Define your marketing and sales funnels and the handoff between them.
Map the buyer's journey to a marketing funnel and a sales/deal funnel — then document the stages, the handoff, and the operating cadence that make them work together. Educate yourself, capture your decisions, and export a draft your S&M leaders can sign.
What this tool is built around.
Read this before anything else. This tool works when Sales and Marketing use it to agree on a shared funnel and a shared number, rather than to settle attribution debates.
This tool is built around a shared deals goal that Sales and Marketing own together, supported by a defined, regular operating cadence. Attribution of individual leads and opportunities is treated as secondary to hitting that shared number.
The shared deals number, and the math behind it.
Anchor everything else. Every stage, target, and rejection reason traces back to this number.
Foundation questions
These determine your math: nurture lengths, recency windows, MQL targets, pipeline coverage. Wrong assumptions here cascade into every later stage, so complete them before moving on.
Buyer's journey, marketing funnel, deal funnel.
Three views of the same motion. The buyer's journey belongs to the buyer. The marketing and sales funnels belong to you — and must map cleanly to it.
The two funnel paths and where they meet.
The behavioral path runs Prospect → Lead → MQL → SAL. The declared-intent path runs Hand-Raiser → SAL. Both converge at SAL — the only stage where both teams must agree.
Define each stage on your terms.
Stages don't all apply to every business. Toggle off any you don't need (e.g. no outbound motion → skip Prospects). For each stage you keep, write your own definition, owner, entry/exit criteria, KPIs, and SLA.
Target accounts / audiences
The shared pool that sits above the funnels. In-ICP companies and people both Sales and Marketing may draw from — Marketing through demand programs, Sales through outbound. Not a marketing-only stage.
Prospects
Known contacts (name + email) who have not opted in. Run permission-respecting first-touch motions only — never put them into nurture they didn't opt into.
Leads (engaged / opted-in)
Contacts who have explicitly agreed to receive engagement. They want to learn — they have not requested a sales conversation. Move them toward a sales conversation with relevant value rather than pressure.
MQL — Marketing Qualified Lead
The three-part test: Fit (matches ICP) + Intent (one or more defined behavioral signals) + Recency (signals fresh, typically 7–30 days). Score-only definitions let cold-but-frequent contacts trigger MQL status.
Hand-raiser leads (HRL)
Buyer-declared intent: demo request, contact sales, pricing inquiry. Bypasses the MQL gate — a requested call should not wait behind qualification scoring. Speed to first touch is especially consequential at this stage.
SAL — Sales Accepted Lead
The interface where the handoff succeeds or fails. Both teams agree a lead is real before Sales commits resources; without an accepted-lead step, Marketing-qualified leads pass to Sales with no shared agreement that they are worth pursuing.
SQL / Opportunity
SALs that, after a Sales conversation, are confirmed as real buying opportunities — defined need, budget, timeline, decision process. Marketing's role shifts to air cover.
What keeps the handoff healthy.
Six things a healthy MQL→SAL relationship requires. Assess where you are on each — gaps here are a common source of Sales–Marketing friction.
Handoff requirements — current state
For each, write where you are today and the gap to good. "We don't have one" is a valid answer.
Both teams agree what an MQL is and what makes it acceptable. Written, versioned, reviewed quarterly.
Response-time commitments in both directions. Sales touches every MQL within X hrs; Marketing produces Y MQLs/week.
Explicit, observable signals Sales uses to accept or reject. Fit + intent + timing thresholds, documented.
Sales tells Marketing why a lead was rejected. Required field, reviewed weekly.
Recurring forum to review the handoff itself. Weekly pipeline review, both teams in the room.
Both teams measured against the same revenue number. Comp aligned to pipeline + closed-won, not silo'd activity.
A defined, regular operating rhythm.
Who meets, when, and what they decide. The stage definitions only hold if Sales and Marketing review them on a regular cadence.
Cadence plan
Define who's in the room and what they decide. These reviews are how the stage definitions stay current between Sales and Marketing.
Before you ship.
Check each only if both VPs would agree it's true today. Below, the anti-patterns to watch for.