Sales and marketing automation for the handoff both teams believe they already own.
Marketing reports that the lead was passed. Sales reports that it was not qualified. Both records are accurate, the lead is still cold, and that is a definitions problem before it is a technology one.
Qualified
- Score above the threshold
- Form completed
- Not on the suppression list
- A budget somebody named
- A date it has to happen by
- Someone who can decide
Six tests, one word, and no row where the two lists were ever reconciled.
Shape of a definition, illustrative. No rule or threshold on this page is read off this drawing.
Three things that happen to a lead before anyone speaks to it.
A form submission is not a conversation. Between them sits a queue of automated steps that each look harmless, and a lead can be lost at any of them.
It arrives as a stranger you have already met
Most forms create a record before they look for one, so the same person filling in a second form, from a work address instead of a personal one, lands as a new lead carrying none of the history that would have told anyone what to say to them. The same rules make the opposite mistake in the other direction: two different people writing from one shared inbox are one person to a rule that matches on the email address.
It is assigned to an owner who never accepted it
Assignment and acceptance are two different events, and most routing rules only do the first. A territory or a rota puts a name on the record, and nothing in that step asks the person whether they agree the lead is theirs. The rota is quietly stateful as well: reassigning one lead by hand moves who receives the next ten, and a rep who sources their own lead becomes its owner and is skipped when the next one is shared out.
Two teams report it differently and neither report is wrong
Marketing counts it as delivered, because their system holds the moment it was passed. Sales counts it as rejected, because theirs holds the reason it was returned. Both are reading their own records correctly, which is why the argument recurs every month and the lead is never called.
What the plumbing has to do.
This is the ordinary content of the work, most of it is well understood, and none of it settles the disagreement in the section after this one. That order is deliberate.
One record per person, and one per company
Matching and deduplication run at the point a record is created rather than as a quarterly clean-up, so a second form fill updates a history instead of starting one. It matters that this runs early rather than as a gate: deduplication that blocks somebody from working a lead gets switched off within a fortnight, and then nothing is deduplicated at all.
Consent captured with the evidence for it
What was agreed, the version of the wording that was on the screen at the time, when, and through which form. Held on the record rather than in the form tool, because the obligation is to be able to show all of that afterwards, and a field reading consented is not a record of anything.
One suppression list that every system reads
An objection or a withdrawal is recorded once and screened before every send by everything that could send anything, including the sequence somebody set up last year without telling anyone. Suppression is a record that has to be kept rather than a row that gets deleted, because a contact you have deleted is one you can no longer screen the next list against.
Assignment that requires an acceptance
The rule names an owner, and the owner accepts it or returns it with a reason inside an agreed window. The accepted state is the whole point: without it, a lead nobody worked cannot be told apart from a lead that was worked and was genuinely no good, and that is the distinction the monthly argument turns on.
The definition enforced on the record
Whatever the two teams agreed qualified means becomes required fields and a check, so a lead that does not meet it cannot be passed across and counted as though it had. A definition that lives only in a slide is a definition that only holds while everyone is in the room.
One shared account of what happened next
Attempts, outcomes and reasons written back to one place both teams read, in words both teams agreed, including the reasons for sending one back. The return path is the half of the agreement almost nobody writes down, and it is the half the monthly argument is actually about.
Where the real problem is an unclear offer or demand path, this is the wrong page. No routing rule improves an offer, and faster handoff of dead leads just proves it faster.
Growth MarketingBoth reports are accurate. The lead is still cold.
The header is one lead; underneath is what each team's system holds about it. No field is wrong, and the two lists share no row.
Enquiry 4471. One person, one company, one form, one week. Both teams can produce a complete and defensible account of what they did with it.
The marketing record
Every field is true- Source
- Pricing page form, paid search
- Submitted
- Tuesday, 09:14
- Consent
- Marketing email, captured at the form, wording stored
- Score
- Above the threshold set last year
- Status
- Marketing qualified
- Passed to sales
- Tuesday, 09:16
Passed inside two minutes, with the consent evidence attached and the source recorded. Nobody in marketing did anything wrong.
The sales record
Every field is true- Assigned
- Tuesday, 09:16
- First attempt
- Wednesday, 16:40
- Outcome
- Not qualified
- Reason
- No budget named
- Returned
- Thursday, to nurture
Called, dispositioned against the reason list, returned. Nobody in sales did anything wrong either, and the reason they chose was the closest one available.
Any statement of what qualified was supposed to mean, who agreed it, and what the person receiving the lead was expected to do about it. The threshold on one side was set against no outcome data. The reason on the other came from a list nobody in marketing wrote. Every monthly review of this lead will produce the same two answers and the same disagreement, because the disagreement is not in the data.
This is the one handoff with a disputed owner rather than no owner. The first piece of work is a written definition of qualified, agreed with whoever acts on it.
How the work runs.
Five of these six steps are cheap and well understood. The first two are the ones people want to skip, and skipping them is what produces a working automation that both teams still distrust.
Take both definitions down separately
Each team writes what qualified means in its own words, before anyone tries to reconcile them. Two written definitions that disagree are progress. One spoken definition everybody nods along to is the state you are already in.
Settle one definition with the person who acts on it
The salesperson who will make the call, not the manager who will read the report. If that person will not commit to working every lead that meets the definition, it is not finished, and finishing it is worth more than anything further down this list.
Follow one real lead all the way through
One record, from the form to the last thing anybody did with it, read out of both systems rather than described in a workshop. It reliably turns up a step nobody in the room knew existed, and usually a second copy of the same person.
Repair the record before touching the routing
Matching, deduplication and the consent fields first. A routing rule built on records that do not resolve to one person will send the right lead to the wrong owner, consistently and without ever looking broken.
Build one narrow path and put it in real use
One source, one definition, one route, one owner, working for a month before a second is added. A handoff that works for one form is a fact. A design that covers nine of them is a hope with a diagram.
Give the definition a review date and an owner
A definition agreed once and never reread drifts back into two within a year, usually after the first change of personnel on either side. Somebody owns it, and it gets checked against what actually closed.
What we will not automate.
Three of these four end in a conversation rather than a build, which is a legitimate outcome of a first conversation with us. The first row is the commonest of the four and the cheapest to fix.
A definition still being argued about
Automating a disputed handoff encodes the dispute and hands both sides faster evidence for the position they already hold. We would rather chair that meeting than build the reporting for it.
Sending to a list whose consent we cannot see
Where nobody can show what each person agreed to, when, and against what wording, the answer is to stop sending and rebuild the permission. Routing it faster only increases the number of contacts you cannot account for.
A score with nothing to learn from
Scoring needs outcomes to calibrate against. Where nobody has recorded which leads became customers and which did not, a score is a rule somebody invented in a meeting, and a rule is cheaper to run as a rule than as a model.
A handoff the receiving team will not work
Where sales has already decided a source is not worth calling, routing is not the problem and no rule settles it. That is a commercial disagreement, and putting software into the middle of one makes the next round of it louder.
None of these is a reason to do nothing. Each has a smaller piece of work behind it, and in three cases that work is a decision somebody has been avoiding.
What we can and cannot show you here.
No published case study of ours is a sales and marketing automation engagement, and we will not dress one up. What we can show is work where a record had to reach a named person.
Milo, an assignment that has to be accepted
Trip assignment moved off the phone and onto a record a driver sees and accepts, with check-in and check-out logged against it.
The published note is that payouts stopped being disputed, which is what happens when two parties finally read the same record. That is the mechanism this page is about, running in a fleet rather than in a sales team.
Fitelo, routing to a named person
Routine questions answered where they can be, and the complex ones routed to the right dietician rather than left in a queue.
A rule that decides which cases reach a named human, and a human who is expected to act on what reaches them, is the same problem as a lead route with an owner on the end of it.
Conscious Chemist, the join this page is about
An assistant wired into the website and the CRM, so a conversation on the site became something the marketing and support teams could act on.
That is the marketing-to-record join, built and running, in a support and commerce setting rather than a sales one. It is the closest published work we have to this page and it is still not the same engagement.
All three are cited as adjacent work, not equivalent work. The figures on those case studies belong to those engagements and are not repeated here.
Deliberately absent
What this page will not give you:
- A speed-to-lead figure for your business. The published research on response timing is real and none of it was measured on your enquiries.
- A share of leads recovered. We have no published result for this work, and inventing one would be worse than the gap it fills.
- A conversion improvement from settling a definition. What changes first is that the monthly argument stops, and that is not a rate.
- A target for how quickly a lead should be contacted. That depends on what you sell and on who answers the phone, and a number copied out of somebody else's business is not a target.
Who we need from your side.
Three of these four are people rather than systems, which is the usual proportion on this work and the reason it cannot be run entirely by a supplier.
One salesperson who will act on the definition
Not the sales manager, and not a committee. The person who makes the call, because a definition they did not agree to is one they will keep rejecting, politely, for as long as it exists.
Whoever set the current scoring rule
Somebody chose that threshold and had a reason. Ten minutes with them is faster than reverse-engineering the intent out of a year of records, and it usually explains at least one field nobody else can account for.
Someone who can answer for the privacy notice
What each form told people at the point of collection decides what the record may lawfully be used for afterwards. That is a question about your own notices and it is not ours to answer on your behalf.
Read access to both systems, early
The marketing system and the sales system, before anything is designed. The trace in step three is read out of both of them, and a description of the process is never a substitute for what the records actually say.
Which of these is actually your problem?
Five of these six point somewhere other than this page, and one of them points away from us entirely. Saying so here costs less than finding out three weeks into an engagement.
- Leads are passed and returned, and both teams have a report proving they were rightSales & Marketing Automation · you are hereThe definition is the work, and the plumbing follows it. This page.
- The offer, the buyer or the demand path is not clear yetGrowth MarketingNothing downstream of an unclear offer is worth automating, and routing will not make it clearer.
- The work that stalls is internal, and nobody owns the gap it stalls inBack-office AutomationThere the handoff has no owner at all. Here it has two, which needs a different first move.
- Two systems report the same number differentlyData EngineeringThat is a question about where a number came from, which is answered by tracing it rather than by agreeing anything.
- The customer, not the lead, is the one being dropped between channelsCustomer Experience AutomationSame boundary, other side of it. That page is written from where the customer is standing.
- Sales will not work these leads whatever the definition saysA conversation with your own sales leadershipThere is no page here for this, because it is not something to buy from us. It is a decision that belongs above both teams.
Send us one lead both teams remember differently.
One record, from the form to the last thing anybody did with it. We will show you where your two systems part company, and whether the next step is a build or a meeting.
What teams ask before they start.
Pick a topic, or ask us directly. We answer every inbound within one business day.
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