Marketing Says Leads Are Up. Sales Says They're Rubbish. Here's How to Fix It.

Every B2B company has had this Monday meeting. Marketing shows a chart with leads going up. Sales says the leads are useless. Both teams are telling the truth, and that's the problem.

I spent fifteen years in B2B sales across Asia and the Gulf, and I've been the one saying "these leads are useless." Looking back, the leads usually weren't the problem. The problem was that nobody had agreed on what a lead actually is.

Here are three steps that fix it.

1. Write down what a real lead is

Put marketing and sales in one room for an hour. Agree on three or four things a lead must have to count. For example:

• The right type of company, such as manufacturers, distributors or EPC contractors, depending on who you sell to
• The right size, by revenue, headcount or number of sites
• The right job title, meaning someone who can influence or make the decision
• An actual project or need, not just curiosity

If a lead is missing those, it isn't a lead. It might be worth nurturing, but it shouldn't count in the numbers. Write the definition down and share it with both teams.

This one step ends most of the arguments, because now marketing and sales are counting the same thing.

2. Sales gives feedback on every lead

Within 48 hours, sales marks every lead as good, bad or not yet, with one line on why.

It takes about two minutes per lead in the CRM. In return, marketing finally learns which campaigns bring in buyers and which only bring in form fills. Without that feedback, marketing is optimising blind, and every campaign looks like a success because the form count went up.

Keep it simple. Three options and one line of text. If it takes longer than that, sales won't do it.

3. Track it all the way to the deal

Most B2B companies track leads up to the form fill and stop there. That means budget goes to whichever channel produces the most forms, not the most revenue.

Connect your CRM back to your ads and website so you can see which channel brought in the deals that actually closed. You'll often find that the channel with the most leads isn't the one bringing the revenue. A trade show, a LinkedIn campaign or a single well-ranked article might quietly be driving most of your pipeline.

Once you can see that, the budget decision makes itself. Put more money where the revenue comes from.

What changes

Do these three things and your Monday meeting looks different. Instead of arguing about lead quality, both teams are looking at the same numbers: how many real leads came in, what sales thought of them, and which ones turned into deals.

It's not complicated, but most companies skip it, especially across markets like China, Southeast Asia and the Gulf, where teams, tools and channels all differ.