How to Align Marketing & Sales for Faster Revenue Growth in the Sustainability Sector

For businesses in the fast-evolving sustainability sector, fostering alignment between marketing and sales is no longer optional. Green businesses often have complex offerings, long sales cycles, and a mission-driven audience that demands both credibility and clarity. When marketing and sales teams aren’t working in sync, growth slows, leads fall through the cracks, and your sustainability message gets diluted.

In this article, we’ll explore how to create marketing and sales alignment that accelerates revenue growth—backed by data, technology, and shared strategy.

Why Marketing & Sales Misalignment Hurts Revenue

Misalignment between marketing and sales is a silent growth killer. In the sustainability sector, where buying decisions often involve technical detail, ESG compliance, and educational content, a lack of cross-functional alignment can derail even the most well-intentioned growth strategy. Here are just a few ways misalignment can stunt company growth:

• Marketing might generate leads that aren’t sales-ready. This results in sales teams wasting time trying to close deals with unqualified leads.
• Sales may not follow up with MQLs quickly or consistently due to communication delays between sales and marketing.
• Both teams might have different definitions of success. In an ideal team structure, the success of marketing campaigns directly benefits sales teams and helps them meet their KPIs. But if each team is working towards metrics that don’t tie into that of the other team, the company’s sales cycle ends up slowed or even stalled.

According to HubSpot, organizations with strong alignment between marketing and sales achieve 20% higher annual revenue growth on average. For sustainability companies, where both mission and margins matter, that kind of impact is game-changing.

Key Components of a Unified Sales & Marketing Strategy

Shared Goals & KPIs for Sustainable Companies

The first step to alignment is speaking the same language. That means agreeing on what success looks like—and how it will be measured.

Some shared KPIs for sustainability-focused companies might include:

• Marketing-Qualified Leads (MQLs)
• Sales-Qualified Leads (SQLs)
• Average deal size
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)
• Deal velocity

Through working with dozens of sustainable companies over the years, we’ve found that many companies don’t have a shared internal definition or understanding of these terms. When everyone within a team has a different definition of an MQL, that KPI becomes meaningless. It’s essential to create clear, shared definitions of what these KPIs mean to your company, and determine how they will be measured and reported. When both teams share ownership over pipeline and revenue goals, collaboration becomes natural, not forced.

Using CRM & Data to Improve Collaboration

Your CRM must serve as a single source of truth that connects marketing activity with sales outcomes. When everyone can see lead activity, content engagement, and deal progression, decisions become data-driven—not anecdotal.

Leverage your CRM to support cross-team alignment with:

• Lifecycle stages
• Lead scoring
• Deal tracking tied to campaign attribution
• Shared contact records with marketing and sales notes
• Dashboards that reflect joint KPIs

Want to go deeper? Read: The Future of Sustainability Marketing & Sales Strategy →

Best Practices for Marketing & Sales Alignment

If you want results, alignment needs to be embedded in your day-to-day processes—not just talked about in quarterly reviews. True collaboration happens when both teams are incentivized to work together toward shared goals and are equipped with the tools and information to do so. Here’s how to make that happen:

1. Hold Joint Planning Meetings

Regular, structured planning meetings between marketing and sales teams are essential for maintaining alignment and momentum. These sessions should go beyond status updates and instead focus on syncing campaign timelines, messaging priorities, and target accounts. For example, if marketing is launching a campaign focused on clean energy tax incentives, sales should know the messaging, call-to-action, and content being used so they can reinforce it in their conversations. This cross-functional input ensures that campaigns are both relevant to the market and useful for driving pipeline.

2. Define Clear Lead Handoff Criteria

One of the biggest breakdowns between marketing and sales occurs during lead handoff. Without clear, agreed-upon definitions of MQLs and SQLs, your teams risk wasting time on the wrong prospects—or worse, missing out on good ones. By implementing a lead scoring model that reflects both engagement signals (downloads, webinar attendance) and firmographic data (industry, company size, ESG priorities), marketing can ensure that sales is only receiving leads that are genuinely ready for outreach. HubSpot’s lead scoring and lifecycle stage features make this easy to implement and optimize over time.

3. Build Shared Buyer Personas

Creating buyer personas shouldn’t be the sole responsibility of the marketing team. Sales reps have direct access to customer pain points, objections, and decision-making dynamics that can dramatically improve persona development. These teams should collaborate to build detailed, actionable personas that reflect the unique buying behaviors of sustainability decision-makers,  such as procurement officers at ESG-focused manufacturers or policy-conscious COOs at renewable energy firms. These personas should guide everything from campaign messaging to sales scripts.

4. Create a Sales Enablement Library

A sales enablement library is a centralized collection of resources that empowers reps to have more informed, confident conversations with prospects. For sustainability-focused companies, this might include ESG case studies, ROI calculators for green technology adoption, whitepapers on clean energy policy, or one-pagers explaining Scope 3 emissions. Marketing should collaborate with sales to build, organize, and continuously update this library based on feedback from the field. When reps have the right content at their fingertips, they can respond faster and more persuasively, especially when prospects ask technical or policy-driven questions.

5. Use Closed-Loop Reporting

Marketing can only improve if they know what’s working, and that requires visibility into what happens after a lead is handed off. Closed-loop reporting tracks the full customer journey from first interaction to closed deal, allowing both teams to understand which campaigns, channels, and messages are actually driving revenue. This kind of feedback loop is especially important in the sustainability sector, where deals often involve multiple stakeholders and long nurturing cycles. HubSpot’s campaign attribution tools and contact lifecycle reports are invaluable for connecting the dots and making smarter decisions across both teams.

Tools & Strategies to Improve Communication & Lead Handoff

Effective alignment also relies on smart tooling and automation. Here’s how to streamline collaboration:

• HubSpot Workflows: Automatically assign lead stages based on behavior (e.g., downloading a whitepaper on net-zero compliance).
• Sales Alerts: Notify reps when a prospect takes high-intent actions, like watching a demo or requesting pricing.
• Email Templates & Sequences: Ensure consistent messaging and follow-up tailored to sustainability challenges.
• Meeting Links & Bookings: Make it easy for leads to schedule sales calls directly from marketing emails or landing pages.

Explore our sales enablement content for more resources→

Case Study: Successful Marketing & Sales Alignment in Clean Energy

Take Reposit Power, an Australian clean energy company that struggled with siloed tools and misaligned teams. After implementing HubSpot's CRM and aligning around shared goals, they:

• Grew qualified leads by 300%
• Increased sales pipeline volume by 280%
• Improved follow-up speed and conversion rates

Marketing began creating content that directly addressed sales objections, while sales used engagement data from campaigns to personalize outreach. The result? Faster deals and more mission-aligned growth.

View the full case study →

Final Steps to Improve Revenue Growth

Alignment isn’t a one-time project—it’s a mindset and a system. And for sustainability businesses, it’s the secret to scaling both your impact and your revenue.

Here’s how to get started: 

✅ Audit where your teams are currently misaligned
✅ Build shared dashboards and buyer personas
✅ Consolidate your tech stack with tools like HubSpot CRM
✅ Regularly review your shared KPIs and refine handoff processes

When marketing and sales are aligned, you don’t just close more deals—you close better ones, faster, and with mission-driven clients who stay longer and spend more.