Last week we talked about why moving boxes on an org chart rarely fixes scaling, and how real restructures touch people, processes, and the alignment between sales and marketing. The line that landed with a few of you was the one about moving the people because we won't move the decision.

This week I want to zoom in on one of those processes. The handover between marketing and sales, where you've spent the budget, run the campaigns, generated the leads, and then watched a worrying number of them vanish.

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It's been coming up everywhere lately, in different disguises, at different stages of business. A few stories from recent weeks worth pulling together.

A generous demand engine and a closing door

A portfolio business doing solid demand gen, where marketing was hitting their MQL targets and feeling pretty good about it. When we pulled the actual touchpoint data, the sales development team was making one or two attempts to reach a lead before quietly marking it dead. The widely cited industry benchmark sits at around 18.

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The maths is brutal. They were generating leads at decent cost and then writing most of them off inside 48 hours, often before the lead had even opened the follow-up email.

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Marketing wanted more budget. Sales wanted better leads. Both responses are reasonable, but neither one was the actual fix.

A process no one could see inside

Another business had outsourced its sales development entirely. The marketing team had built a respectable lead engine in-house, and qualified leads were being pushed across to the outsourced team through a chat tool (yes, really), copied by hand into a separate ticketing system, and reported back in a weekly spreadsheet. Nothing was connected. There was no view of what was happening to leads in the middle bit, only how many went in and how few came out.

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When the founder asked why pipeline wasn't growing in line with spend, no one had a clean answer. The honest answer was that no one could see inside the box.

Automating the bit you don't understand

The story I keep thinking about is the founder who decided to fix his outbound problem by removing his marketing lead and rebuilding the process himself, with a lot of automation bolted on the top. He didn't fully understand the process he was replacing, which was partly why he wanted to take it out of his head in the first place. The automation worked beautifully at the top of the funnel and broke at every handover point further down. Six months in, the team had lost the one person who knew how the original system was meant to fit together.

What's actually going on

This is the pattern worth flagging. Calling it a sales issue or a marketing issue lets both teams off the hook. It's a process and ownership problem, sitting in the gap that the org chart never quite shows.

If any of that felt uncomfortably familiar, here's what tends to actually help. None of it is glamorous and all of it is doable inside a quarter.

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• Treat the whole funnel as one shared system, owned by sales and marketing together. The "sales owns this bit, marketing owns that bit" framing is often what creates the gap in the first place
• Get everyone on the same tools. Two CRMs that don't talk to each other, or a CRM plus a separate ticketing system being updated by hand, will quietly cost you pipeline every week
• Run shared reporting on a regular rhythm, with both teams in the room looking at the same numbers. If marketing and sales are reading different dashboards, you'll never agree on what's actually happening
• Agree the cadence and stick to it. If the benchmark is 18 touchpoints, your team shouldn't be calling a lead dead at 2
• Be careful about automating processes you've stopped wanting to think about. Automate the ones you genuinely understand, and keep a human close to the rest

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The thread back to last week is this. The structure can look perfectly sensible while all of this is happening underneath. People in the right roles, the right tools in place, and the money still leaking out through the gaps in between.

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If you've got a nagging feeling this is happening in your business but you can't quite point at where, drop me a line. It's one of the first things we map in week one of most engagements, and it tends to pay for itself before the quarter is out.