What types of insights are common drivers in impacting changes within Sales & Marketing?

Some of the insights I've seen that led to direct action items are misalignment on lead follow-up and poor multi-threading practices. 

If a lead comes in after seeing an ad about purple bananas, searches on Google for "purple bananas" and clicks on our ad that claims we have the best purple bananas in the biz, and the person requests a demo to see our purple bananas in action, we need to ensure our first-touch sales follow-up reinforces that intent and share how excited we are to schedule a demo call about our purple bananas. Sometimes the most obvious insights are here, when we follow up for demos about yellow watermelons instead. We see often times this breakpoint is where we see leads go unresponsive, or it takes too many touches to bring that marketing scent back into the convo to progress the sales cycle. 

Another insight that impacts changes between sales & marketing, is when we see Salesforce Stage 1 meetings get rescheduled or lots of no-shows. If we see this a simple action item is to inject automated reminder emails and/or inject a call to action or a teaser video in the calendar invite itself. When we see meetings canceled, rescheduled, or a flat out no-show, is when the lead was not properly educated on the exciting opportunity that awaits them on that call. By including a CTA in the calendar invite such as "please let us know what your 3 biggest KPIs are and I'd love to share at least 2 ways we can help you with those KPIs on our call tomorrow!" or a teaser video that will reinforce the value prop of your business to the lead as they inspect the calendar invite that they received last week and think about whether or not they should join. 

Think about how many times you've woken up to check your calendar and not remember what the meeting is about -- now imagine seeing a teaser video of that neat tool you were researching to help you hit your quarterly goals... that should eliminate reschedules and no-shows immediately. 

The types of insights that can be gleaned will largely be business-specific; however, the partnership between the departments is critical. For the purpose of this question, I'll focus on the data analysis aspect.

Data can be very telling. It can help guide optimizations such as budget reallocation, lead quality, conversion rates, segmentation, and ultimately ROI. In partnership, the data can help tease out what is working and what is not working. For example, what does lead quality look like? How is the ABM campaign performing over X amount of time?

I'm a believer that marketing is there to support the sales team. This partnership is critical for the success of the organization.