Sales vs. Marketing – Ever wondered whose job it really is to qualify leads?

Sales is like the engine and marketing is the transmission – both are essential to moving forward, but they do very different jobs. This is what HubSpot calls ‘Smarketing,’ where sales and marketing align to reach shared goals. Even though both aim for growth, their skills, success metrics, and views on how to present a brand often differ.

A key process that both sales and marketing teams are involved in is qualifying leads, and having aligned views on this (informed by data from both parties) is step one of “Smarketing” success.

Using sales data to see which wins matter most helps refine your lead qualification process. This then allows marketing to target and engage with better leads, saving the sales team time by avoiding less-than-ideal prospects. Here, Sales spots the pattern and shares it with marketing, so marketing can bring in leads that are more like your ideal clients, leading to better sales conversations.

In practice, this means ongoing conversations between sales and marketing about things like how marketing efforts are helping sales, the quality of leads, and how to keep refining criteria to stay on target with the (possibly changing) ideal client persona.

I’ll end with a few simple observations that will seem obvious to some in the hope of informing others-

• The “Your success is my success” mindset changes everything, even if roles and KPIs differ.
• How often do Sales and Marketing meet? At Aero, we prioritize meeting with our clients’ Sales teams when developing a marketing strategy. It’s never too late for a “smarketing” session.
• A good “smarketing” goal could be: “I want to boost email marketing success over the next 6 months by having sales help guide campaign creation and marketing share key data trends to help sales.

Want to turn your sales and marketing into a seamless, lead-generating machine? Contact Aero Media to see how a smarter approach to content and strategy can help you attract and qualify the right leads—so your technical experts can focus on closing, not chasing.