Whose responsibility is the sales pipeline anyway?

When the sales pipeline dries up, the blame more times than not is placed solely on marketing and the market awareness and demand generation campaigns employed — or lack thereof. While marketing may have some fault in a lack of steady or valuable leads, the truth is that this shortcoming is both the fault of marketing and the sales teams.
In fact, through our experience across a broad base of clients, we have found marketing to hold the power to generate just 15% to 20% of the sales pipeline through its efforts. That means sales is directly responsible for more than 80% on average of pipeline development efforts.
The trick here is for marketing to do its job well, while sales follows up on the marketing department’s work in valuable ways. I am talking about sales and marketing alignment, a long-time issue for many companies.
The Pipeline-Generating Ingredients to Put into Play
Consider sales