In most companies, marketing and sales share the same target, but never the same system.
That’s where performance dies.
Here’s what actually goes wrong (and how to fix it).
Different Definitions of “Qualified Lead”
Marketing counts MQLs.
Sales cares about SQLs.
Between those two acronyms lives the black hole of alignment.
How to fix it:
Define one qualification framework. Example: BANT + Fit + Intent.
Automate lead scoring in your CRM.
Review it monthly together, not separately.
If you don’t agree on what a “qualified” lead means, no metric downstream will make sense.
No Shared Metrics
You can’t align if you measure different things.
Marketing celebrates impressions; sales celebrates invoices.
Fix: build a shared Revenue Dashboard with:
Cost per qualified lead
Lead-to-opportunity rate
Opportunity-to-close rate
Revenue per campaign
If these four metrics aren’t tracked in one place, you don’t have a revenue team, but two departments guessing.
Poor handoofs
80% of marketing leads die because the follow-up flow is broken.
Automation doesn’t equal alignment.
Fix:
Define a maximum response time (e.g. <30 min for hot leads).
Automate notifications, not handovers.
Marketing should monitor lead follow-up as part of campaign success.
If the handoff fails, the whole funnel collapses - no matter how strong your top of funnel is.
Lack of Feedback Loop
Sales hears objections every day. Marketing never does.
That means your next campaign is built blind.
Fix:
Run monthly “closed-lost” reviews.
Tag lost opportunities by reason in the CRM.
Let marketing rewrite copy and offers based on real feedback.
Good data comes from the field.
The Bottom Line
Misalignment isn’t a culture problem. It’s a system problem.
The solution isn’t another meeting . it’s a shared structure, shared data, and shared accountability.
At InGrowth, we help teams move from “marketing vs. sales” to a single revenue system, where every click, call, and conversion feeds the same goal: predictable growth.
