Article Summary

When Sales says the leads are bad, don't defend the campaign and don't kill it. Pull 25 leads and find out whether the failure sits in the source, the targeting or the follow-up. Then fix that failure and report what you found, without turning it into a verdict on either team.

Key Takeaways

• "Bad leads" can mean anything from a dead email address to "didn't book a meeting." Get the specific reason before you accept or reject the complaint.
• Leads that meet the agreed spec but still don't fit what Sales wants point to a targeting problem, and both teams own that one.
• Reason codes, an agreed QA window and a 25-lead joint review turn a recurring fight into a routine check.

Sales says the leads are bad. Marketing knows the campaign hit every targeting criterion in the insertion order. Someone pulls up Salesforce. Someone else pulls up the vendor agreement. Fifteen minutes later, everyone has data and nobody has an answer.

The complaint is usually real. But "bad leads" is a symptom report. It doesn't tell you where the process broke.

Start with what happens to the leads everyone agrees are good. In a March 2026 test by Workato, researchers submitted demo requests to 114 B2B companies. Only one sent a personalized email within five minutes. The average personalized reply took 11 hours and 54 minutes. Nearly one in five never replied by email at all, and just 31% called at all.

Those were people asking to see a product. Webinar and syndication leads sit earlier in the buying process and need a different follow-up plan. But if companies struggle with explicit demo requests, check what happened to your campaign leads before you call the campaign a failure.
Security vendors buy leads against narrow personas, like a CISO or SOC manager above a set employee count, and pay a premium for that precision. Cutting a program that works is expensive. So is renewing a source that sends junk.

Questions to Ask Before You Agree the Leads Are Bad

Agreeing too fast can mean cutting a program that works, or claiming replacements you aren't owed. Ask these first.

Scope

• Which leads, from which campaign, delivered when?
• How many have actually been reviewed? A complaint about "the leads" often rests on the first eight a rep happened to open.
• How many were contacted, how quickly, and how many attempts did each get?

The specific problem

Ask what makes each lead bad. The answers usually land in one of these:

• Wrong company or company size
• Wrong job function or seniority
• Invalid email or phone number
• Duplicate of an existing contact
• Outside the agreed geography or target account list
• Doesn't remember the webinar or asset
• Not looking to buy right now
• Didn't respond

You can check the first five against the order. The last three are about timing and follow-up, which is a different conversation.

The promise

Go back to what this particular campaign guaranteed. Syndication usually delivers people who match a profile and engaged with an asset. A webinar delivers registrants, and only some of them attend. Neither hands over a signed budget and a project start date.

So "didn't book a meeting" only counts as a quality failure if someone sold the campaign internally as a source of sales-ready opportunities. In that case, Marketing owns part of the problem.

Diagnose the Problem: Source, Targeting or Follow-Up?

Most "bad lead" complaints trace back to one of three failures. From the sales floor they look the same. They have different owners and different fixes.

Source failure. The lead doesn't meet what was ordered. A dead email. A duplicate record. A 40-person company on a program with a 1,000-employee floor. A contact nobody can trace back to an opt-in. The provider owes you an explanation and, where the contract covers it, a replacement. Marketing owns the fix, working with the source.

Targeting failure. The lead matches the spec, and Sales still doesn't want it. Maybe the order targeted IT directors and your reps only close deals with CISOs. Maybe the company-size floor was 500 employees when every closed-won deal last year came from accounts above 2,500. Maybe the target account list changed in Q2 and nobody updated the campaign. The provider delivered what you asked for. What you asked for was wrong. Marketing and Sales fix this one together, before the next insertion order goes out. If you run syndication, this is where the filters you set at purchase matter most.

Follow-up failure. The lead meets the criteria and the targeting makes sense. Something breaks after delivery. The lead sits in a queue for a week. It gets one templated email. Or an SDR pitches a demo to someone who downloaded a ransomware readiness checklist yesterday. Influ2's 2025 analysis of 105 companies put 53% of them in a "broken hand-off" category, where Sales contacted fewer than 35% of the prospects Marketing had engaged. Read that with care. The sample was Influ2's own customers, mostly software and technology firms, and "engaged" meant clicking an ad. Influ2 also notes that low outreach can reflect a deliberate awareness program. Use it as a reason to audit your own hand-off.

The owner here is the revenue process. Routing rules, SLAs, sequences and rep incentives cross both teams. Buying more leads won't repair a hand-off that drops the ones you already have. Label it a Sales problem and it usually stays unfixed.

Build a Shared Lead QA Process Before the Next Campaign

We covered the structural side in Why Does Lead Quality Fall Apart Between Marketing and Sales? This is the lighter version you can run campaign by campaign.

1. Agree on the definition before launch. Write down company size, geography, job functions, seniority, target account list, exclusions (customers, open opportunities, competitors), email requirements, duplicate rules and the engagement that counts as a lead. Get a sales leader to sign it. A definition that lives only in the insertion order is one Sales has never seen.
2. Replace "bad lead" with reason codes. Set up CRM dispositions such as wrong role, wrong account, invalid contact, duplicate, outside ICP, no response and no current project. Keep "no response" and "not interested right now" separate from the quality codes. Those describe timing, and lumping them in makes every program look broken.
3. Agree on a QA window. Give Sales a set period to flag real data or criteria problems while the provider can still investigate and replace them. Its length depends on your team and contracts. Both sides just need to know when it closes.
4. Pull 25 leads and review them together. Don't debate 400 rows in a spreadsheet. Pull a random 25, add the specific records Sales flagged, and keep the two groups separate in your findings. Flagged records help you diagnose. Only the random sample tells you how common the problem is. Put a marketer and a rep in a room and trace each lead from delivery to the rep's last touch. Treat 25 as a first inspection. If the result is mixed or a budget decision rides on it, review more.
5. Build a recycle path. A good-fit contact who isn't sales-ready today shouldn't vanish from the CRM. Route them into nurture, subject to the permissions and preferences on the record, with a note on what they engaged with. Invalid, disputed or off-target records stay out.

What If Sales Is Right?

Sometimes the sample confirms the complaint. Picture a review where six of the 25 random records have dead emails, eight work at companies a third of the agreed size and three can't remember downloading anything.

Say so plainly, and say it early. Then:

• Put a number on it: what share of the sample failed, and on which criteria.
• Work out whether it's isolated (one bad batch, one segment) or systemic (every delivery looks like this).
• Take the reason-coded sample to the provider, ask how those contacts were sourced and verified, and request replacements or credits where the contract allows.
• Decide whether the source earns next quarter's budget.

The review exists to find the failure, wherever it sits. If it only ever clears Marketing, Sales will stop showing up. Owning a bad source buys credibility for the day the sample points the other way.

What If the Leads Aren't Bad?

Now picture the opposite: 23 of the 25 random records meet every agreed criterion. That answers the delivery question. It doesn't prove the campaign produces pipeline.

For each lead in the sample, check:

• Time from delivery to first touch
• Whether it was contacted at all
• Number of attempts, over how many days, and on which channels
• Whether the outreach mentioned the webinar or asset the person engaged with
• Whether an early-stage lead got the same "15 minutes this week?" ask as a demo request
• Whether Marketing kept nurturing after the hand-off or stopped the day the lead was routed

Recall the Workato numbers. If companies take almost 12 hours to answer a demo request, a webinar lead routed late on a Friday may not have had much of a chance.

None of this means the reps are lazy. SDRs are usually paid on meetings booked, and a lead that needs three weeks of nurture is a poor use of their Tuesday. That's a design choice, and it belongs in the fix.

If delivery and follow-up both hold up, look at the offer. An asset can pull the right roles at the right accounts and still attract interest in a problem your product doesn't solve. Compare meeting and opportunity progression by topic and asset across a few campaigns before you decide.

Report Back on What Failed

Report what happened, in numbers anyone can check. For example, with hypothetical figures:

We reviewed 25 leads from the August webinar. Twenty-two met every agreed criterion. Two were outside the specified job functions, and one had an invalid email. Nineteen received outreach, with a median first touch of 31 hours. Eleven got a single attempt.

Nobody has to defend themselves against that paragraph. Then give each finding an owner, an action and a date for the next check. The provider corrects the three off-spec records. Sales ops fixes routing and cadence before the next batch. Both teams test the next delivery against the same definitions at the following review.

After the first review, report the same few metrics every month by source and campaign type, with webinar registrants and attendees split out:

• Acceptance rate
• Rejection reasons, by code
• Contact rate
• Time to first touch
• Progression to opportunity and pipeline

For that last one, connect leads to opportunities so they aren't judged one at a time. Kerry Cunningham, who leads research at 6sense and was previously a principal analyst at Forrester, makes the point that one opportunity rarely has only one lead behind it, so contacts should be measured together at the opportunity level. A webinar attendee who never booked a meeting may still sit on the buying committee of a deal Sales closes six months later.

The Four Questions That End the Argument

The next time someone says the leads are bad, skip the defense. Ask:

1. Which leads?
2. What specifically is wrong with them?
3. Do they meet the criteria we agreed on?
4. What happened after we delivered them?

If both teams can answer those with data, the argument tends to end on its own. What's left is a specific problem with an owner, and someone can fix it.