Is your company’s sales enablement process as effective as it could be? Think about it — how often do you hear about a lead that falls through the cracks, or a sales call that was a waste of time? Maybe more often than you’d like.

Frustration is common among marketing teams that feel their sales counterparts half-heartedly follow up on qualified sales ready leads, if at all. On the other hand, sales teams often complain that marketing hands over leads prematurely, or fails to properly vet them for quality. This disconnect could be hurting your business: the Aberdeen Group found that companies with strong sales and marketing alignment achieve a 32% increase in annual sales revenue growth.

If your sales and marketing teams have trouble working together, it could be evidence of a flawed lead management process. In a few steps, you can create standard expectations and procedures for a more successful lead gen, lead nurturing and sales conversion process.

Clearly define lead quality expectations
Disagreement over lead quality is one of the most common grievances between sales and marketing teams. Plan a discussion to jointly decide what constitutes a marketing lead, and at what point that lead becomes an opportunity ready for hand-off to the sales team. In the meantime, early-stage leads should remain in the marketing funnel for nurturing campaigns.

For example, a contact who likes your Facebook page is probably not ready to receive a sales call. On the other hand, a lead who visits the Services page of your website or fills out a form to request a demo is probably more receptive to hearing from someone on your sales team.

Decide what actions or “triggers” warrant a hand-off, and make sure everyone is on the same page.

Develop an SLA between Marketing and Sales
A service-level agreement (SLA) functions as an accountability contract between the sales and marketing teams. Marketing may be responsible for opportunity identification and generating a certain number of qualified opportunities per month (per agreed-upon standards), while the sales team.