How Marketing and Sales Build a Shared Lead Definition That Sticks
Misalignment between marketing and sales over what counts as a qualified lead costs companies millions in wasted effort and lost revenue every year. This guide presents twenty-eight tested frameworks that businesses use to build a lead definition both teams will actually follow. Industry experts share practical methods—from behavioral triggers to compensation models—that eliminate handoff friction and improve conversion rates.
Refine First-Call Questions As One
At Resolute, we have a set of criteria that qualifies a lead based on the service they are looking for. Our marketing team will respond to initial leads and conduct a pre-screening call to gather details about their organization and request which will determine if they are a fit as a MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead). Sales will meet with MQLs to do a deeper dive and collect all details necessary to produce a proposal. During this time, things like cost, technology stack, and timing can disqualify leads. However, from an organizational standpoint, they should already be fairly aligned due to the pre-screening process. When too many unqualified leads do make it through the initial screen, marketing and sales adjust what questions are asked on the first call to better align targeting.
Co-Define Criteria And Tie To Revenue
Marketing and sales only stay aligned on lead quality when both teams define it together and connect it directly to revenue outcomes, not just marketing activity. In our organization, we moved away from broad definitions like "engaged prospect" and built a shared framework around fit, intent, and timing.
A qualified lead is not simply someone who downloads a guide or attends a webinar. We evaluate factors such as company size, industry fit, role/title, buying signals, engagement history, and the prospect's position in the buying journey. A prospect requesting a demo after engaging with multiple resources would qualify differently from someone who interacts only with top-of-funnel content.
The biggest factor in making this successful was involving sales from the beginning. Marketing and sales jointly reviewed closed-won opportunities to identify patterns among leads that actually converted into revenue. That shifted the process from assumptions to data-driven decision-making.
One step that helped the agreement stick over time was establishing a consistent feedback loop within the CRM. Sales teams were required to clearly dispose of leads, including why each lead was accepted, rejected, stalled, or converted. Marketing then used that information to refine scoring, nurture campaigns, messaging, and qualification criteria over time.
We also established service-level agreements between the teams. Marketing is committed to lead quality and volume goals, while sales is committed to timely follow-up and lead management expectations. That accountability on both sides helped maintain alignment and reduced friction between teams. Most importantly, we treated lead qualification as an ongoing process rather than a one-time setup. Buyer behavior, market conditions, and priorities evolve, and qualification criteria need to keep pace.
Require Decision-Maker Before Handoff
As founder of Intellar, marketing and sales agree that a qualified lead is one where we are speaking with the decision-maker or someone who can directly influence the buying decision. Marketing's job is to confirm that contact during initial outreach before handing the lead to sales. The one step that made the agreement stick was a firm handoff rule: no transfer unless outreach has confirmed the decision-maker, either verbally or in writing. That clear, simple requirement reduced back-and-forth and kept both teams focused on conversations that move toward a decision.
Study Losses And Elevate Conversation Signals
Early on, our biggest problem wasn't defining a qualified lead, it was that marketing and sales were quietly using two completely different standards.
We saw this during weekly pipeline reviews. Marketing would celebrate a campaign because leads were coming in consistently, while sales would push back because many of those people were just browsing or collecting information. After a while, both teams stopped trusting each other's numbers.
What finally fixed it was reviewing lost deals together instead of only looking at wins. We started replaying sales calls and noticed something interesting: the leads that eventually became customers usually asked operational questions very early. They wanted to know how onboarding worked, how long implementation would take, or whether their internal team would struggle using the system.
That changed how we qualified leads. Instead of scoring people mostly on downloads or form fills, we started paying closer attention to buying-behavior signals tied to real conversations.
The reason the agreement stuck is because both teams helped build it from actual customer behavior, not assumptions. Once marketing and sales were looking at the same evidence, the arguments mostly disappeared.
Prioritize Serious Homeowners And Humanity
I work in real estate and I think too many companies make lead qualification more complicated than it needs to be. The qualified leads I work with are simply homeowners who are open to having a real conversation and are serious about finding a solution for their property. Marketing should not focus only on getting the highest number of leads because that usually creates a lot of wasted time for sales teams and frustration for homeowners. Homeowners can tell when someone is just trying to hit numbers versus actually helping them solve a problem. We are very straightforward with who our customers are and we never depart from that. I created an environment where both understand the human side of the business and that has made it much easier to agree on what a good lead actually looks like.
Write Single Behavioral Trigger Sentence
The marketing-sales qualified-lead agreement that's actually held up at Smarfle wasn't the standard "fit + intent" SLA most teams document. The lasting step was co-defining one specific behavior as the qualification trigger and writing it down in one sentence both teams signed off on. For us: "qualified means a prospect from our ICP attended a webinar AND visited the pricing page within 14 days." Anything else is a marketing-warmed lead, not an MQL.
The reason the simpler definition lasted is that arguments between marketing and sales about lead quality almost always trace back to two teams using the same words to mean different things. Writing the trigger as a literal behavior removed the interpretive layer entirely. Conversion-to-opportunity climbed because sales trusted the queue (they knew what came in), and marketing stopped padding the funnel with leads that didn't meet the bar (they knew sales wouldn't touch them). The lasting step isn't the SLA template. It's getting both leaders to write one trigger sentence together and agree it's the only one that counts.
Enforce Plain Reason Codes For Decisions
The most effective step was simple. Marketing stopped defining lead quality alone and sales stopped changing the standard during slow periods. Each accepted and rejected lead included a clear reason code written in plain language. Specific reasons like wrong market stage or low urgency replaced vague labels and made patterns easier to see.
This process worked because it reduced opinion and created clarity. Marketing could see where intent was judged too high while sales could notice gaps in follow up discipline. Both teams worked from the same set of facts instead of separate views. Qualified lead criteria became a shared rule and not a repeated point of conflict.
Verify Ownership And Present Need
Our definition focused on just one criterion: did this individual own the property and had a current problem to solve? The result of implementing such a filter helped us avoid dealing with the unnecessary follow-ups of the renter leads, tire-kickers, and those who will need any help within three years' time. After our team reached an agreement on the criteria and set up our questions according to them, the discussions about the lead quality ceased at all.
Spot Directed Inquiries Through Clear Content
We receive multiple inquiries every day but not all of them can turn into qualified leads. Some are just asking for reference, quote, or planning to get into business. The ones that usually stand out are the clients who already come in with ideas of how they want their packaging to look, the style, colors, product type, or even references they've saved from our website or socials. Since we handle custom packaging, having that level of direction already shows they're more serious about building their brand and move forward with the project.
One thing that helped marketing and sales stay aligned was making the website and socials work together. On our Instagram and Pinterest, we show real packaging usage and product examples then direct people to the website. They can explore product details such as specifications, pricing, MOQ information, and request quotes on our website. Because the information is already clear upfront, the inquiries coming in are more intentional and easier to qualify.
What made it stick over time was keeping communication simple between the team handling content and the team handling clients. We pay attention to the kinds of inquiries that actually convert, then adjust our content and product pages around those patterns. That helped both sides naturally agree on what a strong lead looks like without overcomplicating the process.
Adopt BANT And Narrow Target
As a full stack agency we were attracting broad interest from our ads campaigns and used the BANT (Budget, Authority, Need payoff and Timeline) framework to qualify the leads, this helped us to prioritize and move only the vetted leads as opportunities into the pipeline. We were at about 11% Conversion which is traditionally high but diluted, this disconnect could harm the data it would seem like marketing is doing it right and sales weren't holding up. We have tried to push for lesser conversions by narrowing targeting further this has pulled the conversion at around 4.7% but its build a much more relevant and predictable pipeline.
Reverse-Engineer Wins And Retire MQLs
answer as a sales leader - not more than 300 words
11:29 AM
Claude responded: The honest answer is that marketing and sales almost never agree on lead quality — until both teams feel the pain of the gap.
The honest answer is that marketing and sales almost never agree on lead quality — until both teams feel the pain of the gap.
What worked for us was sitting down together and reverse-engineering from closed deals. Not from campaigns, not from lead scores — from the deals that actually converted. We looked at every closed account over the last two quarters and asked: what did these people have in common before they ever talked to sales? Industry, company size, the trigger that made them reach out, the job title that made the first contact.
That exercise forced marketing to stop defending their MQL numbers and forced sales to stop saying "these leads are garbage" without evidence. The data made the conversation honest.
We built the ICP definition from that session together. Not marketing handing it down, not sales demanding it. Both teams in the room, both teams with skin in the outcome.
The one step that made it stick: we killed the MQL handoff as a success metric for marketing.
Use Five-Point Yes No Checklist
In an agency my size, marketing and sales is basically the same three people wearing different hats on different days. But I still had the problem where leads coming through the website felt "qualified" to whoever wrote the landing page copy and completely unqualified to whoever jumped on the discovery call.
I fixed it by creating a dead-simple scoring checklist in our CRM. Five questions, yes or no. Does the lead have an existing WordPress site? Is their monthly revenue above a certain threshold? Are they the decision-maker? Do they have a timeline within 90 days? Have they mentioned a specific problem I actually solve? Three yeses out of five and I book the call.
Below that, they go into a nurture sequence instead. The step that made it stick was reviewing it monthly. Every first Monday, I look at the last 30 days of calls and check whether the leads that scored well actually converted into paying clients. Twice I've adjusted the criteria based on what I saw. Keeping it alive like that stopped it from becoming another document nobody ever opens.
Make Bot Detection Point Zero
When the two go head-to-head on defining the boundaries of a qualified lead, they argue about either firmographics or intent. But in my experience, the biggest destructive cause of misalignment in today's industry is rooted in data integrity: specifically, the failure to filter out AI bots before qualifying an account.
The hidden alignment killer, because of all these fake intent signals used to train advertising algorithms funded by actual humans
AI-powered bot networks are creating engagement at scale, and fake intent looks real. I recently saw a case study in the wider PR space, not sales. Per the Wall Street Journal, a major restaurant chain recently rebranded and was faced with a ton of criticism. But 50% of the criticism was actually bot-generated. And at the peak of the crisis, 70% of the posts were duplicated. This manufactured movement looked incredibly real and caused the chain's stock to drop 10.5%, losing nearly $100 million in a few days. From a B2B RevOps POV, companies are faced with this same attempt at manipulation at the top of the funnel. Engagement spikes, marketing wins! Sales chases ghosts. And if marketing accepts bot actions as qualified, they are literally training ad platform algorithms that this works. So you get feedback loops of filters and junk data that erode the trust between functions. The one step that created alignment, bot filtering as "point zero" of the lead qualification playbook
The one step that created the most lasting alignment for our system was making bot detection the absolute first thing, the "Point Zero" in the lead qualification playbook. Before marketing and sales start arguing about scoring matrices, every engagement must first go through verification filters and behavioral detection so that the humans can separate themselves from the coordinated AI bot networks. Once this happened, the MQL to SQL handoff perceived friction dissolved, because Sales knows they're verifying, and that a few dozen bots pretending to be real buyers won't move the needle. Until you do this, agreement on the definition of qualified lead is meaningless.
Count Showroom Visitors As Real Prospects
At Sleep Basil, marketing and sales are not separate departments. Josh, Lillian, and I are the entire team. Lillian handles our social media and marketing support, and Josh and I are the ones on the floor having direct conversations with every customer who walks through the door. There is no handoff between teams because we are the same people wearing all the hats.
What that means in practice is that our definition of a qualified lead is pretty straightforward. It is someone who walks into our showroom. Full stop.
Our website and our local SEO work are not designed to generate online conversions. They are designed to drive foot traffic. Phil has been clear about this in our strategy conversations. The goal is visibility on search engines and AI platforms so that when someone in Denver or the surrounding south Denver neighborhoods is ready to buy a mattress, they find us, trust what they see, and come in.
Once someone is in the store, that is where the real work begins. We spend time understanding their sleep position, body type, and comfort preferences, and we guide them to the right product from there.
The one thing that has made this approach stick is staying laser focused on foot traffic as the primary metric, not online form submissions or digital conversions. Knowing exactly what we are optimizing for keeps everyone aligned because we are all working toward the same single goal.
Set Firm Filters For Luxury Buyers
We made the qualification criteria explicit and non-negotiable from the very first client touchpoint.
A qualified lead for us is not simply someone who is interested in Switzerland. It is someone who is looking for a private, tailor-made experience, is comfortable with four and five-star hotels, and has a budget that genuinely fits our service level. Those three filters are clear across everyone on our team, from the first marketing message a potential client sees to the first email our experience agents send back.
The step that made it stick was building the disqualification logic directly into our communication process. Budget is addressed in the first exchange. We ask about travel style, group composition, pace, and priorities before we ever touch an itinerary. If the answers tell us it is not a mutual fit, we say so honestly and move on. No grey area, no wishful thinking.
This alignment works because marketing and sales are not operating from different assumptions. The content we put out, on our website, through search, through travel advisor channels, already speaks directly to high-net-worth travelers who want private and bespoke experiences. By the time someone reaches out, the messaging has done a significant part of the filtering already.
The result is that our team spends its energy on clients we can genuinely serve well. That focus is a large part of why nearly 400 five-star reviews on TripAdvisor reflect consistent quality rather than occasional wins.
Clarity upfront protects the experience at every stage after it.
Gate Discovery Calls With Three Must-Haves
At Tibicle, marketing and sales sat in the same room for the first two years. Me and my co-founder Arjun. Alignment was not a process problem. It was a conversation we had daily.
As the team grew, that changed. Arjun leads business development and I oversee delivery. The disconnect that started appearing was around lead quality. Marketing was bringing in enquiries. Some were strong fits. Some were not. Without a shared definition of what qualified looked like, we were spending time on discovery calls that should never have happened.
The agreement we built was simple. A qualified lead at Tibicle meets three criteria before a discovery call gets booked. They have a defined project scope, a realistic budget for custom development, and a decision-maker involved in the conversation. Not a researcher, not an intern gathering quotes. Someone who can actually say yes.
The step that made it stick was putting it in writing and attaching it to our intake form. Every enquiry now answers those three things before anyone picks up the phone. Leads that do not qualify get a polite response directing them toward our blog or a smaller engagement option.
Wasted discovery calls dropped immediately.
Anchor Quality To Connected Phone Outcomes
The fastest way to start a fight between marketing and sales is to call every form fill a lead. I stopped doing that when I got deeper into call logs and saw the real gap, 41% of inbound HVAC leads from paid ads were not answered within 60 seconds, and 22% went to voicemail and were never returned. The problem was not lead volume. It was that "qualified" meant one thing in the ad account and another thing on the phone. What made it stick was forcing both sides to agree on a single, observable definition tied to call behavior, not opinions. For one home services account, we defined a qualified lead as a live call or callback-connected prospect in the service area, for the right service, with intent to book within a reasonable window. If the caller could not be reached, was outside the territory, or wanted something the company did not offer, it did not count. Then we made that status show up in one place, call outcome tags tied back to campaign source. That changed the conversation immediately. Marketing stopped optimizing for cheap conversions that never turned into conversations. Sales stopped blaming lead quality when the issue was speed-to-lead. Once both teams were looking at the same tagged outcomes every week, the argument died. My rule is simple, if sales would not take the call today, marketing should not count it as a qualified lead.
Credit ICP Meetings That Actually Occur
We aligned marketing and sales on lead qualification by killing the term "MQL" entirely. It's the most abused acronym in B2B SaaS - everyone defines it differently, and the friction between teams almost always lives in that definition gap.
Instead we use a single shared definition: a qualified lead is one where sales has booked - and the prospect has shown up to - a discovery call, AND the prospect matches our written ICP criteria (industry, company size, role, geography). Two checkboxes. Both have to be true. Marketing isn't credited for the lead until sales confirms both.
The one step that made it stick over time was tying marketing's number to revenue-influenced pipeline, not lead volume. We literally took "leads generated" off the marketing dashboard. The only metrics we report are: qualified meetings booked, pipeline created, and closed-won influenced. That single change ended the arguments overnight, because there's nothing for marketing to game. You can't pad qualified-meeting numbers with junk traffic - sales is the gate.
A secondary thing that helped: a weekly 15-minute pipeline review where marketing and sales look at the same dashboard together. Not a meeting to fight about definitions - a meeting to look at specific deals, ask why a lead was disqualified, and tune the criteria. When both teams are literally reading the same numbers off the same screen, the political theater disappears.
The failure mode I see at other companies: marketing measures itself by top-of-funnel volume (MQLs, form fills, demo requests), sales measures itself by closed revenue, and the middle of the funnel becomes a no-man's-land where leads die and nobody owns them. The fix isn't a better definition document. It's making sure both teams are scored on the same downstream outcome.
Translate Definition Into Attorney Language
For law firms, this question is harder than it sounds. The "sales team" is usually the attorney taking calls, and they've never thought of themselves as salespeople. So we learned early: you can't define a qualified lead in marketing language and expect attorneys to use it.
We stopped using "qualified lead" internally and shifted to "right-fit intake." That's language they understood. Someone with the right case type, realistic expectations about timeline and outcome, and willingness to move forward. Once we framed it their way, evaluations actually happened.
But what made it stick was tying the definition to a number they already cared about. We built a 7-point scoring rubric and mapped each criterion to historical data on which intake factors correlated with high-value case outcomes. When attorneys saw that "right-fit" clients also produced better results, the friction didn't disappear but it dropped noticeably.
The one step that's held it together: reviewing 10 intakes together every month. Not to debate old decisions but to recalibrate. You can't write a definition once and expect it to hold in a firm that's adding 50 new clients per month. It's a living document, not a policy.
Center Judgment On Near-Term Choice Intent
At my company, Cllimber, a qualified lead is defined as someone who is showing decision intent, not just downloading a guide or subscribing to a newsletter.
A person who is reading a general AI article is most likely not in the same decision making mindset as someone using one of our AI-powered decision engine tools to choose their ideal marketing software.
So we have one simple question we ask, "What decision is this person trying to make right now?" The answer to this is the difference between our sales and marketing.
Jenny Allan
Founder
Cllimber.com
Making AI practical for everyday life and business
Treat Intake As Model-Aligned Checkpoint
Alignment happens when marketing and sales stop chasing a universal definition and instead adopt one tied to the organization's actual operating model. A qualified lead must fit the kind of matters the team can responsibly pursue, come from the right region, and signal near term intent. That standard avoids the common trap of rewarding attention that cannot become action. I have found that clarity improves fastest when qualification is treated as a filter, not a trophy.
The step that made the agreement durable was scoring every lead against the same short rubric before it entered performance reporting. That simple discipline created consistency, reduced hindsight bias, and gave both teams a stable basis for improving decisions month after month.
Pursue AI-Visibility Aware Businesses Only
I handle both marketing and sales at growthvibe, which makes staying aligned pretty easy. But it also means I have to be very specific about what a good lead looks like, since I'm the only one there to spot a bad fit.
For us, a qualified lead is a business that already has an online presence and is specifically wondering why they aren't appearing in AI search results. That awareness is important. If I have to spend time convincing someone that AI visibility matters, the sales process takes too long and the partnership usually doesn't start off right.
I refined this definition by writing it down and testing it against actual sales calls. Every time a prospect seemed like a good match but didn't work out, I went back and made my criteria stricter.
Over time, this created a filter I trust, which prevents me from chasing leads that would just waste everyone's time.
Work Backward And Align Compensation
Marketing and sales were operating with completely different definitions of a qualified lead when we started. Marketing was sending over lists of property managers who'd downloaded a guide or attended a webinar. Sales was frustrated because half those managers were either testing tools or managing properties too small to justify our pricing. We were burning cycles on leads that had zero intent to buy.
The shift happened when we decided to define a lead in reverse — starting with what our sales team actually needed to close a deal. That meant a property manager running 20+ units, actively managing occupancy or pricing and willing to talk about revenue challenges in a specific conversation. Not just a download. Not a newsletter signup. A real indicator someone was thinking about this problem right now.
We built that definition into our landing pages and email sequences so marketing wasn't casting as wide a net. It felt counterintuitive at first — fewer signups looked worse on the surface. But the conversion rate from lead to qualified conversation jumped from around 8% to 34% within two quarters because both teams were suddenly working the same list.
What actually made it stick was tying compensation for both teams to qualified conversations closed not to raw lead volume. Once sales and marketing shared the same number on the scoreboard, alignment became automatic. You stop arguing about definitions when you're both measured on the same outcome.
Appoint RevOps As Standard Owner
We like to separate signal from story. Marketing often focuses on engagement while sales looks for clear signals that a deal can happen in practice. We agreed that a qualified lead must show intent and a clear business reason. This could be repeated high intent actions with a clear pain point or an internal trigger for decisions.
This balance helped us avoid valuing activity that looks good but does not show buying intent. The key change was giving one owner responsibility for the definition. We chose revenue operations as that neutral owner across teams. This reduced conflict and made the process more consistent and harder to change without data over time.
Pass Accounts Not Contacts
I run an account based marketing consultancy, and almost every sales-marketing alignment problem I've audited comes down to the same thing: marketing is grading individuals, sales is buying accounts. You can write SLAs all day, but if the unit of measurement is different, the fight never ends.
The shift that works: stop passing leads, start passing accounts. We define a qualified account as one with ideal customer profile fit, two or more engaged stakeholders in the last 30 days, and a documented trigger event (funding, hiring, tech change, intent surge). Single-lead handoffs go into nurture, not the sales queue.
The one step that made it stick across every client we've done this with: a monthly 30-minute "rejection review." Sales brings the accounts they disqualified, marketing brings the accounts they think were ignored, and both sides agree on what the data actually showed. After three cycles, the definitions sharpen themselves, no consultant required.
Shar, Founder, Motionabx.com
Link Pay To Long-Term Value
Paperless Pipeline is bootstrapped. We have never raised outside capital. That forces sales and marketing to agree on lead quality, because every wasted hour comes out of the same pot.
Our definition of qualified is narrow and written down. A brokerage that closes more than 8 transactions per month, has at least 2 admin or transaction coordinator roles to support, and has a named decision-maker on the call. Smaller than that, the per-transaction math does not save them money against pen and paper. Larger than 200 agents, we are still a fit, but we add a different sales path. The agreed lead profile sits in one shared doc that marketing, sales, and customer success all see. No version 2. No "stretch" tier.
The step that made it stick over time. We tied compensation to retained revenue, not closed deals. A salesperson who books a 5-agent shop that churns at 90 days earns less than a salesperson who books a 40-agent shop that stays for years. Once that change went in, marketing stopped chasing top-of-funnel volume because the sales team stopped saying yes to anything that walked through the door. Both teams started asking the same screening question on the same first call. "How many transactions did you close last month?"
The before / after. Before we changed comp, our pipeline had a lot of single-agent shops that drained support hours and left within a year. After, our average customer stays for many years. Breakside Real Estate Group in British Columbia has been with us for 10+ years and managed over $2 billion through the platform. That is what a properly qualified lead looks like five years on.
The honest limit. This works when you sell software with low marginal cost per customer and you can afford to wait for retention to compound. If you sell something where the comp clock has to close fast, the trade-off is different.
One more rule. Sales and marketing both reject leads, in writing, with a reason. The reason goes into a shared sheet. Every quarter we review the patterns and tighten the criteria.
Stress-Test Scores With Simulations Prelaunch
To align sales and marketing on lead qualification, we deployed a three-step framework that anchors qualitative sales feedback into quantitative scoring models.
Step 1: Historical Funnel Segmentation. We aligned with sales qualitatively on their ideal customer profile (ICP), but then backed it up by auditing historical won and lost opportunities to track how specific segments actually performed once inside the pipeline.
Step 2: Dual-Signal Blended Scoring. We built a scoring model balancing demographics with behavioral intent data. To keep intent accurate, we instituted negative scoring parameters alongside positive ones—for example, a page view on a careers page yields a -10, while a deep dive into our pricing page gives a +10.
Step 3 (The Step That Made it Stick): What kept this agreement from breaking down over time was using AI to stress-test our rules before pushing them live. We ran thousands of simulated sample personas through our theoretical funnel to see exactly who would trigger an MQL and who wouldn't. By presenting sales with a realistic, AI-vetted prediction of the exact accounts they would receive before turning on the switch, we built ironclad trust in the data from day one.
Favor Actions Over Superficial Fit
We define a qualified lead by behavior, not by job title or firmographics. Most companies still rely on demographic filters like firm size or role to score leads. Those filters are easy to define but they don't predict who actually buys.
Here's what behavioral qualification looks like for us. A lead is qualified when they've imported real case data into the trial, not just signed up. That single signal predicts conversion better than every demographic field combined.
At my previous company, we spent six months feeding sales leads that matched our ideal customer profile on paper. Right firm size, right role, right industry. Sales rejected most of them. We finally pulled the data and found that buyers all shared one behavior we'd ignored. So we rebuilt qualification around that behavior, and the close rate doubled in a quarter. That experience shaped how we built Chronicle from the start.
The agreement only stuck because we run a shared weekly review. Marketing and sales sit together and walk through the leads from the prior seven days. We look at which ones imported cases, which ones stalled and which ones got rejected by sales. The numbers force an honest conversation. If marketing is sending leads that sales keeps rejecting, the definition needs updating.
Speaking of that, the shared review is the part most companies skip. They write a definition once, post it in a doc and assume alignment will hold. It never does. The only way I've seen the agreement actually stick is by reviewing real leads together every week.
