Here is a meeting that happens in most B2B companies, roughly every quarter.

Marketing says sales is not following up on leads. Sales says the leads are bad. Someone proposes a shared definition of a qualified lead. Everyone agrees it is a good idea. Nothing changes, and three months later the same people have the same conversation.

The reason it does not change is that nobody in the room read the comp plan. Reps are behaving exactly as their compensation tells them to. When behaviour looks irrational, the plan is usually the explanation.

The alignment meeting that never fixes anything

Alignment meetings deal in agreements. Comp plans deal in money. Money wins.

A rep can genuinely agree in a Tuesday meeting that inbound leads matter, and then on Wednesday morning look at a pipeline that has to close by month end, and work the deal that pays. That is a person responding to the system they are paid inside.

So before the next alignment session, get the comp plan on the table. Rates, quota period, accelerators, thresholds, what counts as a sourced deal, what an SDR is paid on. Read it as a description of what the company has asked sales to do, because that is what it is. Most marketing leaders have never seen it, which is a strange gap given how much of their output it controls.

Comp plans that make reps ignore inbound

Three structures do most of the damage, and none of them look wrong on paper.

A large rate gap between self-sourced and marketing-sourced deals. The logic is fair enough: the rep did less work, so they earn less. The effect is that when a rep has four hours and six things to do, the inbound lead is the cheapest thing to drop. A small gap is fine. A large one tells everyone which pipeline is real.

Ask the honest question: if your business depends on inbound converting, why does the plan pay reps less for doing it?

Rates that vary sharply by product line. A rep paid double on one product will steer every conversation there, including conversations marketing generated for something else. Marketing then sees a campaign that produced leads and no revenue, concludes the campaign failed, and cancels it. The campaign worked. The routing was fine. The plan sent the conversation somewhere else.

Thresholds and accelerators near a deadline. A rep sitting just under a threshold that unlocks a higher rate will chase whatever crosses it fastest. That is almost never a new inbound lead requiring weeks of work. And a rep who has already missed the period will park good leads until the next one starts, because a deal closed on the 28th is worth less to them than the same deal closed on the 3rd.

Both behaviours show up in marketing's dashboard as poor lead quality.

Quota timing versus nurture cycles

This is the one that costs the most and gets discussed the least.

Take a business with a six-month sales cycle and a monthly quota. Every month, a rep is measured on what closed in thirty days. A lead that will genuinely convert in month five is worth nothing to that rep this month, next month, or the month after. It is worth something once, in a future period, and only if it is still theirs by then.

So it gets a call, maybe two, and then it goes quiet. Marketing sees a lead that was not worked. Sales sees a lead that was not ready. Both are describing the same structural problem, which is that the measurement window is shorter than the buying process.

The fix is to make the quota period resemble the sales cycle. Quarterly measurement in a business with a 60 to 90 day cycle. Semi-annual where cycles run longer. If monthly targets are needed for cash flow visibility, measure activity and pipeline creation monthly and pay on closed revenue quarterly.

The second fix is to stop treating a paused lead as a dead one. If a rep works a lead properly and the buyer is not ready, that lead should go back into nurture with the relationship preserved, and the rep should keep credit when it closes later. Without that, every rep learns that long deals are somebody else's problem, and your nurture programme becomes a place leads go to disappear.

Paying SDRs for meetings booked

If you pay for meetings booked, you will get meetings booked. This is the most predictable incentive failure in B2B and companies keep running into it.

What arrives is exactly what was purchased: meetings with people who cannot buy, meetings with people who agreed to make the calls stop, meetings scheduled for a Friday afternoon that no-show. The SDR did the job as written. The job was written wrong.

Then the account executive complains, the SDR feels attacked, and someone runs a training session on qualification. Training does not beat a comp plan either.

Pay SDRs on qualified opportunities accepted by the account executive, with the acceptance criteria written down before the quarter starts. The SDR needs to know exactly what counts, and the AE needs to lose the ability to reject a meeting after the fact for reasons nobody agreed to in advance. Some companies add a smaller component tied to pipeline that reaches a later stage, which pulls the SDR's attention toward accounts that go somewhere.

Expect meeting volume to drop and expect that to be uncomfortable for a month. The number was measuring the wrong thing.

Territory and routing rules do the same damage

Compensation gets the attention, but the rules sitting next to it can undo a marketing programme just as effectively.

Round-robin routing is the common one. Leads are distributed evenly to be fair to reps, which means an inbound enquiry from an ideal-fit account might land with whoever is next in the rotation rather than whoever is best placed to win it. Marketing generated exactly the lead it was asked for and the outcome still looks like a marketing failure.

Ownership timers are the other. If a rep can hold a lead indefinitely with no activity, good leads go into a personal pipeline and sit there. A rule that returns an untouched lead to the pool after a set number of days is uncomfortable to introduce and it changes behaviour immediately, because a lead nobody worked is now visibly nobody's.

Neither of these is a pay decision, which is why they are easier to change than commission rates. Fix them first if the comp conversation is going to take a quarter.

What to change in the plan

Four changes, in the order I would make them.

  1. Match the quota period to the sales cycle. Nothing else on this list matters as much. A measurement window shorter than the buying process guarantees that long deals get abandoned.
  2. Narrow the rate gap on inbound. Keep a difference if you want one. Make it small enough that it does not decide how a rep spends Tuesday.
  3. Pay SDRs on accepted opportunities, not meetings. Write the acceptance criteria down first and hold both sides to it.
  4. Protect credit on nurtured leads. A rep who correctly puts a lead back into nurture should share in the outcome when it closes. Otherwise nobody ever does it.

None of these costs more in total compensation. They redirect the same money at different behaviour, which is what a comp plan is for.

To make the case to sales leadership, bring data instead of an argument. Pull inbound lead follow-up: how many were contacted, within what time, how many attempts, and the conversion rate of the ones that were genuinely worked. If well-worked inbound converts respectably and most leads received a single call, you are having a conversation about lost revenue rather than a complaint about effort. The handoff audit lays out how to pull that.

What marketing owes sales in return

The uncomfortable half.

If marketing is measured on lead volume, marketing will produce lead volume, and this whole essay applies in reverse. A team with a monthly MQL target and a shortfall on the 25th will loosen the definition, and every rep will notice. That is how reps learned to distrust inbound in the first place.

So marketing should be measured on qualified pipeline rather than leads. Fewer, better, with the definition agreed in advance and not adjusted when the number looks bad.

Marketing also owes context. A rep should open a lead record and see what the person read, what they downloaded, what they typed into the form, and what the company does. Handing over a name and an email address and then asking why follow-up was slow is not a fair trade.

And marketing owes honesty about which leads are early. A person who read one blog post is not the same as a person who requested pricing. Label them differently, route them differently, and stop sending both to a rep with the same urgency flag.

The takeaway

Sales and marketing alignment is a compensation problem. It shows up as a communication problem, which is why the quarterly meeting keeps failing to fix it.

Read the comp plan. Match the quota period to the sales cycle. Pay SDRs for opportunities instead of calendar events. Protect credit on leads that need time. Then measure marketing on qualified pipeline so the incentive runs the same direction on both sides.

People do what they are paid to do. Pay for the right thing and the meeting stops being necessary.