Ideally, your sales and marketing teams work in close collaboration to carefully target the right B2B buyers. The reality? A recent LinkedIn survey found that 90% of sales and marketing teams are misaligned, resulting in marketing leads that won’t convert.
When that happens, you get Shadow marketing: ad-hoc marketing activities driven by the sales team. Shadow Marketing is often an effort to close perceived gaps and to fill pipelines by any means necessary – but even if it succeeds in the short term, it can also erode brand trust, widen the internal divide, and drive up the cost of marketing.
Here’s what it is, why it happens, what makes it dangerous, and what you can do about it.