let’s Stop Talking about Stakeholder Alignment

Organizations shouldn't be hiring for alignment, they should be hiring for vision, impact, and strategic execution.

I’ve been on the hunt for a new marketing leadership role. Throughout this process, as I explore job descriptions and organization’s websites, there’s been many interesting insights. But one thing continues to puzzle me is the myriad of job descriptions requiring marketing leaders to “build alignment between sales, marketing, and/or other key stakeholders”. 

A few examples pulled from recent jobs posts:

• “Partner closely with BDR and Sales organizations to ensure messaging alignment and lead follow-up”

• “Ensure cross-functional collaboration with Sales, Product Marketing, and Customer Success to ensure seamless alignment.”

• “Partner closely with the business unit and other senior leaders to ensure alignment between marketing efforts and overall business objectives.”

  
  

Why does this need to be called out in job descriptions? They might as well say - “You need to be able to breathe.” It’s 2025, alignment should be a given. That’s table stakes for any B2B marketing leader to be successful. I’ve never worked in a marketing or communications function that didn’t require sales and marketing to be in lockstep to hit targets and drive growth.

The Persistent Stakeholder Alignment Requirement

Successful marketing leaders aren’t just collaborators; they are business strategists influencing go-to-market decisions, revenue growth, and customer retention. By the very nature of the job, marketing leaders must interact with a variety of functions - sales, product, finance, customer success, leadership, communications, HR, and more to grow the business.

I can’t fathom how I, or any other marketer, could do my job without this alignment, just as I can’t do my marketing job without knowing how to string a sentence together, understanding what a CRM is, or recognizing why we need leads.

The fact that alignment is still called out as a critical requirement suggests one of two things: outdated structures and leadership expectations or, more likely, a fundamental misunderstanding of what marketing does and how it serves the business. Good marketing leaders moved beyond these basics a long time ago.

Where Marketing Leaders Should Be Focused

Experienced marketing leaders (and the organizations that hire them) should be prioritizing the following:

• Revenue Impact: Constantly thinking about how marketing directly drives and influences pipeline and deal velocity.

• Delivering the Customer Promise: Holding the business accountable for delivering what the business said it would.

• Customer-Centric Growth: Going beyond just lead gen to focus on retention, expansion, and advocacy.

• Insights: Harnessing data, market and customer insights to drive decision-making for the whole organization.

• Brand and Category Creation: Differentiating beyond product features and competing on thought leadership.

• Operational Efficiency: Developing scalable, repeatable marketing processes that drive predictable growth.

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Be Better Than Alignment

The most success I’ve had in my career came when sales and marketing had:

• Clear consensus on the role of each function.

• A shared understanding of how they work in tandem.

• Regular conversations on targets and progress.

• Broad organizational support, especially from the C-suite and other key stakeholders.

When this foundation is in place, sales and marketing leaders can build a unified strategy and tactical execution plan that both teams understand and work to deliver. It results in clear outcomes tied to revenue growth, customer expansion, and market differentiation.

Organizations that expect marketing leaders to focus on basic stakeholder collaboration are missing the bigger picture. Organizations with truly strategic marketing teams don’t hire for alignment—they hire leaders who will deliver vision, impact and strategic execution. And those are far harder skill sets to find. 

A Call to Action

It’s easy to tell if hiring managers understand the marketing function or not. I was interviewing for a CMO role (along with the associated wage that comes with that role) after about 45 minutes the COO asked me to send writing samples to the recruiter. Immediate red flag. The odds are high they won’t hire the kind of leader they actually need to pivot their business to a new market as they were hoping to do.

Start looking at marketing leadership as a growth function, not a support function. You want leaders who:

• Inherently know the importance of collaboration.

• Build cohesive strategies anchored to a differentiated vision and impact

• Ensure all functions understand the plan, their role in it, and are executing in lock-step.

If alignment is still a major issue in your organization, maybe the real issue isn’t marketing—it’s leadership.