There's a picture that haunts my dreams. It's a Venn diagram of buyers reached by marketing and buyers reached by sales. In an ideal world, those circles would overlap almost completely. Marketing would generate awareness and demand, sales would engage and close, and together they'd reach every potential buyer.
In reality? According to research from LinkedIn, the overlap is just 16%.
Sixteen percent. That means 84% of potential buyers are being reached by marketing OR sales—but not both. The "funnel" we all draw on whiteboards? It's fiction.
The Circles of Doom Explained
Here's what's actually happening in most B2B organizations:
Marketing's circle: Reaches a broad audience through advertising, content, and events. But many of these people are out-of-market (remember the 95-5 rule) and will never enter the sales funnel.
Sales's circle: Reaches a different audience through outbound prospecting, referrals, and existing relationships. But sales often targets accounts that marketing has never touched.
The overlap is tiny because marketing and sales are essentially running separate operations with separate targets, separate strategies, and separate definitions of success.
Why This Happens
In my experience scaling startups, I've seen this misalignment stem from several causes:
- Different time horizons: Marketing is measured quarterly or annually; sales is measured monthly or weekly. This creates fundamentally different incentives.
- Different definitions of "qualified": Marketing considers someone qualified based on engagement signals; sales considers them qualified based on fit and timing.
- Limited visibility: Sales often has no idea what marketing is doing, and marketing has no idea which accounts sales is pursuing.
- Separate tooling: Marketing uses one tech stack, sales uses another, and the integration is poor or nonexistent.
Practical Solutions
I've worked through this problem at multiple companies. Here's what actually helps:
1. Unified Account Targeting
Marketing and sales should be targeting the same accounts. This sounds obvious, but it's surprisingly rare. Implement a shared target account list that both teams work from.
2. Shared Metrics
Stop measuring marketing on MQLs and sales on closed-won. Create shared pipeline and revenue metrics that both teams own together.
3. Visibility Infrastructure
Sales should see what marketing content an account has engaged with. Marketing should see what accounts sales is pursuing. This requires tool integration or a unified platform.
4. Regular Sync Rituals
Weekly meetings where marketing and sales review the same data and coordinate efforts. Not status updates—actual strategy coordination.
How Simulated Buyers Can Help
One thing I've started doing: using synthetic personas to model the buyer journey that spans both marketing and sales touchpoints.
I'll describe a complete buying scenario to synthetic personas: "You first heard about this company through a LinkedIn ad. Then you received an email from a sales rep. What would your experience feel like? What would make you more or less likely to engage?"
This helps identify disconnects between marketing messaging and sales approach—problems that are invisible if you only research each function separately.
The Path Forward
The circles of doom aren't a marketing problem or a sales problem. They're an alignment problem. And alignment is ultimately a leadership problem.
Someone needs to own the complete buyer journey, with the authority to coordinate both functions. Whether that's a Chief Revenue Officer, a VP of Revenue Operations, or empowered leaders who work closely together—someone needs to be accountable for making those circles overlap.
Because right now, 84% of your potential buyers are falling through the gap between marketing and sales. That's not a leak in your funnel. That's a structural failure.
Time to fix it.