Marketing to sales: the handoff rule

In many companies, the same conversation keeps coming back. Marketing: “we send contacts, and nobody calls them back.” Sales: “the contacts are not ready, we are wasting our time.” Both are often right, because one thing is missing: a rule written together that says when a contact moves from one team to the other, and what happens next.

This guide describes that rule for teams of 20 to 500 people. It is not about replacing salespeople with a score or a tool: they are the ones who turn an enquiry into a sale. It is about giving them the right contacts, at the right time, with what they need to know. It extends our guide to marketing automation for SMEs.

Why timing matters so much

An enquiry cools fast. A study published in the Harvard Business Review measured how long 2,241 US companies took to respond to a test enquiry sent through their website.

In another study, the same authors analysed 1.25 million enquiries: companies that tried to reach the contact within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to have a meaningful conversation with a decision maker as those that waited even an hour longer. The study is old and covers the US market, but it says something that has not aged: without a timing rule, some enquiries never get an answer.

What the rule contains

1. 01Who is ready.

   A profile (sector, size, role) and a deliberate action: a request for a quote or a meeting, a question asked during a webinar, a reply to an email. Both, not one or the other.

2. 02Who receives it.

   By sector, region, account size, or in turn. One name per contact, never “the team”.

3. 03How fast.

   A written deadline, counted in working hours, and what happens if it is missed (a reminder, then another salesperson).

4. 04With what.

   The contact’s source, their history (what they read, downloaded, asked for), and their question in their own words.

5. 05How the salesperson responds.

   Accepted, not ready yet, or out of target, always with a short reason.

6. 06The review.

   Each month, both teams look together at the contacts passed on, accepted, rejected and signed.

The rule fits on one page. It is written with sales, not for them: they are the ones who know which contact signs. It then goes into the year’s marketing plan, next to the objectives.

A score, or a simple rule?

Many tools offer a score: points for each page viewed, each click, each download, and a threshold above which the contact goes to sales. Scores have their uses, but they drift quickly if nobody checks them.

The right start combines both: an explicit request always goes through, without waiting for a score; the score is only used to rank the other contacts and tell marketing who deserves one more message. Reliable signals are those that require a deliberate action, as our guide to segmentation explains: a click, a reply, a registration, not an email open.

Feedback from sales

A “not ready yet” contact is not a failure: it goes back to marketing with the reason (“project next year”, “not the decision maker”, “budget not approved”). It then receives what fits its stage: the newsletter if they asked for it, a case study in their sector, an invitation to the next webinar. The reasons for rejection, counted each month, tell marketing what to change: a campaign’s target, the promise of content offered for an email address, the message of a post from the leader’s profile.

This feedback only exists if it is simple: one field in the CRM, three possible answers, a reason in a few words. A ten-question form will never be filled in.

No enquiry lost on the way

The most elaborate rule is useless if the enquiry never arrives. The most fragile path is often the most common one: a form that sends an email to a shared address.

We apply the same rule to our own website: every enquiry from the contact form is saved to storage hosted in the European Union before the email is sent, and the email only becomes the sole record if that storage fails. For an online plush toy store we work with, we delivered and tested in a single day a control centre that sends important events to four of the team’s channels; the same principle alerts a salesperson as soon as a contact meets the rule.

What AI can do, and what it leaves to sales

AI helps before the call: summarising a contact’s history in a few lines, grouping their questions, suggesting an order of priority in a list. Whatever the model, that summary gets reviewed, like any generated text (our method: review, source, sign). The call, the listening, the proposal and the negotiation remain the salesperson’s job, and that is the time the rule protects. What AI changes in marketing jobs is detailed in AI and digital marketing: what changes for agencies.

Measuring the rule

Four numbers are enough for the monthly review: contacts passed on, actual time to first contact, the share accepted by sales, and signed sales from those contacts. A low acceptance rate says the rule is too broad; a growing delay says the sales team is overloaded or the alert is not arriving. Our guide to automated marketing reporting pulls these numbers every week, and marketing attribution ties each sale to the channel that brought the contact: email campaigns or SEO in a new market, for instance.

All of this assumes a CRM where each contact keeps its source, its history and its salesperson. We use Twenty, an open source CRM, in production since early 2025: our feedback is in Twenty CRM in production.

Where to start

Bring the marketing lead and two salespeople together for an hour. Write down together the two criteria that make a contact ready, the callback deadline and the three possible answers. Check that a test enquiry actually arrives, saved, with the right salesperson. Review the rule after a month, numbers in hand.

For a handoff rule kept by the CRM, with alerts and each contact’s source, our digital marketing offer connects your forms, your campaigns and your salespeople.

Frequently asked questions