Most marketing organizations are optimizing for a number that doesn't fund the company. We've built an entire industry around leads, and the moment those leads hit a sales rep's inbox, marketing checks out. The gap between MQL targets and closed revenue is where marketing credibility goes to die, and it happens quietly, one quarter at a time.
Here's what nobody wants to say out loud: CFOs and CEOs don't speak in leads. They speak in pipeline and closed-won. Your board doesn't care about your cost per lead or your lead volume. They care whether marketing is moving the business. And if your dashboard is built around activity instead of outcomes, you're speaking a language nobody in the C-suite is listening to.
This isn't about metrics preference. It's about survival. Jason Seeba from OneSignal put it plainly in a recent conversation: "MQLs are dead. You're all working toward creating pipeline and deals that close together." He's not wrong, and more importantly, your CRO already knows this. The problem is that you haven't had the conversation yet.
What pipeline ownership actually requires from the top of the org isn't complicated. It requires three things: alignment on what counts as pipeline, monthly syncs with sales to track movement not just creation, and willingness to kill programs that generate leads but don't generate business. That last one is the hardest because it means admitting that something in your current playbook isn't working.
The one conversation with your CRO that changes everything happens when you walk into their office and say this: "I want to be measured on the pipeline we influence, not the leads we generate. Help me understand what pipeline looks like for each segment, and I'll build my team's targets around that." That's it. That's the conversation. Everything else follows.
You'll spend less time defending your numbers and more time actually building business. Your team will stop celebrating vanity metrics and start building habits around what actually closes. And your board will finally see marketing as a function that drives revenue, not a department that generates noise.
If you're not speaking pipeline language yet, you're not speaking to the people who fund you.
Talk to your CRO this week.
Scott.
