Our marketing team is consistently hitting their target for weekly leads generated, but our sales team complains that these are completely cold contacts with zero intent. How do we redesign our marketing Scorecard metrics to stop this gaming and align both seats?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When you measure volume without quality, you invite your team to game the system. Your marketing seat is naturally incentivized to hit their lead target, so they will buy low-quality lists or run generic campaigns to make their weekly Scorecard turn green. This creates a false sense of victory while wasting your sales team's valuable time.

To fix this disconnect, you must raise the bar on what constitutes a scorecard-worthy metric. Replace the generic leads generated metric with a tighter, dual-gate metric. You can achieve this by implementing these changes:

- Track marketing qualified leads that meet strict, agreed-upon criteria such as company size, industry, and budget.
- Track sales accepted leads, which requires the sales seat to formally accept the lead within twenty-four hours of transfer.
- Measure the conversion rate from lead to introductory meeting, which forces marketing to focus on intent.

By shifting the weekly metric to sales accepted leads, you tie the marketing seat's success directly to the quality of their output. If they pass along cold contacts, the sales team will reject them, the marketing number will turn red, and the issue will be forced into your Level 10 Meeting for IDS.

This structure stops the gaming instantly. It forces your marketing and sales leaders to sit down and agree on the exact profile of a high-intent prospect. Run your business on data that reflects real commercial progress, not vanity metrics that make one department look good at the expense of another.