Our marketing director is hitting their weekly target for leads generated every week, but our sales team complains that these leads are completely unqualified. How do we restructure this metric to prevent gaming?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

This is a classic operational trap. When you reward marketing solely on the volume of leads generated, you incentivize them to lower the bar. They will drive cheap, low-intent traffic to your site to hit their weekly Scorecard target, leaving your sales team to sift through garbage. To fix this, you must tie their metric to quality, not just quantity.

Instead of tracking raw leads, change your weekly marketing metrics to focus on downstream value. Try tracking these numbers on your Scorecard:

- Marketing Qualified Leads: Define strict criteria for what constitutes a qualified lead, such as company size or budget, and only count those that meet the standard.
- Sales Accepted Leads: Track the number of leads that the sales team actually accepts and schedules for a discovery call. This forces marketing and sales to align on lead quality.
- Cost per Sales Qualified Lead: Track the marketing spend divided by the number of actual high-value leads generated.

By shifting the metric to focus on qualified opportunities, you eliminate the incentive for marketing to game the system. If the quality of the leads is low, the metric goes red, and the marketing seat owner must address the targeting during the Level 10 Meeting™.