Where Do Sales and Marketing Meet?

I'm sure some of you -- those actually in sales or marketing -- read this post title as "Do sales and marketing meet?" Both are fair questions. Sales in concerned with nurturing prospects through a process to become leads and eventually customers. Marketing is concerned with nurturing conversations with multiple people, some of whom are prospects and customers, and connecting their brand with those people in a personal way.

The disconnect comes when the two cycles -- the sales cycle and the marketing cycle -- are out of sync. Just like gears in a clock, if one cycle gets ahead of the other, there's a terrible mashing sound -- and sometimes something breaks loose. Very often, that something is a prospect or customer.

Jeff Ogden, Principal Consultant at Find New Customers, has written an interesting whitepaper on the topic of Demand Generation, cleverly called "How to Find New Customers" where he defines:

The classic problem between marketing and sales:

Marketing says Sales does not follow up on leads. They drop the ball.

Sales says Marketing’s leads suck. The ball is not worth carrying.

The solution to this problem is an agreed definition of a lead and tracking of prospect behavior, so the right content is shared at the right time.

It's those two things -- the right content and the right time -- that is often the crux of the problem.

It's also the intersection of sales and marketing. What's your take?