The Revenue Leak: When Marketing and Sales Don’t Align
- Sunil Dutt Jha
- Mar 20
- 3 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Imagine carefully filling a bucket with water, yet wondering why it never seems full. No matter how much water flows in, unnoticed leaks continually drain it away.
Many sales leaders experience exactly this: despite significant marketing investments, sales activities, and pipeline efforts, predictable revenue remains elusive.
Why?
Because Marketing and Sales misalignment quietly drains revenue every day—hidden from explicit visibility yet devastatingly impactful.
Let’s explicitly break down this widespread revenue leak clearly through structured logic.
Level 1: Surface Misconception – Poor Communication
At surface level, misalignment between Marketing and Sales feels straightforward—poor lead handoffs, communication breakdowns, or unclear lead qualification criteria.
Consider a SaaS technology company experiencing chronically poor lead conversion:
Marketing meets their KPIs (high lead volumes).
Sales complains that leads aren’t truly qualified or aligned clearly to buying stages.
At Level 1, the company’s immediate response: “Let’s have more meetings and improve communication.” Yet clearly, the deeper issue remains unresolved.
Level 2: Operational Limitations – Misaligned KPIs and Incentives
Going deeper, you explicitly recognize operational limitations—misalignment of Marketing and Sales KPIs and incentives.
In our SaaS scenario:
Marketing KPIs explicitly focused on volume-based metrics (number of leads, impressions).
Sales KPIs clearly focused on quality (conversion rate, deal size, sales cycle duration).
Result: Marketing floods Sales with high-volume but poorly-qualified leads, explicitly causing internal conflict and revenue inefficiency.
Operational misalignment at Level 2 creates invisible tension and inefficiencies, even when surface communication seems adequate.
Level 3: Hidden Complexity – Structural Disconnect
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