The Silo That Is Negatively Impacting Your Commercial Performance

"In my experience, the gap between marketing and sales is rarely about capability. It is about ego — two functions that both believe they understand the customer better than the other, and neither of whom has sat in the other's meetings long enough to find out." Steve Gardiner

Marketing generates the leads. Sales converts them. Finance measures the outcome. Three functions, three sets of priorities, three different definitions of success — and between them, a gap that most businesses have learned to manage rather than close.

Managing the gap is expensive. Closing it is transformative.

Aligning Marketing and Sales

The alignment between marketing and sales begins with a shared definition of what a qualified lead actually is. This definition does not belong to either function independently. It is negotiated between them, tested against conversion data, and revised when the data suggests the definition is wrong.

From that shared definition flows everything else. The audience targeting of marketing campaigns. The content is produced to move prospects through the pipeline. The handover process that ensures a lead generated by marketing arrives with sales with enough context to make the first conversation productive rather than repetitive.

Without the shared definition, marketing optimises for volume and sales complain about quality. With it, both functions are optimising for the same outcome, which is the only condition under which either performs at its ceiling.

Bringing Finance Into the Conversation

The relationship between marketing and finance is typically adversarial. Marketing wants to invest. Finance wants to control costs. Neither position is wrong. The problem is that when these two positions meet without a shared language of revenue impact, the conversation defaults to budget cuts rather than investment optimisation.

The solution is metrics that both functions recognise as meaningful. Customer Acquisition Cost connects marketing spend directly to commercial outcome. Customer Lifetime Value connects that outcome to long-term revenue. Return on Ad Spend connects individual channel investment to measurable return.

These are not marketing metrics reported to finance. They are commercial metrics that marketing and finance build together — and that create the shared language necessary for investment decisions to be made on evidence rather than on institutional habit.

Standardising How Work Gets In

Every marketing function receives requests from other departments. Brand assets for a sales presentation. Content for an HR recruitment campaign. Communications support for a product launch originating in the technology team. Without a standardised intake process, these requests arrive through informal channels, jump the queue, and consume resources that were allocated elsewhere.

A project management tool with a uniform request process — visible to every stakeholder, trackable at every stage — is not bureaucracy. It is the operational infrastructure that enables a marketing function to manage its capacity honestly and deliver its commitments.

———

About the Author

Steve Gardiner (exec MBA) is a senior marketing and commercial leader at Lighthouse PR, bringing global experience from Accenture, Electronic Arts, Virgin Media, Telekom, and Etisalat. Latterly, as VP Business at Etisalat, he was responsible for $1.8B in revenue.

Today, Steve applies his strategic, marketing, and growth expertise to support Lighthouse PR clients as part of the agency’s service offering.

About Lighthouse PR

Lighthouse PR is a leading PR agency in Romania that works with a select number of organisations across Central and Southeastern Europe, delivering media relations, reputation management, crisis communications, social media and an extensive range of marketing services — always led by senior practitioners.

We hold exclusive membership for Romania and the Republic of Moldova in both the Eurocom worldwide PR network and the CCNE, Europe's leading crisis communications network.

Lighthouse PR: Clear. Concise. Convincing.