Every founder I talk to at seed to Series A describes the same scene.
Marketing and sales are in a standup. The numbers are bad. Marketing says they delivered the MQLs. Sales says the MQLs were garbage. Marketing shows a dashboard. Sales shows another dashboard. Both leave the meeting certain that the other side is the problem.
The founder sits in the middle and tries to mediate. Maybe they bring in a consultant to run a workshop on “marketing-sales alignment.” Maybe they pay for a shared dashboard in HubSpot or Salesforce. Maybe they change the MQL definition. Maybe they change it back.
None of it works. Because none of it addresses what’s actually broken.
The war between your marketing team and your sales team isn’t cultural. It isn’t a personality issue. It isn’t even a process issue.
It’s a compensation issue. And you designed it.
Your sales team’s comp plan is tied to revenue. If revenue goes up, salespeople make more money. If revenue goes down, they make less. Simple. Their scoreboard is the company’s scoreboard.
Your marketer’s comp plan is base salary plus - maybe - a bonus tied to MQLs, SQLs, lead-to-MQL conversion rate, MQL-to-SQL conversion rate, or some combination of those. Their scoreboard is not the company’s scoreboard. Their scoreboard is a proxy that lives upstream of revenue.
You now have two departments optimizing for two different things. They will behave exactly as the incentive design predicts.
Marketing will optimize for MQL count, because that’s what pays them. They will lower the bar to qualify a lead. They will lean on behavioral signals - page views, ebook downloads, webinar attendance - that inflate the number without improving the quality. They’ll run campaigns that look good on a dashboard and feel bad in a sales call.
Sales will push back. They will disqualify leads faster. They’ll change their criteria for what counts as “engaged.” They’ll build their own pipeline outside of marketing because they can’t trust what marketing delivers.
And both sides will be correct, inside their own system.
This is the core insight founders miss: the MQL wars aren’t a failure of judgment. They’re a feature of the comp plan.
MQLs feel safe because they sound revenue-adjacent. They have “qualified” in the name. They sit between leads and closed deals on a funnel diagram. When your marketer reports “we delivered 240 MQLs this quarter,” it sounds like work product.
It isn’t.
An MQL is a number your marketer gets to define and measure themselves. That’s the entire problem. Any metric where the person being measured also controls the measurement will get gamed. Not because marketers are dishonest. Because that’s how incentives work.
At a company with 40 MQLs per month and an MQL-to-SQL rate of 20%, your marketer can hit a higher SQL target by loosening the MQL definition. They can hit the same SQL target by tightening it and running better campaigns. Guess which one takes less work.
Now add the sales side. Sales is measured on closed revenue. If marketing ships 240 MQLs and 48 convert to SQLs, sales has no incentive to accept those SQLs at face value. They’ll disqualify aggressively at the SQL stage to protect their pipeline conversion rate. Marketing will push back. The definition of “qualified” becomes a negotiation, not a standard.
Meanwhile, the revenue target - the only number that actually matters to the company - is something neither side fully owns.
You’re paying two departments to argue about the shape of a funnel while the revenue line flattens.
When I joined the B2B SaaS company where I lead marketing, I was mid-level. I was doing work that normally gets split between three people. That wasn’t accidental. It was the structure the company needed and the structure I needed to grow in.
The other thing that mattered, more than I understood at the time, was how I was paid. My compensation wasn’t tied to MQLs. It was tied to pipeline that actually closed.
This changed what I optimized for.
When I was thinking about whether to run a webinar, the question wasn’t “will this generate attendees.” The question was “will the attendees who show up be the kind of prospects that sales can actually close.” When I was thinking about content, the question wasn’t “will this rank.” The question was “will this pull in buyers who fit our ICP tightly enough that a discovery call converts.”
I asked sales what they were hearing on calls. Not out of goodwill. Because their answer changed what I worked on that week. If sales said “prospects keep asking whether we handle retail chains,” I wrote a case study about a retail chain. If sales said “three prospects in the last two weeks wanted to know about integration with SAP,” I built a page about SAP integration.
This isn’t remarkable. It’s what any marketer would do if their comp was tied to revenue. The reason it stood out is that most marketers aren’t paid that way. They’re paid to hit MQL numbers, so they optimize for MQL numbers, and the gap between what marketing produces and what sales can use keeps widening.
The system I worked inside wasn’t perfect. But the compensation structure did one thing that no workshop or shared dashboard can replicate: it made the sales team’s results my results. We weren’t aligned because someone facilitated a meeting about alignment. We were aligned because the math made us aligned.
If you want marketing and sales to stop fighting, you don’t need a new process. You need a new comp plan for your marketer.
Here’s the structure I recommend for B2B SaaS founders at seed to Series A:
Marketing gets a quarterly bonus tied to the company’s quarterly revenue target.
Not to MQLs. Not to SQLs. Not to pipeline sourced by marketing versus pipeline sourced by sales. To the revenue number the CEO presents to the board.
The thresholds I use as a starting point:
Below 80% of target - no bonus. 80% to 89% of target - bonus equals 0.35% of quarterly revenue. 90% to 99% of target - bonus equals 0.65% of quarterly revenue. 100% of target or above - bonus equals 1.2% of quarterly revenue.
Concrete example. Your Series A company has an annual revenue target of €3M, so a quarterly target of €750k. In a given quarter:
Adjust the percentages to fit your economics. A company with tighter margins can halve them. A company with higher-margin expansion revenue can push them up. The exact numbers matter less than the structure. The structure is what does the work.
Three things about the structure matter more than the percentages.
It’s tied to revenue, not MQLs.
This is the core move. Marketing stops being a lead factory and starts being a revenue function. Their job becomes “help the company hit its target,” not “produce numbers that look like they will eventually help the company hit its target.” MQL definitions stop being a battlefield because nobody’s bonus depends on winning the MQL definition argument.
It’s quarterly, not annual.
Quarterly feedback loops match how B2B SaaS actually operates. Marketing campaigns compound over weeks and months, not years. If the bonus is annual, your marketer won’t know whether what they’re doing in Q1 is working until Q3. That’s too slow. Quarterly gives them four shots at learning what moves the number and adjusting.
The jump at 100% is steep.
From 99% to 100% the bonus roughly doubles. That’s deliberate. Hitting target matters to the board, to fundraising, to the entire company. The comp plan should reflect that. A marketer sitting at 95% in week ten of a quarter should feel urgency to push the last 5% across the line - because the difference between finishing at 99% and finishing at 100% is the difference between €6,000 and €9,000 in their pocket.
When I describe this comp plan to founders, I hear the same three objections.
Objection one: “The marketer doesn’t control whether sales closes.”
Correct. That’s the point.
Your marketer doesn’t close deals. But your marketer decides what content gets produced, which prospects see which messages, how the pipeline is shaped at the top, which case studies get published, which objections get addressed before the sales call. Every one of those decisions affects close rates.
If your marketer isn’t thinking about close rates, it’s because their comp plan tells them close rates aren’t their problem. Change the comp plan and they’ll start thinking about close rates within a quarter.
The fear that “it’s unfair to pay marketing based on things they don’t control” misses what compensation is for. Compensation isn’t a reward for effort. It’s a signal about what matters. If you want your marketer to care about revenue, you have to pay them on revenue.
Objection two: “We won’t know what marketing actually contributed versus sales.”
You won’t. And that’s fine.
Attribution at your stage is a trap. The data is too thin for statistical significance. The sales cycles are too long for clean causal chains. Every attribution model - first-touch, last-touch, linear, W-shaped - is a negotiation dressed up as an equation. Trying to solve the attribution problem will put you exactly where the MQL wars put you: two departments arguing about the measurement instead of hitting the number.
Skip attribution. Tie marketing’s bonus to company revenue and let them figure out what moves the needle. If they’re wrong about what works, you’ll see it in the next quarter’s revenue. That’s a cleaner feedback loop than any attribution model will give you.
Objection three: “Marketing will push garbage leads to sales just to hit the number.”
This objection usually comes from founders who’ve worked with marketers paid on lead count, and they’re generalizing from that behavior. The generalization doesn’t hold.
If marketing’s bonus is tied to revenue, pushing garbage leads to sales hurts their bonus. Garbage leads don’t convert. Conversion is what feeds revenue. Revenue is what pays the bonus. The incentive loop closes cleanly - marketing wants to send sales leads that will actually close, because those are the leads that earn them money.
The failure mode to watch isn’t “marketing pushes garbage.” It’s “marketing gets quiet.” If your marketer’s bonus is tied to revenue and revenue isn’t moving, they may back away from activity that doesn’t visibly tie to pipeline - including brand, content, and top-of-funnel work that compounds over time. That’s a real risk, and it’s why the comp plan isn’t a replacement for management. But it’s a much easier problem to manage than the MQL wars.
Three situations where this comp plan needs adjustment:
Product-led growth. If your growth model is self-serve signups and expansion revenue within existing accounts, the connection between marketing decisions and closed revenue is less direct. You can still tie marketing comp to revenue, but you’ll want to factor in product-qualified leads, activation rates, or expansion metrics rather than closed new business.
Very long sales cycles. If your average sales cycle is 12+ months, quarterly targets won’t capture what marketing did this quarter. You’ll either need longer bonus windows or a hybrid structure that rewards leading indicators of pipeline quality alongside closed revenue.
Multi-product companies at later stages. Once you have multiple product lines with different buyers and different marketers, tying everyone to a single company revenue number blurs accountability. At that stage you need product-line-level comp structures. But you’re probably not at that stage yet - and if you are, you’re not reading this article.
For the typical seed to Series A B2B SaaS with one product, sales-led motion, and a single marketer or small marketing team: the structure works.
The MQL wars aren’t the real problem. They’re a symptom.
The real problem is that you have two groups of smart people being paid to optimize for different things inside the same company. You can paper over that with workshops, shared dashboards, and new process. None of it will hold, because the compensation plan will keep pulling them apart.
Change the comp plan and you don’t have to manage the relationship between marketing and sales anymore. The relationship manages itself. Marketing asks sales what’s happening on calls. Sales asks marketing to build assets for specific objections. The argument about what counts as qualified disappears because the only qualification that matters is whether the deal closed.
This is the cheapest thing you can change in your company this year. It costs nothing to implement. It doesn’t require a consultant. It doesn’t require new software. It requires one conversation with your marketer, one change to their comp plan, and one quarter of patience while the behavior shifts.
I’ve never seen a founder implement this structure and regret it. I’ve seen many founders continue paying their marketer on MQLs and spend the next two years wondering why marketing and sales can’t get along.
The MQL isn’t the enemy. The comp plan is.
If you want to think through your situation, I run a free 45-minute diagnostic call for founders who fit the profile. We’ll look at how your marketing and sales are structured today, identify the two or three things worth fixing first, and talk about what the build-out actually looks like. No pitch, no deck. You leave with useful direction either way.
Daniel Tupczyński is the founder of MOAT Marketing, a boutique consultancy helping B2B SaaS founders at seed to Series A build in-house ABM capability. He also leads marketing at a B2B SaaS company.
