Is Your Lead-to-Close Process Costing You Sales? Here's How to Fix It.

43% of companies never respond to inbound inquiries. Does your process let prospects slip through the cracks?

Imagine this: You’ve worked hard to create marketing campaigns that speak directly to your ideal customers. You’ve targeted the right audience, nurtured leads with personalized content, and the sales team is primed and ready to engage when the right opportunity arises. But then something critical gets missed: the handoff. Without a smooth and efficient lead-to-close process, even the most interested prospect can slip through the cracks, leaving you wondering why you aren’t hitting your booking goals.

We’ve all seen the research: At least 70% of buyers are already researching solutions before they even contact you. That means that when they do, your sales team needs to act fast. Really fast. But here’s the kicker: A report from InsideSales notes 78% of sales go to the first company that responds. Despite this, a staggering 43% of companies never respond to inbound inquiries. Even worse, most sales teams give up after just 1.29 attempts.

This is where an optimized Lead-to-Close (LTC) process comes into play. When sales, marketing, and customer success teams are aligned, and everyone understands exactly what needs to happen at every stage to successfully win business, it’s not just about capturing leads. It’s about converting them into long-term, loyal customers. And that’s what ultimately drives revenue. Without an optimized LTC process, your team is fighting a losing battle from the start.

What is the Lead-to-Close Process and Why Does It Matter?

At some point in your company’s evolution, a CRM was purchased and likely, a junior team member was tasked with implementation. 2024 data from CRMSearch shows that CRM implementations have a 50% failure rate within the first 2-3 years. Why? Because of the absence of well-defined goals and objectives. Companies rush into implementation without understanding what they want to achieve, which leads to a misalignment between the CRM system, the company’s strategic goals, and how the company actually does business. Pre-built templates are used for everything including stages, definitions, and paths, without first thinking through how your team actually goes to market. Reports and dashboards are built that don’t really provide a true picture of how the business is performing.

A well-defined and documented Lead-to-Close process (or lead-to-revenue) solves this and is the backbone of your entire GTM strategy. When done right, it transforms leads into customers, ensures smooth handoffs between teams, and optimizes each stage of the bowtie for maximum efficiency. Without clear definitions, SLAs, and optimized workflows, however, you are likely leaving money on the table.

So how do you optimize the LTC process and get it aligned with your business goals?

The Essential Elements of an Optimized LTC Process

Here is what you need for a streamlined and efficient LTC process:

• Visualizing Every Step: From list import to becoming a customer and moving through to renewal, upsell, or cross-sell, you need to map out every stage of the journey. And I mean every. Single. Stage.

• Clear Definitions: What does it mean to be an inquiry vs a lead vs an MQL vs a stage 2 opportunity? What are the criteria for entry and exit at each stage?

• Lead Scoring: While lead scoring isn’t as critical as it once was (prospects are doing so much before they ever come to your site or engage with you), it still plays a role when it comes to messaging and how you’ll target prospects during nurturing.

• Nurturing Strategy: What is your plan to keep prospects engaged during their journey? Unpopular opinion: there may be a role for sequences during pipeline stages.

• SLAs: Otherwise known as Service Level Agreements, SLAs are between marketing and sales, sales and customer success, and marketing and customer success. Does the team have agreed-upon SLAs for each stage of the buyer journey? And how does your CRM support them?

• Sales Stage Accuracy: Are the sales stages aligned with the reality of what’s happening in the sales process? Is the team using consistent definitions, SLAs, realistic opportunity timeframes based on the definitions, opportunity values, and probability?

• Post-Sale Engagement: What happens when a deal is closed? Can AEs self-report both won and lost reasons within the CRM? And is there a nurturing program set to run based on loss reason? What is the handoff to onboarding? The onboarding process introduces the first churn opportunity. Having a system in place to keep them engaged and happy from day one is incredibly important.

• Lifetime Engagement: What are your plans to nurture customers after the sale? What is the plan? Who reaches out and how is that actively noted in your system of record (CRM)? How will value continuously be reinforced to help prevent churn?

• Reports and Dashboards: Make sure your team has the right visibility into the process. What reports are needed? Are they reporting the right information? Total open pipeline is very different from stage two pipeline with an expected close date of this quarter. One could provide a false sense of security while the other is a much more realistic view into what to expect this quarter (provided the team is using the same stage definitions).

Who Owns the LTC Process?

The short answer is: Whoever owns the CRM. But it’s not as simple as that. The LTC process is a cross-functional effort. Sales, marketing, and support leaders need to come together to review and optimize it regularly. You’ll also need input from your CFO and CEO, as they will have data requirements that differ from your GTM team’s.

How to Start Optimizing Your LTC Process

It may sound daunting, but optimizing your LTC process is simpler than it seems. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a lot of work. But having a well-thought-through process makes it much easier. Here’s the step-by-step approach I use when helping clients revamp their process:

1. Review the Existing Process: Start by talking to the key stakeholders in each team: revenue operations, sales, marketing, and success. Understand the flow of information from import to sales acceptance and through all stages to onboarding and renewals. If I am working in the office with the team, we use a large wall and different colored sticky notes to denote each step, process, and definition. Otherwise, I use a poster board (or the like) to pencil out the process as I understand it.

2. Map It Out & Identify Gaps: Once I have the process down, I transfer it to an online tool like LucidChart. Do not skip this step. It is through this process that you can easily identify dead-end processes, missing processes, and elements of the CRM that are needed and don’t exist, issues, and opportunities.

3. Refine the Process: Map out what the optimized process should look like. Are the entry points correct? What should the nurturing paths be? What are the right SLAs between handoff points (note that 24 hours is too long)? How does information flow between marketing, sales, and customer success? This is the most important step in the process. Because you have a deep understanding of the business and the overall GTM strategy and objectives, what process best supports the requirements? Again, I map this out on paper with a pencil and then transfer it into LucidChart.

4. Is There an AI or Automation Overlay: Before sharing the process map with others, I review it to understand where automation or AI can augment what needs to be done. Everything from auto-responders to sequences to chat replies, intent data, reporting, and analysis. The LTC process is the perfect place to leverage new tools to help augment the process.

5. Collaborate with Your Team: Share the refined map, definitions, SLAs, really everything with the cross-functional team and get their input. One important thing to note during this stage is that the team should review and approve your LTC workflow definitions. Based on your CRM lifecycle stages (or however you look to define stages), what are the stages, who is the owner, what are the explicit entry and exit criteria, and the agreed-upon SLA? This is how you ensure that when you see a stage two opportunity reported, for example, it means the exact same thing for every single AE on the team.

6. Build Dashboards & Reports: Based on the updated process, develop the reports and dashboards that are needed so that all parties can transparently measure performance. This includes everyone from your CEO, CFO, Marketing, Sales, and Success leaders, to your campaign managers, AEs, and success managers. What data do they need daily to effectively manage the business?

7. Build the Blueprint: Depending on your starting point, optimization may be fairly simple or could be complex. Put together the plan for how the changes will happen, ownership, and timeline.

8. Plan for Continuous Improvement: Your business isn’t static and your LTC process shouldn’t be either. Your rev ops person should be looking at this weekly. If you don’t have a rev ops manager, your GTM team leaders should be looking at this. The larger GTM team should review it quarterly with an eye toward what’s working, where things might be getting stuck, and where tweaks may be needed.

9. Train Your Team: Before rolling out changes, ensure your GTM teams understand any new processes, definitions, SLAs, etc. After all, the goal is to ensure the GTM team wins more business, so make this transition as seamless as possible for everyone involved.

An optimized LTC process isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s a critical component of your GTM strategy. When your sales, marketing, and customer success teams are aligned and working in sync, your revenue growth will follow.

Ready to optimize your LTC process? Let’s talk. I can help streamline and optimize your lead-to-close process to ensure you’re capturing every opportunity and driving more revenue.

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