Sample frameDay 232·Sales · Alignment

Morning. Two teams, one funnel, and nothing written down about the thing they hand each other.

Sales.

The Lead Treaty

5 min read·Apply by lunch

The question

Ask your marketing lead and your best salesperson to write down, separately and without conferring, what makes a lead worth phoning — and when the two sentences don't match, what has that gap already cost you in leads worked badly and leads never worked at all?

The idea

Day 115 set out why two people can argue for weeks and both be sincere: each applies a rule that feels obvious, and every obvious rule quietly favours whoever holds it. That was a negotiation across a table. This is the same failure inside one company, on the handover that matters most. In 2006 the Harvard Business Review ran 'Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing', by three people who had earned the right to write it: Philip Kotler, the S.C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at Northwestern's Kellogg School; Neil Rackham, the researcher behind SPIN Selling; and Suj Krishnaswamy, whose firm studies the sales-marketing interface for a living. They interviewed pairs of chief marketing officers and sales vice presidents, and studied the relationship in depth inside companies across a spread of industries. The friction runs two ways: economic, over who gets the budget, and cultural, over how each group is judged. They sorted what they'd seen into four states — undefined, defined, aligned, integrated — and what separates the first from the second isn't warmth or a shared offsite. It's rules: a common language for the contentious areas, and the example they reach for is exactly the one you'd expect. How do we define a lead? The trap is that the definition already feels obvious. It's obvious to each side, differently, and neither has written theirs down.

The framework

01
A lead is a set of observable facts, not a feeling.
Write the definition as things anyone could check from the record: the role of the person, the size and type of company, the action they took, and what they said about timing, budget or a trigger. Ban every word that needs a judgement call — interested, engaged, warm, promising — because each side reads those in its own favour. Then test it mechanically. Hand ten real records to your marketer and the same ten to your closer, apart, and see how closely they match; anything below eight out of ten and the definition isn't finished.
02
Put a clock on the handover — and a name beside it.
A definition without a response time is half a treaty. Agree what happens the moment a lead crosses: who owns it, how fast the first attempt goes out, how many attempts before it comes back, and what coming back actually involves. Hours, not days — the number matters less than the fact that both sides picked it and can be held to it. Most of the resentment marketing carries is really about leads that sat untouched, and most of what sales carries is about leads that shouldn't have been sent at all. One page settles both complaints.
03
What happens to the ones you reject?
The rejection path is the part everyone forgets, and it's where the treaty earns its keep. A lead that fails the definition shouldn't quietly vanish; it should go back with one coded reason — wrong role, wrong size, no trigger, already a customer — chosen from a short fixed list. Free-text rejection notes are how this dies, because nobody can count a paragraph. Within a quarter those codes tell you which campaigns manufacture work rather than revenue, and the argument stops being about who is trying harder and starts being about which channel is lying to you.
04
The monthly reconciliation — same room, same list.
Once a month both sides sit down with one list: leads passed, accepted, rejected and why, and what the accepted ones became. Not two decks. One list. The point isn't scoring each other; it's amending the definition, because a treaty written in January against a market that moved in March is just a document people quote at one another. Change the criteria deliberately, date the change, and keep the old version so you can see what tightening did to volume. Kotler and his co-authors called the next state up aligned, and disciplined regular meetings are how they said you reach it.

Members only · 4 principles + template + AI mentor

364 more frameworks are waiting.

The Lead Treaty is Day 1 of 365. One framework every morning for a year — across strategy, sales, negotiation, leadership, and more.

$1 /day

Billed $365/yr · cancel any time

365 frameworks

12 topics · templates · AI mentor

Reserve your place — $365/yr →

One payment a year · the whole library · no auto-renewal.

More Sales frameworks

All 24 sales frameworks →