I have worked with more than forty B2B companies to build or improve their marketing teams and processes over the last 10 years, and unfortunately, I see as the biggest challenge to these companies, is the lack of marketing and sales teams' alignment on metrics, as well as, the sharing of responsibilities in building the sales pipeline to exponentially grow the company.
Without marketing and sales teams aligning on metrics, on what constitutes a MQL, SQL, and SAL in the leads pipeline, each team blames the other for low quality leads to sales conversions. Executives, marketing and sales teams must buy into what defines the metrics stages, otherwise, frustrations ensue in each of the teams, and ultimately make a divisive environment, rather than a cohesive business strategy in the pursuit of the same goal, make money!
For all of you CEOs, it is your responsibility to make sure that you communicate sales pipeline objectives to your marketing and sales leaders quarterly, and support them by making it clear what each team is responsible for in the process, as well as, making the budget investment to support these objectives.
Successful B2B company's marketing teams manage the top and middle of the funnel, to create good qualified leads, so that the leads that are passed to the sales teams (BDRs) have a much higher ratio to move through the pipeline to becoming a sale. 50% of MQLs should convert to the SQL stage, as well as, 40%-50% of those leads should move to the SAL stage. If your company's leads are not at these levels, then you should look at fixing your processes to achieve these B2B industry conversion standards.
To build a great company, make the investment into technology, such as in a marketing automation software product, ABM tool, and a CRM, such as SalesForceCRM to force the marketing and sales teams to take responsibility for each of their parts of the sales pipeline funnel and create a transparency in the reporting of leads. No one can hide, when the transparency in the reports show the movement of leads from touches to sales closings.