B2B Growth slowing, but why?
When B2B growth stalls, leadership teams often point the finger at market shifts, aggressive competition, or disruptive technology. Those factors matter, but in countless organisations I’ve seen, they’re not the real killer. The silent assassin of B2B growth is misalignment across functions. It doesn’t scream for attention. It rarely makes it into the board pack. Yet it eats away at momentum every single day.
The danger with misalignment is that on the surface everything looks fine. Revenue is coming in, deals are being signed, teams are hitting their targets. You can still hit your sales numbers while quietly destroying trust and repeat business. That’s why misalignment is so dangerous — it gives the illusion of progress while undermining your foundation. The good news? All is not lost. Misalignment can be fixed. But it takes honesty, hard work, and genuine backing across the organisation.
What Misalignment Looks Like
If you’ve worked in B2B for any length of time, you’ll recognise the symptoms.
Sales teams, desperate to close deals, promise functionality or timelines that Delivery knows are impossible. The customer hears “yes,” but internally everyone knows it’s a ticking time bomb. Marketing runs from campaign to campaign, chasing clicks and followers, proud of their numbers but disconnected from whether the leads turn into revenue. Pre-sales staff, often the unsung heroes, pour hours into shaping proposals and solutions but get little of the recognition when the deal lands.
Meanwhile, Customer Service is stuck firefighting. Their metrics reward short call times or low drop rates, not genuine resolution or customer satisfaction. Legal teams delay contract sign-offs because turnaround time isn’t even measured. And engineering is under pressure to hit daily install targets, often rushing work that leads to expensive rework later.
Individually, these look like operational issues. Collectively, they reveal a pattern: your teams are not playing the same game. And the customer can see it more clearly than anyone inside your organisation.
Why It’s So Damaging
Misalignment corrodes growth quietly. You celebrate quarterly targets while the foundations weaken. Teams congratulate themselves for “hitting the number,” but customers are quietly losing faith.
Short-term wins mask long-term decline. New logos land, but the leaky bucket of churn means overall growth flatlines. Referrals — the lifeblood of B2B — dry up because customers don’t trust you to keep your promises. Energy that should be going into momentum is wasted in firefighting between teams, as internal handoffs fail and finger-pointing takes over.
On the surface, dashboards glow green. But behind them, the reality is red.
The Elephant in the Room: Incentives Drive Behaviour
Misalignment isn’t just cultural or operational. It’s economic. People chase what they’re paid for. If every team has its own scoreboard, misalignment is inevitable.
Here’s what that looks like in practice: – C-Suite: rewarded on share price, profit, or major project delivery. – Sales: driven by margin, revenue, accelerators, or supplier incentives. – Marketing: focused on clicks, leads, or followers — rarely tied to revenue. – Pre-Sales: often salaried only, despite carrying the heavy lift in winning deals. – Customer Service: measured by call times, dropped calls, or NPS scores. – Legal: no metric tied to deal velocity, so contracts stall. – Engineering: installs per day, not quality or rework avoided.
Each function optimises for its slice. Nobody owns the end-to-end customer outcome. And the customer? They fall into the cracks between the scoreboards.
Why Leaders Struggle to See It
If misalignment is so damaging, why do leadership teams miss it?
Because it hides in plain sight. Everyone is hitting their numbers. Board packs look fine. The revenue line ticks up, even as renewal rates collapse. In too many boardrooms, numbers are accepted at face value rather than interrogated for what they actually mean.
And the truth rarely bubbles up. Senior leaders don’t engage enough below the C-Suite to hear what’s really happening. Pre-sales won’t challenge sales incentives. Customer service won’t contradict delivery leadership. Misalignment remains unchallenged — until a major customer walks away and everyone scrambles to understand what went wrong.
Fixing the Silent Killer
The good news is that misalignment is not a death sentence. But fixing it takes deliberate action.
First, align the scoreboards. Shared KPIs should tie directly to customer outcomes: renewals, lifetime value, advocacy. Not just outputs, but outcomes that reflect whether customers will buy again.
Second, build one narrative. Every function must live the same customer promise. The story you tell in the pitch room should match the experience customers get in delivery and support. Anything less is a recipe for disappointment.
Third, surface real customer insight. NPS is a blunt tool. You need the unfiltered stories from the field in the boardroom — the things customers actually say about your service, not just their tick-box scores.
Fourth, empower Commercial Directors. This role, more than any other, sees the full cycle from sales through to delivery. Give them the mandate and authority to call out misalignment and drive cross-functional accountability.
Finally, adopt Customer Spectacles and champions. Build the discipline of putting on the customer’s glasses at every decision point. Ask: What would this look like from their side of the table? Without that lens, internal scoreboards will always dominate.
The Alignment Advantage
Growth without alignment is an illusion. True growth is measured not by today’s bookings but by tomorrow’s loyalty.
You may hit your sales target this quarter. But if the customer walks away frustrated, was it really growth? Or just revenue borrowed from the future?
The organisations that win will be those that break down silos, align incentives, and rally every function around one scoreboard: the customer. That’s the work Oak Consult helps leaders do. Because when alignment is achieved, growth isn’t just possible — it’s repeatable, resilient, and real. Get in touch and let’s talk.