Ending the Sales and Marketing War: Why Your MQL to SQL Handoff Needs a Middle Step
In most growing companies, sales and marketing share the same goal (grow revenue, grow the brand, grow the company) and somehow still end up on opposite sides of a trench. Sales says marketing isn’t producing. Marketing says sales isn’t following up. Both are partly right, and both are losing. The friction almost always concentrates in one place: the MQL to SQL handoff.
In a recent podcast conversation, Virago Marketing’s Jennie Malafarina sat down with revenue operations veteran Chris Gelder to unpack why this happens and, more usefully, how to fix it. Gelder, who has spent roughly three decades inside RevOps and BDR organizations, framed the dysfunction bluntly: “this war of attrition, as we say, exists.” The encouraging part of the conversation was how practical the fix turned out to be.
In short: the MQL to SQL handoff is the point in the lead qualification process where marketing passes a lead to sales. It breaks because the two funnel stages sit too far apart, with no shared definition of a viable lead in between. The fix is a middle checkpoint and a definition both teams build together.
Why do MQL to SQL handoffs fail?
The instinct, when sales and marketing clash, is to assume one team is underperforming. Gelder’s view is that the conflict is almost never about competence. Both teams want the same outcome; they just can’t see each other’s path to it.
His first recommendation costs nothing: open the doors. “Invite marketing to your sales meeting as silent participants. Invite sales to your marketing meeting,” he said, so each team can start to see the other’s agenda. When marketing watches a sales pipeline review, and sales watches a campaign get built, the abstract complaints start turning into shared context.
When meetings alone don’t close the gap, Gelder uses a more deliberate tactic: partner a single sales rep with the marketing team to pilot a new strategy. As that rep starts posting wins, the rest of the sales floor notices. “All of a sudden they start to come to the dark side,” he said. “It really isn’t the dark side, it’s the light side.” Proof, not persuasion, is what eventually turns a divided bridge into a well-traveled one.
Malafarina pointed to two structural fixes that reinforce the same idea. The first is a BDR who sits deliberately between the two functions: qualifying inbound leads, watching lead scores, checking ICP fit, and bridging the gap so sales doesn’t get buried in bad leads. The second is a CRO.
When one leader owns both functions, the CRO’s KPIs are the marketing and sales KPIs, and the old excuse, “marketing is only responsible for MQLs, sales is only responsible for revenue,” stops working. As Gelder put it, “silos shouldn’t exist anymore.”
The healthier mental model both landed on: there is no marketing team and sales team. There is one revenue team.
What is a Sales Accepted Lead (SAL)?
The single most useful idea in the conversation was a small change to a familiar funnel.
Most companies measure the jump from MQL (marketing qualified lead) straight to SQL (sales qualified lead). The problem is that those two funnel stages are far apart, and the gap between them is where leads, and inter-team trust, go to die. An SQL typically implies real qualification: budget, authority, need, and timing. An MQL implies far less. The handoff asks sales to treat the two as if they’re adjacent.
Gelder’s preferred fix is to insert a stage between them: the Sales Accepted Lead, or SAL. Instead of MQL straight to SQL, the path becomes MQL → SAL → SQL. The question the SAL answers is simple: will sales accept this lead as worth their time? It isn’t yet qualified on budget or timing. It’s a quality checkpoint confirming the lead is viable for follow-up. As Gelder described it, a SAL is “one or two letters away from being an SQL.”
This matters because the classic handoff failure is so familiar. Marketing passes a lead. Sales calls immediately. The prospect says, “I didn’t fill out a form, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Sales concludes marketing’s leads are garbage; marketing concludes sales won’t do the work. The SAL stage forces an explicit agreement on what a viable lead actually looks like before anyone picks up the phone, and it rescues good leads that simply aren’t ready.
A prospect can be a strong fit with genuine engagement and still have no budget this quarter. Under a blunt MQL to SQL metric, that lead looks like a marketing failure. Under a SAL framework, it’s correctly identified as a real lead that needs a different message: continued nurture with the right content, at the right time, until the timing turns.
Quality beats quantity, and the wrong goal guarantees the wrong result
The SAL conversation led naturally into one of the sharpest warnings of the episode: be very careful what you ask marketing to produce.
Malafarina described a company whose marketing team carried a monthly MQL quota. She called it “a horrible goal,” and the reasoning is hard to argue with. Marketing controls the definition of an MQL.
If the target is volume, the team can simply lower the bar (upload a list because the names fit the ICP, or count a website visit as qualifying engagement) and hit the number every month. The quota gets met. The MQL to SQL conversion rate quietly collapses, and sales works far harder for far less.
Gelder added the human cost. Feed a sales team a steady stream of box-checking MQLs and they stop believing any of them are worth attention. “They start to think everyone you give them is the same,” he said, “and they’re missing those gold nuggets.” The leads get dumped into an automated sequence, never called, never worked. At that point, as Malafarina noted, sales “might as well just go pull a list of 900” themselves.
The alternative requires discipline. As a company matures and moves upmarket, the model shifts from volume to precision. “I’d rather give my sales team 10 really good ones than 100 ones that meet a series of five questions,” Gelder said.
That’s a hard adjustment for a sales floor accustomed to a full funnel (the workload doesn’t shrink, it just moves to a smaller, higher-value audience), but it’s the trade that protects conversion rates and trust at the same time.
What actually closes the gap
For all the frameworks, both came back to something unglamorous. “This segment is all about communication, communication, alignment,” Gelder said, “understanding that you’re in it together for the same outcome.”
That means more than a standing meeting about leads. The most valuable exchange flows the other direction too: sales reporting back the objections they hear, what customers loved, why deals were won. That intelligence lets marketing answer objections earlier and tell better stories. Gelder also recommended including the people who will be affected by a change (the BDRs, the reps, the marketers) in the decision before it’s announced. Define what an MQL is, or introduce a SAL stage, with that group in the room, and the buy-in is dramatically better. As he put it, “the more you can eliminate surprises between sales and marketing, the better aligned you are.”
The takeaway for any company still fighting the sales-versus-marketing war: the fix isn’t a better tool or a tougher quota. It’s a shared definition of a good lead, an honest checkpoint between MQL and SQL, and the humility to build those definitions together.
Key takeaways
- The sales versus marketing conflict is a communication problem, not a competence problem. Both teams want the same revenue outcome.
- The MQL to SQL handoff fails because the two stages sit too far apart, with no shared definition of a viable lead between them.
- A Sales Accepted Lead (SAL) is a middle checkpoint, turning the path into MQL → SAL → SQL. It confirms a lead is worth sales’ time before full qualification on budget and timing.
- Quality beats quantity. An MQL volume quota lets marketing lower the bar and quietly collapses conversion rates. Ten strong leads beat a hundred box-checking ones.
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