Marketing and sales.

Where the budget gets lost

Marketing brings in enquiries, sales turns them into money. When these two areas work apart, budget leaks away unnoticed: ads are running, enquiries are coming in, yet revenue isn't growing.

The cause is almost always the same — the two sides measure results differently. The marketer reports on the number and cost of enquiries, the salesperson complains about their quality, and both are formally right.

Linking these areas isn't a matter of corporate culture, it's a matter of money. As long as there's no link, part of the ad budget pays for enquiries that nobody follows through to a deal.

What joint work delivers

• Saved resources — tasks and data stop being duplicated, and time isn't spent working on the same thing in parallel.
• A precise understanding of the audience — salespeople know what people ask about, marketing turns that into offers and ads.
• Enquiry quality — feedback from sales makes it possible to cut off the audience that never buys.
• Clear communication — what the ads promise matches what's said on the phone.
• A shared goal — both sides answer for revenue, not each for its own intermediate metric.

The last point is the heart of it. As long as the departments have different goals, every meeting ends in passing the buck.

Agree on what counts as an enquiry

The most common and most expensive gap is the lack of a shared definition. For marketing, an enquiry is any contact; for sales, it's a person who can buy.

It helps to agree in writing: which attributes make an enquiry workable, what counts as off-target and what to do with borderline cases. It's a dull agreement, but it immediately removes most of the conflicts.

The second agreement is about speed. An enquiry handed over within a minute and the same enquiry a day later are different enquiries, and comparing their effectiveness is pointless.

Shared numbers instead of two reports

You can't link departments without unified tracking. You need one picture showing the whole path: where the enquiry came from, what was done with it, how it ended.

The minimum set of metrics: how many enquiries per channel, what share was deemed workable, how many reached a deal, what revenue resulted and what acquisition cost.

Once these numbers are counted in one place, the argument about enquiry quality stops by itself: it becomes clear which channel brings deals and which brings only volume.

Regular exchange

Even with shared numbers, a live exchange of information is needed. Sales knows which objections come up most often, which phrasings work, what people ask before deciding. For marketing, that's ready-made material for ads, pages and articles.

Something else flows back: exactly what the ads promise, which queries bring people in, what they expect by the time they call. Without this, the salesperson starts every conversation from scratch.

The format can be anything; what matters is regularity and a short cycle. Going over a few won and lost deals once a week is more useful than discussing a report once a quarter.

Frequently asked questions

What if marketing is outsourced and sales is in-house?

That's even more common. Then the agreements need to be fixed in the contractor's brief: the definition of a workable enquiry, handover deadlines and mandatory feedback on outcomes.

Who should be responsible for the shared numbers?

Whoever has access to both parts — usually the manager. If there's no one responsible, the reports will split in two again.

What if sales says all the enquiries are bad?

Go through specific enquiries by hand. It usually turns out that some really are off-target, while others were simply handled slowly or perfunctorily.

Where to start if the company has three people?

With logging the source of every enquiry and its outcome. That's enough to see which advertising brings in money.

What to do next

Take the last ten enquiries and trace each one to its outcome: where it came from, how quickly it was answered, how it ended. The gaps usually show up in the very first ten.

We set up advertising with deals in mind, not clicks — that's advertising setup and management. Next, you may find our articles on how to measure marketing returns and why you need a CRM system useful.