Aligning Marketing and Sales: Where Leads Get Lost Before the First Call

Why do marketing and sales so often work past each other?

Every month you spend money on ads, trade shows or content. The report shows rising visitor numbers and full forms. Yet sales says the inquiries are useless, and incoming orders barely move. Companies with three employees know this picture just as well as companies with three hundred.

In small businesses, marketing and sales are often the same person. In larger ones they are two teams, or one team and an agency. The pattern is similar in every case: one side counts visitors and forms, the other complains about inquiries that go nowhere.

Both are right as long as nobody has defined what is being handed over. Marketing delivered what it can measure. Sales worked on what seemed worthwhile. In between lies a handoff that belongs to no one. That is exactly where you lose inquiries you have already paid for. Put simply, the question is: how do you align marketing and sales so that paid-for inquiries become orders? To answer it, we first look at marketing as a supplier to sales and find the points where leads get lost. After that we introduce the handoff contract, clarify response times and feedback, and finally calculate the cost per order by channel.

An inquiry that nobody calls back is the most expensive advertising you can buy.

Marketing as a supplier: what does it actually deliver to sales?

The most useful idea for this topic comes from manufacturing. A supplier is judged by whether its parts fit at the customer. How many parts it produced matters only after that. Applied here: marketing delivers conversations with suitable prospects to sales. Everything before that is a means to an end.

This changes what you talk about in the monthly meeting. Reach, clicks and forms remain useful interim values because they show early when something is broken. They do not decide whether the budget paid off.

Where do leads get lost between the form and the conversation?

A lead is a prospect who has left you contact details and a reason for getting in touch. Between that moment and the first conversation there are more stations than most companies have written down. Something regularly gets lost at four of them.

• The shared inbox. The inquiry lands in a mailbox that everyone reads, so nobody feels responsible for it.
• The late reply. In the meantime the prospect has written to two competitors and already spoken to them on the phone.
• The single attempt. One call, nobody picks up, the inquiry counts as handled.
• The missing pre-check. Sales spends time on inquiries that never fit the offer and has none left for the good ones.

A worked example with freely chosen numbers shows how this adds up. Of 120 inquiries in a quarter, 84 are reached at all. These turn into 48 conversations, 30 proposals and 9 orders.

In the example, 72 of 120 inquiries disappear before anyone has held a conversation. That is not an advertising problem, and it is not a problem of sales technique either. It is a process problem, and processes can be improved without additional budget. Put your own numbers into the same five stages and you will see which stage to tackle first.

The handoff contract: three agreements between marketing and sales

I call the remedy the handoff contract. It is a single page on which marketing and sales record three things. It also applies when both roles sit in one person or when an agency is involved. Large corporations call this a service level agreement, meaning an agreement on promised service levels. For a business of your size, one page is enough.

1. What is a good inquiry?

   Two or three criteria are enough, for example industry, company size and a concrete reason. Sales sets the criteria, because sales knows which conversations turn into orders.

2. Who gets it?

   A named person with a named deputy. A shared inbox is not a responsibility.

3. How fast do you respond?

   A fixed deadline the team can keep in everyday work, and a fixed number of contact attempts before an inquiry counts as unreachable.

What usable criteria look like

Good criteria can be answered with yes or no and are ideally already part of the form. The following table shows an example for a service provider selling to business customers.

Inquiries that do not meet the criteria still get an answer. A friendly decline or a pointer to a suitable alternative takes two minutes and protects your reputation. A prepared text is worth having for these cases.

How fast does sales need to respond to an inquiry?

Someone who submits a form has time and a problem on their mind at that very moment. An hour later they are in the next meeting, and by the next day they may already have spoken to someone else. Response time is therefore the lever that costs the least and that you can change the fastest.

A deadline is only worth something if it is kept. An honest rule such as “on the same business day, by the next morning at the latest” is worth more than a five-minute promise that breaks every other day. Also define how often and by which channel you follow up.

Feedback closes the loop: what sales has to report back to marketing

After the first conversation, sales knows whether an inquiry is any good. That information belongs back in marketing. If it is missing, money keeps flowing into channels that only fill forms.

You do not need an elaborate system for this. Two fields per inquiry are enough: the source and the outcome. The source is set when the inquiry arrives and is never overwritten afterwards. Sales maintains the outcome, choosing from a short, fixed list.

What matters is a fixed appointment at which both sides look at this list together. Thirty minutes a month are enough. The agenda always stays the same: which source produced conversations, which produced orders, and what do we change before next time?

Measurable from click to close: what does an order cost per channel?

If every inquiry keeps its source until it has become an order or dropped out, you can say for each channel what an order cost. Only this number makes channels comparable. Cost per inquiry, by contrast, is easily misleading, as the following worked example shows.

In the example, social media ads look best as long as you only look as far as the form: 50 euros per inquiry. Calculated through to the order, they are the most expensive channel. Your own numbers may turn out exactly the other way around. The example only shows why you have to calculate to the end.

Two caveats belong here. With small numbers, chance plays a part, so you should wait at least one quarter before cutting a channel. And many customers have several touchpoints, for instance a trade show first and a search later. To begin with, it is enough to record the source of the first inquiry and to ask in the conversation how the customer found you.

The next step

To get started you need neither new software nor a project. One hour with the people involved and a spreadsheet are enough. If you alone are responsible for marketing and sales, you simply write the handoff contract with yourself.

• Pull the last 20 inquiries and note for each: source, time to first response, outcome.
• Agree with sales on two or three criteria for a good inquiry.
• Name one person and one deputy for incoming inquiries.
• Write down the response deadline and the number of contact attempts.
• Create the fields “source” and “outcome” wherever inquiries are recorded today.
• Schedule a monthly 30-minute appointment for the joint review.

After one quarter you will have, for the first time, a number that belongs to marketing and sales together: cost per order by channel. From then on you argue about decisions and no longer about blame.

Marketing and sales, then, work together rather than past each other when the handoff belongs to someone. The handoff contract defines what a good inquiry is, who gets it, and how quickly to respond, and feedback from sales closes the loop. Only when every inquiry keeps its source through to the close does it become clear that the cheapest channel per inquiry is often the most expensive per order.