The 70% nobody measured

Key findings

1. 01

   Each side traces the same failure to the other, and the research says why. A study of the "thought worlds" of the two functions found that they differ in what they speak for, the customer or the product, and in knowledge and skills². The oldest study here, from 2006, opens on the complaint each side makes: marketing blames the follow-up, and sales blames the leads¹.

2. 02

   Inside sales, leaders and sellers describe the same leads differently. Asked for their sales organization's top source of leads, 42% of top executives named referrals and 24% the sales team's own prospecting. Among individual contributors it was 23% and 44%³.

3. 03

   Sellers give leads from marketing a small part of their time. Among 461 sales reps at four B2B firms, leads from marketing took 5.7% of working time on average, and leads the reps found themselves 15.6%⁴.

4. 04

   The most quoted number in this dispute was not measured by the study that made it famous. The claim that sellers never contact 70% of marketing's leads comes from trade publications. The study cites it, measures something else, and notes that the figure reflects on marketing as much as on sales⁴.

5. 05

   Better qualification wins sellers' time. Closer tracking does not. In the same study, a 1% higher rating of how well leads were qualified went with 1.12% more time on them, and 1% more tracking by managers with 0.14% less⁴.

6. 06

   Pay that rewards one side widens the gap. Among 196 sales and marketing managers, rewards focused solely on sales or solely on marketing widened the distance between the integration they had and the integration they wanted, and that distance went with lower firm performance⁵.

7. 07

   Not every difference should be closed. Market performance was higher where one side argued for the customer and the other for the product. Differences in product knowledge went with lower performance².

Do sales and marketing mean the same thing by a lead?

They start from different places. No source here counts how many companies share one definition of a qualified lead. What the research describes is why a definition is hard to share. A study of the "thought worlds" of the two functions found differences of two kinds. One is orientation: one side speaks for the customer and the other for the product, one for the short term and the other for the long term. The other is competence: product knowledge and interpersonal skills². A study of 337 companies based in the European Union found five distinct arrangements of marketing and sales, and concluded that the roles of the two vary a great deal from company to company⁶. A lead is defined inside one of those arrangements. There is no definition that holds across them.

The two sides also read the same failure differently. In interviews with 42 people in 21 pairs of a sales person and a marketing person, the same breakdown set off different explanations on each side, and the response each side chose sometimes worked against fixing it⁷. The complaint the 2006 study opens on has the same shape: each side names the other's work as the cause¹.

Do the head of sales and the sellers count the same leads?

Not by their own account. A software vendor's survey of more than 6,200 people in 99 countries asked which source brings their sales organization the most leads. Overall, 37% named leads the sales team finds itself, 32% referrals and 28% leads from marketing. Split by job title, the answers part. Top executives named referrals most often (42%) and the sales team's own prospecting least (24%). Individual contributors answered the other way round: 23% and 44%. Managers were closer to the individual contributors (22% and 49%), and vice presidents and directors closer to the executives (39% and 33%)³.

Both ends of the company gave marketing about the same share, 30% and 31%. The disagreement inside the sales organization is over where the rest comes from: relationships the company already has, or work the sellers do. The survey is from 2018 and most of its respondents were the vendor's own contacts, so read it as a pattern, not a measure.

What happens to a lead after it is handed over?

It competes for a seller's time, and mostly loses. The one study we found that measured this asked 461 sales reps at four B2B firms (scientific instruments, chemicals, copiers and computers) how they divide their time. On average 5.7% went to leads from marketing, 15.6% to leads the reps had found themselves, and 78.8% to everything that is not winning a new customer⁴.

The pay explains part of it. The reps were paid mainly on quota, commission and bonuses for sales, some of it tied to winning new customers. At none of the four firms did any part of the pay reward following up a lead from marketing⁴.

The famous number is borrowed. The same paper opens with the sentence that made the "sales lead black hole" known: sales reps never contact about 70% of the leads their marketing departments generate. The paper does not measure that figure. It cites two trade publications for it, and adds in a footnote that there can be more leads than reps could pursue even if they wished to, so the figure reflects on marketing as well as on sales⁴. Among the sources we read there is no peer-reviewed measurement of the share of leads that are never contacted.

More leads do not help by themselves. A study built with one large home improvement retailer followed inquiries through to appointments and sales. Its authors conclude that a high volume of leads can hurt later sales, through effort wasted on poorly qualified leads and through delays in follow-up when the sales force has limited capacity¹. In the four-firm study, 1% more leads from marketing went with a 0.07% smaller share of time spent on them⁴.

Why do sellers pass over leads they were given?

Because they rate them low. In the 2018 survey, respondents rated the quality of leads from each source on a scale of 1 to 5. 59% gave referrals one of the two top marks, 49% gave them to leads the sales team found itself, and 28% to leads from marketing. 27% gave marketing's leads one of the two bottom marks³.

Marketers in the same survey ranked the sources the other way. Asked which source gives the sales team its best leads, 60% named inbound marketing, 21% the leads the sales team finds itself and 18% outbound work such as cold calls and trade shows³. Each side rates its own leads highest.

The four-firm study shows what a low rating does. Reps scored how well their firm qualifies leads before passing them on at 2.87 on a scale of 1 to 7, on average. Where they rated it higher, they gave the leads more time: across the sample, a 1% higher rating went with 1.12% more of their time on marketing's leads, and between 0.58% and 1.64% more at each of the four firms⁴.

Checking on sellers does not bring the leads back. Tracking by managers went the other way: across the sample, 1% more of it went with 0.14% less time on marketing's leads. The direction differed by firm. It was negative at the instruments and chemicals firms and positive at the copier and computer firms, most of all at the copier firm, whose reps were the least experienced (8.83 years on average, against 11.92 overall). With experience, reps responded less to tracking and to the number of leads, and more to how well the leads were qualified⁴. Tracking is the head of sales' usual lever. On experienced sellers, in this study, it worked backwards.

Who decides what counts as qualified?

Often a third team, which answers to one of the two sides. Many B2B companies put a sales development team between marketing and the sellers: people who research a lead, make the first contact and pass it on. A field study that interviewed 13 people at eight firms describes those three steps (lead research, engagement and handover) and four settings in which they differ: inbound or outbound, aimed at a person or at an account⁸.

In a consultancy's survey of 351 B2B companies, most of them North American software companies, 60% of these teams report to sales, 26% to marketing and 10% to a C-level executive, a split the survey says has held since 2012. 60% of the reps were at quota, the lowest share in the survey's history⁹. The step the definition dispute is about usually sits inside one of the parties to it.

Above the two functions there is rarely a referee. In an independent survey of top marketers, 72% said marketing and sales work together on an equal basis, 10.3% that marketing sits within sales and 7% that sales sits within marketing¹⁰. Where the two are equals, a dispute over a definition has nobody to settle it short of the chief executive.

What does each side ask for, and what works?

• Sellers: leads worth the callSellers ask for leads that were checked before they arrive. It is the factor their time followed most closely, and they scored their firms' checking at 2.87 out of 7⁴.
• Lead generation: follow-up on what it sendsMarketing's standing complaint is poor follow-up by sales¹. The time study gives it some ground: marketing's leads got 5.7% of sellers' time, and 39 of the reps surveyed gave them none⁴.
• The head of sales: sellers who work the leadsThe manager's lever is tracking what sellers do with the leads they are given. In the time study, more tracking went with slightly less time on marketing's leads, and experienced reps responded to it least⁴.

Working together goes with better results. A study of collaboration between sales and marketing found a direct and positive relationship with business performance. It names five things that come before collaboration: the attitude of senior management, less conflict between the departments, better communication, organizational learning and market intelligence systems¹¹. Among the five arrangements found across 337 companies, the most successful had strong structural links between marketing and sales, and a marketing unit that knew the market well⁶.

Sameness does not. The study of thought worlds separates differences that hurt from differences that help. Differences in product knowledge and in interpersonal skills went with lower market performance. Performance was higher where one side argued for the customer and the other for the product, and where one side argued for the short term and the other for the long term. That gain outweighed what the difference cost in cooperation². What the evidence supports is a shared count and a shared language. It does not support a single point of view.

Pay matters. In a survey of 196 sales and marketing managers at several firms, rewards that focused solely on sales or solely on marketing widened the gap between the integration managers had and the integration they wanted, however much the two functions depended on each other. A wider gap went with lower firm performance⁵.

A written agreement between the two functions is the usual advice, and it is not the usual practice. In the 2018 survey, 26% described their company's sales and marketing as tightly aligned or working to a service-level agreement, a written statement of what each side owes the other³.

Can a score settle it?

Only where there is a record to score. A review of 44 studies of lead scoring, published from 2005 to 2022, sorts the methods into two families. Traditional scoring rests on rules and points set from sales people's experience and judgment, and the review calls it prone to error because the values are chosen by hand. Predictive scoring is driven by data, and in the studies reviewed it had the more positive effect on sales performance, measured most often by the share of leads that become customers¹².

Our reading: a rule written by one side is that side's opinion with a number on it, and the other side will treat it as one. A score built from what happened to past leads is at least an account both sides can check. The review itself traces low conversion mostly to the low quality of the leads in the queues sales teams work from¹², which is the sellers' complaint, put in a researcher's words.

Either kind of score needs one place where a lead, its source and what became of it are written down. In the European Union in 2025, 28.51% of enterprises with ten or more persons employed used CRM software: 24.69% of the small ones and 65.43% of the large ones¹³. Where there is no shared record, each side counts from its own list.

The research has a gap in the same place. A systematic review of more than 25 years of studies of how sales and marketing work together names four directions the field has still to cover. Two of them are digital technologies and small and medium-sized firms¹⁴. That suggests most of what is known comes from companies large enough to have two departments.

What this does not show

• The studies that measure the handover are old. The peer-reviewed work that looks at lead follow-up directly dates from 2006 to 2013, before most of the tools teams use now. The newer evidence is surveys, interviews and reviews of earlier studies.
• Two of the fourteen sources come from firms that sell to the people they asked. One is a software vendor's survey and one a consultancy's. We sell business software too. Read their numbers, and our reading of them, with that in mind.
• We read eight of the ten studies in abstract only. What we report from them is what their authors put in the abstract. The full papers may qualify it, and two of the abstracts do not give the size of the sample.
• The time study is four firms. It covers 461 reps at four B2B firms with field sales forces, who reported their own time. Nobody measured it. Reps who gave marketing's leads no time were left out of the analysis.
• These are associations. No source here gave a practice to some teams and withheld it from others. "Went with" does not mean "caused".
• The survey of lead sources is from 2018. Most of its respondents were the vendor's own contacts and partners, and it does not say how many people are in each job-title group.
• Nobody has measured the share of leads that are never contacted. The figure of 70% is quoted from trade publications.
• No source here counts how many companies share one definition of a qualified lead. The studies describe why the two sides differ. They do not say how often.
• Companies without two departments are missing. The research was done where marketing and sales are separate units, and the official figures cover enterprises with ten or more persons employed. Where one person finds the leads and also sells, none of these sources applies directly.