Publisher’s Note:
Jonathan Graviss (“JG”) is a regular OOH Today contributor whose Thursday columns offer practical advice for OOH operators. Graviss’s observations are based on real-world, extensive industry experience. No fluff or phoniness here. Many sales teams rely on his insights. Start your Year with more substantial revenues with today’s feature. Man! I wish I had his when I managed my OOH Markets back in the day!
“Man! I wish I had his when I managed my OOH Markets back in the day! “
When Marketing and Sales Drift, Revenue Suffers
By Jonathan “JG” Graviss, Graviss Marketing
Most OOH leaders would describe their marketing and sales functions as aligned. Ask them to define what that alignment looks like in practice, and the answer gets less certain.
They share the same revenue goal. They attend the same meetings. They work for the same company.
That is coordination. It is not alignment.
That is coordination. It is not alignment.
The distinction matters because coordination is passive. Alignment is active. And when the active work of keeping marketing and sales pointed at the same objective stops, drift begins. Quietly, gradually, and at a cost that shows up in revenue long before it shows up in awareness.
Drift Is a Leadership Problem, Not a Functional One
The instinct when marketing and sales feel disconnected is to address it at the functional level. Improve communication between teams. Add a shared reporting dashboard. Schedule a joint meeting.
Those responses treat drift as a coordination failure. It is usually something else.
When marketing and sales drift, it is almost always because leadership has not defined a clear enough priority to anchor both functions simultaneously. Teams default to what feels most relevant to them. Marketing optimizes for visibility and content cadence. Sales optimizes for the deals in front of them. Both are working. Neither is compounding the other’s effort.
McKinsey research from 2023 identified strategic misalignment between functions as one of the primary drivers of execution failure in mid-sized organizations. The finding was consistent across industries: when shared priorities are not explicit and actively reinforced, functions drift toward local optimization. The organization stays busy. Growth becomes uneven.
In OOH, uneven growth is the norm for operators who have not solved this problem. It is not inevitable.
What Drift Looks Like From the Outside
Advertisers experience internal drift before operators recognize it internally.
It shows up as inconsistency. The message on the website does not quite match what the sales team is emphasizing. The content being published does not reflect the conversations happening in proposals. The operator feels slightly different depending on which touchpoint an advertiser encounters first.
No single inconsistency is disqualifying. The accumulation of them erodes confidence.
Edelman’s Trust Barometer research shows that B2B buyers consistently rate vendor consistency as a primary trust driver. In competitive markets, trust is often the deciding factor between two operators with similar inventory and coverage. Drift undermines that trust at the exact moment the buying decision is forming.
By the time an operator notices the symptom, a slower close rate or a renewal that required more effort than expected, the confidence erosion is already weeks old.
The Revenue Mechanism Nobody Talks About
There is a direct revenue mechanism in marketing and sales alignment that operators rarely discuss explicitly.
When marketing is reinforcing the same narrative that sales is advancing, advertisers arrive at conversations already partially convinced. They have encountered the operator’s point of view before the first call. They ask better questions. They move faster. The sales team spends less time establishing credibility and more time advancing the decision.
When drift exists, the opposite happens. Sales teams rebuild context that marketing should have already established. Proposals address objections that consistent messaging would have preempted. Conversations that should start at alignment start at introduction.
Gartner’s research on B2B sales efficiency found that aligned marketing and sales organizations generate meaningfully higher conversion rates and shorter sales cycles than misaligned ones. The advantage is not marginal. It compounds across every deal in a quarter.
In OOH, where the sales cycle is relationship-driven and trust-dependent, that compounding effect is amplified. Every touchpoint either builds toward a decision or requires recovery from inconsistency.
Recalibration Is a Leadership Responsibility
The operators who manage this well do not rely on marketing and sales to self-correct. They build recalibration into how they lead.
That means starting each quarter with an explicit answer to a question most leaders skip: what is the single most important thing both marketing and sales should be reinforcing right now? Not a revenue target. A directional priority that both functions can translate into their own work.
It means checking that translation mid-quarter. Not to audit performance, but to ask whether the narrative is still coherent. Whether what marketing is producing still supports what sales is saying. Whether what sales is saying still reflects the positioning the company wants to own.
PwC’s 2024 CEO Survey found that organizations with consistent internal communication rhythms recover faster from market disruptions and maintain execution quality more reliably than those without them. In OOH, where advertiser priorities can shift quickly and competitive pressure is ongoing, that stability is a measurable advantage.
Recalibration does not require new tools or additional headcount. It requires leadership attention directed at the right question on a consistent basis.
The Compounding Advantage of Sustained Alignment
Alignment compounds in both directions.
When marketing and sales stay pointed at the same objective over multiple quarters, something shifts in the market. Advertisers begin to associate the operator with a consistent point of view. The message feels familiar before the conversation begins. The sales team enters with credibility already in place.
That familiarity is not accidental. It is the accumulated result of deliberate alignment, quarter after quarter, even when individual results vary.
The operators who build this over time are not competing on inventory alone. They are competing on confidence, clarity, and consistency. Those qualities are difficult to replicate quickly and nearly impossible to buy.
Drift costs revenue in the quarter it happens. Sustained alignment builds the kind of market position that protects revenue across years.
The choice between them is a leadership decision made, or not made, at the start of every quarter.
Graviss Marketing works with independent OOH operators and regional networks to build the strategic alignment, positioning systems, and planning rhythms that connect marketing and sales to predictable revenue outcomes. You can explore our approach at GravissMarketing.com.
Let’s elevate OOH together and make sure your company’s marketing is as strong as your locations.
Let’s elevate OOH together.
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