What does marketing owe sales in the first 90 days?

What does marketing owe sales in the first 90 days?

Three things: a written definition of who you are selling to, the actual words buyers use, and a lead handover that arrives with context attached. Not a volume promise. Not a brand refresh. Those three artefacts are what make a sales team able to work, and they are almost never delivered.

Alignment conversations usually fail because they are about attitude. Everyone agrees to communicate better, nothing changes, and three months later sales says the leads are bad while marketing says sales is not following up. The argument is unresolvable because nobody wrote anything down.

So this is a list of deliverables rather than intentions, in the order I would produce them.

Why does the first 90 days matter more than the plan?

Because habits set in the first quarter and then stop being negotiable. Whatever handover process exists at day 90 is the process you will still be arguing about at day 400, and it will be much harder to change because both sides will have built workarounds.

The other reason is evidence. Ninety days is roughly enough to see whether the leads marketing generates turn into conversations, which is the only question that settles a lead quality argument. Before that, both sides are asserting.

What I would explicitly not do in the first 90 days is anything that takes 90 days to show a result. Brand work, a site redesign, a long content programme. Those may all be correct, and none of them helps the sales team in front of you this quarter.

What is the first thing to hand over?

A written definition of the buyer, one page, specific enough to be wrong. Company size, situation, the trigger that makes them start looking, and, critically, who you are not selling to.

The exclusions are the useful part. A definition that says you serve growing software companies is not a definition, it is a mood. A definition that says you do not serve companies under ten people, or anyone without a dedicated marketing owner, gives a salesperson something they can use to disqualify quickly.

Write it, show it to sales, and let them argue with it. The argument is the deliverable. If sales disagrees with the definition, you have found the misalignment on day five instead of day ninety, and it cost you an afternoon.

What should you hand over about language?

The actual phrases buyers use, collected rather than invented. Marketing's biggest contribution to sales in the first quarter is usually vocabulary, because marketing is the function that reads what strangers write in forms and search queries.

Collect it from real sources. Form submissions, search queries, support tickets, recorded calls. Then hand sales a short document of how buyers describe the problem in their own words, alongside the internal terms your company uses. The gap between those two lists is where deals get confused.

This is also what lets a website do sales work when nobody talks to a rep at all, which is increasingly common in software buying. I have written about that scenario in writing for buyers who never talk to sales.

How many leads is the wrong promise?

Any number promised before you have run the channel for a quarter. Volume forecasts in the first 90 days are guesses dressed as commitments, and they poison the relationship when they are missed.

What you can honestly commit to is activity and learning. A specific number of experiments, a specific set of channels tested, and a written answer at the end of the quarter about which one produced conversations. That is a promise you can keep, and it is more useful than a number nobody believes.

If leadership insists on a volume target anyway, put a range on it and state the assumption underneath. A number with a visible assumption can be revised when the assumption proves wrong. A bare number can only be missed.

What should marketing ask for in return?

Two things. Disposition on every lead, and access to the conversations. Without the first, marketing is optimising blind. Without the second, marketing is writing copy based on imagination.

Disposition means a sales person marking what happened to each lead, in a field, consistently. Not a long form. A single value from a short list, applied to everything. This is the least glamorous ask in the whole relationship and the one that makes every later decision possible.

Access to conversations means sitting in on calls or reading recordings regularly, not once during onboarding. A marketer who has heard twenty real objections writes differently from one who has read a persona document, and the difference is visible on the page.

How do you handle disagreement about lead quality?

Resolve it with a sample, not with an argument. Take thirty recent leads, have both sides independently mark each one as a fit or not, and compare. The disagreements are the actual problem and they are usually about one or two criteria.

What this exercise almost always reveals is that the two functions are using different definitions of the same word. Marketing counts anyone matching the profile. Sales counts anyone ready to buy this quarter. Both are reasonable and they are not the same population.

The fix is to name both groups separately and stop using one word for them. Once you have two names, the conversation becomes about how many of each you want, which is a resolvable planning question rather than a competence dispute. Win loss conversations are the other place this gets settled, which I have covered in win loss interviews that actually improve marketing.

The weekly meeting should cover three things and nothing else: what came in, what happened to it, and what either side needs from the other this week. Twenty minutes, standing agenda, no slides.

The failure mode is a meeting that becomes a status report. Status is what the shared record is for. The meeting exists for the part that cannot be written down, which is the pattern somebody noticed in a conversation and has not yet articulated.

Keep the same three questions every week, because consistency is what makes drift visible. If the same request from sales appears for four weeks running and never gets done, that is the most useful signal the meeting produces.

What does failure look like at day 90?

Nobody can say what happened to last month's leads. That is the diagnostic. If disposition data does not exist, nothing else you built in the quarter can be evaluated, and the next quarter will be run on opinion again.

The second failure signal is a definition of the buyer that nobody has challenged. An unchallenged definition means sales has not read it, which means it is not being used, which means it did not do its job.

The third is a marketing team that has not heard a real sales conversation. Across more than 70 projects for more than 25 clients over more than six years, that single gap explains more weak website copy than any lack of skill or budget.

What if there is no sales team yet?

Then the founder is sales, and the same obligations apply with one difference: the handover is to your future self. Write the buyer definition and the language document anyway, because you will hire against them.

Founder led selling makes the language work easier, because the person writing the site is the person hearing the objections. It makes the disposition discipline harder, because nobody is forcing you to record anything. Record it anyway, with something simple, because those notes become your first sales training material.

It also changes what you should validate first. Before scaling anything, establish that the offer works on strangers rather than on your network, which is a separate exercise I have written up in what a soft launch should prove.

What should you do next?

Write the one page buyer definition this week and send it to whoever sells. Ask them to mark the parts they think are wrong. That one document, and the argument it starts, is worth more than a quarter of planning.

Then agree a single disposition field with a short list of values, and start filling it in from today. It will feel pointless for three weeks and then it will be the only reason you can answer anything.

If you are setting up this relationship and want an outside view on what to hand over first, reach out. The sequence matters more than the content, and it is easy to spend a quarter on the wrong thing.