Same Team, Different Game: How to get marketing and sales working together without the friction

For marketing and business leaders who are done having the same argument and want to build something that actually works.

Most of my career has been spent in larger, multinational organisations, working closely alongside sales and business development teams. In those environments, there was usually an amicable - or at the very least collaborative - relationship between the two functions. That included honest, two-way feedback on lead quality: Which sources were producing conversations worth having, and which were not. When the notorious blame cycle did erupt, with sales claiming the leads were unworkable and marketing firing back that sales just was not working the pipeline properly, those conversations tended to burn hot and then give way to something more useful: A proper look at which lead sources were actually performing and how we needed to tweak the marketing mix accordingly.

So I have been genuinely surprised, more recently, by the volume of LinkedIn posts that use this tension as a hook, almost always angled the same way: Marketing chases vanity metrics, delivers leads nobody wants to call, and is fundamentally not to be taken seriously because the only metric that counts is closed deals.

This last claim seems to come up a lot and gets applauded even by some marketers, so before I delve deeper, let me just say this:

Measuring both functions solely on closed deals is not the bold, commercially-minded take it appears to be. If marketing is only ever assessed at the end of the pipeline, you lose all visibility into what contributed to getting there.

No closed deal exists in a vacuum. Something generated that lead, nurtured that prospect, kept that brand relevant during the sometimes six or more months before sales ever made contact. Remember from my last post: The vast majority (81%) of a B2B buying decision happens before a salesperson even gets involved. Stripping those insights out does not simplify and align your reporting. It just makes you unable to learn from it.

That also means taking so-called vanity metrics out of the equation does the same thing. Just because there is no direct line between a LinkedIn post being seen by a prospect and that prospect ultimately signing a contract months later does not mean the post was not one of the many factors that got them there.

So the real question is not how to find better marketers or more disciplined sales reps. It is whether the organisation has designed a system in which both functions can succeed together, with KPIs that reflect what each role actually does, and a shared definition of what winning looks like. That is what this post is about.

Two different jobs. One shared goal.

Marketing generates demand, nurtures prospects and keeps the brand front of mind across the entire buyer decision process. Sales builds relationships and closes deals. These are not interchangeable jobs, and they should not be measured as if they were.

Marketing is, by nature, dealing with volume. Its job, broadly speaking and if we leave something like ABM aside for a moment, is to reach a large number of potential buyers, maintain presence across channels, build brand awareness and move prospects and customers along the funnel before they are ready to speak to a sales rep. Sales, on the other hand, is focused on depth: maximising the quality and value of every individual conversation, working out timing and fit, and converting interest into revenue.

The shared goal is closed deals and revenue growth. But the KPIs that get each team to that goal are necessarily different, and forcefully trying to combine them is where most of the dysfunction starts. Measuring marketing only on closed deals ignores everything it does upstream. Measuring sales on top-of-funnel reach is equally pointless. The fix is not to reduce all the insight down to one metric; it is to use and analyse metrics in a way that reveal which activities – both from marketing and sales side – actually work.

The real problem is usually language, not laziness

Most of the friction between marketing and sales is not about effort or attitude. It is about definitions. If marketing calls something a qualified lead and sales calls the same contact a waste of a follow-up call, that is not a performance problem. That is a calibration problem, and no amount of SLA documentation will fix it.

The lead scoring model is the most common flashpoint here. Marketing builds one based on the signals it can track, hands it over, and wonders why sales ignores it. Sales ignores it because they had no input or the data simply doesn’t make sense from their experience in the field.

If your context tells you that the numbers and conclusions put in front of you don’t add up, you don’t trust them. And that’s where many organisations find themselves today.

One shared number at the top, different KPIs underneath

The structure that tends to work best is straightforward in principle. There is one shared outcome metric both teams are accountable for. Pipeline generated from sales-accepted opportunities, or revenue influenced within a defined period, are both good candidates.

Underneath that shared number sits the layer that actually lets you learn, and for it to work, the latest and the most promising models imply that the metrics historically labelled marketing and the ones labelled sales have to be measured as one continuous picture. The principle is to track every touchpoint and engagement across the full lifecycle, through the engagement, prospecting and closing stages, and to capture not just the touchpoints themselves but the triggers that moved a prospect from one stage to the next, how long they sat in each stage, and where they dropped out, became disqualified and why. Capturing the information this way and per lifecycle stage enables us to analyse by trigger and by touchpoint which activities from both sales and marketing side genuinely moved prospects into the next stage, toward an opportunity and a closed deal, and which ones simply created noise.

What this also means is that there is no such thing as vanity metrics in marketing. Each touchpoint forms part of the diagnostic layer that tells us in each stage whether the work of sales and marketing is functioning properly, and they are exactly what you lose visibility into if you collapse everything into a single closed-revenue number.

The shared outcome metric keeps both teams oriented toward the same goal. The lifecycle data underneath tells you what to fix - whether that sits in marketing or sales - and how, when things go wrong.

The bottom line

Marketing and sales are different functions doing different jobs on the way to the same goal. The solution is not to pretend otherwise by collapsing their KPIs into one number, and it is not to keep measuring them in isolation and wonder why the friction persists.

Give both teams metrics that reflect what they actually do. Connect those metrics to a shared outcome. Track the full lifecycle underneath, so you can see which touchpoints and triggers actually moved the needle and which just made noise. Build the definitions, dashboards and incentives that make that real. And put both teams in the same room often enough that the shared insights remain shared.

That is less exciting than a provocative LinkedIn post but it is what works.