B2B organizations have perpetuated an antiquated, fundamentally flawed model of sourcing pipeline—one that breeds internal dysfunction, erodes productivity, and completely contradicts the core principles of executing an effective account-based strategy.
The broken model? Dividing opportunities into marketing vs. sales-sourced pipeline.
This article will explore why it’s time to abandon sales vs. marketing-sourced pipeline attribution. Specifically, we’ll cover:
More importantly, we’ll reinforce why it’s crucial to transition to a unified, account-based approach with marketing and sales alignment. This way, you can operate as one integrated revenue team, orchestrating a cohesive experience through the entire account lifecycle.
Let’s dig in a bit more on why the old-school approach should be outlawed.
Just 30% of sales professionals say their sales and marketing teams are strongly aligned and 61% say alignment is “more important now than it was last year.” We live in a world where nearly three quarters of sales folks don’t believe their teams are strongly aligned with marketing.
Anything that can cause more fights and tension around who gets credit for an opportunity—an opportunity that both teams have likely been working to create—is a further drain on resources and cycles.
That’s why dividing opportunities into marketing vs. sales-sourced pipeline is dumb.
This approach creates artificial barriers and rivalries in a space where teams should be in lockstep. Rather than operating as a unified revenue team, this “us vs. them” model pits groups against each other into endless cycles of infighting over who gets credited for initially engaging an account.
In camp #1, Sales Reps: “Marketing is not filling the pipeline with quality leads” (cue the 1992 film Glengarry Glen Ross).
In camp #2, Marketers: “Sales dropped the baton (again!) on following up with all of our air cover campaigns and engaged accounts.”
Even worse, this often bubbles up to the CMO and CSO — resulting in unproductive “ego battles” over whose contributions are sourcing pipeline.
About that sourcing…
The entire concept of sourced pipeline credit is really just an arbitrary mechanism to determine which department “gets credit” for the initial, first-touch interaction with an account — long before any real opportunity even existed.
But trying to define what constitutes that all-important first touch quickly becomes an exercise in absurdity.
Is a first visit…
Most often, these visits are blind, anonymous interactions where the account likely had zero awareness they were engaging with your company. How valuable is that in terms of driving any actual demand?
And remember what you discover as your first touch is based on an arbitrary period set up by the owner of your attribution model. If a person engaged with sales or marketing eight months before an opportunity is created, yet the attribution model only looks for touch points six months before the creation of an opportunity, are you capturing the real first touch?
A real-life example: A person attended a webinar in February and then booked a meeting with a sales rep in October. An opportunity was created in December. Is the first touch in February (webinar attendance from marketing-driven demand) or October (meeting booked from sales)?
The bottom line: reducing an account’s journey to a single first-touch interaction is reductive and fails to reflect the dynamic interplay between marketing and sales efforts.
Both teams are ideally running orchestrated plays across a diverse range of channels and touchpoints for each prioritized account. Trying to isolate which departmental interaction gets siloed pipeline credit is arbitrary at best and detrimental at worst, especially within the context of ABM.
Account-based experience (ABX) is a go-to-market strategy that uses data and insights to orchestrate relevant, trusted marketing and sales actions throughout the B2B customer journey.
It’s a customer-centric rethinking of ABX — one that combines the engagement of inbound marketing with the precision and targeting of account-based marketing.
With that context, the zero-sum, marketing vs. sales-sourced pipeline mentality undermines everything ABX is meant to achieve: tightly coordinated plays from marketing and sales to penetrate priority accounts and maximize lifetime value.
If you are sourcing pipeline separately for marketing and sales, the assumption is that one team is “better” at sourcing opportunities from certain accounts. Expecting one team to be solely responsible for “sourcing” entire pipeline is detrimental.
In an effective ABX strategy, marketing and sales efforts must be inextricably linked.
Both teams must work together to choreograph personalized plays from start to finish for each prioritized account – not just at the initial sourcing stage, but at every phase across the entire buying cycle.
Consider Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal. Shaq didn’t bicker with Kobe about who scored more points off whose assists. Instead, Kobe’s pinpoint passing set up Shaq’s dominance in the paint, and vice versa. They were a devastating combination.
In an ABX world, marketing and sales operate as Kobe-Shaq, a unified revenue team collaboratively identifying and prioritizing target accounts. Marketing runs campaigns to build awareness and interest, while sales tackles personalized outreach and conversations.
Rather than wasting cycles on territorial battles, marketing, and sales need a full mindset shift to focus on their collective ability to drive strategic, high-value deals from start to finish.
As the Principal GTM Expert and former Head of Marketing Operations of both Demandbase & Engagio, Tom has been responsible for creating and teaching best-in-class GTM Strategies that help companies achieve their goals. Over the last decade plus at enterprise and midsize companies he has spearheaded operational strategies, creating scalable and efficient growth methodologies, implementing AI technologies and building world class teams filled with high performers.
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