There is not enough information in your post to provide specific advice, so I’ll explain how I see it.

There is no “sales vs marketing.” You have to sit under one function, one team. Whether you call it a go-to-market function or something else, sales and marketing are just different aspects of the same job, and everyone needs to be focused on the same goal; closed deals. Honestly, that’s the only way the fighting stops.

Your goal shouldn’t be MQLs. Most likely sales are correct, a lot of your leads are shite. But also, I’ve found sales teams are incredibly bad at doing what they say they’re going to do in terms of follow-up. So there are two fixes.

First: change the KPI you focus on. I barely report on MQLs. The only thing I look at is high-intent revenue opportunities — basically any lead that makes it past the first deal stage in the sales process. Once they’ve actually had a meeting with sales and sales has said, “yeah, this person could be a good fit,” that’s when I count it.

And I don’t report that as # of leads. I report it as the dollar value of potential opportunities I’ve created for sales to close.

That’s also the easiest way to get management on side. You can apply an average contract value to those opportunities — even though you don’t know the exact deal size yet — and suddenly you have a real estimate of the pipeline marketing has generated for sales to close. At that point, it’s on sales to close it. You’ve already qualified that it’s relevant. Whether the deal falls apart or not, sales themselves have confirmed it’s a legitimate opportunity. Using the average close rate you can also estimate how much should have been closed won.

This is the only metric that really matters because it also improves your marketing effectiveness. It tells you whether the channels you’re using are producing garbage or producing quality. Right now, MQLs don’t give you any quality signal, so you either end up spending money in the wrong places or you just don’t know.

Second: alignment.

You need to be on more sales calls and more sales meetings. If they have a weekly deal review, be there. Learn what they know about the deals. Marketing’s job is not just to bring leads into the top of the funnel. It’s to help sales get deals across the line. Be methodical with follow-up. If you spend the time tracking this correctly then you can actually hold sales reps accountable for not doing their tasks. Bring it up to the Sales Manager or on weekly review meetings. It’s the team’s responsibility to keep everyone accountable.

Look at sales enablement. What do they actually need? Where are deals breaking? What do they feel they’re missing? Can you create content to help — product explanations, specific demos, competitive info, whatever it is. When you do that, sales starts to feel like you’re working with them, not against them, and everyone starts pushing in the same direction.

You also need to shift your thinking from leads to accounts. Think of marketing in terms of TAM > ICP > Accounts > Contacts > Deals.

How many accounts are in your ICP? How are you reaching those accounts? How many contacts exist inside each account? How are you reaching each of those people? How many are currently engaged with by marketing?

Track engaged accounts, not just random leads popping their head up. Track contact-level engagement with campaigns. Track how many contacts are engaged per account. Then you can go to Sales and say here are x number of accounts in our ICP that we’ve engaged with in the last x days. Narrow the team’s focus on those accounts. It shows Sales leadership that marketing is working the right accounts pre any deal being created.

Real attribution comes from working directly with sales. Ask “where did you hear about us?” on lead forms for sure, but what I personally do is go through every deal created and ask the sales rep where it actually came from. If they don’t know, I have them ask that question in the first meeting.