The Biggest Mistake Marketing Teams Make

One of the biggest mistakes marketing teams make is to try to optimise their performance in isolation. They focus on metrics, more leads, higher engagement, and better email open rates, without truly understanding what is happening once those leads become prospects.

They're optimising for their piece of the puzzle, while the pipeline breaks further down in the customer journey. This often leads to follow on challenges. When performance drops, the obvious response is to pull the marketing lever and drive more lead volume.

As many would know, more volume does not necessarily lead to more customers. Especially in B2B where we are working with 2-5% of leads converting to customers as a global standard.  

Real improvement comes from fixing the flow. Starting with diagnosis before scaling volume, and identifying where the customer momentum drops, friction appears, or customers stall and disengage.

Fix the flow first, and the revenue will follow.

Fixing the Marketing–Sales Disconnect

We worked with an organisation that was struggling with the ‘poor lead quality’ saga. Their marketing activity was sophisticated and campaign data signalled strong uptake. But conversion was low in comparison to the rest of the industry.

Marketing assumed it was a sales follow-up issue. They assumed sales needed more training, so they could 'get better' at converting those leads. But sales were saying the lead quality was poor, so they couldn’t convert.

This is a common scenario.

Ultimately, it came down to different departments optimising for separate goals. Marketing was optimising for fit and interest, whereas sales was optimising for readiness to buy.

Through an extended Clarity Roadmap Sprint^TM, we brought those teams together, alongside onboarding (because onboarding always has insight that no one else has) and plotted the actual customer journey.

As part of this process, we interviewed internal stakeholders and potential customers who had gone dark during the process. And what we found out was something that neither marketing nor sales had ever considered.

The biggest barrier to lead conversion was internal buy in - the prospect’s ability to influence for a ‘yes’ from the buying committee..

In B2B, deals typically require buy-in from 7-10 decision makers—and sales teams can't enable that alone.

Marketing, as the lead generator, hadn’t really considered creating content or collateral that might help sales bring the buying committee on the journey.  Common, because marketing visibility often drops once a prospect is qualified in the CRM system. And sales didn't have the content, collateral and bandwidth to work with the entire committee to drive the ‘yes’ across increasingly extended sales cycles. Also common.

What sales is typically looking for in a qualified lead is readiness to buy, as soon as possible.

What came out of this session was an updated nurture sequence specifically targeted at this friction point, and tools designed to support sales and keep these prospects on track.

This only worked because both teams could finally see the problem. They weren’t guessing anymore, or blaming each other. They were now equipped with the knowledge on how to support each other to drive a more cohesive and integrated customer journey.

That alignment created opportunities for meaningful cross-functional collaboration, which is where the vast majority of business results come from.

Why Marketing Struggle to Prove ROI  

All of this links back to the bug bear of most marketing teams. How to prove that a specific campaign, ad or content piece has contributed to the bottom line. Though it's not for lack of trying. The main reasons marketing teams struggle to prove ROI isn’t a lack of effort, creativity, or even technology — it’s a lack of visibility across the full pipeline.

Most marketing teams can confidently report on what happens up to the point a lead is generated. We know how many leads come in, which campaigns performed well, and what content drove engagement. But what often disappears from view is everything that happens after that lead is handed to sales.

• Do those leads become real opportunities?

• Do they convert into customers?

• Which marketing activities actually influenced the buying decision?

What’s usually missing is the connection between marketing activity and pipeline outcomes, and even more importantly, the link between what marketing creates and sales’ ability to have meaningful conversations that move customers toward a decision.

Marketing might be able to say, “We generated 500 leads this quarter.” But far fewer teams can say, “Fifty of those leads became customers, generating $500,000 in revenue, largely influenced by our comparison tool and webinar series.”

That tangible connection to business outcomes is where ROI often breaks down. When we can map marketing activity directly to pipeline performance, marketing stops being seen as a cost centre and starts showing up as a revenue driver.

The first step is creating visibility across teams and across the customer journey. From there, we can connect the dots between engagement and impact. We can start to see patterns like prospects who engage with a specific piece of content being three times more likely to close, or webinars that shorten the sales cycle.

This requires a more granular approach to data and cross-functional approach to how marketing, sales, and customer teams work together. But when it’s done right, marketing can step into its role as a strategic partner, driving customer-centred business growth.

Want to know exactly how to connect marketing to real revenue outcomes? Get access to my FREE on-demand webinar ‘The Pipeline Optimiser’ and find out how to turn more leads into closed deals without spending more on marketing. Sign up now!