Sales vs. Marketing: Understanding the Key Differences

One of the most ever-present conflicts we see is the conflict between Sales and Marketing. Ask any emerging tech services founder or revenue leader, and you’ll hear familiar frustrations: Sales complains that Marketing sends over low-quality leads, while Marketing insists Sales doesn't follow up. This conflict keeps the business from scaling. 

In many ways, they are very similar. They both have the common goal of customer acquisition, but they own different stages of the customer relationship, which makes Marketing and Sales completely dependent on each other for results. One team failing will cause the other to fail, too. Without clarity, this situation frequently leads to a blame game and conflict. To understand this conflict better, let’s take a closer look at how each of them works.

It’s not just the nature of activities that is different, but also what the customer is thinking and what they need. In the beginning, the customer doesn’t know about you or even if they have a problem that you can solve. At this time, your role is to plant the seeds in the customer and strengthen your relationship. As your relationship advances, Marketing must show you can solve the customer’s problem. This includes heavier thought leadership. They also create trigger events to advance the customer’s journey through the pipeline. Finally, when the lead matures into an opportunity, then sales is ready to step in, negotiate, marshal resources, and guide the deal into a signing. 

So, how do we resolve this conflict?

Fix Your Positioning

We may sound like a broken clock when we say this, but you need to fix your company’s positioning before you can have alignment between any part of the company. A well-defined strategic positioning is particularly important for collaboration between Sales and Marketing.

A strong positioning ensures alignment between the customer and the value we provide to them. This enables the Marketing department to build a brand with the right audience and create the correct collateral and assets for sales to succeed. The prospects Marketing finds will have the same problems and profiles as your customers.

Accept All Leads Are Not Equal

Not every lead is ready to talk to sales—and that’s okay. A root cause of the frustration between Sales and Marketing is that Marketing does not see their leads as getting fair treatment from sellers. Sellers, in return, complain that Marketing leads aren’t responsive. 

What’s important to recognize is that the customer is going through a journey. Sales can receive leads at different stages in their customer journey. And if they have a mix of leads, they’ll understandably focus on the ones most likely to convert. But the key to controlled growth is being able to consistently nurture prospects through all steps in their journey. If you can do that, then you can have calculated growth by putting resources into the bottleneck. So you must be able to work with the variety of leads that your business receives, as long as they meet your customer criteria.

Understanding your customer’s journey requires understanding that there is an unwritten checklist of criteria that needs to be met before they will buy. You need to develop processes that catch people at their stage and nudge them along in their path. Tactically, this means establishing a lead scoring model and shared definitions for MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) and SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads). In addition, you can’t have sellers working on deals at different stages. You’ll need to have Marketing and Business Development grow leads to where they can be SQLs before handing them over.

Clarify and Make Transparent

What makes the relationship with Sales and Marketing more contentious than other teams is how closely they have to work together and how dependent they are on each other. In other parts of the organization, there is a clear demarcation. Sales and Marketing don’t have such clear boundaries. Rather, they are working on different aspects of the same problem. In any situation where responsibility is not clear, politics takes over. And that causes conflicts between the two teams.

The only way to address this issue is by adding clarity. This starts with the previous suggestions we shared but also includes developing SLAs, analyzing sales and marketing data, and creating shared goals.

Wrapping Up

Sales and Marketing aren’t rivals. They’re co-pilots of the same growth engine. When aligned, they can turn awareness into interest, interest into trust, and trust into revenue. But alignment doesn’t happen by accident. It is built from shared definitions, regular communication, and strong leadership.

If you're a founder building a tech services company, this alignment is one of your most powerful tools for scaling your company. Get it right, and your go-to-market motion becomes a growth multiplier, not a source of friction.

A Gift for You 🎁

At Vixul, we spend a large part of our time reviewing the forecasts created by the founders of our portfolio companies. It is amazing for us to see our founders mature as executives and be able to answer questions they couldn't in the past. Unfortunately, most founders struggle with these issues until we point them in the right direction. We believe the lack of guidance on forecasting is a primary issue for early-stage tech services founders.

That's why we're working on an eBook with detailed instructions on how to set up forecasts for sales pipelines. This will help you plan your new year with better foresight. The book will be free for people on our mailing list when it is published, so please subscribe now to ensure you receive it.