Getting sales and marketing to work together instead of blaming each other

Sales and marketing work well together when they agree on three things: what a good lead looks like, exactly what happens to a lead when it arrives, and which numbers both teams look at. Most of the blame ("these leads are useless", "sales never follows up") comes from those agreements never having been written down, not from lazy or careless people. Fix the agreements and the arguments usually fade.

Where the blame comes from

Listen to each side and both sound reasonable.

Marketing says: "We brought in plenty of enquiries this month. Sales called a few of them days later and then said the leads were bad."

Sales says: "Most of these people only wanted a price, lived outside our area or had clicked an ad by mistake. We can't waste the day on them."

Both may be right. Behind the frustration there are usually four gaps:

• Different definitions. Marketing counts every enquiry as a lead. Sales only counts people ready to talk seriously.
• No clear handover. Enquiries land in a Facebook inbox, a staff member's WhatsApp or a shared email account, and nobody is sure who owns them.
• Different scorecards. Marketing is judged on likes, clicks or the number of enquiries. Sales is judged on closed deals. Neither is responsible for the space in between.
• No feedback. Marketing never learns which leads turned into customers, so it keeps doing what produces volume rather than what produces sales.

Agree what a good lead looks like

Sit together and write two short definitions.

• A marketing-qualified lead fits your basic criteria and has shown real interest.
• A sales-ready lead has also shared enough to justify a proper sales conversation.

For example, a hypothetical solar installer in Rajshahi might define a marketing-qualified lead as someone who owns a home, shop or factory in the service area and asked about installation. A sales-ready lead has also shared their roof space or monthly electricity use and wants a site visit. Neither definition is perfect, but both teams can now count the same thing. A simple scoring method, such as the one in lead qualification and scoring, helps keep this consistent.

Design the handover

Decide, in writing:

1. Where every lead goes. One place, not several personal phones. A simple CRM or even a well-kept shared sheet is enough to start.
2. Who responds, and how quickly. Agree a target response time that the sales team can actually keep, including at weekends or during busy seasons.
3. What information travels with the lead: where it came from, which ad or page, and what the person asked.
4. What happens to leads that are not ready yet. They should not be thrown away. They go back to marketing for lead nurturing until they are.

Close the feedback loop

The handover only improves if information flows back the other way.

• Sales marks every lead with an outcome and a short reason: won, lost to a competitor, no budget, outside the area, not reachable.
• Marketing uses those reasons to adjust targeting, ad wording and content.
• Both teams meet briefly every week or two. Instead of only looking at totals, they read through a handful of real leads together and ask: "Was this a good lead? Why or why not?"

This meeting matters more than any tool. Twenty minutes looking at actual enquiries replaces weeks of complaining about them.

One set of numbers for both teams

Rather than marketing reporting likes and sales reporting closed deals, look at a single chain from first contact to sale: enquiries, qualified leads, meetings, proposals, deals won, and where each one came from. When both teams own the whole chain, the conversation changes from "your leads are bad" to "leads from this campaign stall at the proposal stage. What's happening there?" The article on managing a sales pipeline shows how to keep that chain honest.

When marketing and sales are one or two people

In many small businesses in Bangladesh, "marketing" is one person running the Facebook page and "sales" is the owner on the phone. The same principles still apply, just on a smaller scale. The page manager notes what each enquiry asked about and where it came from. The owner notes what happened next. Once a week, they spend a few minutes looking at it together. If the owner does both jobs alone, the habit is the same: write down where each sale came from, and look back at it regularly.

A good first step this week: put the two definitions of a lead on one page, agree where every enquiry will be recorded, and book a short weekly review. If you'd like help setting up the process and tools, take a look at the lead generation service.