Most SME owners don’t wake up one morning and decide to pit their marketing team against their sales team. It happens gradually. Marketing starts running campaigns that bring in a decent number of leads.

Sales starts ignoring half of them. Both sides blame each other, and the founder gets stuck in the middle trying to work out who’s right. The frustrating answer is usually neither.

Marketing Chases Volume, Sales Wants Quality

This is the most common symptom. Marketing gets measured on how many leads come through the door. So they’ll optimise landing pages, run broader ad campaigns, and cast a wider net to hit their monthly target.

From their perspective, the job’s done. Leads are up, cost per lead is down, and the dashboard looks healthy.

But sales sees something different. They’re spending hours chasing contacts who were never going to buy.

Maybe the lead downloaded a free guide out of curiosity, or they’re a student doing research, or they work at a company that’s far too small for your product. Either way, the conversion rate tanks and sales blames marketing for sending them rubbish.

The fix here isn’t complicated, but it does require both sides to sit down and agree on what a good lead actually looks like.

That means defining specific criteria: company size, budget, job title, level of intent. If marketing is filling the top of the funnel with contacts who’ll never convert, your cost per acquisition will keep climbing no matter how many leads come in.

Nobody Owns the Definition of a Qualified Lead

This one’s closely tied to the first sign, but it deserves its own section because it’s where the real damage happens. In many SMEs, there’s no shared definition of what makes a lead “qualified.”

Marketing team might consider someone qualified because they filled in a form. Sales might not consider them qualified until they’ve had a phone conversation and confirmed a budget.

Without a clear, written definition that both teams have agreed on, you’ll end up with a constant blame game. Marketing will say they’re generating plenty of qualified leads. Sales will say they aren’t. And both will be right according to their own criteria.

The practical solution is to create two definitions and make them visible to everyone. A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is someone who’s shown enough interest to be worth pursuing.

A sales qualified lead (SQL) is someone who meets the criteria for a real sales conversation. The handoff happens when an MQL becomes an SQL, and both teams need to agree on what triggers that transition.

GTM Thoughts calls this go-to-market alignment, and the label fits. Getting your definitions right isn’t glamorous work, but it’ll save you from months of finger-pointing between departments.

There’s No Shared Dashboard

Here’s a question worth asking at your next team meeting: can marketing see what happens to their leads after they’re handed to sales? And can sales see where their leads came from and what content they engaged with before the first call?

In most small businesses, the answer to both is no. Marketing lives in one platform, sales lives in another, and the two rarely talk to each other.

According to Forrester, 70% of CRM decision-makers now primarily use their CRM for service workloads rather than sales. That tells you something about how far the original vision of CRM as a sales tool has drifted.

When teams can’t see the same data, they can’t have productive conversations about what’s working.

Marketing might kill a campaign that was actually producing great customers because they could only see the lead numbers, not the close rates.

Sales might dismiss an entire channel because they had a bad run with three leads, without realising the other twenty from that channel closed well.

The Handoff Is an Email, Not a Process

In too many SMEs, the “handoff” between marketing and sales looks like this: someone in marketing sends an email to someone in sales with a spreadsheet attached.

Or worse, they drop a name into a shared Google Sheet with no context about what the lead did, what they’re interested in, or how warm they are.

This is where deals go to die. A sales rep picks up a lead with no background, makes a generic call, and the prospect loses interest because nobody seems to know why they got in touch in the first place.

The lead had spent fifteen minutes reading your case studies and pricing page, but the sales rep opens with “So, tell me about your business” as if they’re starting from scratch.

A proper handoff process doesn’t need to be complicated. But it does need to include some basics:

• What content the lead engaged with
• How they found you
• What problem they’re likely trying to solve
• Any specific actions they took (like requesting a demo or visiting the pricing page)
• A clear timestamp so sales knows how fresh the lead is

When this information travels with the lead, sales can have a relevant conversation from the first contact. That alone will improve your close rate more than most marketing campaigns ever will.

How to Start Fixing This Without a Major Overhaul?

You don’t need to hire a consultant or buy new software to address these problems. Start with a monthly meeting where marketing and sales sit in the same room and review the numbers together.

Look at which leads converted and which didn’t. Talk about why.

Then pick one thing to fix first. Usually, the biggest bang for your buck is agreeing on lead definitions. Once both teams are speaking the same language, the other problems become much easier to solve.

The businesses that get this right don’t treat marketing and sales as separate departments with separate goals. They treat them as two halves of the same revenue engine.

And that small change in thinking will make a bigger difference than any new tool or tactic you could throw at the problem.