Is paranormal activity required to bound marketing and sales?

We all have heard and know about the gap between marketing and sales.
Marketing has good intentions by creating awareness and generate leads, whereas sales is blamed not to follow-up on the leads provided.

There is clearly a misunderstanding between either departments or the people of those departments.
- Marketing is paid to create brand awareness and leads.
- Sales are paid to bring in revenue or close deals.

In many cases the leads generated by marketing are not considered serious or valuable enough as sales has had already too many worthless leads from marketing. A waste of time.
Salesmen prefer to get inbound calls or find their own leads.
The gap seems to be ever becoming greater and seems impossible to solve as B2B businesses have been failing on this since almost ever.

Paranormal activity needed ?

It seems that some kind of paranormal activity is needed to bound marketing and sales together as they don’t seem to match up.

The activities of both departments need to be synchronized and adjusted to each other as the current method of working is spilling money, efforts and wasting time.

The real life feedback
For a start marketing people should start their job in sales first in order to learn about the real business and real customers. If someone just stays within the sophisticated well pampered boundaries of Marketing, he will never get confronted with real life: the real struggle of salesmen facing the customers or chasing leads.

The recurrent feedback
Next salesmen should be able to give feedback on the leads generated by marketing and the effectiveness of those generated leads.
How many actually become customer and why and where they exit the funnel?

The interest level feedback
Sales should not only give feedback on the lost leads or customers, but as they are feeling the pulse of the market every day, they should give feedback on changes or trends the encounter or see in the market with their customers and leads.

The feedback on marketing efforts
Marketing can claim great results with their statistics about their successful marketing campaigns; however these are company/market wide statistical data.
Sales should have the opportunity to give feedback on how leads and customers respond to these marketing campaigns. How did they react upon marketing efforts? What was the perception?
As long as Marketing keeps on believing their statistics and analytics, Marketing can retain its’ self-fulfilling prophecy.

Marketing should serve Sales like a customer

In the end Marketing should server its’ customer that is Sales (and the Salesmen) and not the CEO or Board of Directors as they are far away from real life.

No paranormal activity needed between Sales and Marketing, just sales providing the right feedback and Marketing listening and learning from Sales.

How many times have you been able to give feedback to your marketing ?
Was it effective ?