Marketing blames sales for not closing. Sales blames marketing for bad leads. Both teams say the other is wasting the company’s money, and the customer gets lost somewhere in the middle.
I have sat on both sides of that argument. I spent two of my years in marketing as an SDR, making the calls, updating Pipedrive and writing a personal one-liner for every prospect before AI could do any of it. So when Harry Spaight joined me on the Marketing Leadership Podcast, I wanted to hear what a sales leader thinks marketers keep missing.
Harry is a fractional sales leader and the founder of Selling With Dignity. He has led sales teams for around 25 years, and he came into sales after years of mission work in the Dominican Republic. That background shows in how he sells: from a position of service. His view on marketing is the same. Stop talking about yourself and start serving the person you want to buy.
They don’t need a widget
Harry’s favourite idea comes from the StoryBrand way of thinking: the client is the hero, not the company. “They don’t need a widget, they need what the widget does.”
He hears a lot of marketing that still leads with the product. We’re number one. We’ve been around the longest. Salespeople on the street find out fast that buyers don’t care. Twenty years ago, saying you were number one might have got you somewhere. Today people are so spammed and scammed that they tune it out. They want to know what’s in it for them.
That doesn’t mean momentum has no place. Talk about the customers you’ve served and the projects you’ve delivered. Harry’s fix is to let someone else say it for you. Put your customers’ success at the front, and other buyers see a company that cares about its clients rather than one shouting about its ranking.
I agree with him. The root of good messaging is education: how does this help me get my job done? It isn’t always exciting, but it works in B2B and B2C alike.
Spend a day in sales
The part of our conversation I want every marketer to hear was about empathy. Harry’s suggestion is simple. If your outbound team is out in the field, go on a field ride. Sit in their meetings. Be in the room with a prospect and ask your own questions instead of hearing the answers third hand.
He has heard marketers call salespeople overpaid whiners whose deals are always a mess. His answer: spend a day in sales. Feel the rejection and the apathy. See how hard it is. You come back with more empathy and a different read on your own work.
He was fair about the flip side too. Marketing isn’t easy either, and sales teams that say “why don’t we just get some billboards?” have no idea what goes into a campaign.
Where I come from, people avoid sales because of the targets. A marketer can spend the budget, report a million impressions and call the job done. A salesperson who misses quota can lose the job. Harry’s point was that this gap is exactly why the two teams have to understand each other.
A “bad lead” is often a timing problem
Harry explained why sales and marketing argue about lead quality, and it changed how I think about the complaint.
Most salespeople live in this month. Maybe next month. They need to hit their number and get paid, and very few are looking at the full quarter or the year. Only a small share of any market is ready to buy this month. So when marketing hands over someone who says “we like this, but there’s no budget for six months,” sales calls it a terrible lead.
It isn’t a terrible lead. Marketing found someone interested. The timing is wrong, and that is where nurture has to do its job. When both teams agree on that, the person stays warm until they are in market instead of getting written off.
Is the SDR still worth it?
I asked Harry about the argument that SDRs are on the way out, now that buyers can serve themselves with guides, tools and portals. His answer was practical.
Think about how many Facebook groups you belong to, or how many programmes you’ve joined with libraries of content you never open. We have more information than we can use. Then an SDR calls, asks a question that gets you thinking and brings you straight to the moment of what you need. That conversation jumps ahead of everything sitting in your bookmarks.
From my side, it depends on the business. Some companies want little to no human contact, and enterprise brands with strong equity can lean on automation. For small and mid-size businesses, an SDR still adds context a website can’t. There is no single formula, and Harry agreed: if one existed, we’d all be using it.
The opportunity already in your client base
When we got to sales qualified leads, Harry pointed somewhere most teams overlook: cross-selling inside the accounts you already have.
Most salespeople want the sale and then want to move on. A consultative salesperson is a rare find, and Harry’s advice is to hold on to that person. For the rest, give them a few questions to ask when they visit a customer, so they learn what’s happening in other departments. Then hand that back to marketing to nurture with content that matters to that VP of operations or CFO. When that account fills out a form, marketing can tell sales to go back in.
His other idea costs almost nothing. Follow your current clients on social media and highlight what they are doing. Comment on their posts. Promote them in their community. Most of your competitors aren’t doing it, and the client starts to feel like part of the family instead of a source of money you only call when you want more. Harry linked it to the law of reciprocity: people want to do business with people who promote them.
Keep it proportionate. If your client lifetime value is $1,000, don’t lose sleep over this. If it’s hundreds of thousands of dollars, take your top 10% of accounts and comment on their posts once a week. Stay consistent and see what it does.
Where to start
Book one field ride or one sales call with your sales team this month and listen to what buyers say. Then pick your top 10% of accounts and make sure someone in marketing or service is showing up for them every week. And the next time a lead looks “bad”, ask whether it is a fit problem or a timing problem before you throw it out.
Want the full conversation? Watch my episode with Harry Spaight, founder of Selling With Dignity, where we talk about the blame game, field rides, SDRs, sales qualified leads and his favourite marketing quote.
