The quality of marketing leads is an age-old sales gripe. David Mamet famously captured this sentiment in the 1984 play (and 1992 movie) Glengarry Glen Ross. The leads were so bad, they became a running joke among the sales team.
In 2002, B2B research firm SiriusDecisions gave the problem a framework, the Demand Waterfall, and its now ubiquitous byproduct, the “Marketing Qualified Lead” or MQL. Forrester later acquired SiriusDecisions and helped turn MQLs into a widespread industry metric.
But any metric tied to incentives eventually gets gamed. Just how “Qualified” these “Marketing Qualified Leads” are has become an ongoing challenge, ever getting harder with the rise of bot traffic.
Part of the problem starts even earlier than qualification. A few years ago, the LinkedIn B2B Institute analyzed the targeting overlap between sales and marketing across 7,046 B2B organizations and found the average alignment was just 16%.
Sales and marketing aren’t even reaching the same buyers. Small wonder that the handoff from marketing to sales so often misses the mark.
As Jon Lombardo and Peter Weinberg (then at the B2B Institute) put it:
“The primary reason that marketing and sales are so misaligned is because at most B2B companies both departments pursue a hyper-targeting strategy. The small coverage of the sales and marketing circles dramatically decreases the likelihood of overlap.”
We’ve come a long way from Glengarry Glen Ross with new tools, new acronyms, and a CRM instead of index cards. But sales still doesn’t trust what marketing hands over.
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
