Today’s GTM Metrics consistently mislead us because they’re still rooted in the outdated funnel model—the one no modern buyer actually follows. They reflect yesterday’s motions, where marketing generated leads and sales simply closed them.

The world today is very different. Marketing educates and nurtures people through their entire customer journey, from initial impression to lead, pipeline, and closed won. After the sale, marketing can play a pivotal role in renewal, expansion, and even post-churn referrals and returning customers.

Sales and CS are equally complex and interconnected, shepherding customers from initial impression to renewals and expansion, all while leveraging marketing content and events along the way.

Why? Because buyers demand it.

Buyers themselves have become more complex, with ever larger buying committees. Teams rely heavily on research, peer recommendations, and self-serve content like marketing assets and pre-recorded demos. In many cases, they consume all of this before talking to anyone—even after the initial sale.

Kyle Poyar wrote a post on this here and I wanted to take it a step further.

MQLs Don’t Buy. Companies Do.

MQL targets are the #1 reason sales and marketing are misaligned and also the #1 reason pipeline generation and revenue targets are missed. It’s by far the most misleading KPI in GTM.

Before any B2B decision is made, 6-10 people participate in the decision, on average. In larger deals this number can be 15, 20, 25 people. MQLs attempt to measure a single individual’s engagement with marketing and then predict the likelihood of a buying decision from these 5-25 people.

Everyone has been screaming “MQLs are Dead” for a while now because:

• MQLs ignore buying committees
• MQLs often fail to factor ICP/Personas
• MQLs usually fail to factor 3rd party intent
• MQLs usually fail to factor customer product usage
• More often than not, sales thinks MQLs are worthless
• Sales is usually right. MQLs don’t convert to revenue enough.

Part of this is a problem with leads. Part of this is a problem with how leads are managed. Let’s fix both.

Account Stage Changes Our Entire GTM

To fix this, we need to look holistically at the entire Account to see where it stands and if we’re making progress moving them closer to evaluating, buying, renewing, or expanding with us. We wrote more about this in our Allbound Framework and Kyle Poyar shared some very interesting ways to look at this.

I absolutely love how he laid this out here:

This is a great way to visualize where accounts lie and how to measure it.

As much as I love this, though, it only factors in new business pipeline. What about customer health, renewals, and expansion?

We could add Account Stages, post-purchase, like these:

• Onboarding
• Unhealthy Customer
• Healthy Customer
• Expansion Opportunity
• Former Customer

This would allow us to look at every account, through their entire customer journey, to identify where they stand and what actions we may want to take.

By shifting our focus from MQLs to Account Stages, we’re forced to look holistically at our entire GTM Engine, from marketing to sales to CS. This allows us to see how we build trust with accounts and generate pipeline, both new business and expansion, to drive revenue growth.

This radically changes how we look at costs and investments in GTM, alleviates some of the pressure to get attribution perfect (which will never happen), and breaks down silos, aligning our entire GTM Team on the same goals.

Tracking Account Coverage

Okay, so let’s say we have the perfect Account Stages. What are we doing to drive them?

We’re doing lots of things, from marketing to sales to CS—but a BIG part of this is sales activity and meetings. We need to carefully track them across each named account. We’ve talked a lot about Capacity Planning and Territory Planning that results in sales and CS reps having the right number of accounts, such that they can cover all of them without skipping steps. We also need to track that they’re doing this.

We should track calls, emails, LI DMs, and meetings to each target account and to each target contact in those accounts. We can track the number of sales activities per account and per contact and which resulted in a meeting. This allows us to quickly see why one rep is moving accounts in their name through their journey and another is not.

We can then couple this with marketing activities to see which accounts received marketing emails, attended webinars, downloaded or subscribed to our content, etc. This gives us a holistic picture of what we’re doing to move Accounts through the evaluation process. It allows management to provide real coaching to the GTM Team on how to improve.

Most importantly, it allows us to see what’s working and what’s not working to attract buying committees.

Pipe Gen Metrics 2.0

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about the concept here because the metrics themselves are pretty straightforward.

• # of Accounts by Stage
• Activities by Account by Rep
• Meetings by Account by Rep
• Stage Conversion Rates by Rep
• Cost Per Conversion

Kyle talked a lot about running and testing experiments. I don’t want to simply plagiarize him but I agree. If we can clearly measure our inputs (marketing, sales, CS activities and money spent) with the outputs (stage progression and revenue) then we are in a FAR better position to test new ideas and iterate quickly.

This means we spend less money to generate more revenue because we double down on what’s working and cut or fix what’s not working much faster. This means we can attract and deploy more capital to grow faster. This means we can grow the value of the company much faster.

Operationalizing Account Based

Here’s some bad news. If you just spent all this time reading this (maybe even forwarding it to someone on your team), it was a complete waste of time… unless you operationalize these concepts. Without operationalization, it’s a fruitless exercise.

We can ping RevOps and quickly spin up new fields and reports but this does nothing without execution. Those reports are incredibly valuable, especially the activities, meetings, and stage conversions of accounts by reps, but we need to use those reports to drive execution.

More specifically, we need to have clearly defined processes on what people need to do to drive these metrics, and a management process to hold them accountable to executing that process. As an example, sales managers could quickly pull up an Account Coverage Report and sit with each rep to discuss how they’re covering their target accounts and what results they’re producing.

This makes or breaks the initiative. It makes the difference between having data in those reports we trust and data we don’t trust. It makes the difference between consistent execution and each person doing their own thing. Most importantly, it makes the difference between hitting our pipe gen targets and missing them.

There’s a BIG catch here though. This ONLY works if executive leadership is behind the initiative.

We Don’t Need Perfect Metrics. We Need Useful Ones.

Part of the reason companies fail here is because we overcomplicate things. We try to build the perfect system, one that will never see adoption. We need to keep it simple to get useful metrics.

One of Kyle’s key takeaways is that every GTM function should know:

• Where their target accounts are in the buyer journey
• What actions they can take to move those accounts forward

That’s the right mindset.

But it doesn’t require perfect reporting.

It requires metrics that are accurate enough to take action.

If we wait until every account is perfectly tagged, every persona is mapped, and every journey is instrumented—we’ll be waiting forever.

Start small:

• Define clear entry/exit criteria for Account Stages
• Automate as much of this as possible to limit admin work
  • Example: Integrate calendars and update stage on first meeting
• Create simple reports and a review cadence for each layer of management
  • And just hammer away at it until all accounts are in the right stage

Useful beats perfect. Every time.

And now we can see how effectively our entire team is generating pipeline.

We can then drill into what they’re doing to achieve this, and the processes, systems, metrics, reports, and management review necessary to drill into the next layer.

What to Do If We’re Stuck

If we’re still tracking MQLs and generic pipe coverage, we’re not behind—we’re in the majority.

The difference between teams that evolve and teams that don’t is simple:

The teams that evolve stop trying to duct-tape new metrics on top of broken processes.

• They fix the process first
• Then they drive the adoption
• Then they inspect the data regularly
• Then—and only then—do they iterate.

Usually that means focusing on one metric and one process at a time. 

If you want help getting there, we’ve operationalized this process for dozens of GTM teams. We’ll help you stop admiring the problem and start fixing it—at the process layer, where it actually counts.