Superwise.ai builds observability for AI systems. Its own funnel had a blind spot: leads changed hands by memory, in DMs, or not at all. We rebuilt the marketing-to-sales handoff as a graded, automated system inside HubSpot.
Marketing could prove activity. Sales could prove pipeline. Nobody could prove the connection.
Campaigns ran, webinars filled, forms converted. Then the trail went cold. When a lead looked ready, the handoff happened however that person preferred: a DM, a spreadsheet row, a mention in standup. No shared definition of ready, no record of the pass, no way to trace it afterwards.
Qualified leads sat untouched. Not because sales didn't care, but because there was no place where they showed up as work.
The discovery session ended with one agreement: "ready for sales" would be computed, not felt.
With both teams in the room, we drew the line where marketing's job ends and sales' begins, and gave it a grammar. Every contact carries a two-character grade: a letter for fit, a number for engagement. The same rule for every rep, every campaign, every week.
Nine combinations exist. Exactly one creates work for sales: A1: right company, moving now. The moment a contact hits it, a lead is created with its source attached and lifecycle stage set to MQL.
A grade can only count what it can see. So before any scoring, every signal had to live inside HubSpot.
Webinar attendance, form submissions, email engagement, site behaviour: the raw material of the engagement score sat scattered across tools. We wired each source into the contact record, so a prospect's entire journey reads as one timeline. If it isn't in HubSpot, it doesn't count. Now, everything is.
This is the mechanic that closed the gap. Build a prospect: who they are, what they've done. Watch where they land on the grid. Only one cell creates a lead.
Neither dimension is strong enough. Nurture continues quietly, and sales' queue stays clean. Under the old handoff, a contact like this could still end up in a rep's DMs.
Sales got what they never had: a place where marketing's leads show up as work. Not a list. Not a DM. A pipeline.
Every A1 lands in stage one with its source, its MQL lifecycle stage and its full signal history attached. Reps qualify here, before anything touches the deal pipeline. Good conversations convert to opportunities; the rest are disqualified with a reason and recycled to nurture. Nothing evaporates in between.
The gap is now a gate. And for the first time, both teams can see through it.
The entire sales team works marketing's leads in one queue: same definition, same stages, same record. Because every lead carries its source, marketing finally sees which campaigns become conversations and which never leave the matrix. The weights keep being tuned as real data accumulates. That's the ongoing part of the partnership.