Sales and marketing alignment: a shared lead definition, response times and shared metrics

Take a hypothetical packaging manufacturer with 150 employees. An online campaign brings in 200 enquiries in a month, and marketing reports a success. The salespeople go through the list and judge 20 contacts to be worthwhile. The rest are students, companies that are too small, customers in countries the company does not ship to, and people who only downloaded a guide.

Each side has a point. Marketing does not know that most contacts are a poor fit, because nobody has told it. Sales does not know why the campaign was so broad, because nobody asked. The management board listens to both sides and does not know whom to believe.

The root of the problem is usually the same set of gaps:

First, describe your ideal customer together: industry, company size, region and the job title of the person worth talking to. Then agree which signals show interest. A request for a quote is different from downloading a guide, and signing up for a webinar is different again.

On this basis, introduce two contact statuses and a rule that every rejection comes with a reason, as described in the table below. In marketing systems you will see the abbreviations MQL (marketing qualified lead) and SQL (sales qualified lead) for them. Four questions are enough for sales to confirm a lead: is there a budget, who decides, what is the need and when does the customer want to buy.

You can agree this definition at a single meeting of about half a day with the heads of sales and marketing and a few salespeople. The result is one page signed by the heads of both departments. Come back to it after a quarter, once you see the first data.

Once you know what a good lead is, you need to agree who responds to it and how quickly. Companies call this a service level agreement (SLA), but a simple table with deadlines is enough. Both sides must have commitments; otherwise it quickly turns into a list of sales’ demands on marketing.

The deadlines in the table are examples. For quote requests it is worth requiring contact on the same business day, because customers often approach several suppliers at once.

The most frequently cited study on the subject appeared in Harvard Business Review in 2011. The authors sent test enquiries online to 2,241 US companies and measured the response time. 37% of companies responded within an hour, and 23% did not respond at all.

Using data on 1.25 million leads from 42 companies, the authors also examined how response time affects the outcome. Companies that tried to make contact within an hour were nearly 7 times more likely to qualify the lead than those that called an hour later. Compared with companies that waited a day or more, they were more than 60 times more likely.

The study covers the US market and is now well over a decade old, so do not apply these figures directly to your company. The direction is clear, though, and easy to test for yourself. Ask someone outside the company to send an enquiry through the form on your website and measure when a salesperson calls back.

Marketing usually reports clicks, cost per lead and the number of enquiries, while sales reports pipeline opportunities and signed contracts. These figures never meet, so you cannot see which channel brings customers and which only brings contacts. The shared metrics in the table below connect the two worlds.

An example calculation: in a month, marketing hands over 120 qualified contacts, sales confirms 60 of them, and within a quarter 9 end in a contract. Sales therefore accepts 50% of contacts; 15% of accepted contacts end in a contract, and 7.5% of all contacts do. When you run the same calculation for each channel separately, you can see straight away where to move the budget.

Do not search online for “good” values for these metrics – they depend on the industry, the price point and the length of the sales cycle. Use your own results from the last 6–12 months as the benchmark. The management board gets one report, which the heads of sales and marketing present together.

Without a steady rhythm, shared rules end up existing only on paper after a few months. One meeting a month of 60–90 minutes is enough, attended by the heads of both departments, the sales manager and the person who runs the campaigns. The agenda might look like this:

Passing contacts on by email becomes a source of delays in itself. A well-configured system does this without human involvement, leaving people free to talk to customers. You need two tools: a CRM, the system in which salespeople manage customers, and a place where marketing collects enquiries – website forms or a system for sending emails and running campaigns.

Many companies already have both tools; all that is missing is a connection between them and the rules. Popular CRMs such as monday.com, Dynamics 365 Sales, HubSpot or Pipedrive have ready-made form integrations and automatic assignment rules. Where systems do not connect on their own, Power Automate can build the bridge. A typical flow looks like this:

The Polish Electronic Communications Law (PKE) has been in force since 10 November 2024. Its Article 398 prohibits using phone and email for direct marketing without the recipient’s prior consent. According to lawyers’ commentary, this also applies to contacts with businesses, not just private individuals.

In practice, what matters is what the enquiry was about. If someone asks for a quote and gives their phone number, answering their request is different from calling with an offer someone who only downloaded a guide. In the second case, you need consent to contact them through that specific channel.

That is why forms should have separate consent boxes for phone and email contact, unticked by default. The consent information must go into the CRM with the contact, so the salesperson can see whether they may call. Agree the limits for your industry with a lawyer, because the rules are new and there is little case law.

Start with two things that require no tools at all. Send a test enquiry through your own website and measure the response time. Then bring the heads of both departments together for a meeting on the definition of a good lead.

The order of the next steps matters, because automation without rules only speeds up chaos: