The Marketing-Sales Wall
Two teams. Two dashboards. One missed revenue number.
Marketing hit their lead targets. Sales ignored the leads. Revenue missed anyway. How an ERP managed services firm tore down the handoff and grew revenue 68% in a year.
Marketing was hitting their lead targets every month. Sales would glance at the list, decide none of them were real, and go back to chasing referrals.
Both teams hit their internal metrics. Revenue missed.
The firm runs support and ongoing optimization for clients on NetSuite, Acumatica, and Dynamics. Long buying cycles. Multi-stakeholder decisions. A buyer who doesn't fill out a form because the CFO doesn't want vendor emails in their inbox.
The wall between marketing and sales wasn't a culture problem. It was a structural one. Marketing was measured on lead volume. Sales was measured on revenue. Nobody owned the middle, where the actual buyer journey lived.
The opportunity we saw
The 75 accounts that actually fit the ICP were not the ones marketing was generating leads from. The signals that predicted a deal were not the form fills marketing was counting. And both teams already had the data to tear the wall down. They just had two different views of it.
One target list. One shared signal layer. One metric both teams owned. That was the whole fix.
What we built
- 01
Scrapped the lead-handoff workflow.
No more contacts dropped over a wall. No more "qualified" tier with its own scoring rules nobody believed.
- 02
A single target list of 75 named accounts that fit the ERP managed services ICP.
Manufacturers, distributors, and mid-market industrials running one of the three platforms.
- 03
One metric both teams owned: pipeline velocity.
Opportunities, deal size, win rate, cycle length. One number, both teams accountable.
- 04
A signal layer that read accounts instead of individuals.
RB2B for de-anonymized site visits, ZenABM for LinkedIn engagement against named campaigns, Clay enrichment for triggers like ERP-related hiring and module rollouts.
- 05
Stage-mapped content.
Industry pieces for aware-stage accounts. Practical frameworks for engaged-stage. Deal-mover content for hot-stage. Every piece had a job.
- 06
A distribution engine running across LinkedIn, ERP user communities, and mid-market operations podcasts.
Paid amplification to the 75 named accounts. Behavior-mapped email nurture for each role inside the buying group.
- 07
Outbound rebuilt around what each buying-group member had already engaged with.
The results
- 01
68% revenue growth in the first year.
- 02
Sales cycles 16% shorter.
Accounts arrived multi-threaded and pre-educated, so first calls started halfway in.
- 03
The blame game ended.
There's no wall to point across when both sides are looking at the same pipeline.
- 04
One weekly pipeline review, both teams in the same room.
Asking the same question: what moves these accounts forward this week?
The firm had a marketing team and a sales team. Now they have a revenue team.
The audit starts where the wall does. Until your two teams agree on what an account is doing, the buying group is making decisions without you.
The fix is rarely a new tactic. The fix is a system.
Start with the audit. We score your revenue messaging against the same framework we used inside this story.
Already know you need to build the engine, not score it? Talk to us about your GTM engine →