MarketingThe marketing lead at a 20–200 person company

When sales says the leads are poor and I see they are not followed up, I want both sides looking at the same picture, so we stop arguing and start fixing.

Khi đội bán hàng nói đầu mối kém còn tôi thấy họ không theo đuổi, tôi muốn hai bên nhìn cùng một bức tranh, để thôi tranh cãi và bắt đầu sửa được.

Job context

Who: A marketing lead working with a small sales team
When: At each targets review
Trigger: A missed quarter and each side blaming the other
Situation: Two functions measure the same customer with two different metrics
Constraints: Nobody manages both teams, and the data sits in two systems

No agreement on what a good lead is
High
Each side holds a definition that serves its own target.
Root cause: The definition is set by the party measured on it
Cannot see how far leads were pursued
High
Sales activity is only recorded when something happens.
Root cause: Sales systems record stages, not effort
The two sides' targets are out of phase
Medium
Marketing is measured monthly, sales quarterly, and customers buy on their own cycle.
Root cause: Measurement cycles follow reporting needs rather than buying behaviour
Feedback from sales only arrives when they are annoyed
Medium
There is no channel for ordinary feedback, only one for complaints.
Root cause: Feedback is not scheduled, so it only happens on incident
The data sits in two disconnected systems
High
One customer has two records and nobody joins them.
Root cause: Each function buys its own tool for its own need

A solution is not the same thing as a product — a customer can hire a behaviour or a workaround too.

A service-level agreement between the teams
Product
The right mechanism, alive only if someone above both enforces it.
Share one CRM
Product
Solves the data problem, not the definition problem.
Sit in on sales calls
Behaviour
The most effective way to learn what a lead really looks like, and few do it.
A weekly joint meeting
Behaviour
Turns feedback into a rhythm instead of an incident.
Score leads in a spreadsheet
Workaround
Marketers build the shared definition the organisation lacks.

The handover of a lead from marketing to sales belongs to nobody, and that is where things fall.
Why existing solutions fail: Each side is measured on its own metric and neither on the quality of the handover, so improving it returns nothing to anyone.
Potential opportunity: One metric on the handover itself, on which both teams are measured.
Sales systems record outcomes; a lead never called leaves no record.
Why existing solutions fail: Recording effort asks salespeople to log what they did not do, which is asking for evidence against themselves.
Potential opportunity: Reading effort from existing traces — calls placed, emails sent — instead of from self-reports.