A business can spend thousands of pounds generating traffic, creating content, running campaigns and building awareness.
Then a good enquiry comes in.
And sits in somebody’s inbox for three days.
At that point, is it a marketing problem or a sales problem?
I would argue that it is neither.
It is a commercial system problem.
This is why I have always believed that marketing and sales should work much more closely together.
Marketing should not stop when someone fills in a form. Sales should not have to start from scratch when a lead arrives.
They should be part of the same customer journey.
Marketing and sales are working towards the same goal
At a very basic level, marketing and sales should both be helping the business create customers.
Marketing helps the right people become aware of you, understand what you do and see why it might matter to them. Sales takes that interest and turns it into conversations, opportunities and, hopefully, customers.
The problem comes when the two functions start operating as completely separate departments.
Marketing talks about impressions, engagement and leads.
Sales talks about conversations, pipeline and revenue.
Both may be working hard, but if they are measuring completely different things and rarely sharing information, it becomes very easy for them to blame each other.
Marketing says:
“We generated 100 leads.”
Sales says:
“But none of them were any good.”
And there begins a problem that is very common in growing businesses.
More leads is not always the answer
One of the first things businesses often tell us is:
“We need more leads.”
Sometimes they absolutely do.
But before increasing advertising spend or creating another lead generation campaign, I would want to understand what is happening to the leads already coming into the business.
How many are being followed up?
How quickly?
Who decides whether a lead is a good fit?
What happens if somebody is interested but not ready to buy today?
How many leads turn into genuine sales conversations?
How many become opportunities?
And how many eventually become customers?
Without that information, simply generating more leads can sometimes mean pouring more water into a bucket with holes in it.
Marketing should know what a good lead looks like
This is where your Ideal Customer Profile becomes particularly important.
Marketing and sales should agree on the type of company the business actually wants to win.
Not vaguely.
Not “SMEs”, “technology companies” or “life sciences businesses”.
They should understand what makes a company a particularly strong commercial fit.
What size are they?
What stage are they at?
What problem are they dealing with?
What has changed in their business?
What makes solving that problem important now?
If marketing is targeting one type of customer while sales is prioritising another, there is going to be friction.
A shared ICP gives both teams somewhere sensible to start.
Sales has some of your best marketing information
One of the most valuable things a marketing team can do is spend time talking to sales.
Salespeople hear directly from customers and prospects every day.
They hear the questions.
The objections.
The misunderstandings.
The reasons somebody is interested.
And the reasons somebody decides not to buy.
That information is incredibly useful for marketing.
If prospects regularly ask the same question in sales meetings, perhaps that question should become an article on your website.
If people repeatedly misunderstand what your product does, perhaps your messaging needs to change.
If sales keeps hearing the same objection, marketing may be able to address it before the prospect even reaches the sales conversation.
The best content ideas are often already sitting inside your sales team.
Marketing should make selling easier
Marketing should not simply generate a name and email address and then disappear.
Good marketing should help prepare the customer for the sales conversation.
By the time someone speaks to sales, they might already have:
Read an article.
Watched a video.
Visited a service page.
Seen a case study.
Followed your company on LinkedIn.
Downloaded a guide.
Read an email.
All of those interactions can help someone understand the problem, understand your point of view and build confidence in your business.
That means sales does not always have to begin with:
“Let me explain who we are and what we do.”
The prospect already knows something.
And that can make the sales conversation much more useful.
The customer does not see departments
This is another important point.
Internally, we might think in terms of marketing, sales, customer service, operations and accounts.
The customer does not.
They experience one company.
They see your LinkedIn post.
They visit your website.
They fill in a form.
They receive an email.
They speak to somebody in sales.
They receive a proposal.
From their perspective, this is one continuous experience.
So when marketing and sales are disconnected internally, the customer often feels the gap.
They may have to repeat information they already submitted.
They may receive completely different messages from different people.
They may engage with one part of the business and hear nothing for days.
Or they may receive a very polished marketing experience followed by a sales process that feels completely unrelated.
That disconnect matters.
What should happen when a lead comes in?
This is where systems become important.
Imagine somebody fills in your website form at 10am tomorrow.
What actually happens next?
Does the enquiry go into a shared inbox?
Does somebody get a notification?
Does it automatically enter the CRM?
Can the salesperson see which service the prospect was interested in?
Can they see how the person originally found the business?
Is there a task created for follow-up?
Does the prospect receive a useful acknowledgement?
Can the team see whether somebody has responded?
These sound like small operational details.
But together, they can make a significant difference to how effectively a business turns marketing interest into a real commercial opportunity.
Your CRM should connect marketing and sales
A CRM should not simply be somewhere you store names and email addresses.
It should help create visibility around the customer journey.
Marketing should be able to understand which campaigns and content are generating interest.
Sales should be able to see where leads came from and what happened before the conversation.
Management should be able to understand what is progressing through the pipeline.
And ideally, marketing should eventually be able to see which activity contributed to actual customers.
This allows much better conversations.
Instead of:
“That campaign got 250 clicks.”
we can start asking:
“How many of those people became qualified leads?”
Then:
“How many became opportunities?”
And eventually:
“Did any of them become customers?”
That is a much more commercially useful view of marketing performance.
What about leads that are not ready yet?
This is another place where sales and marketing need to work together.
Not every good prospect is ready to buy when they first find you.
They might have the right problem but the wrong timing.
The budget may not be available until next quarter.
A project may have been delayed.
They may need internal approval.
They may simply be researching.
That does not necessarily make them a bad lead.
It might just mean they need more time.
Marketing can play an important role here through useful content, email, retargeting, events, LinkedIn or other forms of nurturing.
Sales does not need to manually chase every prospect every week.
But the business should have a sensible way of staying visible until the timing changes.
Otherwise, a perfectly good future customer can disappear simply because they were not ready on the day they first made contact.
Sales and marketing should agree on the handover
One surprisingly useful exercise is simply agreeing when a lead moves from marketing to sales.
What needs to happen?
Has the person requested a meeting?
Downloaded something?
Asked for pricing?
Visited a particular page several times?
Matched your ICP?
Engaged with a campaign?
There is no universal answer.
It depends on the business, the product and the sales cycle.
But there should be an answer.
Otherwise marketing may be passing leads too early while sales is expecting people who are already ready to buy.
That creates frustration on both sides.
The feedback loop matters just as much
The handover should not be one way.
Sales needs to tell marketing what happens next.
Was the lead a good fit?
What problem did they actually have?
Did the messaging match what mattered to them?
Why did the opportunity progress?
Why did it stall?
Why did they choose a competitor?
That feedback makes future marketing better.
And better marketing should, in turn, make future sales conversations better.
It should become a loop.
Marketing learns from sales. Sales benefits from marketing.
What should marketing measure?
This does not mean we stop measuring awareness, engagement or website traffic.
Those things can all matter.
But they should sit within a bigger picture.
Depending on the business, I would also want to understand things such as:
Qualified leads.
Sales conversations.
Opportunities created.
Pipeline value.
Conversion rates.
Cost per opportunity.
Sales cycle length.
Customer acquisition cost.
Revenue generated.
Not every piece of content needs to generate a sale.
That would be unrealistic.
But the overall marketing system should have a commercial purpose.
What does good sales and marketing alignment look like?
It does not need to be complicated.
In a growing business, it can start with a simple regular conversation between whoever owns marketing and whoever owns sales.
What are we trying to sell this month?
Which customers are we trying to reach?
What is sales hearing?
What questions are prospects asking?
Which leads are progressing?
Which campaigns are generating the right conversations?
What content would help sales?
What information does marketing need?
That one conversation can be surprisingly valuable.
Especially in smaller businesses where people can easily become very busy working in their own areas.
Marketing is not the colouring-in department
I think this is one of the bigger misconceptions we need to move away from.
Marketing should not simply be the department that creates the graphics, writes the posts and makes things look nice once the commercial decisions have already been made.
Marketing should be involved much earlier.
Who are we targeting?
What are we selling?
Why does it matter?
How are we positioning it?
What is the route to market?
What does the customer journey look like?
How will we generate demand?
How will we support sales?
Those are commercial questions.
And marketing should be part of those conversations.
This is also why outsourced marketing can work so well
For many growing companies, there is a gap between where the business is and the marketing capability it needs.
The founder may still be driving sales.
There may be a junior marketing person creating content.
There may be several different agencies or freelancers doing different pieces of work.
And nobody has responsibility for connecting it all together.
This is where an outsourced marketing team can add much more value than simply taking over social media.
The job becomes understanding the commercial goals and then making sure strategy, messaging, campaigns, content, websites, CRM, automation and sales support are all pulling in the same direction.
That is very different from simply producing more marketing activity.
The aim is not more marketing
It is better marketing.
Marketing that knows who it is trying to reach.
Marketing that gives sales something useful to work with.
Marketing that generates the right conversations.
Marketing that learns from what happens after the lead arrives.
And marketing that is connected to the systems that help those opportunities move forward.
Because ultimately, sales and marketing are not trying to achieve two different things.
They are helping the same customer move through the same journey.
At Silver Apples Digital, this is why we look at marketing, sales and systems together.
We help businesses clarify who they want to reach, communicate their value, generate opportunities and put the processes around those opportunities so that marketing activity has a much clearer commercial purpose.
Marketing should not stop at the lead.
It should help create the conditions that turn the right lead into the right customer.
And that is why sales and marketing should never work in silos.
