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Campaign Management6 min read·Not a case study — a common situation, and the shape of how we'd approach it

Fixing a Sales and Marketing Handoff That's Leaking Leads

Marketing generates leads and marks them qualified, but what happens next is inconsistent — some get followed up within the hour, others sit untouched for days, and a meaningful share never get contacted at all before they go cold. Neither team is clearly at fault: marketing doesn't have visibility into what happens after handoff, and sales doesn't have a clear, agreed definition of what counts as sales-ready or how fast a follow-up actually needs to happen once a lead lands in their queue. The result is leads that cost real money to generate quietly going cold, month after month, and both teams pointing at the other for a problem that's actually a missing process and a missing shared definition, not a people problem on either side. Fixing it rarely requires new tooling — it requires a written, mutually agreed definition of a sales-ready lead and a follow-up SLA both teams are actually held to, tracked somewhere both can see.

Does This Sound Familiar?

Marketing has no visibility into what happens to a lead after it's marked qualified and handed to sales.
There's no documented, agreed definition of what makes a lead sales-ready versus still in nurture.
Follow-up time on qualified leads varies from minutes to over a week, with nobody tracking the pattern.
Sales and marketing each have their own explanation for low conversion rates, and the two explanations don't agree.

How This Actually Works

5-stage approach

  1. 1

    Define

    Get sales and marketing to agree, in writing, on what actually qualifies a lead as sales-ready — not a generic industry definition, but one grounded in what's converted for this business historically.

  2. 2

    Set SLAs

    Agree specific, measurable service-level commitments on both sides — how fast marketing hands off a qualified lead, how fast sales follows up, and what happens if either side misses.

  3. 3

    Instrument

    Build the tracking that makes handoff and follow-up time visible to both teams, so the SLA is measured automatically rather than relying on anecdote when something goes wrong.

  4. 4

    Route

    Automate the handoff itself — qualified leads routed to the right rep immediately with the context marketing already has, removing the manual step where leads currently sit waiting.

  5. 5

    Review

    Put a regular joint review in place where both teams look at the same data together, so the SLA stays a living agreement rather than a document nobody revisits after the first month.

What Changes

Before
After
No agreed definition of sales-ready — marketing and sales working from different assumptions.
A single written definition both teams built and agreed to together.
Follow-up time on qualified leads ranging from minutes to over a week, untracked.
A measurable SLA on follow-up time, visible to both teams in real time.
Leads sitting in a shared queue with no automatic routing.
Qualified leads routed automatically to the right rep with context attached.
Sales and marketing each blaming the other with no shared data to resolve it.
A joint regular review using the same dashboard, so disagreements get resolved with data.

Part Of

Campaign Management

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Related Reading

Sales · 10 min readSales and Marketing SLAs: Why Most Fail and What Actually Closes the Gap
Sales · 10 min readThe Death of the Cold Call Script: What Conversation Intelligence Reveals About What Buyers Actually Respond To

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