With 50% of opportunities lacking associated contacts, marketing was flying blind. For a high ACV business with long sales cycles, this is a critical failure. It prevents understanding the buying committee, multi-threading, and nurturing different personas, rendering marketing ineffective during active deals.
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Most B2B companies have a massive blind spot in the poorly tracked period before an opportunity is created. This "black box" of pre-pipeline activity prevents leaders from diagnosing what is truly working, leading to flat growth and inefficient spending.
The company's overall win rate was low (6-7%) and decreasing. Analysis showed this decline mirrored a drop in marketing 'signals' (e.g., event attendance, content downloads) before an opportunity was created. This provided a clear data link between mid-funnel marketing activities and sales success.
The company's win rate collapsed to a catastrophic 3-5%, well below benchmarks. This inefficiency was a direct result of their 80% pipeline visibility gap. Without knowing which triggers produced quality deals, they were trying to fix the problem with a blindfold on, unable to make data-driven decisions.
Marketing influenced only 6% of opportunities, not due to poor strategy, but because of a technical failure. Contacts added to opportunities in Salesforce were not syncing back to their marketing automation platform (HubSpot). This simple data flow issue cut marketing off from nurturing active deals and influencing the buying committee.
In B2B sales with multiple decision-makers, tracking individual MQLs is a "lazy metric" that misrepresents buying intent. Success depends on identifying and engaging the entire buying group. Marketing's goal should be to qualify the group, not just a single lead.
The company had a significant 'prospecting black box.' For 40% of all opportunities, there was no traceable sales trigger or activity log, such as logged calls. This meant they couldn't measure or optimize a huge portion of their pipeline creation process, particularly SDR outbound efforts.
Marketing engages with people (contacts), not just accounts. If those individual contacts aren't programmatically associated with open opportunities in your CRM, you sever the connection between marketing activities and revenue outcomes, making true impact measurement impossible.
Despite wide acceptance of committee-based buying, an alarming number of sales pipelines remain flawed. In some organizations, over 80% of deals in the CRM have only one contact person attached. This data highlights a critical execution gap between knowing the right strategy and actually implementing it.
Legacy GTM models relegate marketing to top-of-funnel activities. Data shows marketing’s continued engagement *after* a deal is created significantly impacts outcomes. Deals with active marketing signals during the sales cycle close faster and at a higher rate, proving marketing is a full-funnel powerhouse.
A $25 million SaaS company discovered that 80% of its pipeline was effectively invisible. They tracked the 'deal source' (the last touch) instead of the 'prospecting trigger' (what initiated sales outreach), leaving them blind to what actually generated opportunities.