At this year’s OMR Festival in Hamburg, Gabriel Fugli, Senior Channel Sales Manager at Pipedrive, took the stage with a masterclass that tackled a critical challenge many companies face: the disconnect between marketing and sales.
His session, titled “From leads to deals”, unpacked how cross-functional misalignment wastes time, reduces win rates and ultimately damages revenue.
Drawing on over 15 years of experience in sales and close collaboration with SMBs and integration partners, Gabriel offered a practical playbook to help companies build a smoother, activity-based pipeline that turns leads into real deals.
Sales and marketing: a dysfunctional relationship?
Despite good intentions, many companies still suffer from silos between sales and marketing. As Gabriel highlighted, lack of mutual understanding, fragmented data and poor communication remain widespread. For example:
Sales claims marketing leads are low quality
Marketing sees sales ignore valuable content and data
Teams rarely sit together to align on goals, priorities or KPIs
CRMs are often cluttered with inactive deals that have no activities linked to them
This leads to a costly truth: 65% of created deals never receive a follow-up activity and 51% of a sales rep’s time is spent on non-sales tasks, according to Pipedrive’s research about Pulse. That’s not just inefficient – it’s a recipe for missed revenue opportunities.
The case for activity-based selling
Gabriel introduced Activity-Based Selling as a solution to bridge this gap. Rather than focus only on outcomes like closed deals, this approach emphasizes the measurable, repeatable actions that move a lead forward.
By tracking daily activities – calls made, emails sent, demos scheduled – managers can uncover bottlenecks, improve transparency and ensure pipeline momentum. As Gabriel put it:
From chaos to clarity: a three-part framework
Gabriel’s masterclass was structured around three main pillars:
1. People: empowering sales to prioritize
Many reps struggle to prioritize leads. In SMBs, 63% have over 100 deals in their pipeline, making it difficult to know where to start. Scoring and automated prioritization help filter by deal value, close date and probability, allowing salespeople to focus their limited time on what matters most.
2. Process: activities over everything
Sorting deals isn’t enough. Sales needs a clear next step for every lead. Gabriel stressed the importance of:
Creating activities as soon as deals are created
Following up within 5 minutes of a lead arriving (which makes qualification 21x more likely)
Automating workflows that generate tasks and reminders in real time
3. Product: enabling smart automation
Great tools support great processes. Gabriel’s checklist for a modern CRM includes:
Out-of-the-box lead generation or integration
Automatic lead assignment
Activity creation and follow-ups
Click-to-call, email tracking and reporting
Bonus: Integrating these features reduces admin time and helps reps stay focused on selling, not data entry.
Takeaways you can implement today
To ensure marketing efforts aren’t lost along the way, Gabriel proposed a new standard of collaboration. Here’s what that looks like:
Leads are enriched with just enough relevant info
Sales responds within minutes – not hours or days
Activities are automatically tied to every lead and deal
Scoring replaces manual prioritization
Sales works from activity feeds, not deal lists
Lost reasons and engagement data are tracked
Sales and marketing meet regularly and give honest feedback
Ultimately, this approach boosts conversions, builds trust across teams and creates a shared sense of accountability.
Turning leads into deals is a vital part of the sales process. Leads are prospective customers who have expressed interest, whereas deals are finalized sales agreements. Lead conversion focuses on guiding and nurturing these prospects through different stages to encourage them to make a purchasing decision.
Final thoughts
Gabriel’s German-language session at OMR 2025 drew a standing-room-only crowd, with over 200 attendees – a clear indication of growing interest in aligning sales and marketing.
His core message emphasized that driving revenue isn’t just about generating more leads or investing in better technology; it’s about ensuring the right people take the right actions at the right time.
Want to see how Pipedrive makes activity-based selling easy? Try it free for 14 days and turn your leads into deals – with fewer silos and more success.
