SUMMARY: Which best practices are marketers NOT using to effectively manage their marketing-to-sales process? The one that stands out here is the ability to hand leads back to marketing when they have proven not to be sales worthy. These are usually qualified prospects that simply aren’t ready to purchase. And not having process to handle this is a missed opportunity by allowing these future sales to fall through this gaping crack in the pipeline.

Closely aligning marketing and sales is essential to creating a productive new business pipeline. As this chart demonstrates, many marketing and sales organizations are collaborating at the shallow end of the pool ” by mutually engaging in best practices like defining what a sales-ready lead is ” but few are diving deeper to make the pipeline flow in both directions. Read more at www.marketingsherpa.com