Your leads aren't disappearing. They're getting lost between teams.

"We need more leads" is one of the most common requests we hear from B2B companies. When we look at the data, the picture is usually different. The leads exist. They arrive through the website, trade fairs, email campaigns, paid ads, partners and the phone. The problem is what happens next.

The symptoms

If several of these sound familiar, the issue is probably not volume:

• Sales says marketing leads are "poor quality", and marketing says sales "doesn't follow up".
• Nobody can say with confidence which channel produced last quarter's revenue.
• Trade fair contacts sit in spreadsheets for weeks.
• The same company appears three times in the CRM under slightly different names.
• Monthly reporting means exporting data from several tools and stitching it together by hand.

Why more campaigns make it worse

Every new campaign adds leads to a system that already loses them. Spend rises, the share of leads followed up falls, and the conclusion — "marketing doesn't work" — is wrong. In a recent project for an industrial equipment distributor, leads came in from 11 different sources. Only around 55% were ever followed up by sales, and the average response took two days.

Five fixes that matter more than the next campaign

1. One entry point. Every lead, from every source, lands in the same place — usually the CRM — automatically, without manual import.
2. Clean data on arrival. Deduplication and basic enrichment happen before a salesperson ever sees the record.
3. Lead scoring the sales team believes in. Build the score from historical won and lost deals, then validate it with the people who will use it. A score sales does not trust is ignored within a month.
4. Routing and response rules. Each lead goes to a named owner by region and product line, with an agreed response time and an alert when it is missed.
5. Nurture for "not yet". Most B2B leads are not ready to buy today. Automated, relevant email sequences — in the buyer's language — keep them warm until they are.

Measure the handover, not just the funnel

Three numbers tell you whether the system works:

• Response time — from enquiry to first contact.
• Follow-up rate — the share of leads that receive any contact at all.
• Revenue by source — which channels produce deals, not just form fills.

After the distributor's leads were unified and routed automatically, response time fell from two days to under four hours, the follow-up rate rose to 96%, and monthly reporting became fully automatic.

A realistic 90-day plan

• Weeks 1–3: map every lead source and handover point; interview marketing and sales.
• Weeks 4–6: agree the data model, scoring logic and routing rules with both teams.
• Weeks 7–10: build integrations and automation; test with live leads.
• Weeks 11–13: launch the dashboard, train the teams and set review routines.