Hitting sales targets in B2B should be a well-oiled machine. Plenty of businesses are falling short anyway, and the reasons are more structural than most leadership teams want to admit.

I've always believed sales success comes from genuinely understanding your audience. Not the product, the person — their pain points, their aspirations, and what keeps them awake. What are your customers' goals? What are they grappling with daily? How do they decide, and who do they trust when they do?

After years working with businesses across industries, I keep finding the same two reasons organisations miss their numbers.

1. Sales and marketing misalignment

The most glaring issue is the gap between sales and marketing. They share objectives — revenue growth, customer acquisition, brand expansion — and they routinely operate in silos with barely any communication between them.

I've watched the classic "us versus them" play out at company after company. Marketing is from Venus, sales is from Mars, and nobody is incentivised to translate. Marketing complains the leads were followed up badly. Sales complains the leads were never any good. Both are describing the same broken handover from opposite ends, and because each team's targets are set separately, both can hit their numbers while the business misses its own.

The two shouldn't merely coexist. When they genuinely work together, the effect is measurable:

1. Organisations with strong alignment see a 20% increase in annual revenue growth, according to the Aberdeen Group.
2. Closely aligned companies enjoy a 36% higher conversion rate from lead to opportunity, per MarketingProfs.
3. HubSpot reports sales productivity rises 34% when the two functions are aligned.
4. SiriusDecisions found aligned businesses see 27% faster profit growth over three years.

How's that for data to get these two teams talking?

The fix is rarely a new tool. It's shared definitions and shared accountability — agreeing what a qualified lead actually is, in writing, and holding both teams to the same downstream number rather than to two separate ones that can both be met while revenue stalls.

If your business is missing targets, the first question isn't about pipeline. It's whether your sales and marketing teams are working together or quietly working against each other.

2. Buyers moved. Sales tactics didn't.

The second issue is that B2B buyers have evolved while a lot of sales practice has stood still, and the pandemic accelerated a shift that was already well underway.

Buyers are more digitally capable, more self-reliant and more data-driven than they were. They use AI to guide decisions, read reviews, and do substantial research long before they'll speak to anyone in sales. By the time they do make contact, they often know your pricing model, your competitors and your weak points. Yet plenty of teams still work as though a few calls and one presentation will close a deal.

Four things have changed in particular.

Remote work made digital collaboration standard. Buyers now expect video calls, online demos and virtual negotiation as the default rather than the fallback, and a seller who insists on a room is adding friction rather than warmth.

AI has made buyers better informed than ever. They analyse reviews, compare performance data and pressure-test claims before the first conversation. That raises the bar on what a salesperson has to add — repeating the website is worse than useless.

E-commerce has absorbed high-ticket transactions. Buyers now purchase substantial B2B items through online marketplaces without ever speaking to a salesperson, which means convenience competes directly with relationship.

Supply chain fragility changed the criteria. The pandemic exposed how brittle global supply chains were, and buyers came out of it more risk-conscious, weighting local sourcing and supplier reliability far more heavily than price alone.

Buyers have moved forward. Sellers need to catch up.

What Martin Garvey sees at Gong

On a recent episode of the SaaS Stories podcast, I had the pleasure of speaking with Martin Garvey, a sales leader at Gong, about why B2B SaaS teams keep missing targets even when everything looks fine on the dashboard.

Listen to the full episode of SaaS Stories with Martin Garvey

His first answer is a time problem. Salespeople spend up to 70% of their time on non-selling activity — updating the CRM, writing reports, preparing for meetings, chasing internal approvals. That's time not spent building relationships or closing anything, and it rarely shows up in a pipeline review because the activity metrics all look healthy.

His second is about who's in the room. Win rates rise 16% when four or more contacts are involved in a deal, and most teams still concentrate on a single champion and hope that's enough. In an era of buying committees, it isn't. Your champion can leave, get reassigned, or simply lack the authority everyone assumed they had, and a single-threaded deal dies the moment any of those happen.

"If you're not multi-threading, you're not selling. Sales cycles drag on when you're only talking to one person."

Revenue intelligence tools like Gong's exist precisely to attack both problems — cutting administrative load, and showing you whether you are actually engaging the whole committee or just the one person who returns your calls.

How to shorten your sales cycle

Here's what we use at Hat Media, and with our clients.

Do the buyer persona work properly. Progressive profiling helps you understand needs, goals and pain points without demanding everything in one form. The better you understand the buyer, the faster you can tailor the approach — and the fewer discovery calls you burn establishing basics.

Use content to do the selling. Whitepapers, case studies and webinars build trust at every stage of the decision and shorten the live conversation when it finally happens. A prospect who has read your case study arrives with better questions.

Automate the nurture. Automation scores prospects and hands them to sales at the right moment, which removes manual work and improves timing at the same time. Most leads aren't unqualified; they're just early.

Act like an advisor. Trust is the differentiator when the products look similar, and they usually do. Personalised solutions that address a specific concern beat a polished pitch every time.

Try social selling properly. One tactic that worked for Lenovo's sales teams was positioning the salespeople as thought leaders rather than the executives. We wrote over 350 articles under their names and built out their social presence, which started conversations with buyers already searching for exactly what those salespeople solved. The reps became findable, which is a cheaper route to a conversation than any outbound sequence.

Alignment, digital adaptation and a real understanding of modern buyer behaviour are what get you back on target. If you only change one thing this quarter, make it multi-threading — it costs nothing, and it's the fastest correction on this list.