Claim
The traditional marketing-then-sales handoff is broken. At Leena AI, building a growth team with five sub-functions — product marketing, content, brand, demand gen, and revenue marketing (the SDR/BDR/ABM unit) — and setting cross-functional KPIs that depend on other functions (sales enablement owns lead-to-meeting; product marketing owns sales velocity and win rate) is what actually drives alignment.
Mechanism
Functional KPIs reward local optimization that breaks the funnel. Cross-functional KPIs force teams to collaborate to hit their own number, so the alignment problem solves itself instead of needing offsites. Pod-style organization by product (not geo) keeps each motion tight.
Conditions
Holds for multi-product B2B SaaS with mature funnel and identifiable cross-team handoff failure points. Fails for early-stage single-product companies where the structure is overhead.