Before the next meeting about this, go and pull the last fifty leads sales rejected and read why they rejected them.
You will find three reasons, roughly. No budget. Not the decision maker. Wrong fit, meaning the person wanted something you do not sell.
Which of the three dominates tells you whose problem this is, and it takes about forty minutes to find out. Almost nobody does it, and instead the argument gets held once a quarter with no evidence, and everybody leaves annoyed.
But I want to make a bigger claim than “go look at your data”, because the audit fixes the symptom and the cause is somewhere else.
This is not a communication problem, and calling it an alignment problem is part of why it never gets solved. Marketing and sales are not misunderstanding each other. They are both doing precisely what you pay them to do, and what you pay them to do is in direct conflict.
You engineered the argument
Marketing is measured on lead volume, or something that behaves like lead volume. Sales is measured on closed revenue.
Volume and quality trade against each other. Tighten the form, add qualifying questions, disqualify the wrong industries, and lead count falls. Marketing’s number gets worse while the business gets better. Loosen everything and marketing has a great quarter while sales spends it calling students and competitors.
So when marketing says the leads are fine, they mean the leads hit the definition they are judged against. When sales says the leads are junk, they mean the leads do not turn into revenue, which is what they are judged against.
Both statements are true. They are answers to different questions, and the reason nobody wins the argument is that there is nothing to win. A workshop will not fix it. A shared Slack channel will not fix it. Nothing fixes it except changing what one of the two teams is measured on.
If marketing’s primary number is a count of leads, you will have this argument forever, and you will deserve to.
It got harder in 2026, and not because of your team
Two findings worth knowing before you blame anybody.
Forrester’s research on this has long held that fewer than 1% of leads ever close. Not 1% of a bad month. That is roughly the shape of the funnel in normal B2B conditions, which means a lead count is a number where 99 in 100 of the units are noise.
And buyers now complete something like 70% to 80% of their evaluation before they contact a vendor at all. By the time somebody fills in your form, they have read the comparisons, asked their network, and shortlisted. The form fill is not the start of the process. It is a receipt for a decision that has mostly already been made somewhere you could not see.
Put those together and the thing marketing counts has drifted a long way from anything sales recognizes. This is why so many B2B teams have quietly stopped reporting qualified lead volume as a primary number and moved to pipeline created and pipeline closed instead.
That shift is the actual fix. Everything else in this post is what to do while you are waiting for it.
The version that works when you cannot change the comp plan
You often cannot rewrite how people are paid this quarter. Three things then, in this order.
One definition, written down, signed by both. Not a philosophy. A list of fields with values. Company size range. Industries in and out. Job titles that count as a decision maker or an influencer. Budget stated or not. A specific problem statement in the enquiry rather than a general interest.
The test of a good definition is that a new hire could apply it on their second day without asking anybody. If applying it requires judgment, it is not a definition, it is a preference, and preferences cannot be argued with or improved.
A handoff agreement with numbers in it. First contact attempt inside a set window, and I would make it hours rather than days. A fixed number of attempts across a fixed number of days before a lead can be closed out. Every attempt logged.
This one protects marketing as much as sales. Half the “bad lead” complaints I have looked at were leads contacted once, four days late, by email only.
A rejection reason on every single lead sales pushes back. From a fixed list. Free text defeats the purpose, because free text cannot be counted.
That third one is the whole loop. Once rejection reasons are countable, the quarterly argument becomes a monthly report. Sixty percent rejected for wrong industry is a targeting problem and marketing owns it. Sixty percent rejected for no budget is a messaging problem, because your ads are attracting people who cannot afford you. Sixty percent rejected as “not interested” after one email is a sales process problem, and everybody in the room will know it.
The uncomfortable half of this
Notice that the loop can convict either side, and be honest that this is why it gets resisted.
Marketing usually welcomes rejection reasons right up until the data says the leads really are poorly targeted. Sales usually welcomes them right up until the data shows leads sitting untouched for three days.
If you introduce this and only one team is enthusiastic, you have learned something before you have collected any data.
I have also seen the reverse of the usual story often enough to say it plainly. Sometimes the leads are good and nobody is working them, because the reps have an existing pipeline that is easier and the new enquiries are cold and awkward. That is a coaching and capacity issue, not a lead quality issue, and it hides comfortably behind a complaint about marketing.
The report that ends the argument
One table. Lead source down the side. Three columns: leads, pipeline created, revenue closed.
That is it. No qualification rate, no MQL count, no cost per lead.
The table is powerful because the word “qualified” does not appear anywhere in it, and “qualified” is the word the entire dispute lives inside. A source that produces forty leads and no pipeline is dead regardless of what anybody calls those leads. A source that produces six leads and two closed deals is your best channel even though it looks worthless on a volume report.
Build it once, at whatever quality your CRM allows, and accept that the first version will be rough. I went through which four numbers actually belong in a marketing report separately, and this table is the shortest version of that argument.
What I would do first
Not the workshop. The forty minutes.
Pull the last fifty rejected leads, tag each one with a reason, and count them. You will have the answer to who owns this before lunch, and it will be an answer with evidence rather than a truce.
Then write the definition, get both leads to sign it, and put a rejection reason field on every lead from Monday. That is a week of work and it converts a permanent argument into a monthly number that moves.
My notes on marketing and sales alignment cover how the handoff usually gets built. If you’d like to talk through where your own leads are dying, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat. I’m contracted full time so this isn’t a pitch.