Bridging the gap between sales and marketing: how lead alerts can transform your conversion rates.
Published on 10 June, 2025 | Author: Eboni Ryan
Imagine this: your marketing team has worked hard to craft engaging content, attract the right audience, and generate high-quality leads. These leads are then handed off to sales… and nothing happens.
Sound familiar?
You’re not alone. According to research from our Reframing Demand Gen report, the most common breakdowns in the sales and marketing funnel is the influx of unqualified leads, as well as a lack of visibility into the buyer journey. Without clear insights into how leads engage with content or move through the funnel, marketing and sales often operate in silos. The result: sales teams are left questioning what makes a lead “qualified” in the first place.
At Digitalzone, we faced this exact challenge. And while it’s easy to blame misalignment or siloed teams, we decided to dig deeper and create a process that actually works—for both sales and marketing. That process? Lead Alerts.
But before we get into the solution, let’s talk about the pain.
The disconnect: when sales doesn’t see the full picture.
Marketing thinks it’s doing its job. Sales feels like they’re flying blind. What’s going wrong?
- Marketing hands over a “qualified” lead, but sales has no idea why the lead is qualified.
- Sales doesn’t know what the lead has engaged with—was it a webinar? A whitepaper? A gated ebook?
- The follow-up from sales is either too generic or too slow, and the lead goes cold.
- Ultimately, great leads are wasted, conversion rates drop, and finger-pointing begins.
So where do you start?
You don’t fix this with a quick band-aid. You need process. You need structure. And above all, you need alignment.
Step 1: build a shared engagement scoring system
Before lead alerts can even be a thing, you have to align on what makes a lead “qualified.” That starts with engagement scoring.
At Digitalzone, we created an engagement scoring model where both sales and marketing agreed on the value of each action a lead could take.
How many points are assigned to each asset will vary from org to org, but here’s an example of what a scoring model could look like:
- Downloading a white paper = 20 points
- Attending a webinar = 30 points
- Visiting our product page = 10 points
- Watching a demo = 40 points
After setting individual scores, sales and marketing must then decide on what threshold we deem sales-ready. For example, we might set our Sales-Ready Lead (SRL) threshold at 100 points. Once a lead hits that mark through their interactions, they’re considered engaged enough to be passed to sales.
Key things to keep in mind:
- Scoring should be collaborative between marketing and sales.
- Be specific about what actions are worth and why.
- Build in a decay model (we did!)—so points drop off if the lead hasn’t interacted in a while, so we get a more accurate picture of interest.
This process created a shared understanding of when a lead was ready for outreach—and made sure we weren’t just passing every email-gated download over to sales.
Step 2: introduce lead alerts (and do them right)
Once we had our engagement scoring solidified, we introduced Lead Alerts—and it changed everything.
But here’s the thing. A good lead alert is more than just a system-generated ping that says, “Hey, this lead is now yours.” That’s what we used to do and surprise… it didn’t work.
So, what does a high-quality lead alert look like?
Here’s what we include in every alert:
- Full lead details: name, job title, company, industry, LinkedIn profile, and verification of employment.
- Activity summary: a breakdown of what content the lead engaged with, when, and how.
- Campaign source: what campaign brought them in?
- Suggested follow-up: clear, recommended next steps based on the type of lead
Each alert was custom-built to be as easy as possible for sales to act on—think of it as a mini dossier delivered to their inbox, with everything they need in one view. No digging through Salesforce. No guesswork.
Step 3: do the due diligence
Behind every lead alert is a whole lot of teamwork. The senders of the lead alerts verify that each lead:
- Still works at the company that we have in our records
- Isn’t a bot or fake click
- Matches our ICP (ideal customer profile)
This quality control step ensures we’re not just handing over noisy data or false positives. One of our key goals is to build and maintain a strong foundation of trust with the Sales team. To do that, we need to ensure that the data we provide—especially through alerts—is consistently accurate and reliable. These alerts directly impact how Sales makes decisions, so we take their quality and precision very seriously.
Step 4: hold sales accountable (and give them the tools)
Marketing’s job doesn’t end when the lead is passed off. We built clear expectations into the process so sales knows exactly what to do next.
For one type of lead, we implemented a structured follow-up framework during the initial engagement period, designed to maximize connection opportunities through a mix of strategic touchpoints across relevant channels.
For another type, we applied a tailored outreach approach focused on consistent engagement and education, using a nurturing cadence aligned with early-stage relationship development.
We even provided:
- A navigation video on how to find leads and contact history
- Weekly reporting to track follow-up activity
- A (somewhat infamous) “shame slide” that publicly calls out reps who aren’t following up
This isn’t about policing—it’s about ensuring we prioritize the highest-quality leads that we all agree on. It comes down to accountability on both sides to make that happen.
The results: what happens when sales gets full visibility
Once we rolled out this structured lead alert process, the impact was immediate and measurable.
- Lead conversion rate jumped from 20% to 58% in just one quarter
- Marketing-sourced opportunities had a 13% higher win rate than sales-sourced
- Sales reps were able to personalize outreach faster and with more relevance
- Revenue Operations could better connect the dots between content engagement and pipeline creation
When you equip your sales team with the right context—and hold them accountable for acting on it—magic happens. Suddenly, leads aren’t just names in a system. They’re warm prospects with a clear path to value.
Why this works (and why it matters).
Sales enablement isn’t just about giving reps more tools. It’s about giving them the right tools, with the right context.
Lead alerts work because:
- They’re built on a foundation of sales + marketing alignment.
- They’re timely, actionable, and tailored to the lead’s journey.
- They remove friction from the sales process.
- They reinforce accountability with both structure and visibility.
- And perhaps most importantly—they show that marketing isn’t just filling the top of the funnel. It’s actively fueling revenue.
Sharing the playbook.
This process isn’t theoretical. It’s proven. We shared it in a workshop at B2BMX, and the response was overwhelming. So many teams want this kind of alignment—but don’t know how to start.
That’s why we’re sharing our playbook. Because Digitalzone isn’t just about smarter data and better content. We’re about being the partner that helps you scale real success.
Want to replicate this for your team? Start here:
- Align on engagement scoring.
- Build a templated, rich lead alert format.
- Verify leads manually or automate with checks.
- Set clear expectations with sales—and hold them to it.
- Track outcomes and optimize the process.
Lead alerts aren’t a “nice to have.” They’re the difference between leads going dark—and leads turning into deals.
