You're the head of revenue operations at a B2B company in San José, and you have a cold war between marketing and sales. Marketing says it delivers mountains of leads; sales says they're garbage and won't work them. Each blames the other, and in the gap between them, customers and money get lost. The cure isn't more leads or more finger-pointing: it's integrating the two teams with a shared lead definition, mutual service-level agreements (SLAs), and a closed-loop handoff. GE Capital integrated its industrial sales with marketing this way.
The situation
The marketing and sales integration resolves the classic funnel dysfunction: marketing throws leads "over the wall" and sales ignores them, each with its own definition of a "good lead" and its own goals. Money leaks out in the gap between them. The solution is a two-way contract: a shared definition of a qualified lead, mutual SLAs —marketing commits to X leads of quality Y; sales, to contacting them within timeframe Z— and a closed-loop handoff in which sales reports back to marketing what happened with each lead. That's how the whole funnel gets aligned. GE Capital integrated its industrial sales and marketing with this logic.
Here's the trap, in two directions. Letting marketing and sales operate separately —throwing leads over the wall— produces mutual finger-pointing and leakage: marketing celebrates volume, sales doesn't follow up, and good leads go cold with nobody taking responsibility. And letting sales generate its own leads and ignore marketing is duplicative and doesn't scale: each rep reinvents demand generation, marketing spend gets wasted, and there's no common engine. The defensible move is shared definitions + mutual SLAs + closed-loop handoff: an integrated funnel where each side fulfills its part of the contract and the loop closes.