Years ago, at one of the companies I worked in, my head of marketing pulled me aside and said, “Don’t you dare agree on anything with sales without getting me involved.” She meant it. The two teams did not like each other. They sat in the same building, served the same customers, chased the same revenue, and treated each other as the problem.
I have carried that line with me ever since, because it captures something I have watched play out for twenty years. Marketing and sales, the two functions that are supposed to work as one, spending their energy fighting each other instead of serving the person they are both there for.
Here is how the fight usually goes. Marketing builds an ideal customer profile, runs campaigns against it, and generates leads. Those leads get passed to sales. Sales works a few of them, finds they are not ready to buy, and spends weeks nurturing people who were never going to move. Targets get missed. Marketing says the leads were fine and sales cannot close. Sales says the leads were never real. Round and round it goes, until the two heads of function are barely speaking. Meanwhile the customer, the actual reason any of this exists, is being served by neither.
I spent my first ten years on the marketing side of that fight. Funnels, automation, lead scoring, MQL targets. I thought I understood selling. I did not. When I crossed over to work alongside sales teams, my misconception turned out to be enormous. I had assumed selling was persuasion, pushing the product until someone said yes. It is not. A good salesperson spends their time working out who really influences the decision, what a yes actually means inside that organisation, and how to earn one.
And that is when the thing clicked for me, the thing that changed how I think about all of it.
In B2B, you are not selling. You are building trust.
Sit with that, because it changes everything that follows. Your buyer is not evaluating your product. They are trying to reduce their risk. A serious B2B decision is rarely one person and rarely simple. It is a group, five to ten people across different functions, each carrying their own worry, choosing something they will have to live with and defend for years. Underneath every question about features and price, they are all asking the same quiet thing: who here is the safest to trust?
Once you see the decision that way, the old fight looks different. It is not really a fight about lead quality. It is a symptom of something deeper. Marketing and sales are running as two separate operating systems, each with its own language, both aimed at the same person. Marketing puts one message into the market. Sales says something different in the room. The customer hears two companies and trusts neither. Separate systems, one customer. How is that supposed to work? It never works.
This is also, I think, why so much account-based marketing disappoints. On paper, ABM is the opposite of spray and pray. Pick the handful of accounts that genuinely matter. Understand the real people inside them. Earn their trust on purpose. Yet most companies run it as a volume exercise dressed up in sharper targeting. Lead scoring stands in for actually understanding a buying committee, and it cannot tell you what those people care about, what keeps them up at night, or what a yes would cost them internally.
So here is the position I will happily defend, even though it is unfashionable in a market obsessed with marketing technology. ABM should be sales-led, not marketing-led. Trust is not a mysterious art that only your best rep somehow has. It can be built deliberately, account by account, from the first cold moment when nobody knows who you are, through to real commitment. That is a discipline, not a personality trait. And it belongs with the people whose whole job is to earn a yes.
Which brings me to the order I care about most. People first. Process second. Platform last. Almost every company I meet does it the other way around. They feel the pressure to win more business, and the very first thing they reach for is a platform. Not the message. Not the person they are trying to reach. The tool. That has always struck me as extremely strange, because the tool is the one thing that cannot do the actual work. It cannot decide what you have to say, or to whom, or why they should believe you. Behind every piece of technology there is still a person, and more technology has never once solved a people problem.
This matters more now, not less. Artificial intelligence has flooded every inbox and every feed with outreach that nobody trusts anymore. The noise is deafening. But the same tools that created the slop can, pointed the right way, help you genuinely understand a customer, their pressures and their real needs, faster than ever before. The companies that win will not be the ones with the most technology. They will be the ones with the clearest thinking about the person on the other end.
I know how I want this to end, because I have spent twenty years watching the alternative. I want buyers matched, correctly, with the solutions that actually solve their problem. I want selling to feel less like a war of volume and more like a network of people exchanging real value, where good products find their way into the right hands because someone did the honest work of building trust. I want us to stop having to sell so hard.
Get that right, and the oldest fight in business simply stops being worth having. Marketing and sales stop defending their own targets and start doing the one thing they were always there to do together: fix a real problem for a real customer. When that happens, better products reach the people who need them, businesses get healthier, and, in a small but real way, the world gets a little better.
That is the work. It starts by putting down the platform and picking up the harder question: who is trying to trust you, and have you earned it?
Angeline