Because the two teams are set up to succeed in different ways. Marketing is often judged on activity and reach, sales on closed revenue. Without a shared definition of what a good lead actually looks like, both teams end up optimising for their own numbers rather than the same outcome. The drift isn't a skills clash. It's a structural one.

If you lead a growing STEM business, this probably sounds familiar. Marketing feels like it's doing its job; publishing, campaigning, generating leads. Sales feels like the leads aren't worth the time. Neither team is wrong from where they're standing, which is exactly why the gap is so hard to close through goodwill alone.

Why this rarely happens on purpose

In the early stages, sales and marketing are often the same person, or close to it. The founder writes the LinkedIn post and takes the call that comes from it, so alignment isn't a project, it's just one person's calendar.

As the business grows and these become separate functions, even separate teams, that built-in alignment doesn't automatically travel with them. Each team develops its own priorities, its own targets, and its own sense of what "good" looks like, often without anyone deciding that should happen. It's simply what tends to occur when two functions grow apart without a shared framework holding them together.

Where the gap actually opens up

Different scorecards. Marketing is frequently measured on lead volume, content output or campaign reach. Sales is measured on closed revenue. Both are reasonable things to measure, but they can quietly pull in different directions. Marketing celebrating a strong month for leads while sales sees little change in what actually closes.

No shared definition of a good lead. This is one of the most common root causes, and one of the least discussed. If marketing and sales haven't agreed, in specific terms, what makes a lead worth passing on, marketing will keep sending what it believes is a lead, and sales will keep calling it noise.

Limited visibility into each other's work. Marketing often can't see what happens to a lead once it's handed over. Sales often doesn't see the thinking or research behind a campaign. Without that visibility, each team tends to fill the gap with assumptions, usually not generous ones.

Content built without sales in the room. Marketing frequently creates sales materials with little input from the people who'll actually use them in a conversation. When that happens, the content can be well made and still miss what a prospect asks for.

Why it matters more than it might seem

This isn't simply an internal friction issue. Misalignment between the two teams costs when leads get dropped, followed up late, or never followed up at all. And we all know fortune is in the follow up.

It also tends to compound quietly. A slightly cynical view of "marketing leads" in the sales team, or a slightly dismissive view of "sales feedback" in the marketing team, doesn't need much fuel to keep itself going once it's established.

What tends to close the gap

Agree what a good lead actually is, in writing. Not a vague sense, but specific, shared criteria both teams have signed off on. This single step resolves more of the day-to-day friction than most other interventions combined.

Give both teams visibility into the same pipeline. If marketing can see what happens after a handover, and sales can see what's driving the leads arriving, most of the mutual suspicion has less room to grow.

Build sales content with sales in the room. Even a short, structured conversation before a piece of content is built tends to produce something sales will actually use, rather than something that gets filed away unread.

Review outcomes together, not separately. A shared, regular look at what's actually converting, and why, keeps both teams pointed at the same target rather than defending their own numbers.

Frequently asked questions

Is sales and marketing misalignment inevitable as a business grows? It's common, but not inevitable. It tends to happen when the informal alignment that exists naturally in a small, founder-led team isn't deliberately replaced with something structural as the business grows.

Whose responsibility is it to fix the drift? Both teams contribute to it, so both need to be part of resolving it. In practice, it usually needs someone senior enough to set a shared definition of success and hold both teams to it, rather than leaving it to be worked out informally between them.

What's the first practical step? Agreeing a shared, specific definition of a qualified lead, aligned to company goals. It sounds simple, but it's the single most common gap behind the wider disconnect, and it's usually the fastest one to close.

Priddey Marketing helps established STEM businesses build a scalable commercial growth engine, through stronger market strategy, marketing leadership and commercial alignment. A conversation to discuss a Commercial Growth Review looks at exactly this gap, and sets out a practical way to close it.

Photo by Yan Krukau