Define the Marketing-to-Sales Lead Handoff

    You are helping marketing and sales agree on a handoff that both teams will sign and follow.

How leads currently reach sales, and what happens then: {{current_process}}
What marketing says the problem is: {{marketing_view}}
What sales says the problem is: {{sales_view}}
Lead volume and sales capacity: {{volume_and_capacity}}
What I sell and the typical buying process: {{context}}
Tools available for routing and tracking: {{tools}}

Produce:

**The definition, signed by both.** A single written definition of a qualified lead, covering both the fit criteria and the intent criteria, with specific thresholds. Both teams have to agree to the same words — most handoff disputes are definitional, and the recent decline in lead-to-opportunity conversion across the industry is largely explained by teams routing marketing-engaged contacts without any intent qualification. Include what explicitly does *not* qualify.

**Reconcile the two views.** {{marketing_view}} and {{sales_view}} are usually both accurate descriptions of different parts of the same failure. Name what's true in each, and identify the actual mechanism connecting them.

**Response-time commitment.** What sales commits to, per tier. Make this aggressive on the top tier — following up within the first hour is one of the highest-leverage variables in the whole system, and a defined commitment is what moves response from days back to minutes. State the commitment as a number, with what counts as a response.

**Routing rules.** Which leads go where, who owns each type, what happens to leads that don't qualify, and what happens out of hours or when the owner is unavailable. Cover the edge cases that quietly break routing: an existing customer, an existing open opportunity, a duplicate, a partner, and a lead from an account another rep already owns.

**Follow-up standard.** The minimum sequence before a lead can be marked dead — number of attempts, across which channels, over what period. Most "bad leads" were contacted once. Define what a genuine attempt looks like.

**Marketing's commitments.** Volume, quality thresholds, the context passed with each lead, and what data sales receives. A rep should get enough to make a relevant first contact without doing their own research.

**Recycling.** What happens to a lead sales rejects or can't reach — it should return to nurture, not die. Define the path back and the conditions for re-qualification. This is the single most common leak in the system.

**The feedback loop.** How sales reports back on lead quality in a way that's structured rather than anecdotal, how often the two teams review it together, and what data gets reviewed. Include the specific rejection reasons a rep can choose from, since free-text feedback never gets analyzed.

**Shared numbers.** The three metrics both teams are accountable to, and the one number that would tell us this agreement is working.

**Where this will break.** Given {{current_process}} and {{tools}}, the two most likely points of failure and how to detect each early.