Expertise notes
Marketing & Sales Alignment
Marketing reports lead volume, sales says the leads are junk, and both are right, because nobody wrote down what qualified means.
The pattern
What usually goes wrong here
This is the most common structural problem I have seen, and it is rarely about competence. The two teams are measured on different numbers, they have never sat in the same room to define a qualified lead, and the handover between them is an email nobody owns. Every campaign after that argues in circles.
What I look at
The things that actually move it
- One written definition of a qualified lead, signed off by both teams
- Shared visibility — marketing seeing what closed, sales seeing where leads came from
- A handover with an owner and a response time, not just a CRM record
- Messaging consistency, so the sales call sounds like the ad that produced it
- Objection handling built from what marketing hears and sales encounters
- A feedback loop where sales tells marketing which leads were real, weekly
- Reporting both teams read from the same dashboard
FAQ
Marketing & Sales Alignment — questions I get asked
What is the fastest fix for marketing and sales disagreeing on lead quality?
Get both teams in one room and write the definition of a qualified lead down, together, on one page. It sounds too simple to be the answer. In most companies I have seen it removes the argument entirely, because the disagreement was never about the leads.
Why does knowledge leave when an agency contract ends?
Because the work was done somewhere else. If an outside team runs the accounts and writes the reports, the reasoning behind the decisions never enters the company. Documenting the why alongside the what is what keeps it in-house.
From the blog
Writing on this
How do I build an internal linking strategy?
Most sites cast every internal vote at the contact page. Three exports find the misallocation, and fixing it costs nothing but an afternoon.
Read it →What should I expect in the first 90 days with a marketing consultant?
Almost no new marketing, and that is the point. A plan that arrives in week one was written before they met you. What each stage should produce.
Read it →Why aren't my leads converting into sales?
Marketing says the leads are fine and sales says they're junk. Both are usually telling the truth, because you are paying them to disagree.
Read it →Related
Other notes
SEO
Most sites do not have an SEO problem. They have three at once, and fixing one without the other two is why the work appears to stall.
Read the notes →AISEO
AISEO is not a separate discipline from SEO. It is SEO done with more discipline about structure and more honesty about substance.
Read the notes →Performance Marketing
Ad accounts rarely fail because of bidding. They fail on audience, creative and the landing page, in that order.
Read the notes →Say hello
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