Why Misaligned Expectations Are Sabotaging Your B2B Revenue Goals — The Missing Middle
3-min read
In today’s complex B2B sales landscape, achieving revenue growth requires a well-coordinated effort between sales, marketing, and management. Yet, many organizations face a persistent challenge regarding the timescales for achieving revenue growth—a gap we call the “Missing Middle.” This gap represents the misalignment of expectations, actions, and priorities among these three critical teams, leading to inefficiency, frustration, and missed opportunities.
Understanding the Missing Middle
The Missing Middle emerges from the differing operational timescales and goals of sales, marketing, and management:
- Sellers (Sales): Operating on short-term horizons, sellers focus on immediate revenue goals and closing deals. They expect high-quality, sales-ready leads and responsive support from marketing and management. Depending on the source of revenue, they must also build relationships and trust—particularly when it comes to new customer acquisition.
- Marketing: Working on longer-term objectives, marketing aims to build brand awareness, generate demand, nurture leads, and get the sales team in front of prospects. Success is often measured by metrics such as engagement, qualified meetings, and awareness.
- Management: Balancing short-term financial performance with long-term strategic goals, management operates at the intersection of quarterly targets and visionary initiatives. They expect sales and marketing to deliver measurable results quickly and predictably, often without considering the varying timescales for each revenue source.
These distinct priorities often result in a disconnect: marketing delivers leads that sales doesn’t act on, sales demands immediate results that marketing can’t provide, and management becomes frustrated with the lack of alignment and impact.
Symptoms of the Missing Middle
- Misaligned Metrics: Sales teams focus on ready-to-buy leads and closed deals, marketing tracks campaign success and doors opened, while management emphasizes overall revenue and profitability.
- Breakdowns in Communication: Marketing’s contributions are overlooked or undervalued, sales’ feedback isn’t integrated into campaigns, and management initiatives fail to translate into realized revenue.
- Slow Pipeline Growth: Opportunities are slow to materialize due to low-energy handoffs, misaligned expectations of buyer readiness, and competing priorities between short-, medium-, and long-term goals.
- Frustrated Teams: Sales feels unsupported, marketing feels undervalued, and management is frustrated.
The Cost of Misalignment
The Missing Middle doesn’t just affect internal dynamics; it directly impacts business outcomes. Studies show that aligned organizations experience higher revenue growth, faster pipeline velocity, and increased win rates. Conversely, misalignment leads to wasted resources, lost deals, and diminished market competitiveness.
Many factors contribute to this misalignment in B2B large-deal revenue growth. However, the number one reason that marketing and sales initiatives are often deemed failures is the misalignment of expectations around the time to revenue.
The Path Forward
Bridging the Missing Middle requires more than better communication, it demands a cultural shift toward realistic expectations and alignment on timescales, volume, and win rates based on the source of revenue (existing or new customers) and the complexity of the sale.
By creating a unified approach, organizations can:
- Predict pipeline outcomes accurately.
- Foster strong customer relationships from the outset.
- Build a sustainable foundation for long-term growth.
In the fast-evolving B2B enterprise sales environment, the Missing Middle doesn’t have to remain a challenge. With intentional alignment, businesses can turn this gap into an opportunity for unparalleled collaboration and success.
Further reading

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