Imagine this: Your marketing team is hitting all their targets. Traffic is up, leads are pouring in, and the dashboard looks great. But sales is struggling; There’s no faith in inbound leads, conversion rates are low, and somehow, pipeline looks more like a parking lot than a revenue factory.

Marketing can’t just be about generating leads – it has to be about generating the right leads. If your inbound engine is feeding your sales team a flood of unqualified pipeline, you’re not just wasting their time (and your marketing budget), you’re throwing off every metric downstream.

In this newsletter, we’re breaking down the critical processes that affect the accuracy and consistency of your Pipeline Generation Metrics, Pipeline Management Metrics, CAC, LTV:CAC, GTM Efficiency Ratio, GTM Efficiency Margin, Bookings, Growth Rate, and Magic Number.

(This newsletter is a part of our new Framework, The GTM Process Index, which is a supplement to our GTM Metrics & Index Framework.)

ICP & Buyer Persona Definitions

Although this isn’t technically a process, having your criteria for what makes your ICP and BP “ideal” clearly defined is crucial for every metric that you’ll be analyzing. Miss this one (or get it wrong), and you’ll see a domino effect of inaccurate metrics and inconsistent forecasting that flows through your entire revenue factory.

It starts with marketing: if your marketers are being told to generate as many leads as possible, without clear guidance on who counts as a lead, your sales team is going to be inundated with unworkable pipeline bloat while marketing celebrates hitting target.

In the end, you’ve wasted time and budget on leads that at best will never convert, and at worst will go on to plague your sales and/or CS reps before dropping off or churning.

Qualification Definitions

Here’s how we define MQL, SAL, SQL, SQO, etc. You’ll need to be more specific as to what qualifies a lead into each of these categories for your business.

MQL: A lead that is worthy of sending to sales. Conversion to revenue from MQL, or at least SQL, should be as high as outbound. If it’s not, we’re wasting money paying reps to chase these leads.

SAL: A lead that the sales team has initially reviewed and agreed is worth a closer look.

SQL: A lead that the sales team has thoroughly vetted and determined is ready for a direct sales conversation.

SQO: A lead that has shown clear buying signals and has moved into the qualified sales pipeline.

You might choose to use only one or more of these depending on your inbound/sales process, but it’s important to have clear qualification criteria for whichever ones you choose.

In the case of marketing and MQLs, we look at it as, “when does it make sense to have a sales rep follow up on this lead?” If a lead doesn’t match the criteria we’ve defined, it gets sent back to marketing to nurture.

Lead Scoring & Routing

Lead scoring is taking our qualification definitions above and attaching a point system to each criteria, to help sales and marketing focus on the most promising leads.

Here’s how a lead scoring and routing process helps businesses collect accurate metrics:

• Tracks measurable criteria for lead quality over time
• Aligns sales and marketing teams with common benchmarks
• Provides data for conversion rates, ROI, and lead quality tracking
• Identifies bottlenecks in the funnel, optimizing resource allocation
• Identifies areas for improvement in marketing and sales strategies
• Offers insight into the sales funnel, showing which leads are most likely to convert

Lead Management

When a lead is qualified, scored, and routed to sales, who does it get routed to? Does it go “round robin”, each rep getting the next lead in succession, does it depend on each reps’ territory, or something else? What is then the process for handling the lead once it’s been routed?

Lead Response Time: Having a process for handling hand-raiser leads vs all other leads is crucial for optimizing lead response time. Studies have shown that a lead response time of under 5 minutes for hand raisers can mean the difference between winning the deal and not even being in the evaluation. For leads who only downloaded a whitepaper, this matters much less.

Follow-Up Cadences: How many times do we follow up on a lead? Are we going to call them 3 times? 5 times? Do we email them or send them a LinkedIn DM? What is our step-by-step process/cadence for following up – and when do we give up?

Lead Management Tracking: How do we track these activities? A lot of people book a meeting and then no-show – so do we want to track meetings actually held instead of meetings set? How are we tracking pipeline generation, qualification, and revenue from these leads? This can help create a feedback loop for marketing to get a better understanding of the leads that actually convert.

Funnel Segmentation

A “blended funnel” happens when multiple lead types and marketing metrics are combined into one overall picture. While it shows the full customer journey, mixing data from different channels, lead types, regions, and teams can hide the specific performance differences that tell you what’s really working (or not).

For example, when we look at all MQLs together, we don’t see the dramatic differences between Demo Requests and Webinar Leads in conversion rates, Average Sales Price, etc. and the total revenue they produced.

Here’s a visual:

Most companies segment their funnel to some degree, but the more you can break your funnel down the more hidden insights you’ll be able to uncover. Which means better goal-setting, forecasting, and resource allocation.

More on This Topic:

• Framework – The Modern Inbound Framework
• Newsletter #60 – Most Of Us Are Doing Account Scoring Wrong
• Newsletter #58 – Strategies for Fine Tuning Your GTM Motions
• Newsletter #54 – Inbound Lead Qualification and Routing
• Webinar – Optimizing GTM Using the Revenue Factory Model
• Podcast – Finding an Alternative to the MQL with Andrew Nadeau
• Podcast – Combining Inbound and Outbound with Jim Wilson
• Podcast – How to Launch ABM with Andrei Zinkevich
• More on this topic in upcoming newsletters – subscribe here to get it in your inbox