What is the difference between an MQL and an SQL?

A marketing qualified lead fits your target customer on paper and has asked about something you sell. A sales qualified or sales accepted lead is one that sales has reviewed and agreed is worth a real conversation. The exact definitions matter less than both teams writing them down and using the same ones.

Who should own lead quality, sales or marketing?

Both, through a shared number. Marketing owns attracting the right kind of inquiry and sales owns qualifying and following up, but if each team is measured only on its own half, quality becomes an argument rather than a metric. Disqualification reasons recorded by sales give marketing the evidence to improve.

How do you get salespeople to update the CRM?

Ask for fewer fields, make the important ones required, and show salespeople that the data changes what marketing sends them. When a monthly review visibly removes a source of bad leads because of what sales recorded, compliance tends to improve on its own.

How often should sales and marketing meet?

A focused monthly meeting is enough for most growing B2B companies, covering the shared number, a sample of recent leads, response times and what sales is hearing from buyers. Weekly check-ins can help during a big campaign or a change in process.

How to Align Sales and Marketing in a Growing B2B Company

Why alignment breaks as you grow

In a twelve-person B2B company, the owner usually sells, decides what marketing does, and hears every customer conversation. Marketing and sales are aligned by default because they share a brain.

Somewhere on the way to fifty or a hundred people, that changes. A sales lead is hired, then a small team. Marketing becomes a coordinator, then a manager, then a manager with suppliers. Each side gets its own targets, tools and meetings. And the agreement that used to be implicit (what a good prospect looks like, what to say to them, when to follow up) is never written down.

The symptoms are familiar. Marketing reports a strong month of leads. Sales says the leads are junk. Marketing says sales does not follow up. Sales builds its own decks because the marketing material "does not work with real buyers." Leadership hears both stories and cannot tell which is true, because neither side's data includes the other side's half.

Both teams are usually partly right. The fix is not a team-building day. It is three written agreements and a meeting.

Agreement one: what counts as a lead

Most arguments between sales and marketing are arguments about vocabulary. Marketing counts a form submission as a lead. Sales counts a conversation with a budget holder as a lead. Both use the same word, and the reports never reconcile.

Write down a small set of stages, with a definition and an example for each. A workable version for most B2B companies:

Inquiry: anyone who raised a hand. A form, a call, a chat, a demo request.
Marketing qualified: an inquiry that fits the target customer on paper (industry, size, region, role) and asked about something you sell.
Sales accepted: sales has reviewed it and agrees it is worth a real conversation.
Opportunity: a conversation has confirmed need, authority and a realistic timeline.
Won or lost, with a reason.

The part most companies skip is the list of disqualification reasons. Write them down too: wrong size, wrong region, student or job seeker, existing customer with a support issue, competitor fishing, no budget. When sales rejects a lead, it picks a reason from the list. Over a quarter, those reasons tell marketing exactly what to change.

Agree on response time as well. A qualified inquiry that waits several days for a reply is a lead marketing paid for and sales let go cold. Pick a window both teams can meet, and report on it. For more on how lead stages should flow into reporting, see how to connect marketing reporting to sales outcomes, and for what should count at the top of the funnel, what should count as a marketing conversion.

Agreement two: a feedback loop that actually loops

Marketing cannot improve what it never hears about. In many growing companies, a lead goes into the CRM and disappears from marketing's view. Whether it became a customer, stalled or was ignored is known only to the salesperson.

A working feedback loop has three parts.

Required fields

Every lead record carries its original source, its current stage and, if closed, the reason. Keep the required fields to the few that matter. A CRM that asks salespeople for fifteen fields per lead gets fifteen fields of guesswork.

A regular sample review

Once a month, marketing and sales sit down with a sample of recent leads, chosen at random, and talk through what happened to each. It is slow, it is a little awkward, and it surfaces more useful information than any dashboard. Patterns show up quickly: one campaign attracting the wrong size of company, one form that brings tyre-kickers, one segment that converts far better than expected.

Marketing hears the buyer

Have marketing staff listen to sales calls, or sit in on a few meetings each quarter. The objections, questions and phrases buyers use should feed directly into the website, the ads and the sales material. Brand messaging that connects strategy to sales covers how to turn what buyers say into language your whole team can use.

Expect your CRM and your analytics to disagree about lead counts. That is normal and explainable, and why GA4 and your CRM report different lead numbers walks through the reasons. Agree which system is the record for which number, and stop arguing about the gap.

Agreement three: one number both teams own

If marketing is measured on lead volume and sales is measured on closed revenue, misalignment is built into the compensation plan. Marketing will produce more leads; sales will complain about quality; both will hit their own targets while the business misses its own.

Give both teams a shared number. For most B2B companies the right one is qualified pipeline (sales-accepted opportunities, by value) or revenue from new customers. Each team keeps its own working metrics underneath: marketing still watches cost per qualified lead, sales still watches close rate. But the headline number is shared, and so is the conversation when it is off.

Make the commitments run in both directions. Sales commits to a response window, to recording stage and reason on every lead, and to sharing what buyers say. Marketing commits to a volume of qualified inquiries in the target segments, to keeping sales material current within an agreed time of a change in positioning or offer, and to retiring campaigns that sales has shown produce the wrong buyers. Writing both halves down is what turns the arrangement from a complaint channel into an agreement. It also gives leadership something specific to ask about when the shared number slips, instead of a debate about whose fault it is.

This changes behaviour quickly. Marketing starts caring about what happens after the form. Sales starts telling marketing which deals were easiest to close and why. The difference between the two kinds of lead target is covered in why lead volume is not the same as lead quality.

The meeting that holds it together

Agreements decay without a regular place to check them. One monthly meeting, kept short, is usually enough:

The shared number against target, and the trend.
The lead sample review: what happened to the leads, and the disqualification reasons.
Response times on qualified inquiries.
What sales is hearing from buyers that marketing should know.
One change each team will make before next month.

The leadership sponsor attends, at least at first. Not to referee, but to make clear that both teams answer to the same outcome.

A worked example

Consider an illustrative Moncton company of about fifty people selling industrial equipment and service contracts across Atlantic Canada. Marketing runs search ads and trade shows. Sales is four account managers, each with a territory.

The complaints are classic. Marketing reports rising inquiries. Sales says most are parts requests and service calls from existing customers. Nobody can say which ads produce new accounts.

The company writes its five stages and seven disqualification reasons, adds a source field the CRM requires, and routes existing-customer requests to service automatically. The first month's sample review shows that one campaign, aimed at a broad equipment term, produces most of the misrouted inquiries, while a narrower campaign for a specific product line produces a small number of very strong opportunities. Budget moves accordingly. The shared number becomes qualified opportunities from new accounts, and both teams see it monthly.

Nothing about this required new software. It required writing down what everyone assumed.

Warning signs and first steps

You likely have an alignment problem if sales builds its own material, if marketing cannot say what happened to last month's leads, if the two teams report different numbers to leadership, or if "lead quality" comes up in every meeting without a definition.

Start with the definitions. Get the sales lead and the marketing lead in a room with ten real leads from last month, and have them agree on a stage and a reason for each. The disagreements in that hour are your alignment problem, made specific. Then add the required fields, set the shared number and book the monthly meeting.

Alignment is one of the operating recommendations a marketing strategy should include, because a positioning that sales does not use and marketing cannot measure does not survive contact with the quarter. If the reporting side needs work too, the B2B attribution audit is a sensible companion.