Over the past decade, the ownership of the business development funnel in financial services has been fundamentally changing. What was once a sales-dominated process is now an increasingly marketing-led one, and the shift is far from over.
2015: 75% Sales, 25% Marketing
A decade ago, sales teams owned the lion’s share of the funnel. Marketing focused primarily on the front end: building brand awareness, producing collateral, and creating general market presence. Once a lead entered the funnel, sales took over entirely. Pipeline management, nurturing, and closing were almost exclusively sales’ responsibility.
Marketing’s job was brand, thought leadership, events, and PR. Sales handled prospecting, relationship-building, opportunity creation, and closing. The rough split was 75% sales, 25% marketing.
The practical implication: marketing was a cost center with a support role, while sales headcount drove revenue. Sales leaders held budget authority, and firms built their org structures accordingly.
2022: The 50/50 Inflection Point
Fast-forward to a few years ago when the picture changed considerably. Marketing became responsible not only for brand but for generating qualified opportunities. Digital campaigns, lead scoring, content marketing, and marketing automation meant firms could now nurture prospects to the opportunity stage before handing them to sales.
Marketing’s role expanded into demand generation and MQL-to-SQL conversion. Sales shifted toward opportunity management and closing.
The split reached rough parity, but most firms didn’t adjust their headcount or budget to match. Sales teams remained better funded, even as marketing took on a significantly larger share of the work, a misalignment that created real organizational strain. Marketing teams doing 50% of the funnel work were often still resourced like they were doing 20%.
2028: 75% Marketing, 25% Sales
Looking ahead, the trend line points to another major inflection, particularly in technology and service firms. As more touchpoints become digital and buyers conduct more of their research online or via AI before ever speaking to a salesperson, marketing will increasingly take prospects almost all the way to the buy.
This doesn’t mean salespeople will become obsolete, but their role will become more specialized. Marketing owns full-funnel engagement: awareness, consideration, decision-making, and near-purchase. Sales closes high-intent leads, handles complex negotiations, and manages strategic account relationships.
The projected split: 75% marketing, 25% sales.
What This Means for Financial Services Firms
If you’re still operating like it’s 2015, follow these four steps:
- First, audit your funnel ownership. Map out who is actually responsible for each stage, from initial awareness through close. Many firms discover a significant gap between their formal org chart and the reality of who does the work.
- Second, align budgets to that reality. Firms that still fund their teams based on a 75/25 split in favor of sales are structurally misaligned with how buyers now make decisions. Resources should follow work.
- Third, plan for the shift now rather than react to it later. Even if your firm hasn’t fully moved toward marketing-led funnel ownership, the buyer behavior driving this change is already here. The firms building scalable digital touchpoints today will be better positioned when the shift accelerates.
- Fourth, rethink the sales role itself. The best salespeople in a marketing-led model are relationship specialists and deal closers, not prospectors. Hiring, training, and compensation structures should reflect that.
We’re not here to diminish great salespeople, but we do want to call attention to the reality that the buyer journey has evolved substantially. The roles and budget allocation decisions of 2015 no longer map to 2026 market conditions. The firms that adapt earliest will carry a durable competitive advantage.