Why sales and marketing so often feel like rivals

The monthly meeting goes something like this. Marketing reports sixty enquiries, up from forty-five. Sales says most of them were a waste of time. Marketing points out that sales took three days to call half of them back. Sales points out that one was a student and two were from Melbourne, and you only deliver in Queensland. Everybody leaves slightly annoyed and nothing changes.

The frustrating part is that both sides are telling the truth. The numbers did go up, a lot of the enquiries were poor, and some of the good ones went cold while they waited. Underneath the argument, the two teams are being judged on different things, and the gap between those things is where the blame collects.

Two scoreboards

Marketing usually gets judged on what it can count: enquiries, calls, cost per enquiry. Sales gets judged on revenue. Pay marketing on enquiries and the easy way to grow the number is to widen the net, so more junk comes in. Pay sales on revenue and the sensible move is to ignore anything that isn't a sure thing, so the slow-burn enquiries that might have bought in six months never get a reply.

Each team does well by its own scoreboard and the business loses in the middle.

Write down what a good enquiry is

Ask each side separately to describe a good enquiry and you may well get two answers. Marketing might say "anyone who asks for a quote". Sales might say "a facilities manager at a site with twenty or more machines, inside our delivery area, buying within three months".

Say you distribute commercial floor scrubbers. A uni student after a spec sheet for an assignment and a facilities manager replacing a fleet come through the same form and count as one enquiry each. Until somebody writes down the difference, marketing has no way to aim at one and avoid the other.

A paragraph is enough: the kind of business, where they are, what they need and how soon. I'd put it on one page that both teams sign off on.

Close the loop every month

Then sit down once a month and go through last month's enquiries one by one. Mark each one won, lost and why, still open, or not a fit and why. If they're all in one place it takes half an hour.

The "not a fit" reasons are the useful bit. If a third were out of area, that's a setting in the ads. If they're students, it's a keyword or an ad that reads like a textbook. Marketing finally learns what happened to the enquiries it brought in, and sales gets fewer of the wrong ones.

While you're there, agree how fast a new enquiry gets a reply from a real person, and who covers when the usual person is out. In my view, plenty of what gets blamed on lead quality is an enquiry that sat for two days.

One number you both own

The last step is a measure both sides share. Revenue is too slow when a sale takes months, and enquiries are too easy to pump up. Qualified opportunities sit nicely in the middle: enquiries that sales agrees are real, with a rough value on each.

Marketing can't inflate that by widening the net, because sales has to agree each one. Sales can't sit on enquiries and then complain about quality, because the unreviewed ones show up. And the monthly meeting becomes a conversation about one set of numbers that both teams helped put together.

None of it needs new software. If the rivalry sounds familiar, start with that one page defining a good enquiry, because everything else depends on it.