Company Brief
Forma Studio sells office interiors and design services to corporates redesigning or relocating offices, commercial developers fitting out buildings, and managed space operators like coworking brands needing premium-looking spaces on lean budgets.
This quarter, marketing ran a content campaign — a downloadable "Office Design Trends 2025" report, two webinars, and a LinkedIn thought leadership series. They generated 210 MQLs. Sales converted 19 to signed contracts — a 9% MQL-to-deal rate against an industry benchmark of 18–22%. The CEO has called a review.
210 MQLs generated
19 deals closed
9% conversion rate
Benchmark: 18–22%
Ananya
There's a 91% gap between our MQLs and closed deals. I want to understand what's happening between the top of the funnel and a signature. Rohan — you first.
Rohan
When my team called those leads, over half had no active project, no budget, and no authority to decide. We'd ask about timelines and get "we're just exploring." We can't sell to someone who's exploring. We need buyers, not browsers.
Priya
"Just exploring" is how every B2B purchase begins — especially in interiors where the cycle runs four to six months. The problem isn't that leads are cold. It's that sales is treating a research-stage contact like a purchase-ready buyer, then abandoning them when they don't sign in week one.
Rohan
We followed up within 48 hours on every priority MQL. Called once, emailed once. There was no project. So we moved on.
Priya
I pulled the CRM last week. Three companies we marked as dead are now fitted-out offices — with a competitor's invoice. Not because there was no project. Because we left before the project materialised.
Rohan
That's a timing failure, not a sales failure. My team cannot chase a contact indefinitely on the off-chance they eventually get budget approval.
Priya
I'm not asking for that. I'm asking for a four-email nurture sequence between the first download and the first sales call. Automated. Zero extra work for your team. We agreed on this six months ago and it still hasn't happened because sales keeps saying nurture is a marketing problem, not theirs.
Rohan
Because it is a marketing problem. Once a lead is in our queue, my team owns it. But if the lead isn't ready, four more emails don't change that — they just delay the moment we find out they're not a buyer.
Priya
That's exactly the misunderstanding I want to address. A lead that downloads a report is not the same as a lead that downloads a report, attends a webinar, and visits our pricing page twice in one week. Both of them are hitting your queue with the same MQL tag. Your team calls them identically, gets two different responses, and wonders why conversion is inconsistent.
Rohan
I'll grant you that — the scoring is too blunt. But here's my issue: passing a lead to sales should mean something. Right now it means "they gave us their email." That's not a qualification. That's a transaction.
Priya
Then let's define it together. Because right now I'm building the scoring model in a vacuum. I've been asking your team to log call outcomes in the CRM for two quarters — why a lead was disqualified, what the objection was, what stage the project was at. That data is almost completely empty. How am I supposed to know what a sales-ready lead looks like if sales never tells me what they found when they got there?
Rohan
My team is on eight to ten calls a day. Detailed logging for every exploratory call is not realistic.
Priya
I'm not asking for an essay. I'm asking for a dropdown. Five seconds per call. "No project. No budget. Wrong contact. Nurture and return." That's it. Without that, I'm optimising blindly.
Ananya
Rohan — the 19 deals that closed. What did they have in common?
Rohan
(checking notes) All 19 were companies with 150-plus employees. Sixteen had an active project already in motion when they first contacted us. Twelve had visited our portfolio page before the first call.
Priya
So the content worked. The nurture just happened passively — on their timeline. If we'd had an active sequence, we could have accelerated that journey for others who weren't quite there yet.
Rohan
Or those 191 others just weren't buyers and no email sequence changes that.
Priya
Some, yes. But three of them are now someone else's clients.
Ananya
Here's what I want resolved today. Not the campaign — the process. Who owns a lead between the moment they download a report and the moment sales calls them? Because right now it sounds like nobody does.
Rohan
(pause) Marketing owns it until it's MQL'd. We take over after that.
Priya
But if sales calls once, decides it's not ready, and drops it back — where does it go? Right now it goes nowhere. It sits in the CRM ageing. There's no re-nurture path. There's no "return to marketing" stage. There's no recycle. We have MQL. We have SQL. Everything else is a void.
Rohan
That's actually fair. We do drop leads back into a void.
Priya
We need at minimum three handoff stages with clear ownership. Marketing owns the lead until it hits a defined score threshold — not just a form fill. At that score it becomes an MQL and moves to sales. If sales qualifies it further, it becomes an SQL. If sales calls and it's not ready — it comes back to marketing as a recycle, goes into a nurture track, and re-enters the scoring queue. Right now stage three doesn't exist.
Rohan
I can work with that. But I need the score threshold to actually mean something. If we agree that 150-plus employees, active signals on pricing or portfolio pages, and at least two content interactions is the bar — then I'll commit to a full follow-up sequence on every lead that clears it. Two calls, three emails, spaced across three weeks. Not one and done.
Priya
And I'll commit to the recycle path. Leads that come back from sales go into a 60-day nurture track with content matched to where they are — and only re-enter the sales queue when they hit the threshold again.
Ananya
Is that an agreement?
— The review ends. For the first time, both teams are looking at the same process. —