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.
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.
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.
A key reason for the company's low win rate wasn't just poor execution; it was a flawed process. Sales reps created 'opportunities' to track target accounts for prospecting, not actual qualified deals. This practice completely polluted their pipeline metrics and disguised the true performance of their sales motion.
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.
The company's paid search generated many low-value 'signals' by driving traffic to blog posts, but had negligible impact on pipeline. Using automated tools like Performance Max without careful oversight can waste budget on brand awareness activities instead of capturing high-intent, bottom-of-funnel demand.
While the company's overall win rate was a dismal 3-5%, opportunities from high-intent 'hand raiser' leads (e.g., demo requests) converted at 14%. This shows a highly effective GTM motion was being completely obscured by blended pipeline data, causing the team to overlook and underinvest in their most valuable channel.