We ran a roundtable in London last week. A dozen or so senior B2B marketers, a couple of sales leaders, ninety minutes, and no slides.
The lead quality conversation came up, and I’ve been in enough of these to know the shape it usually takes. Marketing says sales doesn’t follow up. Sales says the leads are bad. Both sides leave with their position intact and nothing gets any better.
This time was different, and it took me a while to notice why. In ninety minutes, in a room with several people who had every reason to say it, nobody used the phrase “bad leads.” Not once.
What they said instead
Partway through, I offered a theory. My read has been that most of what gets labeled a lead quality problem is actually a context problem. The lead shows up as a name, a company, and a form fill, leaving the seller to reconstruct everything else from scratch: Who is this person? Why are they interested? What did they look at, and what am I supposed to do with this before lunch?
Then someone pushed back, and their pushback was better than my theory.
Their point was that a top-of-funnel lead has exactly one job: turning an unknown person into a known one. That’s the whole job. Asking a seller to treat that moment like a qualified opportunity is asking the lead to be something it was never built to be. The real work is what marketing does next, the nurture, the engagement history, and the account context accumulating until what goes over the wall arrives as a complete story rather than just a name.
Both of those things are true at the same time, and that’s the part I keep thinking about. The lead is doing its job, the seller is right that they can’t act on it yet, and the gap between those two accurate positions is where a shocking amount of pipeline quietly dies.
Why it never gets resolved
Someone in the room named the root cause in just two words: misaligned incentives.
Marketing is measured on demand created; sales is measured on meetings booked and opportunities opened. Every function in that chain can hit its individual target without moving the next function’s number at all. Because nobody is measured on the quality of the handoff, the handoff remains nobody’s problem, and it stays broken through three reorgs and two new tools.
You can run alignment workshops until everyone is fluent in each other’s dashboards, but it won’t matter. People ultimately do what they are paid to do. Which is why the most useful thing anyone said all morning was about compensation, not communication.
One of the leaders described a change they made at a previous company. Their team had analyzed where booked meetings were actually converting to revenue and found that while most booked meetings sat below the director level, the actual revenue came from more senior conversations. So they changed what counted: a meeting only credited toward quota if it reached a certain level of seniority in the account.
There was no retraining and no new playbook. They simply changed the measure, and the team’s behavior shifted. It’s a slightly uncomfortable lesson for those of us who like to solve operational problems with a slide deck.
The question nobody could answer
Toward the end, I asked a question I’ve been bringing up a lot lately, both in rooms like this one and internally with our own team:
What has to be true before a signal is worth someone’s time?
Not “what’s a good lead,” and not a complex scoring model. I meant the actual standard, the threshold you would write on a whiteboard with your head of sales, sign together, and use to settle the argument in advance instead of relitigating it one record at a time.
Nobody had a clean answer. Several people admitted they had simply never written it down.
I don’t think that’s a failure of sophistication. Everyone in that room runs a serious operation with real technology and real data. It’s that writing it down requires true agreement, and agreeing means somebody’s current number gets harder to hit. So it stays a casual conversation instead of becoming a firm definition.
What we did about it
We’ve spent the last few months putting that exact question to 500-plus marketing and sales leaders across five countries, looking at the gap between the signals people act on and the signals they actually trust. Some of what came back surprised me, and much of it made the London conversation feel less like an anecdote and more like a preview.
That research, Trusted Demand, publishes on November 3.
In the meantime, there’s a practical version of this you can run without waiting for the report. Pull your last twenty closed-won deals and your last twenty stalled ones, and look closely at what was known about the account at the moment someone decided to act. Ignore the score. Look at what was actually known: the source, the prior history, and whether anyone could see who else was involved.
Then ask your sales counterpart what they would have needed to move faster. You’ll have an answer in about ten minutes.
Nobody in that room said “bad leads.” I don’t think that was politeness. I think they’ve all quietly stopped believing that’s the problem. The harder thing is saying out loud what the problem actually is, with the person whose number it affects sitting across the table.