Marketing has a healthy dashboard. Sales says nobody is coming through. Both are usually reporting accurately, and the gap between them is a real thing happening in the funnel. The job is to find where, not to decide who is wrong.

Start by defining the disagreement

Get both numbers for the same window, in writing, before discussing causes:

Marketing: impressions, clicks, landing views, form views, form submits.
Sales: records created, records assigned, records contacted, and qualified records.

Then look at where the two chains stop agreeing. There are only a few possibilities.

Case 1: submits fell and nobody noticed

If form submits are actually down, marketing's dashboard is not as healthy as it looked, usually because attention was on spend and clicks rather than the bottom of the funnel. Clicks can hold perfectly steady while leads fall, which is its own diagnosis, covered in why Meta Ads clicks stay stable but leads drop.

Sales is right. The break is upstream, in the page or the form.

Case 2: submits held and records did not appear

This is the classic handoff failure. The funnel worked and the delivery did not. Nothing in a marketing tool will show it, because marketing tools stop measuring at the submit. Go to leads submitted but missing in HubSpot and work the chain from the form provider to the CRM.

Sales is right, and marketing's numbers are also right. Both were measuring different sides of a break.

Case 3: records appeared and nobody worked them

The contacts exist. They were not assigned, or they landed in a stage or list nobody watches, or the routing rule sends them to an owner who left. Sales experiences this as "no leads" because from their seat it is indistinguishable from having none.

Search the CRM by email for a known recent submission before accepting that the records are missing.

Case 4: the leads arrived and got worse

Volume held, quality fell. Broader targeting, a cheaper placement, a form change that removed friction along with intent, or a spike in junk submissions all produce this. Sales feels a drop that no volume metric will show. See what is a lead quality drop.

Case 5: the tracking broke, not the funnel

The inverse case is worth checking too. If marketing's numbers fell but the CRM is receiving as many records as ever, the funnel is fine and the measurement is broken. Fixing the wrong one of these wastes a week.

What to check first

Pick one recent real submission and follow it end to end by email address.
Compare form submits to CRM records created for the same window, offset by an hour.
Split both by form and by source. Partial breaks hide in totals.
Confirm the CRM connection or integration has not expired.
Ask sales for three specific leads they expected and did not get, then look those up directly.

Use the lead drop checker to size the drop before the meeting, so the conversation starts from a number rather than an impression.

Example

Illustrative scenario. An account's ad metrics were flat week over week and the client reported a collapse in leads. Form submits were flat too. Contacts were being created, but a routing workflow edited the previous Friday was assigning everything from one form to a deactivated user, so the records never reached a queue anyone opened. Nothing was broken in marketing, and the leads were recoverable once found.

How Quarkad helps

Quarkad measures the whole path, from ad changes through landing views, form views, form submits, and the CRM handoff, as separate stages. When one stage moves, the incident names that stage and shows the changes that landed just before it, which turns the marketing versus sales argument into a specific question about one step. See why did my leads drop and HubSpot CRM handoff monitoring.

FAQ

Who should own this investigation? Whoever can see both sides. In an agency that is usually the account lead, because neither the media buyer nor the client's sales manager can see the full chain alone.

How do I stop this recurring every quarter? Monitor the handoff as a funnel stage with its own alert. The recurrence is not caused by bad people, it is caused by nobody owning the step between two systems.

Why Your Ads Look Fine But Sales Says Leads Are Down