Marketing: “Sales isn’t following up on the leads we’re generating.”
Sales: “We would if the leads were any good.”
It might be the oldest argument in B2B.
But I’m increasingly convinced we’re arguing about the wrong thing.
The problem isn’t always the leads. And it isn’t always the follow-up.
The problem is the handoff.
Think about what happens before Marketing generates a lead.
The team researches the audience. Develops the positioning. Creates the content. Builds the campaign. Thinks deeply about the problem they’re trying to surface and the message that will resonate.
They accumulate an enormous amount of context along the way.
And then a lead comes in.
What does Sales get?
A name. A company. Maybe a lead score. Maybe the title of the ebook they downloaded.
And we expect the rep to take it from there.
That feels increasingly outdated.
Marketing shouldn’t throw leads over the wall. It should cross the wall with them.
If Marketing is responsible for creating demand, I think Marketing also needs to own more of the enablement required to convert that demand.
That means every meaningful campaign should have a Sales enablement component built into it from the beginning.
Before the leads start arriving, Sales should understand:
- Who is this campaign targeting?
- What problem are we trying to surface?
- What point of view did we put into the market?
- What has this prospect already learned from us?
- What questions should a rep ask?
- What objections are they likely to hear?
- Most importantly: What conversation should happen next?
That’s very different from sending Sales a link to the campaign assets and calling it enablement.
Marketing has spent years getting better at understanding buyers, creating content and educating the market.
Why wouldn’t we use that same capability to educate the people who are actually talking to those buyers?
This doesn’t mean Sales gets a pass on follow-up.
It means we stop pretending that Marketing’s responsibility ends when a lead gets assigned.
Maybe the better metric isn’t simply:
Did Marketing generate the lead?
It’s:
Did we create a sales team capable of taking advantage of the demand we generated?
Stop handing Sales leads.
Start handing them conversations they’re prepared to have.
