Direct answer
Because nobody above them decided. When leadership never settled who the company is for, marketing fills the gap with the buyer who is cheapest to reach and sales with the buyer who is easiest to close. Both are rational; both are different people. The cost lands as leads sales won't work, discounts to close the wrong buyer, and a homepage that speaks to neither. The fix is one decision at the top, written down — not a better meeting.
Every business I've walked into with this complaint describes it the same way: sales and marketing "aren't aligned." There have been meetings about it. Someone has proposed a shared dashboard, a service agreement on lead follow-up, a joint offsite. These are treatments for a communication problem. This isn't one.
Ask the sales director to describe the ideal customer and you'll hear about the buyer who signs quickly, pays on time and calls back — usually a version of the customers the company already has. Ask the marketing lead and you'll hear about the segment the campaigns are built for, chosen because it responds, because it can be reached at a sensible cost, because the numbers look good in the monthly report. Both descriptions are honest. Both are rational. They are two different people, and the company has been trying to serve both since the day nobody decided which one it was for.
Two rational answers to a question nobody answered
Departments don't disagree about the customer because they're difficult. They disagree because each is obeying the metric it is measured on. Marketing is measured on leads and cost per lead, so its customer is whoever produces leads cheaply. Sales is measured on closed revenue this quarter, so its customer is whoever closes this quarter. Neither of those is a decision about who the business should be for over the next five years. That decision belongs to the people who set the metrics, and when they haven't made it, the metrics make it for them — twice, differently.
Sales and marketing don't disagree about the customer. They disagree about which metric to obey.
What the disagreement costs
Nobody sends an invoice for this. The cost is paid in installments, across four departments, and each installment is small enough to be argued about rather than fixed.
| Where it shows up | What marketing says | What sales says | What it actually costs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lead handover | "We delivered 300 leads" | "None of them were real" | The spend that produced them, and the sales hours spent rejecting them |
| The homepage | Written for the campaign segment | Never sent to a prospect | A site that speaks to nobody, because it had to speak to both |
| Pricing | "The offer is competitive" | "We had to discount to close" | Margin given away to buyers who were never yours to win at full price |
| Forecasting | Pipeline reported by campaign | Pipeline reported by relationship | Two forecasts, neither of which the CFO can use |
| The next hire | "We need a better sales team" | "We need a better agency" | A third person hired to execute a decision still nobody has made |
Add them up over a year and the total is rarely visible, because it never appears in one place. It appears as a slightly lower gross margin, a slightly longer sales cycle, a marketing budget that gets cut because sales didn't credit it, and a sales team that gets blamed because marketing did. Every department is right about the other. None of them is looking up.
The tell is in how the two departments talk about each other. Marketing says sales doesn't follow up the leads. Sales says marketing doesn't understand the customer. Both sentences are true, and both are beside the point, because the customer they're arguing about was never chosen by anyone with the authority to choose.
From the book: a fashion retail chain had been losing money for five consecutive years. Before our first meeting I visited two of the stores and read the brochures. The stores were laid out for an elderly, conservatively dressed customer, and those were the people in them. The models in the brochures looked nothing like those people. Marketing was describing one customer; the shop floor was serving another; and the owner, when we met, wanted to hear that both were fine. Two customers in one business is not a disagreement between departments. It's a decision waiting for the person at the top.
Settle it above both departments
There are four decisions that sit upstream of every euro a company spends on reaching buyers: who this is for, why they'd pick you over the alternative, what exactly you sell them, and what you say to them. Call it the upstream audit. The first of the four is the one this argument is about, and it cannot be delegated to either department, because each will answer it with its own metric. It has to be made by whoever sets both metrics — and then the metrics have to follow the decision, not the other way round.
The test is quick and uncomfortable. Ask the CEO, the sales director and the marketing lead, separately and in writing, to describe the ideal customer in one sentence and to name one kind of customer the company would turn away. If the three sentences differ, you've found the problem; if nobody can name a customer they'd refuse, the decision has never been made at all. That second question is the one most leadership teams flinch at, and it's the one that does the work — the same point I make from the other side in what guessing your ideal customer really costs. And if the honest answer is "we decided this once, years ago, and it drifted," is it worth revisiting who your business is for deals with the fear that revisiting it puts existing customers at risk. It doesn't.
Once the sentence is written, the rest is mechanics. Sales is measured on revenue from the decided buyer, not on revenue. Marketing is measured on qualified conversations with the decided buyer, not on leads. The homepage gets one reader instead of two. And the next time the departments disagree, they're disagreeing about tactics, which is a healthy argument, instead of about who the company is, which is not theirs to have. If you want the test run on your own business first, the Free 5-Question Check is five questions and takes ten minutes; the full argument is in Reports, Not Revenue.
- Ask the CEO, sales director and marketing lead, separately and in writing, for the ideal customer in one sentence — and for one customer type the company would refuse.
- Compare the sentences. Different answers are the decision problem; no refusals means the decision was never made.
- Make the audience decision at the top, in one line, and circulate it. Neither department gets to edit it to fit its metric.
- Change the metrics to follow it: sales on revenue from the decided buyer, marketing on qualified conversations with that buyer.
- Rewrite the homepage for one reader. If it still has to work for both, the decision hasn't landed.
