A marketing-to-sales handover agreement: what to write down

Marketing says it sent sixty leads this month. Sales says twenty were real and the rest never answered the phone. Both are telling the truth, and the argument will repeat next month unless someone writes down what a lead is. A handover agreement is one page that says what counts as a lead, who is called, how quickly, what sales reports back, and what happens when the call does not happen. Write it as eight short clauses that both sides can read in two minutes. For the wider question of how the two teams work together, see how marketing and sales teams can work together. This post is the written-down version.

Clauses 1 to 3: what is handed over, to whom, and when

1. A lead is. Name the test in plain words. For example: "a person with a working phone number, in a city we serve, who has said what they want to buy." An enquiry from a job seeker or a supplier selling to you is not a lead. It goes to a different person and is not counted.

2. The receiver. One named person, with one named cover. Not "the sales team". A shared inbox is a place where enquiries wait for someone else to pick them up.

3. First contact. State the time in working hours, not as "ASAP". For example: "within [number] working hours of the enquiry, and by [time] if it came overnight". Fill in a number your people can actually keep. A promise nobody keeps teaches everyone to ignore the page.

Clauses 4 to 6: what comes back

4. Outcome in the sheet. Every enquiry gets a status within a day of the first call: reached, not reached, quote sent, lost, won. Marketing reads these, so they need to be one of a fixed list.

5. Reason codes for rejection. If sales rejects an enquiry, it picks one reason from a short list. For a firm selling cabinet hardware to carpenters, the list might be: wrong product, outside area, price only, no answer after three tries, existing customer, spam. Free-text reasons cannot be counted.

6. Marketing's duty to listen. Marketing reads the rejection codes before it changes any ad, form or page, and says what it changed. Otherwise sales stops filling the codes in, since nothing visibly happens when it does.

Clauses 7 and 8: when it goes wrong

7. The unanswered enquiry. Say what happens when the first-contact time is missed. The cheapest rule that works: after the deadline, the enquiry is reassigned to the cover person automatically, and the missed case is noted against the original receiver without drama. The next morning, the owner reads the list of reassigned enquiries.

8. The dispute. If the two sides disagree about whether an enquiry was a lead, the owner decides on the day and writes the ruling in the margin. The definition changes only when the same ruling comes up three times.

An invented example: where the agreement caught a real leak

Consider a Hubballi dealer in industrial paints with one person running Google Ads and a second on the phone. The dealer and the numbers are invented to show the pattern. Marketing reported 60 leads in a month. Sales said 20 were real.

Neither side was lying. The form let people choose "Enquiry" with no product, and the person on the phone treated those as noise. The agreement gave them a test: product named, city in Karnataka or Goa, number answers. Under it, 41 of the 60 qualified, and the rejection codes showed 14 of the rest were people asking for a job at the factory.

The mistake was the form, not the people. They added a "What do you need?" dropdown and moved the job question to a separate link. The rejected pile shrank the next month.

The second catch came from clause 7. Nine qualified enquiries were still unanswered after the deadline on the Monday after a holiday weekend. They moved to the cover person on their own, and the owner saw the list on Tuesday morning. Two had already bought elsewhere. That cost was visible for the first time, and the owner changed who covers on Mondays.

The log that makes clauses 4 to 7 work

One shared sheet is enough, and every enquiry is a row.

Two columns do the arguing for you: first-call time against the promise, and the reject code against the fixed list.

What the agreement does not do

It does not fix a weak offer or a slow quote. It does not make an unwilling salesperson call back; clause 7 only makes the failure visible quickly.

Skip the formal page if you have fewer enquiries than one person can remember. Keep a note on the sheet instead: who calls, by when.

It also should not set a conversion target for sales that marketing cannot influence. Agree on reply time, outcomes recorded and reasons coded. Orders depend on price, stock and the buyer's mood, and neither side controls those.

A text you can paste

Handover agreement, [business], [date].

1. A lead has a working number, a stated need and a location we serve.
2. [Name] receives leads; [name] covers.
3. First call within [hours] working hours.
4. Status entered in the sheet the next working day.
5. Rejections use one code from the list.
6. Marketing reads the codes before changing any ad or form.
7. A missed first call is reassigned to the cover.
8. The owner decides disputes the same day.

Getting it signed without a long meeting

Draft it yourself, send it to both sides and ask only what they would change. People edit a draft happily and resent a blank page.

Put the page where both can see it, next to the sheet it refers to. The sales hub covers the rest of the sales side. For a second pair of eyes on the clauses and the codes, see marketing-to-sales SLA development, or tell us what you need.