Problem · Owners
Leads come in and they sit there. Nobody follows up.
You paid for the ad, the page worked, the form fired, and the lead went to an inbox where it aged. This is the seam between marketing and sales, and it belongs to nobody, which is why more than 70 percent of marketing leads are never contacted by sales at all. It is the cheapest pipeline you will ever buy, because the leads are already paid for.
How people search thisleads not being followed up · sales not following up on marketing leads · lead response time small business · what happens to inbound leads · marketing and sales handoff process
On Catalyst and above, every lead is worked within one business day by a person on our team, with a written follow up sequence behind it. The lead handoff runbook is the fifth of the eight runbooks in the Protocol, if your team would rather run it. Pricing is published.
Why the seam exists
Marketing is measured on leads produced. Sales is measured on deals closed. The step between them, contacting the lead fast and well, counts for neither, so neither owns it. Add a second vendor and the seam becomes a canyon: the agency shows 40 leads, sales remembers 6, and everyone is telling the truth.
A quote request that waits four days is a quote request answered by a competitor. Inquiries answered within five minutes convert at multiples of inquiries answered the next day, and a typical B2B prospect needs five or more touches before agreeing to a meeting. Most companies deliver one touch, late.
The fix costs discipline before it costs money
Write a response standard: every inbound lead gets a human reply within one business day, and a phone attempt within one hour during business hours. Write the sequence: reply, call, email with the relevant page, call, break up email, over ten business days. Route every form to one queue with an owner and a timestamp. Report on time to first touch weekly. That is the entire runbook and it fits on one page.
In our engagements, fixing the handoff before touching any new channel has produced more held meetings in month one than any campaign, because the leads were already there.
What we do about it on each tier
Catalyst at $5,000 a month includes lead follow up within one business day, worked by our team, with the sequence written to your offer. Kinetic adds the outbound seat, which runs the same sequences on cold prospects and confirms every meeting so it holds. If you would rather own it, the Protocol teaches the lead handoff runbook to your team in a day for $5,000, or $3,500 as a client.
Questions on this problem
A CRM records the failure with timestamps. The fix is a person with a standard and a sequence. Our CRM build at $4,000 configures HubSpot or Pipedrive to the runbook, and it only helps once the runbook exists.
Pull the last 90 days of form submissions and match them to first contact dates. Most companies find a third were never contacted. That third is your first month of new pipeline.
On Catalyst and Kinetic, our team makes first contact within a business day and books the meeting. Your closer takes the meeting. We brief you before it.
George Stoff, Founder and Lead Engineer
Thirty years building software, brands, and demand. On every account.