Tom Keefe
Principal GTM Expert, Marketing Operations, Demandbase
B2B organizations have perpetuated an antiquated, fundamentally flawed model of sourcing pipeline—one that breeds internal dysfunction, erodes productivity, and completely contradicts the core principles of executing an effective account-based strategy.
The broken model? Dividing opportunities into marketing vs. sales-sourced pipeline.
This article will explore why it’s time to abandon sales vs. marketing-sourced pipeline attribution. Specifically, we’ll cover:
More importantly, we’ll reinforce why transitioning to a unified, account-based approach with complete marketing and sales alignment, operating as one integrated revenue team dedicated to orchestrating the entire account lifecycle through a cohesive experience … is crucial.
Let’s dig in a bit more on why this old-school approach should be outlawed.
While just 30% of sales professionals say their sales and marketing teams are strongly aligned, 61% say alignment is “more important now than it was last year”.
As evidenced by the quote above, we live in a world where nearly three-quarters of sales folks don’t believe their teams are strongly aligned with marketing.
Anything that can cause more fights and tension around who gets credit for an opportunity – one that both teams have likely been working to create – is a further unnecessary drain on resources and cycles.
So, as the header of this section says, dividing opportunities into marketing vs. sales-sourced pipeline is dumb.
This approach creates artificial barriers and rivalries in a space where these two teams should be in lockstep alignment. Rather than operating as a unified revenue team, this “us vs. them” model pits groups against each other into endless cycles of infighting over who gets credited for initially engaging an account long before any real opportunity materializes.
In camp #1, Sales Reps: “Marketing is not filling the pipeline with quality leads” (cue the 1992 film Glengarry Glen Ross).
In camp #2, Marketers: “Sales dropped the baton (again!) on following up with all of our air cover campaigns and engaged accounts.”
Even worse, this often bubbles up to the CMO and CSO — resulting in unproductive “ego battles” over whose team’s contributions are more instrumental to sourcing pipeline.
About that sourcing…
The entire concept of sourced pipeline credit is really just an arbitrary mechanism to determine which department “gets credit” for the initial, first-touch interaction with an account … long before any real opportunity even existed.
But trying to define what constitutes that all-important first touch quickly becomes an exercise in absurdity.
Is a first visit…
Most often, these visits are blind, anonymous interactions where the account likely had zero awareness they were engaging with your company. How valuable is that in terms of driving any actual demand?
And remember whatever you discover as your “first touch” is just based on an arbitrary period set up by the owner of your attribution model. If a person engaged with sales or marketing eight months before an opportunity is created, yet the attribution model only looks for touch points six months before the creation of an opportunity, are you really capturing the real first touch?
A real-life example: A person attended a webinar in February but then booked a meeting with a sales rep in October. An opportunity was created in December. Is the first touch in February (webinar attendance from marketing-driven demand) or October (meeting booked from sales)?
The bottom line: reducing an account’s journey to a single first-touch interaction is extremely reductive and fails to reflect the dynamic interplay between marketing and sales efforts.
Both teams are ideally running orchestrated plays across a diverse range of channels and touchpoints for each prioritized account. Trying to isolate which departmental interaction gets siloed pipeline credit is arbitrary at best and detrimental at worst, especially when considering Account Based Marketing (ABM).
Podcast → Achieving Cross-Functional Alignment for Revenue Growth
Account-based experience (ABX) is a go-to-market strategy that uses data and insights to orchestrate relevant, trusted marketing and sales actions throughout the B2B customer journey.
It’s a customer-centric rethinking of ABX — one that combines the engageability of inbound marketing with the precision and targeting of account-based marketing.
With that context, the zero-sum, marketing vs. sales-sourced pipeline mentality undermines everything ABX is meant to achieve: tightly coordinated plays from marketing and sales to penetrate priority accounts and maximize lifetime value.
If you are sourcing pipeline separately for marketing and sales, the assumption is that one team is “better” at sourcing opportunities from certain accounts. Expecting one team to be solely responsible for “sourcing” an entire account’s pipeline is detrimental.
In an effective ABX strategy, marketing and sales efforts must be inextricably linked.
Both teams must work together to choreograph personalized plays from start to finish for each prioritized account – not just at the initial sourcing stage, but at every phase across the entire buying cycle.
For those basketball fans, think Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal. Shaq didn’t bicker with Kobe about who scored more points off whose assists. They were a devastating combination where Kobe’s pinpoint passing set up Shaq’s dominance in the paint, and vice versa.
In an ABX world, marketing and sales operate as Kobe-Shaq, a unified revenue team – collaboratively identifying and prioritizing target accounts, with marketing running air cover campaigns to build awareness and interest, and sales tackling personalized outreach and conversations.
Rather than wasting cycles on these territorial battles, marketing, and sales need a full mindset shift to instead focus on their collective ability to drive strategic, high-value deals from start to finish.
Demandbase eliminates the silos between marketing and sales, providing a single comprehensive view into each account’s engagement journey powered by AI-driven data and insights. Rather than petty squabbles over sourced pipeline, teams can orchestrate personalized ABX encounters — from awareness to advocacy — to maximize long-term account value.
Ditch the silos. Stop the infighting. Get aligned.
See Demandbase in action and discover how it can transform your revenue marketing strategies.
Tom Keefe
Principal GTM Expert, Marketing Operations, Demandbase
