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IN THIS ISSUE 🌱
Good Morning {{first_name}}!
It’s Fri(yay) - and that means it’s time for your Revenue Play - an issue where I share some stories from my own career that just worked.
This week, I’m sharing a story of a multi-million dollar MRR company that had a reporting problem hiding in plain sight.
Sales were skipping a lifecycle stage, contacts weren't tied to deals, and nobody could answer the most basic question: where are our leads actually coming from?
We fixed both.
Let’s dive in.
THE PIPELINE LOOKED FINE ON THE SURFACE ✨
THE SITUATION
The deals were flowing, but with zero insights
A multi-million dollar MRR company came to us with solid pipeline volume and a sales team that was moving fast. Leads were coming, converting and closing. But when the board was asking where leads were coming from, who was converting, and how MQL ratios were changing to SQLs, no one could answer the questions.
There were zero answers. And while the pipeline looked good, scratching the surface exposed huge issues.
TWO QUIET BREAKS IN THE FOUNDATION 🌊
THE GAP
Two issues broke the entire thing…
Two major issues were happening:
The sales team was skipping the SQL stage entirely, jumping contacts straight from MQL to Opportunity.
When deals were created, no contacts were associated with the deals. Just companies. But the lead attribution sits with the contact, so there was zero lead source attribution.
Two separate issues, but connected by the same root cause: the CRM was being used as a task manager, not a revenue system.
SHARED DEFINITIONS BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE ⚡
THE FIX
Marketing and sales have to speak the same language
We didn’t start with the tech. We needed to get both teams in the same room to understand the impact of behaviour.
First, we needed to identify what SQL meant for both teams. Once we had shared definitions, the lifecycle stage was automated to reflect that behaviour.
Second, we cleaned up contact-to-deal associations so source data could flow properly through the pipeline.Sales had to understand the importance of contact attribution so we could continue to identify quality leads, not just leads.
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ATTRIBUTION THAT ACTUALLY WORKS ⚡
THE RESULTS AND TAKEAWAYS
Attribution helps with growth planning
Once the fix was in, we could tie opportunities back to their lead sources. Leadership could finally see which channels were producing revenue, not just leads. That's a different conversation entirely.
We could also see where quality leads were coming from and where they stalled. That opened up the door to strategy in nurture and lead scoring.
If sales and marketing don't agree on what a stage means, the data in that stage is meaningless. Before you build any report or attribution model, get the definitions locked and documented together. One conversation upstream saves months of bad data downstream.
CLOSING THE LOOP
💡 Final Thoughts
TL;DR
This week, we’ve talked about how budget scrutiny is up, and ROI questions are harder. And yet most teams are still trying to answer them with a CRM that hasn't been properly configured. The foundation has to come first, and that’s what we did for this client.
Need a second pair of eyes on your growth plan? Email me at [email protected] and let’s talk!
How was this issue!?
P.S.
Does your sales team have a shared definition for SQL that marketing has also signed off on?
Reply with a yes or no — I'd love to know how common this gap actually is.
Until next time!
Ships three times a week.