Dear Growth Guru,
We are a mid-sized UK tech manufacturer trying to scale up our commercial operations, but our sales and marketing teams are at war. Marketing insists they are generating high-volume, MQL-qualified leads through digital campaigns.
Sales claims the leads are completely cold, poorly targeted, and a total waste of time to follow up. Meanwhile, our pipeline is stalling, revenue is flatlining, and our weekly leadership meetings have descended into a blame game.
How do we end this deadlock and get both teams pulling in the same direction?
Siloed in Sheffield
Dear Siloed,
Ah, the age-old B2B civil war. Marketing points to a graph going up, Sales points to a bank account going down, and leadership is left holding the bill. Take a breath: this friction is painfully common, but it is entirely fixable if you are willing to tear up your current definition of a “lead”.
First, kill the traditional MQL immediately. If someone downloads a whitepaper to check your specs, they haven’t asked for a sales call; they’ve asked for a PDF. Forcing your sales team to chase cold content downloads wastes time and damages trust between departments.
Instead, sit both teams down in the same room with a blank whiteboard and agree on a unified Revenue SLA (Service Level Agreement).
Redefine “Qualified”: Have Sales and Marketing jointly agree on exact target company profiles, intent signals, and buying triggers. If a lead doesn’t fit the buyer persona, Marketing gets no credit for generating it.
Shared Pipeline Metrics: Stop measuring Marketing on lead volume. Start measuring both teams on closed-won revenue and pipeline velocity. When Marketing’s bonuses depend on closed deals rather than form fills, campaign targeting improves overnight.
Feedback Loops: Require Sales to provide structured, documented feedback on every rejected lead within 48 hours. If Marketing knows why a prospect failed, they can tweak campaign filters in real time.
Aligning these teams is not about refereeing arguments; it is about building a single, cohesive revenue engine. Force them to share the target, and they will quickly start sharing the wins.
