Our marketing department insists on tracking brand awareness and social media impressions, but as we scale, we need metrics that directly link to sales pipeline creation. How do we shift our marketing scorecard from soft metrics to hard leading indicators of revenue?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Brand awareness and social media impressions are vanity metrics that keep marketing teams busy but fail to predict future revenue. If you cannot draw a straight line from a scorecard metric to cash in the bank, that metric does not belong on your leadership scorecard.

To shift your marketing team toward performance data, you must redefine their scorecard around pipeline contribution. Start by replacing impressions with marketing qualified leads, or MQLs. An MQL is a prospect who has taken a specific action showing intent, such as downloading a high-value resource or attending a webinar.

Next, track pipeline velocity by measuring the average days it takes for an MQL to convert into a sales qualified lead, or SQL, owned by your sales team. This metric prevents your marketing team from passing low-quality leads to sales just to hit their targets.

Finally, track your customer acquisition cost, or CAC, on a rolling weekly basis alongside the total pipeline value generated by marketing. By tracking MQLs, SQL conversion rates, and CAC, you force your marketing department to align their daily activities with your ultimate growth goals, giving you a true leading indicator of sales success.