Last week we talked about removing friction so buyers can engage with you. Good. Now someone filled out your form.

What happens next is where most teams blow it.

The average B2B team responds to inbound leads in 42 hours. Meanwhile, 78% of buyers go with the first company that responds. You do the math.

But here's what most "speed to lead" advice gets wrong: it treats fast follow-up as a marketing problem. It's not. It's a sales and marketing alignment problem. And until you solve the alignment piece, no amount of automation fixes it.

Let's be clear about what AI should and shouldn't do here.

When someone fills out your demo form, AI can immediately pull context: What company are they from? What's their ICP fit score? What pages did they visit? Did they attend your last webinar? What content have they engaged with?

That intelligence gets packaged and handed to the SDR before they make the first call. AI-informed outreach. Not AI outreach.

Here's what most teams miss: B2B companies don't have so many inbound leads they're drowning. The volume problem is usually the opposite. It’s not enough leads, not too many. Which means SDRs have time to make a personalized, human call. They just need the context to make it good.

Marketing's job isn't just generating the lead. It's handing off the intel. "This person attended your demand gen webinar, visited the pricing page twice, and works at a 500-person fintech company that matches your top ICP segment." That's a warm call. That's a conversation starter. That's what turns a form fill into a booked meeting.

This newsletter is sponsored by yours truly.

If this newsletter is hitting close to home and you want help fixing demand, I work directly with B2B SaaS teams on custom demand turnaround engagements. Small number of clients per quarter.

Here's the part that gets skipped, fast follow-up only works if sales is bought in.

I've seen it play out the hard way. We ran a major campaign, agreed on the program, aligned on the plan. Leads started coming in. Pipeline started dropping. Come to find out, the SDR leader instructed his team not to follow up on leads from that campaign. He'd changed his mind. Didn’t like the leads. But never had the conversation.

Good leads went cold. Budget was wasted. Pipeline suffered. And marketing had no idea until the damage was done.

This is why SLAs exist. Not as bureaucratic documents, but as real agreements between marketing and sales: here's what a qualified lead looks like, here's the response time we're committing to, here's what happens if it doesn't get followed up.

Sales doesn't get to unilaterally decide which leads are worth following up on. If there's a disagreement about lead quality or campaign fit, that's a conversation—not a silent boycott. The whole system only works when both teams are operating from the same plan.

If marketing is being measured on booked meetings, and not just leads, then marketing needs to own more of the follow-up process.

SDR and BDR teams reporting into marketing isn't a radical idea. It's a logical one. When the same team is accountable for both generating the lead and booking the meeting, the handoff problem mostly disappears. There's no finger-pointing. There's one funnel, one owner, one set of metrics.

More companies are moving this direction. It's worth a conversation at your organization if booked meetings are your marketing KPI.

Speed matters, but not indiscriminate speed.

The goal isn't to follow up on every form fill within 5 minutes. The goal is to make sure your good leads get fast, informed follow-up and your lower-quality leads get scored, nurtured, and routed appropriately.

Lead scoring exists for this reason. A VP at a 1,000-person company in your target vertical who visited your pricing page three times gets a same-day call. A generic contact form fill from an unidentified email gets an automated nurture sequence until they signal higher intent.

The problem most teams have isn't following up on crap leads too slowly. It's letting good leads fall through the cracks entirely—often because there's no notification system, no routing logic, and no visibility into what happened after the lead was handed off.

Every SDR should know immediately when a new qualified lead comes in, what the context is, and what action to take. That's not a nice-to-have. That's the minimum.

A qualified lead comes in. AI immediately pulls context and scores it. SDR gets a real-time notification with full account intel. Human calls within the hour with a relevant, personalized message. Marketing knows the lead was contacted. Sales logs the outcome.

That's the system. It's not complicated. But it requires routing, scoring, visibility, alignment, and accountability.

Most teams are missing at least three of those five things. That's why pipeline disappears between form fill and booked meeting.

Fix the system. The speed will follow.