Fix Sales vs Marketing Friction in Your Small Business

35.4% of B2B marketers say they’re often in conflict with sales. That’s not a “big company problem” — it’s a warning sign for every small business trying to grow with limited time, limited budget, and a small team wearing too many hats.

In UK small businesses, the conflict can look less dramatic but do more damage: the salesperson (or founder) says marketing “isn’t bringing leads”, marketing says sales “doesn’t follow up”, and everyone quietly starts working around each other. The cost isn’t just bruised egos. It’s wasted ad spend, inconsistent messaging, slow deals, and poor customer experience.

This post is part of the British Small Business Digital Marketing series, and I’m going to take a clear stance: if your sales and marketing aren’t operating as one revenue team, your digital marketing will underperform — no matter how good your SEO, ads, or content look on paper.

The real reason sales and marketing clash (even in tiny teams)

Sales–marketing friction usually comes from misaligned priorities and missing context, not personality.

Marketing Week’s latest B2B reporting highlights two recurring causes:

• Sales doesn’t always have time to explain the day-to-day reality of objections, deal blockers, and what prospects actually ask on calls.
• Marketing gets misunderstood as “promotion” rather than a revenue system, so its work gets treated like a cost instead of an investment.

Those same dynamics show up in small businesses, just faster.

The small business version of the conflict

Here’s what it commonly looks like in UK SMEs:

• Sales wants a campaign this week for a single feature because one hot lead mentioned it.
• Marketing wants to build a consistent message around problems, industries, and use-cases — because that’s what improves conversion over months.
• Leadership asks, “How many leads did we get?” and marketing replies with impressions, clicks, or follower growth.

Sales hears “vanity metrics”. Marketing hears “you don’t value the work”. Both sides dig in.

A line from the source article gets to the heart of it: people confuse marketing with advertising. Advertising is one tool. Marketing is the broader job of shaping demand, clarifying positioning, enabling sales conversations, and improving win rates.

Treat marketing as an investment — or you’ll keep buying “random acts”

If you want less friction, the first shift is practical: tie marketing activity to commercial outcomes that sales actually recognises.

Sales leaders in the article challenge campaigns with blunt questions like:

• “How many trials will this generate?”
• “Will it improve revenue this quarter?”

That can sound harsh, but it’s healthy. Small businesses don’t have the luxury of “nice-to-have” campaigns that aren’t connected to pipeline.

A simple revenue link model your team can agree on

Marketing doesn’t always create revenue directly, but it should create evidence of progress toward revenue.

Use a three-layer model that both sides can live with:

1. Pipeline inputs (marketing-owned): qualified enquiries, booked demos, pricing-page visits, email replies, webinar attendees who match ICP.
2. Sales cycle signals (shared): speed-to-lead, show-up rate, sales-qualified opportunities, objection themes.
3. Revenue outcomes (sales-owned, marketing-influenced): win rate, sales cycle length, average deal size, retention/expansion.

When you report marketing results, don’t start with “reach”. Start with what moved in layer 1 and 2, and what you expect to move in layer 3.

Snippet-worthy truth: If marketing can’t explain how an activity changes pipeline behaviour, it’s not a strategy — it’s a bet.

Build a shared playbook (the fastest way to reduce friction)

The most consistently useful idea from the B2B sales leaders quoted is a common playbook: shared assumptions, shared definitions, shared workflow.

In small businesses, you can build this in a week.

What your “common playbook” must include

Keep it short. One page is ideal.

• ICP and exclusion list: who you’re targeting and who you’re not (industry, size, geography, constraints).
• Positioning statement: the problem you solve, for whom, and why you’re credible.
• Offer ladder: what you want prospects to do first (audit call, demo, trial, consultation) and what they get.
• Lead stages and definitions: what counts as an MQL/SQL (or your own stages) and the required fields.
• Follow-up standards: response time, number of touches, channels used.
• Objection library: top 10 objections + the best answers (marketing turns these into content and enablement).

This matters because “alignment” isn’t a meeting. It’s written agreements people can point to when pressure hits.

Add one rule that changes behaviour overnight

Adopt this rule:

No campaign goes live unless sales agrees (in writing) to the follow-up plan.

That doesn’t mean sales gets to veto everything. It means marketing refuses to spend money to create leads that won’t be handled properly.

Shared context beats shared KPIs (but you still need both)

One of the best points in the source article is that alignment on the bigger picture matters more than identical KPIs.

I agree — mostly.

In small businesses, shared KPIs can help, but only if they’re the right ones. If you pick the wrong shared KPI, you’ll get shared confusion.

The shared metrics that actually reduce conflict

Pick 2–3 that both sides influence and both sides respect:

1. Speed-to-lead (minutes, not days). If you’re paying for Google Ads and replying 48 hours later, you’re donating money to competitors.
2. Lead-to-meeting conversion rate (%). Marketing quality and sales handling both show up here.
3. Opportunity win rate (%). Marketing influences win rate through message clarity, case studies, proof, and objection-handling content.

Then give each team their own internal metrics, but report the shared ones together.

Stop reporting like you’re on different planets

A common cause of “marketing is fluff” is that marketing reports activity while sales reports outcomes.

Fix the format:

• Marketing updates should include what changed in buyer behaviour (e.g., “pricing page visits up 22% month-on-month from LinkedIn retargeting”).
• Sales updates should include what changed in buyer language (e.g., “3 prospects asked about compliance; we need a clearer page”).

That’s shared context. It lowers the temperature immediately.

Working in tandem: practical routines for busy UK SMEs

You don’t need joint departments to work together. You need routines that make collaboration the default.

Routine 1: Weekly “Revenue 30” meeting (30 minutes, fixed agenda)

Answer-first agenda:

1. What did we learn from buyers this week? (sales leads)
2. What did marketing ship that helps sales close deals? (marketing leads)
3. What’s the one bottleneck in the funnel? (decide one fix)
4. What are we launching next week and who owns follow-up?

Keep it strict. If it turns into a debate club, you’ve missed the point.

Routine 2: Marketers shadow sales calls (twice a month)

The article mentions marketers shadowing calls to understand roadblocks. This is one of the highest-ROI habits you can build.

What marketing should listen for:

• exact phrases prospects use to describe the problem
• recurring confusion about your offer
• “why now?” triggers (deadlines, costs, risks)
• competitor comparisons

Then turn it into:

• SEO content briefs (problem-led pages, comparison pages)
• email sequences for nurturing
• one-pagers and follow-up templates for sales

Routine 3: A shared dashboard everyone can see

One sales leader described live marketing data on one screen and live sales data on another. You can replicate that cheaply.

Minimum dashboard for a small business:

• website sessions by channel (organic, paid, referral)
• top converting pages (especially pricing and service pages)
• form fills / booked calls
• speed-to-lead
• meetings held
• opportunities created and won

When both teams look at the same numbers, the argument shifts from “I feel” to “we can fix this.”

The digital marketing angle: where alignment boosts results fastest

If you’re running a small business digital marketing plan, sales–marketing alignment shows up in three places quickly.

SEO: rankings don’t pay wages — conversions do

SEO wins when sales and marketing agree on:

• which services/products are most profitable
• which industries you want more of
• which objections stop deals (and need content)

A practical approach:

• Build or improve money pages (service pages, location pages, pricing page).
• Create objection content ("cost", "switching", "setup time", "risk", "alternatives").
• Add proof assets: case studies, testimonials, “how it works” pages.

Sales should review drafts for accuracy. Marketing should own structure and search intent.

Paid ads: stop sending paid traffic to “generic” pages

If sales says leads are low quality, it’s often because:

• the ad promise doesn’t match the landing page
• the landing page doesn’t pre-qualify
• the form doesn’t collect what sales needs

Fix it by agreeing upfront on:

• targeting criteria
• what a “good lead” looks like
• the offer (audit/demo/quote) and follow-up steps

Content marketing: make sales enablement the first priority

A lot of small businesses treat content as “thought leadership” first.

I’d flip that: your first content job is to make sales conversations easier.

Start with assets that directly reduce friction in deals:

• “How pricing works” explainer
• competitor comparison (fair and factual)
• implementation timeline and responsibilities
• industry-specific use cases
• objection-handling FAQ

When sales starts forwarding your content to prospects, the relationship improves because the value is obvious.

What to do next (a 7-day alignment sprint)

If your sales and marketing are currently operating in parallel, do this next week:

1. Day 1: agree ICP + top 3 offers (write it down).
2. Day 2: list top 10 objections from recent deals.
3. Day 3: audit lead stages + speed-to-lead process.
4. Day 4: create a single follow-up sequence template (email + call steps).
5. Day 5: pick 3 shared metrics and build a simple dashboard.
6. Day 6: build one sales enablement asset (one-pager or FAQ page).
7. Day 7: hold the first “Revenue 30” and choose one bottleneck to fix.

This is the kind of operational work that makes your SEO, PPC, and email marketing perform better without increasing spend.

Sales–marketing friction is real, and the stakes are higher for small businesses because every wasted week hurts.

If you want your small business digital marketing to generate consistent leads and revenue, start by fixing the handoff, the definitions, and the shared context. Then ask a question that keeps everyone honest: what would change in our pipeline if we worked like one team for the next 90 days?