Your marketing team hit their lead targets. Your sales team says the leads are garbage. Both are telling the truth.
Most founders treat this as a people issue. Fire the sales manager. Hire a "collaborative" marketing director. Run an offsite about alignment. Nothing changes because nothing structural changed.
The real problem: you've built an org chart that pays two departments to fight over the same territory. Marketing gets bonused on MQLs. Sales gets bonused on closed deals. The gap between those metrics is a war zone you funded with your comp plan.
Jon Ferrara built Goldmine in 1989 and Nimble in 2009. He's spent three decades watching companies accidentally design their marketing and sales teams to fight each other. The pattern is always the same: different tools, different metrics, different timelines. Marketing thinks in months and quarters. Sales thinks in days. Marketing creates leads they think are great, throws them over the wall, and sales says they stink.
The fix isn't better communication. It's structural alignment around a single metric.
At Goldmine, everyone in the company had one number. Everyone was compensated on that number. The shipping team. Customer service. Everyone. This changes how a customer service person handles a phone call because they know every touch leads to their ability to hit the number.
Replace MQLs with Sales Accepted Leads. Ask your sales team: what do you need for us to succeed? When marketing creates leads that sales has approved the definition of, the fake alignment disappears.
Speed matters more than you think. Under five minutes is ideal. Under fifteen minutes is acceptable. Over thirty minutes, they're dead. Track and publish response times. When salespeople demonstrate they're jumping on leads and converting them, marketing sees their work matters.
Create a weekly meeting where the revenue team talks about what were the best leads and why, what were the worst leads and why, and where buyers are stalled. This gives voice to the sales team and creates real communication with marketing.
The marketing and sales war isn't a people problem. It's a structural one you built with separate tools, separate metrics, and separate compensation. Define what a sales accepted lead looks like. Track response times. Meet weekly. Align everyone on one number.
The turf wars end when there's no turf to fight over.
Watch the Full Episode on Marketing and Sales Alignment with expert Jon Ferrara below:
Follow us to watch live on YouTube and LinkedIn or listen to episodes on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.