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The Sales-Marketing Blame Game Isn’t About People - It’s About Systems

Picture of Garrett Hunt

Here’s a scene that plays out in SMBs every day:

  • Sales says, “These leads are terrible.”

  • Marketing says, “Sales doesn’t follow up.”

  • Leadership watches revenue goals slip and scratches their head.

Sound familiar?

The hard truth: this blame game isn’t about bad people. It’s about broken systems.

Why the Disconnect Happens

In most SMBs:

  • Marketing tracks leads. Sales tracks deals. But the data doesn’t connect.

  • Lead handoffs happen via email, Slack, or post-it notes - and vanish into the void.

  • No one can agree on what qualifies a lead. “Marketing qualified” and “Sales accepted” often mean completely different things.

Result? Misaligned teams, wasted hours, missed opportunities.

Mini Example

Imagine a small SaaS company:

  • Marketing launches a campaign, generating 50 leads.

  • Sales receives 30 of them, but only half are truly ready to talk.

  • Three months later, leadership wonders why the pipeline looks thin - but the data never told the story.

The problem isn’t laziness. It’s the lack of shared visibility.

The Fix: One Shared Playbook

With HubSpot, you can:

  • Define lifecycle stages and lead scoring so sales and marketing speak the same language.

  • Automate lead routing to make sure nothing falls through the cracks.

  • Create dashboards that show marketing and sales metrics in one place.

When both teams see the same data, finger-pointing disappears. Decisions get made on reality, not assumptions.

Mini Example

Same SaaS company, now with HubSpot:

  • Marketing generates the same 50 leads.

  • The CRM automatically assigns them to reps based on score and territory.

  • Sales and marketing can see which leads were engaged, which dropped off, and which need nurture - all in one dashboard.

The result? Less frustration, fewer missed opportunities, and real alignment.

The Huntscape Take

If your teams are pointing fingers, the solution isn’t more meetings. It’s better systems. SMBs don’t have unlimited bandwidth - misalignment costs money, time, and morale.

At Huntscape Operations Partners, we help SMBs build the systems that make alignment effortless. When sales and marketing share one source of truth, growth accelerates.
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