Session 1 — Write the criteria together (90 minutes)
Bring twenty real records, not opinions
Ten that sales considered good, ten it rejected. Working from live examples keeps the conversation out of abstraction.
Extract the pattern into four components
Fit, need, timing, access — each as something observable and recordable. Any criterion that cannot be captured in a field will not survive contact with a busy week.
Run the agreement test
Both teams classify twenty fresh records independently. Under ninety percent agreement means rewrite, not retrain.
Version and date the criteria
Put them somewhere both teams can see, with a version date. Undated criteria become two remembered versions within a month.
Session 2 — Define the contract (60 minutes)
| Part | Decision to make | Typical answer |
|---|---|---|
| Trigger | What moves a record to sales | Criteria met and detected automatically where possible |
| Owner | Who receives it | Assigned by the routing rules, never a shared queue |
| Required input | What must accompany it | Source, qualification answers, intent signal, promises made |
| Standard | What sales must do | First contact inside the response standard; disposition recorded within five working days |
| Deadline | When it returns | No contact in two working days returns it to marketing automatically |
| Escalation | Who is told on breach | Owner at the standard, sales manager at the breach |
Build — enforce it in the system
- Qualification answers are structured fields, not notes. Notes cannot be reported on, and unreportable criteria cannot be improved.
- Acceptance is an explicit action with a timestamp, so the boundary can be measured on both sides.
- Rejection requires a structured reason from a fixed list — wrong fit, wrong timing, no authority, unreachable, duplicate, other with a note.
- Untouched leads return automatically at the deadline, and the return is visible to both teams.
- The source field is written once at creation and locked against later overwrites.
Run — one report, one meeting
A single funnel table, produced from the CRM, read by both teams: leads, qualified, accepted, opportunities, won — with rejection reasons broken out beside it. Fifteen minutes, monthly, with the criteria review on the same agenda.
The failure modes
| Symptom | Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Rejection rate near zero | Reps accept everything to avoid friction | Make rejection cost-free and visibly useful; review reasons publicly |
| Acceptance timestamps missing | Acceptance is implicit | Make it an explicit action with a due time |
| Criteria quietly ignored | They were written by one function | Re-run the joint session with real records |
| Returned leads never reworked | No owner on the marketing side | Name an owner for returns and report on the queue |
Related work
The problem statement is marketing and sales disagree on lead quality, and the routing layer underneath it is the lead routing playbook.
Muhammad Sameed Abid
Muhammad Sameed Abid is a business operations, automation and growth systems professional with 9+ years across operations management, workflow and CRM automation, marketing operations and customer success. He is currently Head of Customer Success at GHA Marketing and writes here about the operating layer underneath growth.