Enterprise buyers decide differently than the customers you have today.

Marketing stops working the market and starts working a list. The shift sounds small. It isn't, because it changes what Marketing is for. When you're selling to smaller customers, Marketing's job is largely to hand Sales enough leads. Once you're selling to enterprise, the job becomes making a short list of accounts easier to win.

In practice that means fewer campaigns and more depth. You learn who sits in the room on those deals, and you build content that helps those people make your case internally, on the days you're not there.

Almost everything about the pace and the shape of the deal. The decision runs through a group, so there's no one person you can convince and be done. Cycles get longer, procurement and security reviews appear, and a deal can stall for reasons nobody tells you about.

The part that catches teams out is the internal work. Your buyer has to sell you inside their own company, to people you'll never meet. Most of what decides the outcome happens in rooms you're not in.

They break the single-persona habit. Most Marketing is built for one job title, the one on the ICP slide. An enterprise deal has a security reviewer, someone in finance, an end user who'll have to live with the thing, and an executive sponsor who only cares about two of the twelve reasons you think you're good.

If your messaging only speaks to one of them, the others have no reason to move, and the deal drifts. A practical first step: map the committee on your last three won and lost deals. Who was actually in the room, and what did each of them need to believe? The gaps in that map are usually the gaps in your content.

Account-level ones. Lead counts still tell you something, but they can't answer the question that matters at this stage: which accounts are moving, and are they the accounts you chose?

A few that earn their place: how much of your target list shows real engagement, how many roles inside an account you're actually reaching (one contact at a large account isn't coverage), pipeline created inside the target list rather than pipeline overall, and win rate on the accounts you said mattered.

You don't need a new tool for this. A simple cold / warming / hot view of your target accounts, updated monthly, tells you more than most dashboards, because it shows Marketing moving accounts before Sales sees it.

There's a quick version of this test. Ask your Head of Marketing and your Head of Sales, separately, to write down what makes an account worth pursuing. If the two answers don't match, that's your finding, and it's a common one.

A few more signs, less comfortable to look at. Sales is building its own decks because Marketing's don't survive a committee. The pipeline looks full, but the enterprise deals in it don't convert. Nobody can say which target accounts got warmer this quarter.

If you want the structured version, the Marketing Readiness Diagnostic walks through twelve questions across the five capabilities on this page and gives you a personalized Executive Brief. It takes about three minutes.

Keep them if they're doing a job. Plenty of teams drop MQLs because it feels like the modern thing to do, then lose the one number their board recognized. The metric is fine. What breaks is leaving it as your headline number after you've moved upmarket.

An MQL says one person did something. An enterprise decision needs a group to agree. So a single MQL from a 5,000-person company barely tells you anything on its own, and a quarter of strong lead numbers can sit alongside no enterprise pipeline at all.

Keep MQLs as one input, and stop reporting them as the result. Budgets get cut on the metric that's easiest to see, not the impact that's real. If lead count is the only thing leadership sees, that's what you'll be judged on.

On the same accounts, to the same definition, with a standing conversation between them.

The definition is where most teams should start. One written description of what makes an account qualified, signed off by both leaders. It sounds administrative, and it settles more arguments than any process change.

After that it's mostly rhythm. Sales usually knows which accounts are becoming active long before Marketing sees it in a dashboard, and that information needs somewhere to go. Fifteen minutes inside an existing weekly Sales meeting is enough to start.

The handoff deserves attention too, because complex deals tend to fall apart there. Rarely because someone drops the ball. More often because nobody agreed who owns the account between “engaged” and “opportunity.”

Changing the Sales team and leaving Marketing exactly as it was.

It's an easy mistake to make, because it doesn't look like a mistake for a while. You hire enterprise AEs, maybe a Sales Engineer, you raise the number. Marketing keeps running the motion that worked: more content, more leads, more campaigns. The old motion still kind of works, so nobody stops to question it. Until it doesn't.

Teams rarely struggle here because people aren't working hard enough. They struggle because the business changed faster than the way Marketing works. The fix is rarely a bigger budget. It's usually deciding, out loud, that Marketing's job is now different, and then changing what it's measured on.