Swapping a lead target for a pipeline target
A Series B workflow platform was hitting its lead number every month while sales ignored most of what arrived.
Where things stood
Marketing was hitting its lead target every month and sales was ignoring most of what it received. The two teams had stopped trusting each other's numbers, which is usually a symptom rather than a cause. Here the cause was a definition. A lead meant anyone who downloaded anything, so the system had quietly optimised for the cheapest possible download.
Three other things sat underneath that. The positioning described the product category rather than the buyer's problem. The paid account was organised around keyword volume. And the attribution model credited the last click for demand that had been created much earlier.
What we did
Changed what counted as success. We replaced the lead target with a sales-qualified pipeline target that both teams signed off on, and rebuilt reporting around it. Once the scoreboard changed, most of the downstream decisions changed on their own.
Repositioned around the problem. Interviews with won, lost and churned accounts produced a sharper claim and a message hierarchy the sales team was willing to use. We rewrote the core pages against it.
Rebuilt paid around buying stage. Campaigns were restructured by how close someone was to purchase rather than by keyword theme, with budget split explicitly between capturing demand and creating it, and creative produced against a written testing plan.
Made search work for pipeline. We consolidated overlapping blog posts, built comparison and alternative pages for high-intent searches the brand had never gone after, and fixed the technical debt that was slowing the highest-value templates.
Fixed the measurement. Server-side tracking, offline conversions imported from the CRM, and a blended economics report reconciled with finance every month.
How it went
Quality moved before volume did. The first two months produced fewer leads and more opportunities, which is exactly the transition the new scoreboard was built to make visible, and it was still an uncomfortable conversation at the board meeting in between.
Replace this with a real client quote, attributed with permission. An unattributed testimonial is worth less than none at all.
By [month] the account was producing [+000%] more sales-qualified pipeline at [-00%] lower cost per opportunity, with organic search contributing [00%] of new pipeline against [00%] at the start.