Marketing–Sales Handover

Marketing says they sent qualified leads. Sales says those were not leads. Nobody has the data to settle the argument, so it repeats every quarter. The root cause is not a people problem or a technology gap. It is that marketing and sales define "qualified" differently and neither side has written down the evidence required before a lead crosses the handover line.

MQL-to-SQL conversion rates look healthy in the dashboard while pipeline quality deteriorates underneath. The scoring model rewards engagement signals — downloads, webinar attendance, pricing page visits — that correlate with curiosity, not buying intent. Sales accepts leads to avoid the confrontation, then quietly disqualifies them two weeks later. The metric is green. The pipeline is hollow.

The answers below dissect the specific failure modes in the marketing-to-sales handover and explain what a functioning handover process actually looks like when built on shared definitions and shared data.