Our marketing manager hits their weekly Scorecard goal of generating 50 new leads every week, but our sales team rejects almost all of them as junk. How do we adjust the Scorecard to stop people from gaming activity volume?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When a metric incentivizes raw quantity without a quality barrier, people hit the number by lowering standards. It is human nature, not necessarily malice. If you measure top-of-funnel volume in isolation, you will get spam submissions and low-intent form fills.

Replace top-of-funnel raw leads with a dual-qualified leading indicator. Define a Marketing Qualified Lead with strict, objective criteria agreed upon by Sales and Marketing on the Accountability Chart. Those criteria must include company size, target industry, and an explicit problem statement.

The weekly metric on the Scorecard should become Sales Accepted Leads or Qualified Pipeline Added in dollars. When the receiver of the lead must verify and accept the lead for the number to count, gaming vanishes overnight. The marketing seat now has skin in the downstream commercial outcome.

If you must track an activity volume metric, pair it with a conversion or acceptance rate. Track both weekly. If the accepted lead volume turns red, drop it down to the Issues List during your Level 10 Meeting™ and use IDS® to fix the qualification criteria. Never let a team member declare victory on raw volume while the next department in line starves for quality.