Marketing and sales are one system, not two departments
The customer experiences one journey. The business gets one result. Everything below follows from that sentence: how to measure the funnel, set KPIs, find the real cause of a failure and plan together.
Alignment is not a soft topic: it shows up in growth and profit.
Read it as direction, not as a guarantee: this is benchmark data, not an experiment.
Source: SiriusDecisions (now Forrester), Summit 2015, “The Economics of Alignment”. Benchmark data from 400 B2B organisations, 2006–2014.
Buyers also spend most of their journey without talking to you.
Content, website and the first call are one continuous experience. A split KPI model measures them as separate events.
Source: Gartner, B2B buying journey research (Smarter with Gartner).
1The funnel: from activity to commercial result
What each stage measures, and what it hides.
The classic funnel: four numbers and two conversions
Useful for operations. Not a diagnosis: it tells you where the numbers fall, not why.
A modern funnel is longer than the dashboard
Awareness, visit or free sign-up, registration, request after registration, lead, qualified lead, sale, repeat sale. Marketing stops at the lead and sales starts at the lead, so nobody owns the middle: qualification, response time, repeat sales.
The same funnel in money (illustrative month)
| Step | Value | How it is calculated |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing spend | $10,000 | budget |
| Leads | 400 | spend ÷ CPL |
| CPL | $25 | spend ÷ leads |
| Sales | 40 | leads × C2 (10%) |
| Revenue | $24,000 | sales × $600 average order |
| Gross profit | $9,600 | revenue × 40% margin |
| ROMI | −4% | (gross profit − spend) ÷ spend |
| Revenue per lead | $60 | revenue ÷ leads |
- The first month often does not pay back: the repeat purchases and later cohorts do.
- Leads, CPL and conversion are all “fine”, yet ROMI is negative until you count repeat sales.
- One lead can be worth $60 or $0. The lead count does not tell you which.
A report is evidence, not an explanation
- The first month rarely pays back. Cohorts pay back later. Read the cohort, not only the calendar month.
- Budget effects are hard to isolate. Past activity, brand and product changes move results at the same time.
- More leads, lower conversion. Volume usually dilutes quality.
- Lead count hides lead quality. Two hundred leads can be two hundred buyers or two hundred browsers.
- Every team has its own source of truth. End-to-end analytics that everyone trusts almost never exists.
- Reports show what changed, not why. Causes come from calls, customers and the people doing the work.
Even good measurement can be off by a factor of three
Researchers compared standard analytics methods with randomised experiments, the gold standard for causality. Where randomisation was not used, results often pointed to the wrong size of effect, even with rich controls.
Practical rule: treat every report as a hypothesis. Verify it with an experiment, call recordings and customer interviews.
Source: Gordon, Zettelmeyer, Bhargava & Chapsky (2019), “A Comparison of Approaches to Advertising Measurement: Evidence from Big Field Experiments at Facebook”, Marketing Science.
2Why marketing and sales pull in different directions
Standard KPIs, and how each team can win while the business loses.
Standard KPIs: each level optimises a different number
| Level | Typical KPI |
|---|---|
| Marketing | Number of leads · CPL |
| Sales | Lead-to-sale conversion · number of sales · revenue |
| Commercial leader | Revenue · ROMI |
| CEO / owner | Profit and growth |
The further down the list, the closer the number is to money. The further up, the easier it is to hit without helping the business.
Each team can hit its KPI while the business gets worse
| Metric | Before | After CPL push | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spend | $10,000 | $10,000 | same |
| CPL | $25 | $15 | Marketing: CPL −40% |
| Leads | 400 | 667 | Marketing: leads +67% |
| C2 (lead → sale) | 10% | 5% | Sales: conversion halves |
| Sales | 40 | 33 | fewer customers |
| Revenue | $24,000 | $20,000 | Business: −17% |
Marketing bought cheaper, weaker leads and hit both KPIs. Sales drowned in them. Illustrative numbers; the mechanism is real.
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
— Marilyn Strathern (1997), restating Goodhart’s law (Charles Goodhart, 1975)
Leads and CPL are good operating metrics. They become dangerous the moment they become the goal.
More leads can make sales worse
- Cheap traffic raises the lead count. Marketing hits its volume and CPL targets.
- Weak leads enter the queue. They look the same in the CRM as strong ones.
- Reps spend time on the wrong people. Sales time is finite; cold leads eat it.
- Hot leads wait and cool. C2 falls, revenue falls, and each side blames the other.
Bad leads are usually cheap. Good leads usually cost more. A queue full of leads is not a sign of success; it is a risk.
Response time is a sales KPI that marketing pays for
“Qualified” meant a meaningful conversation with a decision maker. Slow handling turns paid-for leads into wasted spend.
Source: Oldroyd, McElheran & Elkington, “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads”, Harvard Business Review, March 2011.
3KPIs that connect marketing and sales
Pair every volume metric with a metric that shows its quality.
Marketing: from lead count to profit
- Number of leads and CPL alone
- Rewards cheap, weak traffic
- Pushes the lead queue up and C2 down
- Looks perfect on the marketing dashboard
- Profit, ROMI and profit per lead
- Pays for buyers, not for form fills
- Accepts a higher CPL when the lead is worth more
- Shows the same truth to marketing and sales
Sales on inbound leads: conversion plus revenue per lead
- C2 alone, or revenue alone
- C2 alone rewards cherry-picking the easy leads
- Revenue alone hides whether lead quality fell
- Neither shows who is responsible for a drop
- C2 and average revenue per lead
- Links lead quality to the sales result
- Makes a drop in lead quality visible in numbers
- Gives sales a reason to work B-leads too
Sales on outbound: volume and revenue, never one alone
- Number of contacts, or revenue, alone
- Contacts alone: a lot of calls to the wrong people
- Revenue alone: no early signal of a problem
- A good month can hide an empty pipeline
- Contacts and revenue together
- Activity is a leading indicator, revenue is the result
- Both can be checked against each other
- Shows quickly if the script or the target list is off
The KPI map: every volume metric needs a paired quality metric
| Role | Primary KPI | Paired with | What it prevents |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marketing | Profit and ROMI by source | Leads, CPL | Buying cheap, weak traffic |
| Sales (inbound) | C2 and revenue per lead | Time to first call | Cherry-picking, slow follow-up |
| Sales (outbound) | Contacts and revenue | Share of decision makers reached | Calls to the wrong people |
| Commercial leader | Revenue and ROMI | Profit per lead | Growth that costs more than it earns |
| CEO / owner | Profit and growth | Cohort payback | Judging a month in isolation |
4Who is right? A way to find out yourself
A root-cause algorithm instead of a blame meeting.
The right KPI is far from everything you need. Marketing sees its funnel, sales sees its own, and neither sees the cause between them. If you ask for reasons, you will hear plausible ones, sometimes untrue. Even people you trust will rationalise, and just believing them changes nothing: without checking, the same failure returns next quarter. Setting the right KPI is the start of the work, not the end of it.
The root-cause algorithm
Step 3 is where leaders earn their salary. Steps 1 and 2 only tell you what the team believes.
Why sales fails on inbound leads: check six things in order
- Lead volume. More than the team can handle?
- Time to first call. How long does a new lead wait?
- Unreachable leads. Wrong numbers, no answer, no retries.
- Call quality. Connection, tone, discovery questions.
- Script and execution. A good script poorly used is still a bad script.
- A/B/C lead mix. Did the share of ready-to-buy leads change?
A/B/C lead intent ends the “who is guilty” argument
- A: interested and ready to buy now
- B: interested, not ready to buy now
- C: not interested, not ready
| Per 100 leads | A | B | C |
|---|---|---|---|
| Last period | 30 | 40 | 30 |
| This period | 15 | 35 | 50 |
| Change | −15 | −5 | +20 |
Same lead count, half the A-leads: a traffic-quality problem, not a sales problem. (Illustrative numbers.) Have sales tag every new lead A, B or C. Compare the mix for the last 100 leads against the previous 100.
Why sales fails on outbound leads
- Not enough leads or contacts. Volume of the target list and daily activity are below plan.
- Script and its execution. The pitch is unclear, or people do not follow it.
- Talking to the wrong people. Contacts without authority or need burn the list.
Why marketing fails: root causes versus common excuses
- The product is bad
- The season is bad (partly true, but only if peaks and troughs were not prepared for)
- The contractor is bad
- Too many projects
- Competitors got stronger
- The market changed (partly true)
- Analytics is not set up
- No real knowledge of customer needs
- No creative guidelines or testing method
- Funnels that are too short to carry the buyer
5Aligning marketing and sales plans
Top-down or bottom-up? Both, in a fixed order.
| Step | Who | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Leadership | Sets the revenue target |
| 2 | Marketing | Breaks revenue into leads and budget, and commits to a lead volume |
| 3 | Sales | Breaks leads into sales and revenue through conversion |
| 4 | Commercial leader | Reconciles the two plans, or both teams do it together |
| 5 | Each team | States its growth hypotheses: where the emphasis will be |
One equation, two owners
Plan the cohort, not just the month: leads bought in March close in April, May and June.
6Four iron rules of marketing and sales sync
Operating and strategic management aimed at maximum commercial effect.
Rule 1: build marketing around expensive products
It is better to downsell from an expensive product than to upsell from a cheap one. The more expensive the product, the more room there is for acquisition cost; the cheaper it is, the lower the ROMI. Choose products with the Pareto principle: a minority of products usually brings the majority of revenue (the 80/20 rule of thumb). Sales will thank you.
Rule 2: make one team out of sales and marketing
- Meet on a fixed cadence, every week or two.
- Warn sales before an experiment or an expected surge of leads.
- Sales feeds marketing with insights: the phrases that tip a customer into buying.
Rule 3: prepare for peaks and troughs early, marketing sees them first
| Leading indicator | Before a trough | Before a peak |
|---|---|---|
| CTR (clicks ÷ impressions) | ↓ falls | ↑ rises |
| Time on site | ↑ rises | ↓ falls |
| C1 (visit → lead) | ↓ falls | ↑ rises |
| Time from ad view to lead | ↑ lengthens | ↓ shortens |
Buyers cool down before sales do: they click less, browse longer, convert less and take longer to decide. Tell sales early, adjust plans and budgets before the quarter shows it.
Rule 4: spend your own time where the payoff is
- Time follows potential payoff. The bigger the possible gain, the more of your time it gets.
- Talk to customers, listen to calls. Customer interviews and call recordings beat any summary.
- Rank your channels. Give channels a priority order and defend it.
- Fewer details, more reliable plans. A simple forecast is easier to check and to trust.
- Mornings for analysis. Keep the fresh hours for the work that needs thinking.
- Meetings for insights, not reports. Say it aloud: this is a safe place to discuss problems.
Psychological safety: Edmondson (1999), “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams”, Administrative Science Quarterly.
Key takeaways
- Look at the cohort. Judge a plan by the reporting period and by the cohort it created.
- A report is where the work starts. Only you can find the real reason for a rise or a fall.
- The right KPI is necessary, not enough. Pair every volume metric with a quality metric.
- Sales and marketing are one department. And you act as head of sales, head of marketing and commercial leader at once.
Sources and further reading
- SiriusDecisions / Forrester (2015). The Economics of Alignment, Summit 2015.
- Gartner. B2B buying journey research, Smarter with Gartner.
- Oldroyd, McElheran & Elkington (2011). The Short Life of Online Sales Leads. Harvard Business Review.
- Gordon, Zettelmeyer, Bhargava & Chapsky (2019). A Comparison of Approaches to Advertising Measurement. Marketing Science.
- Strathern, M. (1997). “Improving ratings”: audit in the British University system. European Review. Goodhart, C. (1975).
- Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly.