Where do leads leak between marketing and sales?

Marketing reports that enquiries are up. Sales reports that the pipeline is flat. Both are telling the truth, and the difference between them is somewhere in the handoffs nobody owns. Finding it takes one month of enquiries traced from the form to the report, which almost nobody has done, and no new tool.

The four handoffs

Leads rarely go missing in the middle of a step. A rep who's on a call finishes the call. They go missing between steps, where one system or person hands to another and nobody checks what arrived.

Form to inbox

The web form sends to an address. The address belongs to someone who left, or forwards to a folder, or is filtered as spam by a rule nobody remembers setting. Campaign replies land in a different inbox from the form. A partner sends referrals by email to one rep. Count the enquiries your form tool recorded last month, then count the ones that reached a place a salesperson looks. The difference is this leak.

Inbox to a person

This is usually the largest leak. An enquiry arrives in a shared inbox that three people can see, and because anyone could answer it, nobody does for two days. Or it's answered, but by the wrong person, who parks it for a colleague. Count the enquiries that reached the inbox, then count the ones that got a first reply within a working day. The gap is here, and it's covered in detail in how fast you should reply to a new lead and routing enquiries to the right person.

Reply to follow-up

The first reply happened. A call happened. A quote went out. Then the week got busy and the second touch never came, so a lead who was deciding slowly decided somewhere else. Count the quotes sent last month, then count the ones that received a follow-up. That gap is the subject of following up every quote without nagging.

CRM to report

The fourth leak is the one that hides the other three. If stages in the CRM are updated by hand, the report you read each month describes what reps remembered to type, and the real count of leads that went quiet is invisible. Count the open deals with no activity in the last two weeks. If that number surprises you, the report has been telling you a story. Keeping the CRM accurate without data entry is how the report starts telling the truth.

One more thing the trace shows: where the enquiries that leaked came from. If most of the ones that never reached a person arrived through one channel, that channel's handoff is the problem, and the fix is narrow. If the slow replies cluster around one rep's absences, the fix is a cover rule. The count tells you which joint, and usually tells you why.

How to count it

Take one month. Export the enquiries from the form tool and every inbox they can arrive in, and give each one a line in a spreadsheet. For each, record four dates: when it arrived, when it was first replied to, when the last touch happened, and what the CRM says about it now. It's an afternoon's work, and it will tell you more than any dashboard, because it follows the actual leads rather than the fields someone filled in.

The four numbers at the end are your leak readings: enquiries that never reached a person, enquiries that waited more than a day, quotes with no follow-up, and deals the CRM calls open that have gone quiet. Keep the spreadsheet. It's the before.

Do the trace once by hand before anything is automated. It takes an afternoon, it needs no tools you don't have, and it's the only way to know which of the four gaps is costing you most. Businesses that skip it tend to fix the leak that's easiest to see rather than the one that's largest.

What closes each gap

Every leak has the same two causes: no clear owner, and nothing holding the timing. So the fixes have the same shape.

• Form to inbox: every channel captured into one place the moment an enquiry arrives, with nothing depending on a forwarding rule.
• Inbox to a person: one named owner per enquiry, immediately, with the record gathered and a first reply drafted.
• Reply to follow-up: a schedule that creates the next touch the moment a quote goes out and prepares each one on time.
• CRM to report: stages that move because something happened, and a quiet flag on anything untouched for a set period.

Together these are the front of the sales process, which is what we build in Revenue Growth. They can be done one at a time, and the count tells you which one first. If you're unsure, it's almost always the second.

What the count usually shows

Suppose the form tool recorded sixty enquiries last month. Tracing them, you find that fifty-four reached an inbox a salesperson looks at. The other six went to a filtered folder, a forwarding address that stopped working in the spring, and a partner's email to one rep who was away. That's the first leak, and it's fixed in an hour once you know it's there.

Of the fifty-four, thirty-one got a first reply within a working day. The rest waited two, three or in a handful of cases six days, and the pattern is clear when you look at the dates: the slow ones arrived on a Thursday afternoon or in a week when one rep was travelling. That's the second leak, and it's the biggest.

Eighteen quotes went out. Seven had any follow-up at all, and three of those were a single message. Eleven quotes, each representing a conversation that had already happened, were never touched again. That's the third leak.

The CRM says forty deals are open. Twenty-two have had no activity for more than two weeks, and the report sent to the leadership meeting counted all forty as pipeline. That's the fourth leak, and it explains why marketing and sales have been describing different months.

The numbers will be different in your business. The shape usually isn't. And once they're written down, the conversation about whose fault it is turns into a conversation about which joint to fix first.

What to measure

The four leak readings, monthly, on one page: enquiries that reached a person, speed of first response, follow-up completed on every opportunity, and open deals gone quiet. Then the number that marketing and sales can finally agree on: enquiries that progress to a conversation. When that moves, the argument about whose numbers are right ends.

What to do this week

1. Export last month's enquiries from the form tool and every inbox they can land in.
2. Give each one four dates: arrived, first reply, last touch, CRM status today.
3. Count the four leaks.
4. Pick the biggest one, name an owner for that handoff, and decide what holds the timing.
5. Put the four counts on one page and agree to look at it monthly.

If you'd like a second opinion on where to start, bring the spreadsheet to a call. We'll tell you which leak we'd close first and what it would take.