The Marketing-to-Sales Handoff and SLA Cookbook

Handoff arguments are usually definition arguments. Marketing counts a form fill as a lead; sales counts a lead as someone who might buy this quarter. Both are reasonable, and the gap between them is where leads wait, get ignored or get passed back. The cure is a short document that names each stage, says what must be true for a record to enter it, who owns it, and what moves it on. Most CRMs give you a lifecycle stage property for this. HubSpot's default lifecycle stages include subscriber, lead, marketing qualified lead, sales qualified lead, opportunity and customer, and its knowledge base explains how to use them and how stage changes are tracked. You can use the defaults, rename them, or add your own, but whichever you choose, the definitions have to be shared.

Resist the temptation to build a long ladder of stages. Each stage you add needs an owner, entry criteria and a reason why a record would leave it. A common minimum is four: a raw contact who has shown some interest, a marketing-qualified lead that meets the agreed criteria, a sales-accepted lead that a rep has agreed to work, and an opportunity. The specific names matter less than whether everyone uses them the same way. Where a model gives a lead a numeric score, treat the score as an input to the criteria rather than the criteria themselves, and know what the score is built from. HubSpot documents how its scoring tool works and how score history can be reviewed; the same principle applies in any system.

Two types of entry deserve separate rules. Contacts who ask to talk to sales (a demo request, a pricing enquiry, a contact form) are signalling intent directly and usually go straight to a rep. Contacts who qualify by engagement (content downloads, repeat visits, event attendance) are a weaker signal and need criteria that both teams have looked at. Mixing the two under one definition is a common reason sales ignore a whole queue.

A service-level agreement between marketing and sales is a list of commitments each side can be measured against. It should not read like a policy. Marketing commits to a lead definition, a volume range if one has been agreed, complete required fields, and a routing path that works. Sales commits to a first-response time, a number of contact attempts, and recording an outcome within a stated period. The commitment on the sales side that gets the most attention is speed to first response, and it is worth setting the target on evidence from your own data rather than a number from the internet.

On what the target should be: you will see published figures linking faster response to higher contact and qualification rates, but we have not cited one here: such figures come from particular data sets and periods, and we do not treat them as a rule for your business. Our recommendation is to pick an initial target that your team can plausibly meet in working hours, such as a first response within one business hour for direct sales requests, measure how often you meet it, and tighten it once you are meeting it consistently. Treat that number as a starting point to adjust, not a benchmark. Count the clock in business hours unless you have out-of-hours cover, and say which.

An SLA with no consequence is a wish. The consequence need not be punitive; it needs to be automatic. If a lead has no activity from its owner within the window, the CRM should notify the owner, then notify the manager, then reassign. That escalation is easy to build in a workflow tool. HubSpot's workflows can enrol records on triggers and assign or rotate owners; its knowledge base documents how to rotate or assign record owners within workflows. The principle holds in other CRMs: put the clock in the system so that no one has to remember to watch it.

Routing assigns each qualified lead to an owner. The simplest rules are round robin across an available group of reps, territory (by region, country or state), account ownership (the lead goes to the rep who already owns the company), and segment (by company size or industry). Most teams need a combination, applied in a fixed order: first existing account owner, then territory, then segment, then round robin as the fallback. Each rule should be explainable to a rep in one sentence. If it needs a diagram to understand, it will be applied inconsistently and challenged constantly.

Do not forget the edge cases, because they are where leads are lost. Decide what happens when the rep is on leave, when a lead matches no territory, when a record is a duplicate of an existing contact, when the company is an existing customer, and when the contact is a partner or competitor. A catch-all queue with a named owner, checked daily, is better than silently assigning those leads to an inactive user. HubSpot's documentation on deduplication of records and on assigning and rotating owners covers the mechanics in that platform; whichever tool you use, test the routing with sample records for every branch before launch.

Put the routing logic in one place. When it lives partly in a form, partly in a workflow and partly in a spreadsheet someone maintains, it drifts. The rules sheet that comes with this cookbook is meant to be the one reference everyone edits first, and then mirrors into the CRM.

When sales rejects a lead, the CRM should require a reason from a short list. Free text produces vague answers like "not interested" or "bad lead", which cannot be counted or acted on. A useful list is short, mutually exclusive and tied to something marketing can change: not a fit (company size, industry or geography), no budget or authority identified, no need or wrong product, duplicate or existing customer, bad data (wrong or missing contact details), no response after the required attempts, and not ready now (recycle). Add an "other" option with a mandatory note, and review that note field regularly, because patterns in it signal a missing category.

The weekly review is where the SLA turns into improvement. For the first quarter, hold a short meeting with a fixed agenda, owned by revenue operations or the marketing lead. Look at leads that missed the response window and why; look at the counts of rejection by reason and source; look at accepted leads that did not progress; and ask what single rule or field to change this week. Record that decision. A weekly review that generates no change after a few sessions has either solved the problem or become a status update, and the group should say which. Once the numbers settle, move to a monthly rhythm.

Keep the conversation about the process rather than about people. "Sales ignored the leads" and "marketing sends junk" are both unhelpful as findings. "Thirty percent of rejections this week were for geography" (illustrative) is a finding, and it points to a form field, a targeting change or a routing rule.

You can only enforce an SLA you can measure, and measuring needs timestamps. The minimum set is: the lead source, the time the record became marketing qualified, the time it was assigned, the time of first logged sales activity, the time the rep accepted or rejected it, the rejection reason, and the time an opportunity was created. HubSpot provides default contact properties and lets you create custom ones; its documentation on creating and editing properties and on default contact properties explains what exists and how to add your own. Lifecycle stage changes also record dates that you can use for stage-to-stage timing, per HubSpot's lifecycle stage guidance.

From those fields you can build a small set of reports. Time from qualified to first activity, by owner and by source. Percentage of leads meeting the SLA. Accept, reject and no-response rates by source. Rejection reasons over time. Stage-to-stage conversion and time-in-stage. Open leads breaching the SLA right now, which belongs on a live view rather than a monthly slide. HubSpot documents building custom reports and its sales analytics reports; other CRMs have equivalents. Where possible, use the CRM's own report builder and not a hand-built spreadsheet, so that the numbers are the same for everyone.

Check data quality before you trust the numbers. Reps who log activity in a separate tool, email that is not synced to the CRM, or leads created by integrations without the right source will all distort the response-time figures. Audit a sample of records every month against what actually happened. If the data is not trustworthy, fix that before you use it to judge a person or a campaign.

Run the steps in order. The gates are things you can check in the CRM or in a meeting record, not things you believe you have done.