Every marketing dollar feels hard-earned, yet too many leads slip away the moment they leave your nurture campaigns. Research shows that 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales, often because they’re passed along without the context or cadence needed to close the deal. Even more alarming, while 61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to sales, only 27% of those leads are actually qualified. When marketing, sales, and onboarding operate in silos, prospects vanish into a “ghost handoff” that torpedoes revenue and damages trust.
A Fault Line in Your Funnel
Imagine prospect “ACME Corp.” downloads your whitepaper, visits the pricing page twice, and requests a demo, only to receive a generic email from sales two days later. Meanwhile, your onboarding team assumes all new customers share the same needs. According to Marketo, organizations with true sales-marketing alignment close 67% more deals and generate 208% more revenue from their marketing efforts. Without shared definitions of what constitutes a truly qualified lead, every handoff becomes a potential point of failure.
Aligning Ownership and Timing
Fixing the ghost handoff starts with a cross-functional workshop, not a new software purchase. Bring together leaders from marketing, sales, and customer success to agree on the precise moment a lead becomes “sales-qualified,” for example, a lead score above 75 and a demo request scheduled. Then define the exact criteria for “closed-won,” including payment confirmation and kickoff scheduling, so onboarding teams start with full visibility into expectations and commitments.
Embedding Accountability and Visibility
Once handoff definitions are locked in, translate them into your CRM. Automate the creation of follow-up tasks the moment a trigger fires, and make fields like “next touch date” and “handoff notes” mandatory before any handoff is considered complete. Create a living “transition summary” that dynamically pulls in firmographic details, key pain points, and the content that drove engagement, so every stakeholder sees the same story. Finally, track the time elapsed between marketing’s pass and sales’s first outreach, as well as between contract signature and onboarding kickoff, in a shared dashboard reviewed in weekly alignment huddles.
Your Next Move
Reclaim the revenue lost to ghost handoffs this quarter by booking a Handoff Health Check. With clear ownership, automated triggers, and live visibility, you’ll turn haunted handoffs into seamless handovers—and watch your pipeline metrics climb.
Work Habits & Productivity
Ryan, the Director of Service Operations at StringCan Interactive, orchestrates our technical service strategy to enhance client operations and experience. With deep expertise in tech and operations management, he's committed to driving innovation and operational excellence. Ryan's leadership ensures our team exceeds client expectations, contributing significantly to where StringCan invests time and resources.
Jay, the CEO of StringCan, oversees strategy and vision, building culture that makes going into work something he looks forward to, recruiting additional awesome team members to help exceed clients goals, leading the team and allocating where StringCan invests time and money.
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