Sales says the leads marketing brought in are garbage. Marketing points out that the same leads, worked properly, closed fine last quarter. Neither of them is wrong, which is exactly why the argument never ends.
I spent years watching this play out inside global B2B SaaS funnels. When marketing hands over a lead, they mean someone downloaded an ebook or signed up for the product or booked a demo or requested a price quote.
When sales picks it up, they’re checking whether this is a real person with budget who actually wants to buy. They’re filtering out the student doing research, the operator at a company a tenth the size of who you actually sell to, the curious browser who will never have a reason to pay.
Those are two completely different bars, and nobody ever wrote down which one counts.
So marketing hits its number, sales looks at the same list and sees time-wasters, and both walk into the Monday meeting with data proving the other team is the problem. The fight is not about the leads but about a common definition nobody agreed on.
Is this an honest mistake or is somebody protecting their numbers?
Sometimes this is innocent. The two teams genuinely never compared notes, each assumed “qualified” had one obvious meaning, and the gap sat there unnoticed. That version is easy to fix once you point at it.
But sometimes it isn’t. Each team knows the other’s definition perfectly well and rejects it anyway, because adopting it would make their own work look worse. If marketing admits sales’s criteria are the real ones, their lead count collapses overnight, and that number is the one thing making their work look successful every month.
If sales admits marketing’s criteria are fair, they lose their explanation for why they keep missing the target. Eventually it is not really about leads anymore. The two teams simply do not trust each other, so neither will accept the other’s criteria, no matter how reasonable it is.
The CRM just feeds the problem, since that MQL field was set up years ago by someone who is probably gone now, and it counts leads without either side actually deciding what should count. So marketing waves the number around as proof they did their job while sales points to the same number as proof they didn’t.
Here’s a way to check which version of the problem you’re actually in, the honest gap or the trust breakdown. Ask marketing to say, out loud, what sales actually means by qualified. Then ask sales to do the same for marketing’s definition.
If neither one can answer, nobody has actually looked at the gap yet, and one honest conversation closes it. If both sides can state the other’s definition correctly and still refuse to use it, the definitions were never the real problem. Trust is, and no document fixes that.
Once you know which version of the problem you’re actually facing, the next question is what to do about it. There are three things founders usually reach for first, speed, a formal agreement between the teams, or new hires, and each one misses the same thing.
Does faster lead response improve conversion?
Answering an unqualified lead faster does not make it qualified, it just tells you sooner that it was never going to work. The leads are still moving through the same gap between marketing and sales, so the MQL to SQL rate never actually improves.
Speed feels like a quick fix because it’s the one thing a team can change on its own. Nobody has to hire anyone or convince another team to change how they work, you just move faster. Call the lead sooner and you’re more likely to catch them before they’ve moved on, so contact rate goes up and that looks like progress. Nobody checks whether the people they’re reaching are actually the right fit.
A wrong-fit lead answered in five minutes is still a wrong-fit lead.
Do sales and marketing SLAs actually work?
After speed fails, the next move is usually a process fix. Someone in the room suggests a service level agreement, marketing agrees to send a set number of leads, sales agrees to work every one of them within a set window, and everyone signs off feeling like the problem is handled.
But the SLA does not fix a broken handoff, it just writes the dysfunction into a contract. Both sides sign off on the target numbers without ever sitting down to compare what either one means by a qualified lead.
Marketing commits to a number using its own definition and sales commits to working leads using a different one. Nobody ever compares the two definitions and all that gets agreed on is volume and timing. Fixing that means somebody has to decide which definition counts, or replace both with a new one, and nobody in that room has the authority to do it.
Also, neither function can force its definition on the other. Because, marketing will not sign something that shrinks its own numbers, and sales will not sign something that hands it more work.
Does hiring a new salesperson fix a broken sales and marketing handoff?
The logic behind hiring a new salesperson is simple. If better people are working the leads, more of those leads will close. A VP of Sales, a senior AE with a strong track record elsewhere, someone who has done this before.
The new hire takes three months to get up to speed and two more before the founder concludes this was not the problem. Because, they inherit the same undefined criteria, work the same unfiltered list, and hit the same wall the last person did. A better salesperson cannot convert a lead that was never actually qualified in the first place because the skill was never what was missing.
You just paid more for someone to lose at a rigged game.
How do you get sales and marketing to agree on qualified leads
Speed, the SLA, and the new hire all miss the same thing. None of them produce an actual definition of a qualified lead that both sides accept.
In practice this means someone with authority over both functions, usually the founder, sets specific, checkable criteria for what makes a lead worth a sales conversation. This is not two sides agreeing to a common solution but one person making the call because somebody has to.
The founder should present it as a fix to the system, not a verdict on who was right. Otherwise whoever feels overruled just quietly works around the new rule, the same way this disagreement never actually got settled before. The criteria settle the logical argument but not how people feel about it.
Some common criteria for a qualified lead include:
- Company size inside a defined range
- A title with real buying authority or influence over the decision
- A specific action that signals real intent to buy, not just curiosity
A disqualifier list matters just as much as the list of qualifiers. A generic email domain or a company well below your target size are common ones, and either should carry the same weight as a missing qualifier.
How do you turn lead criteria into a working system?
Once the criteria exist, somebody still has to turn them into a rule a system can run automatically. The CRM is the practical place to start, not because it is the only option, but because the lead already lives there once it enters the funnel, and sales already looks there for their queue. Also, most funded B2B SaaS companies already have one running.
Having a place to run the rule is not enough. The rule also needs data most leads do not hand over on a form. Nobody signs up for a demo and lists their company size or seniority voluntarily.
That data comes from enrichment tools where the company size and title lookup run automatically off the lead’s email domain and name, feeding the result straight into the CRM before anyone manually checks anything.
Once that data is sitting in the CRM, the rule itself does not have to be a binary pass or fail. A lead can be scored against however many criteria the company actually settles on, and routed differently depending on how many it meets. If you have disqualifiers (like a generic email ID, company size below target ICP), the lead gets checked against the disqualifiers first. If any one of the disqualifiers is triggered, the lead is rejected outright, no matter how it scores otherwise.
Here is what that looks like in practice. If a company has the three qualifiers and one disqualifier discussed earlier:
Three out of three qualifiers goes straight to a sales rep.
Two out of three goes to something with a human touch like a recorded webinar.
One out of three goes into a nurture sequence.
Zero out of three gets an ebook, not a rejection, since it cleared the disqualifiers, it just did not show enough signal yet.
Once that system is running, nobody has to check every lead by hand and nobody has to trust the other team’s judgment call. The score does the work either side used to argue about.
Now we can step back and look at what was actually causing the argument. It was never really about any single lead, but about the absence of a standard both sides had to answer to. Build the standard into the system, and there is no one left to argue with.