Growing fast, flying blind.
The company had grown from 20 to 60 people in 18 months. Marketing was generating leads. Sales was closing deals. But nobody could answer: which channel is working? What’s our CAC by segment? Where in the funnel are we losing people?
The CMO was spending 4 hours every Friday manually pulling together a board update. Sales ops had their own spreadsheet. Marketing had three more. None of them matched.
Root causes
- No single source of truth for leads and pipeline
- Salesforce and HubSpot both partially in use — neither configured
- UTM parameters inconsistently applied (60% coverage)
- Lifecycle stages undefined — leads went from “new” to “closed/won”
- No MQL definition agreed across teams
The RevOps stack
- HubSpot as single source of truth — Salesforce deprecated
- 5-stage lifecycle: Subscriber → MQL → SQL → Opportunity → Customer
- Agreed MQL definition documented across marketing + sales
- UTM governance SOP + retroactive data cleanup
- GTM dashboard: 8 metrics, weekly auto-email to CEO
Clarity in 6 weeks, accountability forever.
The marketing team went from 18 hours of manual reporting per week to 3. The CEO’s Friday update is now an automated email. For the first time, they can see cost-per-MQL by channel, lifecycle velocity by segment, and which campaigns actually drive revenue.
The CMO used the new data to cut two underperforming channels and reinvest into what was working — resulting in a 23% improvement in marketing-sourced pipeline within 90 days of the migration.
Over the same 90 days, cost per MQL fell 28%, most of it from cutting the two channels, and MQL-to-SQL conversion rose 44%. That second number is what an agreed MQL definition and a real lifecycle buy you: sales stopped rejecting leads it had never agreed to accept. UTM coverage on new leads went from 60% to effectively all of them once the governance SOP was running.
“I used to dread board reporting. Now I actually look forward to it. The data tells a clear story and we can act on it.”
— CMO, 60-person B2B SaaS
Every number on this page, with its definition.
- +23% marketing-sourced pipeline. The value of opportunities whose original source is a marketing channel, before and after go-live. Source: HubSpot.
- +44% SQL conversion. MQL-to-SQL conversion under the agreed lifecycle definitions.
- −28% cost per MQL. Marketing programme spend ÷ MQLs.
- UTM coverage, 60% → ~100%. The share of new marketing-created contacts whose first conversion carries source, medium and campaign.
- 18 → 3 hours of weekly reporting. The marketing team's own estimate of weekly reporting time.