Most companies don't have a leads problem. They have a listening problem.
If you've ever felt like your sales and marketing teams are pulling in opposite directions, Episode 48 of the Revenue Rewired Podcast covers exactly why that gap exists and how to fix it. You'll learn how to capture the customer intelligence buried in your sales conversations, use simple tools to get it to your marketing team, and stop losing revenue to a disconnect that's way more common than you think.
Grab the episode wherever you listen: 🎧 Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube
Why Your Best Marketing Intelligence Lives in Sales Calls
I've been in sales. I've been in marketing. And I can tell you firsthand that the most valuable customer insight your company has isn't sitting in a dashboard or a CRM report.
It's in the conversations your salespeople are having every single day.
The objections. The questions no one's Googling. The real reason a deal went cold.
That's the gold. And in most organizations, it never makes it back to marketing.
In Episode 48 of the Revenue Rewired Podcast, my co-host Sarah Shepard and I break down why this intelligence gap keeps happening and what to actually do about it.
What's Really Causing the Sales and Marketing Disconnect?
Here's what I've learned from wearing both hats: it's not that salespeople are being difficult. It's that they're human.
Most salespeople are motivated by their compensation. And if they can't connect the dots between sharing insights with marketing and making more money, they're going to spend that five minutes on their next follow-up instead. I've been guilty of this myself.
As I said on the episode, "If you're going to ask a salesperson to have to do more work above and beyond all of their following up and prospect research and proposals and all the things, unless you show them exactly how it's going to be a benefit to them and how they're going to make more money, they're not going to want to do it."
That's not a character flaw. That's just reality. And once marketing accepts that, alignment gets a lot more achievable.
The CRM Swamp: Why Pipeline Data Stays Buried
If your CRM looks like a wasteland of half-filled fields and outdated notes, you're in good company.
Sarah and I wrote about this in our book Revenue Rewired. We called it the "CRM swamp," and it gets more head nods than almost anything else in the book. You don't even need to explain it. Just say the word swamp and people immediately know exactly what you're talking about.
The problem isn't just that data isn't being entered. It's that even when it is, marketing doesn't have the context to use it. A contact record doesn't tell you why a deal almost closed. It doesn't capture the question a prospect kept circling back to or the hesitation that surfaced right before a no.
That context is the marketing intelligence. And it disappears with every call that goes unrecorded.
3 Ways to Bridge the Gap Without Adding to Your Sales Team's Plate
Here's the part I really want you to take away from this episode: fixing this doesn't require your sales team to fill out more forms. In fact, the best solutions barely require anything from them at all.
1. Record and Transcribe Every Sales Call
Tools like Fathom, Otter, and Zoom AI automatically transcribe meetings and generate summaries. With a solid company-specific GPT prompt, marketing can pull out pain points, objections, and recurring questions in minutes.
This is probably my favorite idea on this list, and honestly, the one I think should be step one. Some of these tools are even free.
Here's an unexpected bonus we found with one of our clients: when we listened back to a batch of recorded calls, we realized every single salesperson was describing the company differently. "Everyone was so inconsistent," I said on the episode, "even from how they explain what the company does, the kind of questions they ask, how they're doing follow-ups." That's not just a marketing problem. That's a training problem nobody knew existed.
2. Install Call Recording for Inbound Calls
Not every lead comes through a form fill. For companies where prospects pick up the phone and call in, tools like CallRail capture those conversations automatically. No action needed from the sales team.
Marketing gets the data. Sales keep their rhythm. And you stop losing the intel that's walking in the front door.
3. Make Marketing Work for Sales First
This one is a mindset shift more than a tool recommendation.
When we were working with a client whose sales team just wouldn't engage, no matter what we tried, we stopped asking for information and flipped the question. We asked: "What can marketing do to make you close more business?"
That conversation changed everything. Once sales felt heard and started seeing marketing actually act on what they shared, the relationship shifted. As I put it on the episode, "If marketing came to me and said, look, what can I do to make you close more business, and if we had a really meaningful, intentional conversation around that, I would really appreciate that."
Then you close the loop. You come back and say, "That insight you gave us delivered 14 new leads. Three are going to close at $1.4 million in revenue. And you're going to make 10% of that in commission." That's when it clicks.
The goal is not a one-way street from sales to marketing. Sarah describes it perfectly as a HubSpot-style infinity loop. Sales feeds marketing, marketing tests and refines it, marketing brings results back to sales, and sales keeps feeding it forward.
Don't Forget Your Website and AI Search
There's one more source of intelligence that a lot of marketing teams are sleeping on: their own website data.
FAQ pages are now being indexed by LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini as trusted sources of structured information. If your FAQ hasn't been updated based on what your sales team is actually hearing in the field, you're feeding AI platforms an outdated story about your company.
Heat mapping and page-level analytics can tell you whether your content is connecting. And if it's not, that's a conversation to bring back to sales to sharpen the message.
FAQ: Sales and Marketing Alignment
Q: Why don't salespeople share insights with marketing?
A: Because they don't see a direct line to their commission. Show them how their input led to better leads and more closed deals, and that changes fast.
Q: What's the easiest way to capture sales intelligence without extra work?
A: Start with call recording. Tools like Fathom or CallRail automatically capture conversations so marketing gets what they need without asking sales to do anything differently.
Q: What is the CRM swamp?
A: It's what happens when CRM adoption breaks down. Half-filled records, stale data, no consistent process. Marketing can't trust the data and sales resents entering it. We wrote about it in Revenue Rewired because it's that universal.
Q: How do you actually get sales and marketing to collaborate?
A: Lead with what marketing can do for sales, not what it needs from them. Remove friction first. Build trust. Then the information starts flowing both ways.
Q: How does sales intelligence affect performance in AI search tools?
A: Real customer language, the actual questions and objections your prospects use, maps directly to what people type into ChatGPT or Perplexity. Content built from sales conversations performs better in AI-driven search than content built from keyword tools alone.
Most companies already have the intelligence they need to improve their marketing. It's sitting in their sales calls, their inbound conversations, and their CRM. The challenge isn't finding new data. It's building a culture and a system where that information actually moves between the people who need it.
That's what Sarah and I dig into in this episode. And I think if you listen to it with your sales and marketing teams in mind, you'll walk away with at least one thing you can try this week without a big lift.
It doesn't have to be a massive overhaul. Start with one recorded call. Have one honest conversation with your sales lead. See what comes out of it. In my experience, that first small step tends to open up a lot more than people expect.
If you're ready to stop leaving customer intelligence on the table, connect with our team. We'd love to help you find it.
