How Do I Engage Sales in Lead Generation?

Published on August 30, 2022

Understanding where the Marketing Funnel and Sales Pipeline meet is the key to closing more deals.

Updated: March 2026

Lead generation sits at the core of my Fractional Sales Leadership practice, and few topics generate more questions from business owners and executives.

Most conversations start in the same place: we have marketing doing its job, and we have a sales team ready to close, so why isn’t the pipeline growing the way it should?

The answer, more often than not, comes down to underutilization of your salespeople. For most organizations, the single highest-impact move is getting sellers actively engaged in lead generation, not just waiting for qualified leads to arrive.

This article breaks down why that engagement gap commonly exists, what it costs you, and how to close it.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/9ba2d8_e814ba3d4ffa4b478fa75d4624473bdf/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Your pipeline grows when sales and marketing work as one.

Key Takeaways: 

Before diving in, here is a summary of the core principles this article covers:

• Align your sales and marketing functions. The digital age has created more opportunity than ever, but only organizations that integrate these two functions will fully capitalize on it.

• Define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and make it the shared foundation for both marketing and sales activity, from funnel entry to closed deal.

• Your sales team should always be prospecting, regardless of current results. A healthy, diversified pipeline is built through consistent activity, not reactive bursts.

Lead Generation in the Information Age

In my work with small and mid-sized businesses, I consistently encounter confusion around how marketing and sales should partner in modern lead generation activity.

That is understandable. The current digital age represents the most substantial shift in marketing we’ve ever seen. We have instant access to more potential customers than ever before, along with more information than we know what to do with.

We see the implications of this through entire new business strategies emerging over recent years in the form of Subscription and OnDemand business models.

The digital age has made the differences between business model sales environment more pronounced than ever.

Sure, digital capabilities will continue to evolve, just as we've seen in previous revolutionary shifts with strong ties to socioeconomic conditions. The question is whether your organization is set up to capitalize on it.

In my Fractional VP Sales practice, I engage in a variety of business models where marketing and sales must work in close concert.

In the case of B2B and B2C, a common opportunity I see is the underutilization of salespeople within the Marketing Funnel, particularly in the early stages where their involvement can have an outsized impact on pipeline quality and velocity.

Set up your sales team for success today!

Why Sales Gets Left Out: Three Common Misnomers

Based on broad exposure to hundreds of small and mid-sized businesses, sales underutilization in lead generation consistently traces back to three root causes:

1. The company doesn’t know how to engage sellers effectively within the Marketing Funnel. Salespeople are intentionally kept on the sidelines until marketing determines a lead that has reached Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) or Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) status.

2. Sales teams are being held to the same performance expectations in an entirely new landscape, without being given the updated tools, skills, or training to meet them. The sales playbook has changed, but sellers were never handed the new copy.

3. As digital marketing has taken a more dominant role, sellers have grown uncertain about where they fit in the lead generation process.

A pervasive narrative from digital marketers, including articles and eBooks declaring “cold calling is dead,” has reinforced the idea that sellers should remain passive until a lead is ready to enter the sales pipeline.

In the live business settings that I engage in every day, I witness this approach leaving significant revenue on the table.

The sales playbook has changed, and sellers need to have the updated copy.

What Sales, Marketing, and Leadership Actually Want

Here is what I commonly observe in my client settings:

Sales wants and needs an active role in lead generation. Prospecting and lead generation are the lifeblood of the pipeline. They must be executed with skill and consistency for sellers to generate the lead flow required to hit their goals.

Marketing wants sales more engaged in progressing leads. Especially once a lead enters the “Interest” or “Evaluation” stages, marketing teams want to see their work translate into closed deals, not just MQLs handed off and left to sit.

Leadership wants both functions working together. Top executives need sales and marketing operating in alignment to maximize ROI on high-impact investments that are being made to support both of these business functions.

Understanding where the Marketing Funnel and Sales Pipeline meet is the key to closing more deals.

How the Marketing Funnel and Sales Pipeline Intersect

A lead enters the Marketing Funnel when first contact is made. Marketing’s objective is to drive engagement and convert leads into MQLs, at which point the lead is handed to Sales and enters the Sales Pipeline for further qualification.

From that point forward, Sales’ first task is to validate that the lead aligns with the company’s Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). If it does, the seller ushers the now-qualified prospect through the Sales Pipeline with the goal of closing a new opportunity.

A prospect’s progression through the Sales Pipeline is to be artfully guided by the salesperson following a proven sales process. At that point, the seller is back in the traditional sales realm, the part of the process that hasn’t fundamentally changed.

Sales, marketing, and leadership all share the same goal: a pipeline built for growth.

The key to success is a strategically designed, well-documented sales process, and sellers who are trained to navigate it with precision and predictability.

For a deeper look at sales process design, see my article:, Does Your Sales Process Generate Predictable Results?.

Let’s Talk About Your Lead Generation Strategy

If you’re a business owner or executive looking to integrate your sales and marketing functions more effectively, I’m happy to serve as a sounding board.

I welcome you to reach out to start the conversation by contacting us through any of these methods: info@sxwisconsin.com or fill out our Contact Us form.

Close More Deals: Subscribe to gain proven sales leadership guidance.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We are part of a national group of Senior Sales Leaders who collaborate to share insights like the examples shown in this article. We formed because of our shared passion to help business leaders exponentially grow their revenue.