The Classic Blame Game

It’s a tale as old as time. The marketing team celebrates a successful lead generation campaign, while the sales team rolls their eyes and mutters, “These leads are useless.”

If you’re a CEO or Managing Director in the B2B space, chances are you’ve been stuck in the middle of this tug-of-war more than once. Marketing reports strong performance. Sales misses their targets. Somewhere in between, potential revenue quietly disappears.

I’ve seen this first-hand. During my years as a CEO, I witnessed countless marketing teams proud of the leads they generated, while sales teams called them a waste of time. “You just can’t sell” versus “You don’t understand what a good lead looks like.” The worst part? Both sides often had a point. And yet, nothing changed.

The core problem isn’t about how many leads are generated. It’s about a deeper misalignment between what marketing calls a lead and what sales needs to close a deal.

The Root of the Problem: Misalignment

In many B2B organizations, marketing and sales still operate in silos. Marketing focuses on top-of-funnel efforts, building awareness, driving traffic, collecting contact details. Their KPIs are often tied to reach and engagement, not revenue.

Meanwhile, sales are focused exclusively on results. Their success is measured in contracts, deals closed, and pipeline movement. So when marketing hands off leads that meet campaign goals but aren’t ready to buy, sales dismisses them. No one feels heard. And the cycle continues.

The problem isn’t bad intent. It’s bad calibration.

What Sales Actually Needs and Why It Matters

Sales teams are looking for something very specific. They want leads who already understand the problem they’re facing, who are actively exploring solutions, and who have the power to make purchasing decisions.

In short, they want leads with urgency, authority, and context.

For marketing, this means rethinking lead generation entirely. It’s not about filling the CRM with names. It’s about attracting the right individuals and moving them toward sales-readiness. That requires sharper targeting, deeper qualification, and active collaboration with sales.

Many experienced marketers now work with a lead quality spectrum in mind. Leads aren’t binary. They fall along a range from cold and curious to warm and ready. The job of marketing is to help move people along that spectrum, not just to add them to a list.

From Theory to Practice: A Smarter Way to Collaborate

The first step to solving this disconnect is alignment. Sales and marketing need to agree on what a qualified lead looks like. Not just job titles or company size, but real signals like urgency, timeline, pain point clarity, and budget scope.

One effective way to do this is to work backward. Look at deals that closed. Which leads turned into customers? What did they do early on? What signals did they give off? Reverse engineering these successful deals offers far more useful criteria than a standard persona.

Once that alignment exists, marketing can tailor campaigns accordingly. Messaging gets sharper. Targeting becomes more efficient. Feedback from sales becomes a critical part of the process, not an afterthought.

Importantly, the handover from marketing to sales shouldn’t be seen as a single moment. It’s a gradual process. Marketing should continue nurturing leads until there is a clear buying signal. This is where tools like lead scoring and behaviour tracking add nuance, helping determine the right moment for sales to step in.

Technology plays a helpful role, but only when strategy and communication are already in place. AI tools can assist by identifying behavioural patterns, scoring leads automatically, and streamlining the handover process. But the real driver of success is human alignment.

The Rise of Smarketing: A Unified Revenue Engine

This entire mindset shift is what many now call “Smarketing.” It’s not a buzzword. It’s a practical evolution—sales and marketing working as one unified growth team with shared goals, shared language, and transparent performance reporting.

Smarketing means regular collaboration, mutual accountability, and a focus on the same endgame: qualified opportunities that can lead to business growth.

In some companies, this level of alignment has evolved into a formal Revenue Operations (RevOps) structure, where marketing, sales, and customer success operate under a single strategy.

In many organizations, this evolution is already underway. Marketing teams are getting closer to the bottom of the funnel. Sales teams are sharing feedback earlier in the process. Together, they become one engine instead of two competing systems.

The Real Shift: From Lead Generation to Opportunity Creation

The focus must shift. Lead generation is no longer the goal. Opportunity creation is.

That shift demands more from marketing. It means owning results, not just reach. It also requires sales teams to give structured, honest, and consistent feedback on lead quality.

When both teams buy into a shared definition of success, pipelines become healthier. Sales gains confidence in the leads they receive. Marketing focuses less on quantity and more on qualified engagement. And leadership gains clarity on how marketing efforts contribute to business outcomes.

The result? Fewer leads, better leads and more conversions.

Final Thoughts

This isn’t about blaming marketing or sales. It’s about recognizing that both sides want the same thing, growth. But growth doesn’t happen when marketing optimizes for clicks and sales optimizes for contracts.

No tool, no CRM, and no campaign can fix this disconnect unless both sides are willing to align around qualified opportunities. But when that alignment happens, when both teams pull in the same direction, the entire business accelerates.

At BluMango, we help companies bridge this exact gap. Sometimes, all it takes is a fresh perspective, someone who understands both sides and can translate goals into a shared roadmap. If your teams are still misaligned, BluMango can help. Start with a conversation and let’s uncover what’s holding your revenue back. Contact us to begin.