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A RocketLevel guide for owners and sales and marketing leads, backed by decades of experience in the trade. About a 13-minute read.
If you run marketing and sales inside one shop, one of the most expensive leaks in your business is usually invisible. A lead comes in from a referral, a form, a card from a trade show, or a returned voicemail. Someone on the marketing side logs it, feels good, and moves on. Days later a rep notices it, cannot tell whether it is worth chasing, leaves it sitting, and it goes cold. Nobody decided to lose that lead. It just fell through the seam between two functions that were never connected with a clear rule.
This guide is for a shop that runs its own funnel, where the same handful of people wear both hats. Fixing it takes no big team and no fancy software, just a shared definition of a good lead, a speed rule, a short list of fields that travel with every lead, and an honest two-way agreement about who owes what to whom. That agreement is the service-level agreement (SLA), and it costs almost nothing to put in place.
The handoff fails for predictable, undramatic reasons. Marketing and sales quietly disagree about what even counts as a real lead, so marketing counts everything and sales trusts nothing. Context gets lost along the way, so a rep opens a lead with a name and a phone number and no idea why this person reached out or how interested they are. Nobody owns the clock, so a lead that needed a callback in 1 hour gets one in 3 days, long after the moment of interest passed. And the feedback never comes back, so marketing keeps producing more of whatever does not convert because nobody told them it was junk.
These are process gaps, and they get fixed with a simple, written, agreed set of rules.
The first fix is a shared definition of a lead that deserves a rep's time. For a restoration shop chasing commercial work, run all four tests below. A lead is sales-ready only when all four are yes, and every lead lands somewhere, so nothing sits undecided:
Then handle the near-misses on purpose, because that is where leads actually die. If the decision maker type and the fit test both pass but there is no stated reason for the conversation, or you have no route to anyone who decides, it is a holding contact rather than a lead. It goes on the holding list with a dated next step, not into the pipeline.
Holding is not nurture, and the two are worth keeping apart because they sit at opposite ends of the same funnel. Holding is where a contact waits before it has ever qualified. Nurture is where a qualified account goes after a good meeting that produced no current job, on a quarterly touch with a reason attached. If the decision maker type fails or the work sits outside your geography, facility types, or size range, it is not a commercial lead at all. Route it to the right place or close it with a reason, and tell marketing which it was.
Write this down in plain language and agree on it together. You want marketing and sales to stop arguing case by case because they decided ahead of time what good looks like, and what happens to everything that falls short.