Marketing builds a working list of fifty districts, scores it on fit and readiness, and starts producing content built around those specific accounts. Meanwhile the AE assigned to that territory is still cold-emailing every district in the state, the fifty on the list included, using the same template as everyone else in the territory. Nobody decided this on purpose. It just happened, one function moving and the other not noticing.
I call this the Two Motions Problem: marketing running a narrow, account-based motion while sales keeps running a broad, territory-based one, without anyone in the room deciding that on purpose. Marketing is going deep on fifty districts. Sales is still going wide across an entire state. Neither motion reinforces the other, and the working list marketing built never actually becomes the list sales is working.
Scott Noon, founder of the K-12 go-to-market advisory firm Midday Advisors, sees this exact gap most often in companies that made real progress on one side of the house and assumed the other side would follow.
What is the Two Motions Problem?
The Two Motions Problem is what happens when marketing and sales operate on two different targeting strategies at the same time, one account-based and one broad-reach, without a deliberate, joint decision to align them. It’s not a failure of either function individually. Marketing did the work to build a focused list. Sales is doing exactly what its territory assignment and its comp plan reward. The failure is structural: two reasonable strategies pulling in opposite directions because no one owns the decision to run them as one.
Why does marketing usually shift first?
Because marketing is typically the function sitting closest to the data that reveals the problem. Content performance, email deliverability, and cost per lead all degrade in ways that are visible on a dashboard well before a sales team feels the same pain in a less measurable form. A marketing team staring at the Address Book Problem in its own numbers has an obvious, well-lit reason to narrow its targeting. A sales team living inside the Buried Treasure Myth doesn’t get the same clear signal, because activity volume still looks like effort even when it isn’t producing results, and a rep’s territory assignment and quota structure often haven’t changed at all.
So marketing moves first, narrows its targeting, and starts building account-specific content and campaigns. Sales, still measured and compensated on covering the full territory, keeps working the way it always has. The two functions aren’t in conflict. They’re just no longer describing the same market to each other.
This gets more complicated once buying authority itself isn’t uniform across the list. In districts with school-based budgeting, the real economic buyer can sit at the school level rather than the district office. If marketing has built content and outreach around a principal as the buyer for a given account, but sales is still routing every lead in that territory to a district-level contact by default, the misalignment isn’t just about list size anymore. It’s about the two functions not agreeing on who the buyer even is.
What does this actually cost?
Research on sales and marketing alignment, including a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by LinkedIn, consistently finds that well-aligned organizations grow revenue meaningfully faster than misaligned ones, though the specific percentage lift varies by study. The mechanism is intuitive even without the research: an account that gets personalized marketing content and then a generic sales email undoes the personalization. A district that shows real engagement signal on marketing’s working list but never gets a matching level of sales attention is a wasted signal. A rep chasing territory-wide volume duplicates effort marketing already spent building account-specific context, instead of using it.
There’s a quieter cost too, in how the shift gets experienced internally. When marketing narrows its own targeting without a parallel change on the sales side, it looks to sales like marketing decided unilaterally that certain accounts matter more, without including the team that has to act on that decision. That’s a fast way to turn a good strategic shift into a source of interdepartmental friction instead of a shared win.
What to do instead
Make the shift a joint decision, not a marketing initiative sales finds out about later. The working list, the account scoring, and the buyer mapping should be built with input from both functions, not handed to sales after the fact.
Give sales the same list, the same buyer map, and the same calendar. The working list marketing builds should be the same list sales works for outbound effort, not a separate document that lives in a different tool. The same goes for buyer authority. If an account has been flagged as school-based budgeting with the principal as the real buyer, sales outreach for that account needs to reflect that, not default to the district office.
Change what sales is measured on to match what marketing already changed. If marketing has shifted to engagement depth on named accounts while sales is still measured on territory-wide activity volume, the two functions are being pointed in different directions by design, regardless of what either team’s strategy says on paper.
Put the shift on the same calendar both functions already share. Since nearly every district in the country runs the same fiscal year, marketing and sales don’t need separate timing, they need one shared rhythm, planned together, so the awareness content marketing builds in the fall lines up with the sales push sales runs before the spring adoption deadline on the same accounts.
The list isn’t the strategy until both functions are working the same one
A focused account list that only one function actually uses isn’t a strategy. It’s half of one, waiting for the other half to catch up. The fix isn’t getting sales to copy what marketing did. It’s making the decision together in the first place.
If your organization is dealing with a version of this, let’s talk.
This post is part of the guide Account-Based Sales and Marketing for K-12 Education Providers. Related reading: The Buried Treasure Myth and The Account Rollup Gap.
Scott Noon is the founder of Midday Advisors, a K-12 go-to-market advisory firm.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Two Motions Problem is what happens when marketing shifts to an account-based, narrow targeting strategy while sales continues running a broad, territory-based prospecting motion, without a deliberate joint decision to align the two. Both functions are acting reasonably on their own terms, but the strategies work against each other.
Marketing typically sits closer to the data that reveals the problem: declining content performance, poor deliverability, rising cost per lead, all visible on a dashboard. Sales often keeps working the same territory-wide motion because its quota structure and comp plan haven’t changed, even after marketing has already moved.
A clear sign is a marketing team working a defined account list while sales works a full geographic territory with no reference to that list. Another is a district showing strong engagement with marketing content but receiving the same generic outreach from sales as every other account in the territory.
They need to change together. A shared working list without a matching change to how sales is measured leaves the incentive pointing at territory-wide activity even after the strategy has officially shifted. Changing the comp structure without a real, usable account list gives sales nothing concrete to work from instead.
Yes, when marketing and sales don’t agree on who the buyer is for a given account. If a district uses school-based budgeting and the principal controls real spend, marketing content and sales outreach both need to reflect that. If only one function has updated its approach, the account gets inconsistent treatment depending on which team touches it.
