Sales and marketing are usually chasing the same outcomes: more conversations, more wins, more growth.

But all too often, an on/off rift between the teams leads to slow follow-ups, muddled messaging and deals that drift away while everyone argues about whose fault it is.

We spoke to five B2B thought leaders to get their perspectives on sales vs marketing squabbles. All five work within the construction and engineering sectors, but their insights can be applied across most B2B brands. 

The people we spoke to:

Tom Murray, Sales and Marketing Director, Polypipe Building Services

Gareth Osborne, Associate Marketing Director, Pick Everard

Alex Andrews, Vice President Marketing, Instagrid

Kate Perrin, Marketing Director, Barbour ABI

Gemma Scott, Marketing Communications Manager, BMI

Why is aligning sales and marketing important?

Because the cost isn’t just internal friction – it’s deals that never happen.

Start by being clear what you’re trying to achieve together. Tom Murray describes alignment as “the difference between just ‘activity’ and actually having a real impact in the market.” 

That framing matters because it forces a harder question than ‘are we busy?’ – it asks ‘is any of this helping us win?’

Gareth Osborne puts the upside plainly: “If you get alignment right and you work well with your sales colleagues, you can supercharge the business.”

“And without alignment,” says Alex Andrews, “the silo-ing becomes disruptive and unproductive.” That disruption shows up as duplicated effort, mixed messages, and leads that don’t get handled properly.

Kate Perrin adds that the tolerance for misalignment has dropped: “Before COVID, we probably got away with not having alignment as much as we need it now.” Buyers have less patience, more choice, and more ways to ignore you.

Gemma Scott brings it back to the buyer journey: “Ultimately, it’s about the overall customer experience.” If sales and marketing aren’t aligned internally, customers feel it externally, in handovers, follow-ups and inconsistencies.

What does sales need from marketing?

It starts with clarity on who you’re selling to, and what ‘good’ looks like. 

If you want sales to sell on value, marketing has to make that value easy to explain. Tom Murray’s starting point is specific: “What sales needs from marketing is robust customer personas.” 

That’s not a branding exercise. It’s a tool sales can use in real conversations to choose the right message, proof points and tone for the person they’re speaking to.

That clarity also helps teams stop defaulting to price. Gareth Osborne: “We should ban the phrase ‘it’s all about price’ from our sales colleagues.” If price is the first explanation for every lost deal, no one learns anything. Not sales, not marketing. 

Alex Andrews explains why this should be a partnership rather than a tug of war: “Sales knows the accounts better than anyone, and marketing knows the message.” The optimal path involves combining those strengths: sales brings the reality of the audience, marketing brings the language that lands.

Gemma Scott points to one of the most common causes of squabbles: different definitions of a good lead. The fix, as Gemma puts it, is to do the unglamorous work together: “We sat down with sales leadership and identified what they see as a qualified lead and what we see as a qualified lead. And then we worked together on moving forward.” 

No ‘marketing sends, sales ignores’. A shared definition that both sides believe in.

What does marketing need from sales?

Input and follow-through? Yes please. Last-minute requests for help? No thanks.

A lot of tension comes from a basic misunderstanding: sales thinks marketing is there to ‘support’; marketing thinks sales is there to dutifully use the assets. Neither view is fully rounded. 

Tom Murray has a better starting point: “Everybody sells – or everybody should sell – in a business.” When you treat growth as shared, you stop using each other as excuses.

Gareth Osborne ties that shared effort to commercial reality: “Pulling together helps you get onto that day one supplier list.” 

Alex Andrews: “Marketing wants to be in the room at the start of any new product development.” If marketing is brought in only at the end, it’s forced into comms mode, not strategy mode. You can end up pushing out something that isn’t positioned properly in the first place.

Kate Perrin talks about the day-to-day back-and-forth of the relationship: “Marketers need to develop a thicker skin when it comes to feedback from sales, because there are always golden nuggets in what they’re saying.” That input helps marketing sharpen messages before they’re scaled.

Gemma Scott: “The main thing we want from sales is feedback.” Feedback on lead quality, on potential objections, on what’s changing in the market. Because without all that, marketing is just best-guessing.

How do you stop lead handover turning into a blame game?

If you want to remove squabbles, fix the handover. Get clearer agreements and visibility. Agree definitions, design the process together, and measure what happens next.

Gareth Osborne: “It comes down to having good comms, and good process around deploying strategy and aligning it across departments.” That process needs to cover what gets passed over, when it gets passed over, what ‘qualified’ means, and what happens if leads aren’t followed up.

Alex Andrews explains what misalignment looks like in the wild: “Marketing can spend three months setting up the lead capture forms and technology, and then sales says, ‘I’m not doing that – I’m collecting business cards and putting them in my back pocket.’ That still happens, particularly in construction.” 

If the process doesn’t work for sales, it won’t be used. If it isn’t used, marketing can’t learn. And everyone ends up livid.

Kate Perrin says we need to stop treating the handover as the finish line: “Marketing shouldn’t just hand over the lead. We should track it all the way through the process: what happens, how it converts, why it converts, and when it converts.” 

That’s how you replace opinion with evidence. It also makes the conversation more constructive: not ‘you didn’t follow up’, but ‘here’s where leads stall and here’s why’.

Gemma Scott confesses, “We were passing our sales team every lead that came in and then questioning why they couldn’t follow up on the thousands of leads we were sending over.” If sales can’t follow up, the answer isn’t to send more. It’s to tighten the definition, prioritise, and agree what sales will act on.

What simple activities keep teams aligned all year?

Nothing fancy. Just consistent contact, shared metrics and time with customers. Alignment usually fails because it’s treated as a one-off project. The fix is repetition.

Tom Murray’s prescription is straightforward: “High cadence, frequent joint meetings at every level through the organisation.” That cadence prevents drift and stops misinterpretations and grievances from snowballing.

Gareth Osborne’s tip is simpler still: “Be useful. Actually help your colleagues.” When the relationship is transactional, it becomes brittle. When it’s useful, it becomes resilient.

Alex Andrews highlights the value of shared storytelling at senior level: “Joint presentations up to the C-suite really help.” Presenting together forces a single narrative. It also makes disagreements visible early, while they’re still fixable.

Kate Perrin: “Sales need to know that revenue impact is marketing’s North Star.” If the teams aren’t aiming at the same scoreboard, you’ll keep having the same arguments.

Finally, Gemma Scott gives the most practical alignment move of all: “Marketing should be shadowing sales. Get out on the road with sales and meet customers face-to-face.” Hard to stay siloed after you’ve sat in the same customer meeting…

Need a hand getting your sales and marketing people on the same page? We’re always up for a chat about that, or anything else B2B-related.