Your Best Leads Die in the Three Inches Between Marketing and Sales.
Marketing scores the lead, hands it to the CRM, and nothing happens — no routing, no owner, no clock. The fix isn't another alignment meeting; it's engineering the handoff so routing, flagging, an SLA, and a fallback all fire without anyone deciding to act.
Transcript
The single biggest loss that I see with leads — lead leakage — is in the handoff between marketing and sales. And I've seen this again and again: different clients, different variations of this.
Marketing scores the lead and then passes it off to the CRM, and nothing happens. It's not routed, no one takes ownership, it sits in a queue, nobody sees it. Just sits there.
So marketing and sales will get together and have an alignment session. I'll talk about it in another meeting, I'll have many meetings — but the real fix here is to engineer the system so it operates automatically and proactively. When the lead comes in, it's automatically routed, it's automatically flagged, an SLA automatically starts, and a fallback plan is already in place if nobody acts on this lead in a certain period of time that's agreed upon.
Your best leads aren't lost because marketing isn't generating them. They're lost in the three inches between marketing and sales execution.
