Every healthy company has three core, system-forming units: marketing, PR and sales. In an ideal world, they work as one mechanism, create synergy, and drive the company toward profit and growth. Everyone knows how it’s supposed to work. Tons of books have been written, and executives with six-figure salaries defend the smartest strategies. But in practice, you often “turn it on — and it doesn’t work.”
We’ve built more than one combined PR and marketing system for businesses of various sizes and collected an entire gallery of conflicts between these departments. Let’s try to understand the root causes and find ways — if not to eliminate the discord entirely — then at least to minimize its consequences.
Where Are the Leads? Three Truths About the Essential Question
It seems simple. Business exists to generate revenue, revenue comes from clients, and to get clients you need leads. The word “lead” is the absolute champion of any discussion, briefing or strategy session. Promise leads — we’ll talk. Don’t promise — don’t take up airtime.
It gives the impression that everyone has agreed: marketing, PR and sales exist to generate leads and convert them into clients. But try catching a PR specialist, a marketer and a salesperson separately in a dark alley and ask: “Where are the leads?”
The marketer will talk about the funnel, content strategy and long-term planning. The PR specialist will reflect on reputation, awareness and loyalty. The salesperson will demand “hot” prospects ready to sign a contract here and now. This simple experiment makes one thing clear: views on leads — their role, criteria and sources — differ drastically depending on perspective. Each is right in their own way, but the overall result is at risk.
You can address the problem through consulting, outsourcing or outstaffing. But you must first identify the root causes. We’ve grouped them into three major categories.
- Different Frames of Reference and Time Horizons
Marketing operates in the medium- and long-term. Audience segmentation, hypothesis development and testing, product launches, funnel building — all this requires time and a systematic approach. Marketers think in months and quarters.
Salespeople, on the other hand, have no time. They operate under strict monthly and quarterly KPIs. They need to close deals here and now. Anything that doesn’t help bring in clients immediately feels burdensome and distracting.
And then there is PR, with goals that are often unclear to either group. PR is not about leads or direct sales. It’s about brand awareness, audience loyalty, reputation risk management, and building a sustainable positive image. In short, “why worry about the soup when the whole kitchen is on fire?”
There have been cases where heads of production demanded that PR and marketing immediately drop all “abstract” tasks and launch purely promotional materials with direct purchase calls. In their view, that’s the only thing that works.
As a result, marketing complains about sales mishandling leads. Sales complains that marketing doesn’t understand what kind of leads they need. Both complain about PR because they don’t see its immediate contribution to the funnel. And everyone wants to be in charge.
- Communication Gaps: When Dialogue Falls Apart
This problem follows directly from the first. Even when joint meetings happen, teams go back to their offices afterwards and grumble about “the fools in the next department.” At strategy sessions, each department tells shareholders that no one supports them.
A classic example: the marketing and sales departments of one company spent six months arguing over who should conduct competitive analysis. Marketing insisted it was a strategic task requiring deep analytics. Sales countered that only they understood real customer pains and competitors’ strengths in the field. In the end, neither performed the analysis, and the company missed market opportunities.
- Misaligned Actions: A Case Study from an Industry Event
Take participation in business events as an example. For many industries, trade shows, conferences and forums are among the most effective tools. Events solve many tasks at once: sales get quick access to decision-makers, marketing can test hypotheses and gather feedback, and PR finds news hooks and new communication channels.
But in practice even this obvious scenario leads to disputes. In 17 years of working in sales and marketing, I can count on one and a half hands the cases where teams prepared for an event together: PR aligning messaging and training the team on key formulations; marketing preparing user-friendly surveys and briefs for contact collection; sales capturing feedback and completing reports; and afterwards everyone sitting down together to compile a combined report, calculate conversions and analyze the OVERALL result.
Usually it goes like this: sales call every business card collected at the event, marketing reports social media reach, and PR reports the number of publications. No one understands the combined effect or the true ROI. The same applies to strategy, tactics, analytics and planning.
Checklist: How to Align the Three Pillars
Understanding these root causes allows you to choose the right tools. We developed a checklist for building effective cross-departmental work. It can be used to evaluate existing teams or to build processes from scratch.
- Agree on what and to whom you are selling
Another example. We spent two months developing a go-to-market strategy for a new IT solution. We held several preliminary meetings, aligned sections of presentations and key hypotheses. We defined positioning, crafted key messages, built content plans, and worked through promotion channels. At every stage, the project head and product owners reviewed, approved and contributed.
At the final presentation to the CEO, it turned out the product wasn’t intended for external markets at all, and its name was purely technical — for internal use only. We quickly pivoted to a new direction, but two months of work and a significant chunk of the budget were lost. Even if you’re certain everyone on the team shares the same understanding of the product and its value, double-check — and fix it in writing.
- Decide who sells and how — flexibly and appropriately
This depends directly on the product. Complex B2B products with long sales cycles that require briefings, demos and approvals rightfully belong to the sales department, with active support from marketing and PR. They prepare materials, messaging and create fertile ground for sales.
A simple SaaS product priced like a cup of coffee and sold via ads and landing pages can be safely assigned to marketing. This reduces the load on teams, speeds up the process and helps everyone better understand what a lead is in their specific case. Even for complex products, though, we integrate lead-generation tools into marketing processes: webinars, targeted campaigns, surveys for hypothesis testing, and structured feedback collection.
- Ensure everyone has the information they need
Sales often lack their own analytics, even though it’s critical for understanding channel performance and handling objections. This highlights the need for close integration with marketing and PR — the primary owners of product, market and customer information. Sales must be equipped to communicate the product’s value, unique features and advantages with strong reasoning and concrete examples.
- Achieve shared responsibility for results — in practice
Back to the event example. Before an event begins, everyone should have clear written instructions and a shared plan. Who reviews participant lists and schedules meetings in advance? Who arranges a comfortable meeting space? Who prepares unified presentation materials and scripts? How will visitor feedback be documented? What data must be collected “in the field” for proper lead qualification and accurate conversion calculations — the key metrics of event performance?
System Failure: Why Even a Good Checklist Doesn’t Work
There is a major challenge in replacing comfortable, meaningless activity with a real systematic approach. Processes and instructions alone don’t change anything — they just increase documentation volume.
You get results only if you radically change how you evaluate department performance.
The most popular — and ineffective — approach is to assess each department by narrow KPIs. For marketing, for example, it might be the number of leads; for PR, the number and sentiment of media mentions; for sales, monthly target attainment. As a result, each fights for its own metrics, which often contradict those of the others.
Petty internal battles replace real business value. And this is supported by a recent study among CMOs:
- 84% of employers expect CMOs to drive revenue or profit growth.
- At the same time, 64% of CMOs believe employers are looking not for strategists but for “hands-on marketers” who directly bring in clients.
Hence the classic conflict between expectations and execution. Business claims to want a strategist responsible for money and growth, but hires and evaluates them like a tactical executor responsible for leads. PR and sales face the same issue.
Conclusion: Fix the System, Not the People
The first instinct is to find the perfect formula for lead distribution or appoint someone responsible for end-to-end analytics. It may feel like all the necessary organizational changes have been made and performance will improve.
That’s an illusion. Even if it works, it will only work short-term.
The real solution: integrate goals and metrics into a unified system. In this setup, each department’s success is measured by its actual contribution to final business outcomes.
When PR is responsible for brand awareness and loyalty among the target audience, marketing — for a high-quality and sufficient flow of interested leads at predictable cost, and sales — for effective conversion and customer retention, the grounds for the eternal “who’s in charge” debate disappear. Instead, a foundation for constructive dialogue emerges — because the goals are shared and there is finally something meaningful to discuss.
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