It is the same scene in boardrooms everywhere. The Monthly Business Review is starting, and the tension is palpable. The Head of Marketing stands up, dashboard glowing green. "We hit 120% of our lead target," they say, pointing to a sharp upward curve. "We generated 500 Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) this month. Our Cost Per Lead (CPL) is down 10%."
Then the Head of Sales speaks. Their dashboard is red. They don't care about CPL; they care about closed revenue. "We missed revenue by 15%," they say, voice tight. "And those 500 leads? I checked them. Most were students looking for data or competitors spying on pricing. My team is wasting hours chasing ghosts."
The CEO sits in the middle, frustrated. The problem isn't that your people are incompetent. The problem is Sales and Marketing alignment. They are playing two different games with two different scoreboards.
Sales teams ignore marketing leads primarily due to a lack of trust in lead quality and conflicting definitions of success. When marketing is incentivized on volume (MQLs) rather than purchase intent, they pass "junk" leads to sales. Sales reps, protecting their limited time, eventually stop reviewing CRM notifications and return to self-sourcing prospects.
Marketing is often paid to generate volume, while Sales is paid to close deals. When you incentivize Marketing solely on MQL count, you inadvertently turn them into "Asset Slingers." They stop thinking strategically and start operating like a factory line, optimizing for the easiest conversion rather than the best customer.
This disconnect destroys the currency of a revenue team: Trust.
Imagine a sales rep receives 10 notifications for "New Hot Leads."
By the time they reach the fourth lead, which might be a viable prospect, they are already cynical. They assume it is another waste of time. It is not laziness; it is a rational response to low-quality data. If you want to fix this, you don't need a "better hand-off" process. You need to stop handing things off entirely and start working on the same timeline.
Building a Unified Revenue Team requires shifting from departmental silos to a shared "Smarketing" strategy. This involves creating a single "definition of done" for qualified leads, measuring marketing on pipeline contribution rather than lead volume, and establishing a rigorous feedback loop between both teams to refine targeting continuously.
High-growth companies don't have separate departments fighting for credit. They align goals using the following three steps:
Most friction stems from a lack of clarity on the target audience. Marketing often operates with a broad net ("Anyone in Tech"), while Sales operates in a narrow reality ("CTOs at Series B companies").
You must bring both teams into a room to negotiate the "Qualified Lead" criteria.
Stop measuring Marketing on MQLs and celebrating "cheap leads." Start measuring them on Sales Qualified Opportunities (SQOs) and Pipeline Contribution.
When Marketing’s bonus is tied to pipeline generation, behavior changes immediately:
Strategy is useless without execution. You need a recurring "Smarketing" meeting, not a status update, but a working session.
The Agenda for Alignment:
Growth is not luck; it is engineered alignment. As a CEO or Founder, your job is to change the scoreboard. Stop asking Marketing, "How many leads did we get?" and start asking, "How much qualified pipeline did we create together?"
When Marketing and Sales share a definition of success, the blame game ends, revenue begins and you can finally begin building a predictable pipeline.
An MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) is a prospect who has engaged with marketing content but may not be ready to buy. An SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) is a prospect that has been vetted and deemed ready for a direct sales conversation based on budget, authority, need, and timing.
Sales reps ignore leads when historical data shows a low conversion rate. If a high percentage of past marketing leads were unqualified (wrong industry, no budget, or students), sales reps lose trust in the source and prioritize their own prospecting efforts to meet their quotas.
Marketing can assist sales by shifting focus from lead volume to lead quality. This includes creating sales enablement content (case studies, competitor comparisons), refining targeting to match the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), and measuring success based on revenue contribution rather than just lead count.
