Most discussions about sales and marketing alignment focus on communication, culture, or org structure. The more tractable version of the problem is technical: it lives in the CRM, in lead routing logic, and in the automation rules that govern what happens after a lead arrives.
The technical failure points:
No ownership field with SLA enforcement. If your CRM does not have a defined lead owner field with automated escalation when the SLA is breached, follow-up is discretionary and unmeasurable.
Inconsistent MQL field values. When marketing and sales define MQL differently, lead scoring produces unreliable output. Fixing this requires a single agreed-upon qualification ruleset implemented at the field level.
Sequence coverage gaps. Automation sequences that run for 2 to 3 steps instead of 8 to 11 systematically underperform. The automation setup reflects the process assumption — if the assumption is wrong, the sequence is wrong.
First-contact latency not surfaced. Time-to-first-contact is recorded in most CRMs but rarely surfaced as an alert or dashboard metric. It should be.
Sales and marketing alignment at the data definition layer prevents all of these from reoccurring after a cleanup.
Full article:https://digitaldiconsultants.com/why-sales-ignore-marketing-leads/
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