The Difference Between Leads and Revenue (Most Teams Confuse This)

For GTM leaders struggling with marketing and sales misalignment, this article clarifies a critical issue. Your business does not run on "Marketing Qualified Leads" (MQLs); it runs on revenue. The gap between a "lead" and a dollar in the bank is where most strategies die. We'll show you why a focus on lead volume is flawed and how shifting to a "Pipeline Sourced" model forces accountability and drives real growth.

The Great Divide: Why Marketing and Sales Clash

The problem starts with a fundamental misalignment between marketing and sales. Marketing is incentivized to generate a high volume of MQLs. Sales is incentivized to close deals. When marketing hits their MQL target but sales misses their revenue target, the finger-pointing begins. This is often because, as we've written, marketing and sales optimize for different metrics.

• Marketing says: "We delivered the leads. Sales isn't closing them."
• Sales says: "The leads are junk. They're not qualified."

Both can be right. The issue is that the definition of a "lead" is subjective and disconnected from the only objective truth: a signed contract.

Why Lead Scoring Models Often Fail

Lead scoring feels scientific. You assign points for a title, company size, a webinar view, a whitepaper download. But it's a house of cards built on assumptions.

• It confuses activity with intent. Someone who downloaded three of your whitepapers might be a student doing research, not a C-level executive with budget. This is the classic confusion between interest and intent.
• It's a lagging indicator. It scores prospects based on what they have done, not what they are about to do.
• It's easily gamed. A competitor can trigger your entire lead scoring model in an afternoon, creating a flood of "hot" leads that are completely worthless.

A high lead score is not a signal of buying intent. It's a signal of engagement, and the two are not the same thing.

A Simpler Model: Focus on Sourced Pipeline

It's time to kill the MQL. Instead, there should be only one top-of-funnel metric that both marketing and sales are measured on: Pipeline Sourced.

This means a lead is not considered "qualified" until a sales rep has spoken to them and formally converted them into a stage-one opportunity in the CRM, with an estimated close date and deal value. This single change forces alignment and accountability.

How This Aligns Your Teams:

• Marketing's Job: Marketing is no longer responsible for generating a high volume of low-quality "leads." Their new job is to generate "first meetings" for the sales team with prospects who fit the ICP. Their success is measured by the pipeline value that originates from their campaigns.
• Sales's Job: Sales is responsible for converting those first meetings into qualified pipeline. They have the power to accept or reject a lead based on a real conversation, not an arbitrary score.

The Takeaway: Shift to a Revenue Operations Mindset

This shift in metrics is the first step towards a true Revenue Operations (RevOps) mindset. In a RevOps model, marketing, sales, and customer success are a single, integrated team responsible for the entire customer lifecycle, measured by a single metric: revenue. If a marketing activity doesn't contribute to one of these core revenue metrics, you should stop doing it.