Global survey of marketing and sales managers finds very few satisfied with quality and quality of leads generated by marketing departments.

You may want to sit down for this: sales managers are not satisfied with the number of leads they get from marketing teams *cough*. But if that news didn’t send your coffee spraying over your computer monitor, the full results of a recent survey of 6,400 senior sales and marketing staff could make it taste especially bitter today.

The global survey by sales training firm Huthwaite Asia Pacific looked at the relationship between sales and marketing departments, and found among sales managers less than 10 percent were happy with the number of leads generated by their marketing teams, with more than a quarter saying they receive nowhere near enough. Sales targets are not being met, and the survey’s authors conclude that marketing departments are to blame.

(Here at Marketing we’re not entirely without sympathy, since we assume the main cause of the problem is the plethora of activities in which to partake during the working week: reading Marketing magazine, commenting on marketingmag.com.au, tweeting @marketingmag…).

Those polled comprised sales managers, marketing executives and general managers in Australia, New Zealand, the US, Canada, and Asia, across a range of industries, and rather than the results being indicative of the typical back and forth between sales and marketing departments, managers of the latter were in agreement. The majority of marketing managers indicated they could do better, naturally, but only nine percent said they were happy with the number of leads their departments were generating. And the picture is just as disheartening for industries where quality of leads outweighs quantity. There was strong dissatisfaction among respondents with the quality of leads being produced. Of those surveyed, only seven percent of sales executives said the leads they received were of high quality.

While it may not be surprising that senior sales and marketing staff aren’t happy with the results their teams achieve, the findings of this survey – let alone the fact that we refer to them as separate, at-odds groups – seem to suggest that there are wide improvements that could be made to the way the two departments interact.