Agreeing when a lead is ready for sales
How a software company's sales and marketing people can agree when a lead is ready for an account executive, and how the SaaS pack routes it.
By Achekam · · 5 min read · For Software (SaaS) businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
Launching soon. The Industry CRM add-on described in this article is launching soon. This article describes it as it will work at launch.
Marketing says last month's webinar filled the pipeline. The account executives say they spent the month phoning people who signed up for a trial out of curiosity and never meant to buy. Both sides are describing the same list of names, and both believe the other is wasting the company's money.
The argument comes back every month in many software companies, from a two-founder start-up in Lagos to a scale-up in Johannesburg, because nobody has written down what a sales-ready lead actually is. This article looks at why the two teams disagree, how to agree a definition and a hand-off, when you can skip the formality, and how the SaaS pack in Achekam's Industry CRM add-on routes a lead once the rule exists.
Two teams, two views of the same customer
Writing in Harvard Business Review in 2006, Kotler, Rackham and Krishnaswamy looked closely at this friction. They found that sales departments tend to believe marketers are out of touch with what is really happening with customers, while marketing believes the sales force is myopic: too focused on individual customer experiences and not aware enough of the wider market. Their article, Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing, is still one of the clearest accounts of how the two functions drift apart and what managers can do about it.
The authors put the strains into two groups. One is economic: a single budget is usually split between the two functions, and not always evenly, so every lead marketing claims is also an argument about next year's money. The other is cultural: sales and marketing attract very different types of people, who measure success differently and talk about customers in different words.
Neither cause goes away with a pep talk. What helps is taking the most contested decision, which leads deserve a salesperson's time, out of the realm of opinion.
Write down what counts as a lead
The same research describes a "defined" relationship, in which sales and marketing set up processes and rules to prevent disputes and start building a common language in contentious areas, such as how to define a lead. For a product-led software company, the words to define usually come in three layers:
- Lead: anyone who has given you contact details, through a sign-up, a download or an event.
- Marketing-qualified lead: a lead who fits the customer you sell to (the right kind and size of business, in a country you serve) and has shown interest beyond the first contact.
- Product-qualified lead: a trial user who has done something in the product that your paying customers typically do early, such as inviting colleagues or connecting their data.
The exact signals are yours to choose, and they should come from looking at the customers who did buy. What matters is that both teams sign off on the same one-page definition and that it names the evidence: "invited colleagues during the trial", not "seems keen".
Hand-off points and rules of engagement
Kotler, Rackham and Krishnaswamy advise that where conflicts between sales and marketing come up regularly, managers need clear rules of engagement, including hand-off points for important tasks such as following up sales leads. In practice the rules answer four questions:
| Question | Who answers it |
|---|---|
| When does a lead become product-qualified? | The written definition, applied the same way every time |
| Who receives it? | A routing rule: by region, company size or product line |
| How quickly must the account executive respond? | An agreed number of working days, set by the sales manager |
| What happens to a lead sales rejects? | It goes back to marketing with a reason, never silently dropped |
The last row matters most. A rejected lead with a reason is information marketing can use to tighten the definition. A lead that simply stops being called is another round of the same argument.
When informal is good enough
Not every company needs this machinery. The HBR authors note that in a small business, sales and marketing may enjoy good informal relationships that need not be disturbed, especially where marketing's role is mainly to support the sales force. If the founder still takes every demo and one person runs the website and the newsletter, a weekly conversation over the trial sign-ups may be all the process you need.
The signs that you have outgrown it are practical ones: leads that nobody followed up, two salespeople calling the same trial user, or a month-end debate about whose campaign produced a deal. When those start, write the definition down.
How the SaaS pack routes a product-qualified lead
The SaaS & B2B tech pack in Achekam's Industry CRM add-on uses the vocabulary a software company already speaks: customers are Accounts, deals are Opportunities, implementation work is an Onboarding project and quotes are Order forms. An opportunity moves from Trial to Product-qualified, Demo held, Proposal sent, Negotiation and Won.
When a lead reaches Product-qualified, the pack routes it to an account executive by the business's own rule, then runs discovery, a demo, an optional security-review request, the order form and its electronic signature. Converting a lead creates the customer and the opportunity at once and starts the opportunity's workflow, so nobody retypes the trial user's details.
Stage gates hold the rules of engagement in place. A record cannot move into some stages until set conditions are met, such as a customer being named, an amount being set or a signature being done, and an opportunity cannot be marked Won until the signature task on it is complete. One limit to plan around: the pack does not read usage from your product. A usage score is typed in or imported, so deciding that a trial user has crossed your product-qualified line remains a job for a person or for your own export from the product.
For what happens after the hand-off, see moving a trial through to a won deal and handling a security review inside a deal.
A first step for this week
Put the head of marketing and the person who closes most deals in one room with the last few customers you won. Agree, from what those customers actually did during their trials, the one or two signals that make a lead product-qualified, and write the routing rule beside it. Everything else, including the software, is easier once that page exists.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
