By Meg McParland
For years, Marketing and Sales have lived on opposite sides of a line.
Marketing raises awareness, builds content, runs campaigns, generates leads. Someone fills out a form, shows up to a webinar, or books a demo, and we call it a win. Then we move on to find the next one. Sales takes it from there. That’s the deal.
Sort-of… because the prospect never agreed to that deal.
They don’t know they’ve crossed some invisible border from “Marketing” into “Sales.” MQL to SQL to Opportunity. They don’t care which team owns what. As far as they’re concerned, they’re having one conversation with one company.
So when that conversation suddenly shifts the second they book a meeting, they feel it. The message that got their attention in the first place disappears. The words they responded to don’t show up in the sales call. The problem we spent weeks educating them about gets swapped out for a product demo and a whole different personality… Then we act surprised when the lead goes cold.
Here’s the thing: it’s not always a “we need more leads” problem. Sometimes we’re generating plenty of interest and then dropping it the moment Sales picks up the phone. So here is my proposal… Marketing shouldn’t just support enablement. It should help lead it.
That doesn’t mean Marketing takes over Sales. It means we stop treating enablement as “make me a one-pager” and start treating it as part of the actual customer journey.
Marketing and Sales know different halves of the same story
Marketing usually has a front-row seat to:
- Customer research and market trends
- Messaging and positioning
- Competitive intel
- Customer stories and industry insights
- What buyers ask and object to before they ever talk to a rep
Sales has something just as valuable: the real conversation. They hear “this sounds great, but…” They know why deals stall, which competitors keep showing up, and what language customers actually use to describe their problems, sometimes surfacing issues Marketing hasn’t even built messaging for yet.
Those two things should feed each other constantly. Marketing learns from the market. Sales carries that into real conversations. Sales learns what lands. Marketing sharpens the story. Repeat. Right now, in a lot of companies, that loop doesn’t exist. It’s two teams working off two completely different playbooks.
The handoff isn’t a finish line, (even though we treat it like one)
We tend to think of demand gen as something that ends at the handoff. Marketing makes the lead, Sales takes the lead, Marketing moves on to the next campaign. But the customer doesn’t hit reset the moment they hit “book a demo.”
Ideally every step builds on the last one: the ad, the landing page, the email, the event, the sales call, the demo, the business case, the proposal. The story can (and should) evolve as the customer learns more and we learn more about them. What it shouldn’t do is feel like they got transferred to a different company halfway through.
If a campaign is built around a specific problem, Sales should know that problem cold and keep the conversation going. If a piece of content is resonating with a certain audience, Sales should know why. If Sales hears customers describing the problem in totally different words than the ones we’re using, Marketing needs to know that, fast.
A shared drive full of one-pager PDFs is not a sales enablement strategy
Most companies have some version of this: a shared folder, a “sales enablement platform” packed with one-pagers, battlecards, case studies, and at least three versions of the same deck that nobody’s sure is current anymore.
That’s not enablement. Real enablement helps someone understand what to say, who to say it to, when to say it, why it matters, and what to do next. That takes more than cranking out assets. It takes actually understanding how customers buy: what they ask at each stage, what they need to move forward, what objections come up, who internally needs convincing, and increasingly, what business case the buyer has to make to their own boss to get budget approved.
This is where Marketing can do a lot more than we usually do.
A few things a real enablement strategy should include:
Messaging that doesn’t live in a static PDF. Sales shouldn’t have to reinvent the value prop in every single call. Marketing can hand over core messaging, persona-specific angles, industry framing, problem statements, and objection handling. But that messaging has to keep moving. If it was written once in a planning meeting and never touched again, it’s already stale.
Content built to move a deal, not just generate one. Not everything Marketing makes needs to rank on Google or pull in form fills. Some of the most useful stuff might only ever help one salesperson push one deal over the line: an industry-specific customer story, a competitive comparison, an ROI framework, a business case template. The best sales content doesn’t just help your rep explain the product. It helps the buyer explain it to their own team. A stakeholder can love your product and still lose the deal because they couldn’t make the case to Finance or IT. That’s where Marketing can actually help.
Your sales team is one of the best research tools you’re not using
Marketers spend a ton of time and money trying to understand customers. Surveys, interviews, research reports, intent data, competitor teardowns. All useful… yes… but meanwhile, Sales is on the phone with prospects every single day, and in a lot of companies, none of that gets captured anywhere Marketing can actually use it.
Marketing should have a real system for pulling in: new objections, competitors showing up in deals, the exact language customers use, new use cases, why deals stall, why people choose you (and why they don’t), and how buying priorities are shifting.
That’s the difference between an ICP on paper and actually knowing your customer. Knowing your buyer is a VP of Ops at a 500 to 2,000 person company tells you almost nothing. What are they measured on? What’s happening in their business right now? What else is competing for the same budget? What does winning look like for them personally?
The more Marketing knows the answers to those questions, the sharper the messaging gets. The sharper the messaging, the better the sales conversations go. Which feeds Marketing even better insight. Same loop, again.
Enablement should feel like a feedback loop, not a help desk
Right now, in too many places, the relationship looks like this: Sales asks for an asset, Marketing builds the asset, Sales asks for another one.
It should look more like this: Marketing builds the positioning, messaging, narratives, stories, and content. Sales takes that into real conversations. Sales learns what works, what doesn’t, and what’s new out there. Marketing takes that insight and sharpens everything again. That’s the difference between Marketing being a department that produces things on request, and Marketing being part of how the company actually makes money.
Demand gen doesn’t end at the handoff
We spend a lot of energy talking about how to generate more pipeline. More leads, more meetings, more opportunities. All of that matters. But creating demand is only half the job.
If Marketing understands the market, the customer, the problem, and the story that got someone interested in the first place, why would that role stop the second they book a meeting?
The best marketing teams aren’t just generating demand and tossing it over a wall like a hot potato. They’re helping build the conditions for Sales to actually turn that interest into revenue. Because customers were never experiencing “Marketing” and “Sales” as two different things. They were just talking to one company the whole time. The companies that win are the ones that make it feel that way.
Meg McParland is a marketing leader with 20 years of B2B SaaS experience specializing in demand generation, pipeline strategy, and making complicated things sound like something a human would actually say.
Originally published on LinkedIn on September 7, 2026 → Read the original on LinkedIn
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