Leads don’t fall through stages. They fall through handoffs.

Every team that says leads are falling through the cracks can tell you the number. Almost none can tell you who was supposed to catch them.

That’s the actual problem. Not the number.

A lead never falls through a stage. It falls through a handoff — the gap where one team has stopped being responsible and the next hasn’t started yet. We’ve already written about where they end up. This is about who was meant to be holding them.

There are only four places a lead can be

Capture. Handover. Nurture. Conversion.

Everything else is a variation on those four. Each one needs three things written down: who owns it, what triggers the next step, and the moment it stops being their job. Get those three on paper and most of the cracks close. Leave them implied and no amount of tooling helps, because tooling can only enforce a decision you’ve already made.

Capture: marketing owns it, including the part it doesn’t enjoy

Marketing owns the lead from the click to the record. Not to the form fill — to the record. Those are different, and the difference is where the first leaks live.

A form that submits but doesn’t write source. A chatbot conversation nobody syncs. An event list that lands in a spreadsheet and gets imported in March. A LinkedIn form whose fields don’t map. Every one of those is a captured lead that isn’t a captured lead.

The test is unglamorous: can you take any lead in the CRM and say, without opening a second tab, where it came from and what it asked for? If not, capture isn’t finished, no matter how good the campaign was.

Handover: the crack with a name

This is the one. Almost every lead you’ve lost was lost here.

Handover is not a stage. It’s an event — a specific moment when responsibility moves from marketing to a BDR, or a BDR to an AE. And an event needs four things defined or it doesn’t happen reliably: the trigger, the receiver, the deadline, and what happens when the deadline passes.

Most teams define one of the four. They define the trigger — a score, a demo request, a form — and stop. So the lead is handed to a queue rather than a person, with no clock on it and no consequence for silence. A queue is not a receiver. A queue is a waiting room with no receptionist.

Name the person or the rule that names the person. Put a clock on it. Decide what happens at hour twenty-five — reassign, escalate, or return it to nurture. Anything is better than the current default, which is that the lead sits there being technically owned by someone who never saw it.

Nurture: the job nobody puts their hand up for

Nurture is where leads go when they’re real but early. It’s also the only one of the four with no natural owner, which is why it’s usually nobody’s.

Marketing thinks sales has it, because there’s a name and a company. Sales thinks marketing has it, because it isn’t ready. Both are behaving reasonably. The lead ages out anyway.

Give it to marketing explicitly, with a defined exit — the behaviour that sends it back to a human, and the date it’s declared dead. A nurture with no exit isn’t a nurture. It’s a mailing list with better branding.

Conversion: sales owns it, right up until it doesn’t

Sales owns the deal. Nobody argues with that.

The gap is what happens when the deal stops moving. A stalled deal is a lead again — it just doesn’t look like one, because it’s sitting in a pipeline with an owner and a close date that’s been pushed four times. It has all the appearance of being handled.

Decide, in advance, when a deal stops being a deal and goes back into nurture. Sixty days without a meeting. Two pushed close dates. Pick a rule you can enforce in the system. Otherwise your pipeline slowly fills with things that are technically open and functionally gone, and your forecast stops meaning anything.

Equal responsibility is not shared responsibility

Marketing, BDRs and sales all carry real weight here. Equally. But equal means each one owns a specific moment completely — not that all three vaguely own the whole thing.

Shared responsibility is how you end up with a lead that three people looked at and nobody called. Everyone assumed. Everyone was being reasonable. That’s what makes it hard to fix by asking people to care more: they already do.

The fix isn’t cultural. It’s a map.

The map

One page. For each of the four: the owner, the trigger in, the trigger out, the clock, and the fallback when the clock runs out. Named roles, not teams — “marketing” is not a person who can be asked what happened.

Then build it into the system, because a map that lives in a document is a suggestion. The trigger becomes a workflow. The clock becomes a task with a due date. The fallback becomes a reassignment rule that fires without anyone remembering it should.

That’s the whole job. It’s the least glamorous work in revenue operations and it beats any amount of new tooling, because the tooling was never the thing that was broken.

Ask the next five people who touch a lead where their responsibility ends. If you get five different answers, you don’t have a lead problem.