The usual blame game

The pattern is predictable. Marketing says they’re generating leads. Sales says the leads are terrible. Sales complains they don’t have the right materials. Marketing says sales isn’t following up properly. Everyone points fingers. Nobody hits targets.

Here’s how it typically sounds in leadership meetings.

• Marketing: “We delivered 500 leads this quarter, but sales only followed up on 200 of them.”
• Sales: “Because 400 of them weren’t even qualified. We’re wasting time calling people who aren’t buyers.”
• Marketing: “We’re hitting our lead volume targets. If sales converted at benchmark rates, we’d be fine.”
• Sales: “If marketing understood our customers, we’d have leads worth converting.”

Everyone is defending their metrics. Nobody is talking about revenue.

Why this happens

The dysfunction starts with how companies set up these functions. Marketing gets measured on lead volume, website traffic, and campaign metrics. Sales gets measured on pipeline and closed revenue. These metrics seem logical until you realize they create opposing incentives. Marketing is rewarded for quantity. Sales is rewarded for quality. Marketing wants credit for every inquiry. Sales wants to focus on deals that will actually close. Nobody is aligned on what “good” looks like.

Example:
We worked with a B2B software company where marketing was crushing their lead targets. They were generating 600 leads per quarter, way above plan. Sales was converting 3% of them. The CEO thought they had a sales problem. They actually had a definition problem. Marketing counted anyone who downloaded a whitepaper as a lead. Sales needed someone with budget, authority, need, and timeline. Marketing was optimizing for downloads. Sales was trying to close deals. They weren’t even playing the same game.

The real problem: missing agreements

The dysfunction exists because companies skip the basic agreements that make collaboration possible.

• Who is the ideal customer? Not the general target market. The specific profile of companies and people who actually buy. Most companies have never written this down in detail. Marketing thinks they know. Sales thinks they know. They’re imagining different people.
• What makes a lead qualified? When does an inquiry become something sales should prioritize? If you ask five people in your company this question, you’ll get five different answers.
• What’s the handoff process? When does marketing’s job end and sales’ begin? What information needs to transfer? Who’s accountable for what happens next? Usually, nobody knows. Leads get dumped into the CRM and everyone hopes for the best.
• What does success look like? Not individual metrics. Shared outcomes. Without these agreements, you don’t have misalignment. You have two functions running separate plays.

What does good look like?

We helped a medical device company rebuild their commercial process from scratch. We started with one workshop and one question: who exactly are we trying to reach? It took four hours of debate. Marketing thought they were targeting hospital administrators. Sales was actually selling to clinical department heads who then needed administrator approval. Different people. Different pain points. Different buying process.

Once we agreed on the actual buyer, everything else fell into place.

• We defined a qualified lead together: specific job titles, company size, evidence of active evaluation, and confirmed budget cycle. Marketing stopped counting every inquiry. Sales stopped complaining about lead quality.
• We built a handoff process. Marketing qualified to a certain point, then passed to sales with specific context. Sales committed to follow up within 24 hours and log outcomes. Both teams reviewed results weekly.

The finger-pointing stopped because everyone was looking at the same definition of success. Six months later, lead volume was down 40%. Conversion rates were up 200%. Revenue was up 25%.

The hard part

The hardest part isn’t building the process. It’s changing the culture. You need to stop accepting finger-pointing. When marketing blames sales or sales blames marketing in a leadership meeting, stop the conversation.

You need to kill pride of authorship. Marketing can’t be defensive about their campaigns. Sales can’t be defensive about their process. Both teams need to accept that what matters is the outcome, not who was right. And you need leadership alignment. If the CEO accepts marketing hitting lead targets while revenue misses, the dysfunction will continue. If the board lets sales blame marketing for their gaps, nothing will change.

Marketing and sales alignment isn’t about better communication or more meetings. It’s about shared agreements on who you’re targeting, what qualified means, how handoffs work, and what success looks like. Most companies never have these conversations. They hire smart people, give them different metrics, and wonder why collaboration doesn’t happen. The companies that win create real alignment. They define the customer together. They build the process together. They measure success together. Then the blame game stops because everyone is playing for the same outcome. That’s when revenue starts to move.