How to Shift from ‘Marketing-Sourced Pipeline’ to Real Visibility

Summary

GTM Live — “How to Shift from ‘Marketing-Sourced Pipeline’ to Real Visibility”

Host: Passetto (Carolyn Dilks & Trevor Gibson)
Date: September 26, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode tackles a core challenge in B2B SaaS go-to-market (GTM): the limitations of “marketing-sourced pipeline” as the primary metric for measuring marketing effectiveness. Hosts Carolyn and Amber (Passetto co-founders) break down why pipeline creation is harder than ever, why volume-driven metrics and siloed measurement are failing, and how elite organizations are instead driving growth by exposing the “pipeline black box”—the unmeasured handoffs and activities between marketing lead creation and opportunity conversion. The episode explores how to create true visibility into the prospecting engine, move beyond vanity metrics, and systematically optimize pipeline with scientific rigor.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Problem with “Marketing-Sourced Pipeline”

• Volume Approach is Broken:

  • The traditional playbook focuses on filling the pipeline through tactics like more events, more SDRs, or increased ad spend—without clear evidence these efforts translate into closed-won revenue ([08:36], [26:44]).
  • Even as marketing creates more leads, what happens to those leads after they’re passed to SDRs is largely invisible—leading to wasted effort and misattributed success ([10:48]).

• Misaligned Metrics & Siloes:

  • Organizations measure marketing, SDR, and sales performance separately, creating competition for credit and blind spots in the actual buying journey ([04:38], [14:06]).
  • "Your measurement system is broken. We are iterating so fast, things are changing all around us. But we're using measurement and KPIs a decade old." – Amber [06:38]

• The “Pipeline Black Box”:

  • There’s little to no systematic insight into what really happens between a lead being generated and an opportunity being created. Key steps in SDR/BDR prospecting often go unmeasured ([10:48], [17:13]).

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2. The Factory Analogy & The Case for Actual Visibility

• Pipeline as a Factory:

  • Carolyn and Amber illustrate pipeline creation as a multi-step factory, not just a funnel. Marketing supplies “raw materials” (leads, demo requests, intent data), which then move on a “conveyor belt” to SDRs/BDRs for prospecting ([18:05], [24:20]).
  • “No factory would operate that way...they know exactly how many raw materials they need from what suppliers. GTM should be no different.” – Carolyn [26:44]

• What Organizations Fail to See:

  • Most GTM teams only track the beginning (lead source) and end (opportunity creation), with a complete lack of visibility into the “black box” of prospecting effort, activities, and outcomes ([17:13], [18:05]).
  • “Teams are working contacts multiple times and oftentimes they get lost in the shuffle...We have no way to understand where they are in the factory.” – Amber [10:48]

• The Cost of Waste:

  • Massive waste occurs when leads that won’t convert eat up SDR/BDR resources. For example, taking 100 calls for 10,000 unqualified contacts just to yield a handful of ops ([18:05]).
  • “You're throwing names into your factory...your Lucy person is taking them off and throwing them in the trash...No factory would operate that way.” – Carolyn [26:44]

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3. What Elite Orgs Do Differently: Systematic Measurement & Pattern Detection

• Expose the Black Box:

  • Track and analyze every step post-lead creation: why a rep picked up the lead, how often they reach out, time between stages, disqualification reasons, and how all these patterns affect pipeline yield ([18:05], [24:20]).
  • “We want to know exactly what the reason was that they decided to call them...how long it took...how many activities. Did they disqualify, and why?” – Carolyn [18:05]

• Identify Patterns, Not Just Volume:

  • Instead of fixating on lead source, identify repeatable "patterns" leading to high-converting deals—e.g., which combination of marketing trigger + rep outreach + sales sequence yields the best results ([16:09], [18:05]).
  • “You have patterns that are playing out in your factory. Some are good, some are wasteful. That’s what you want to see and amplify.” – Amber [16:09]

• Smart, Collaborative Optimization:

  • Once patterns and success levers are clear, marketing, sales, and demand teams can collaborate to “engineer” more high-performance pipeline, rather than throwing resources at unproven channels ([29:09], [34:27]).
  • “You can collaboratively start to engineer—if we know that type of person is moving through the factory at this velocity, with this conversion to pipeline, let's get more of those people.” – Carolyn [26:44]

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4. The Mindset & Practical Shift

• Move from Siloed to Systemic:

  • True pipeline creation is a systematic, cross-functional process. Tunnel vision on “sourced” metrics incentivizes defensive, non-collaborative behavior ([30:11], [31:15]).
  • “The first thing that needs to happen is you need to zoom out...engineering pipeline today is a systematic process where one single thing you did in marketing is not an accurate lens.” – Carolyn [31:16]

• Actionable Questions To Ask Internally:

  • Are we tracking 100% of prospects sales works, or only some?
  • Do we know the trigger for every single outreach and its result?
  • If prospects return, does that history stay visible, or does it vanish? ([36:15])

• Proof and Results:

  • When measurement shifts to factory-like precision, result improvements show in core metrics—win rates, speed to opportunity, and budget justification ([26:44], [34:27], [38:12]):
    • “Our win rate on opps went from 13% to 24%.” – Carolyn on Passetto customer [26:44]
    • “Marketing got a $2.2M spend increase for the year—because they illuminated the black box and had the data to back up their ask.” – Carolyn [34:27]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Old Way:

  • “Our measurement system is broken...KPIs a decade old. That is always going to drag you back down and continue to create misalignment across your teams.” – Amber [06:38]

• On Attribution Battles:

  • “If something gets tagged as SDR source, the marketing team is like, wait a sec, that lead came through an event. I’m going to go spend all my time trying to justify that instead of focusing on what I’m supposed to do.” – Carolyn [14:06]

• On GTM as Factory:

  • “Imagine a car factory putting a bunch of extra doors on the line just in case. Totally wasteful...GTM should work with the same level of precision.” – Carolyn [26:44]

• On Patterns Over Volume:

  • “Volume metric after volume metric and none of this is putting it together as a causal system for how these prospects are moving to pipeline in your revenue factory.” – Amber [16:35]

• Career Implications:

  • “I think it's great if you can come to the table saying, like, hey, this is how we're wasting a bunch of our budget. You're going to earn a lot of respect at the table.” – Carolyn [41:38]

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Important Timestamps

• Why “marketing-sourced pipeline” is a flawed metric: [04:38]
• The pipeline black box explained: [10:48], [18:05], [24:20]
• The factory/conveyor belt analogy: [18:05], [24:20], [26:44]
• Examples of tracking waste and repeatable patterns: [16:09], [29:09]
• How to advocate for the new approach internally: [31:15], [34:27], [36:15]
• Career/professional implications for marketing leaders: [41:38]
• Rapid fire objections from status quo marketers with responses: [43:59]–[48:00]

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Takeaways for Revenue Leaders

• Move beyond volume and vanity metrics—siloed, “sourced” tracking hides more than it reveals.
• Illuminate the prospecting black box to diagnose waste and opportunity in your real pipeline engine.
• Adopt a factory mindset: Map, measure, and optimize every repeatable step between lead engagement and opportunity, enabling collaborative and scientific pipeline growth.
• Own and advocate for transparency—admitting past inefficiency is career-enhancing, not damning.
• Push for better data and cross-team collaboration, even if you have to run old and new metrics in parallel at first.

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This episode provides actionable insights for forward-thinking revenue leaders, marketing heads, and GTM operators ready to leave outdated playbooks behind and grow pipeline with clarity, efficiency, and long-term control.

Transcript

[A]

Hey, everybody. Today we are talking about something we hear from almost every revenue leader and CMO that we talk to, and that is that pipeline is getting harder and harder to engineer than ever before. What we've seen across dozens of companies is that the ones breaking through aren't chasing MQLs anymore or clinging to this notion of marketing source pipeline. They're actually looking inside something different, the prospecting engine. And what actually happens when once those leads that they create are worked by a BDR or SDR and then using those insights to run smarter, the results are super consistent. Stronger pipeline, higher win rates, more revenue, and most importantly, far less wasted effort. In this episode, we're gonna share how those teams have made this shift and why it's becoming the new standard for growth in 2025. I hope you enjoy it.

[B]

You're listening to GTM Live, a podcast by Passet.

[A]

Hey, before we jump into today's show, I'm really excited about something we have planned for our community. Coming up. On Wednesday, October 8th at 1pm Eastern, we're running a pipeline visibility workshop for revenue leaders at B2B SaaS companies. If you're a CRO or CMO and you don't have the reliable data that you need to make smart decisions around how to generate more pipeline to predictably, this is for you. We're going to walk through the key data points that most teams miss so that you can see exactly where you need to do a better job of tracking data so that you can get that visibility that you need. The best part about this is that you're actually going to leave with a pipeline visibility scorecard that you can take straight back to your team and leadership that same day. The seats are going to be limited, so Register [e-mail] events and we'll see you there. Hey, Amber, what's up? Hey. We're acting like we're just talking for the first time, but Amber and I have been chatting all day. We're just officially recording now. We had a great idea for a topic today. It's something that we're really, like, connecting the dots around here at Passetto because we get. We've built our community, as you guys know, if you're part of it, literally around VPs of marketing and demand gen and like CMOs, basically, like that is the lifeblood of who is, you know, a Passetto listener and a GTM live listener. But we see the same problems sort of like coming to us over and over and over again. And we're seeing now like a really Big pattern interrupt in just how marketers are thinking about the problem. Like, they see it one way, we see it a whole different way because of what we know to work in this space. And so we really want to talk today about, like, this great big marketing measurement mistake and just unpack that and provide a little bit of education to this community around how you're approaching this problem and how we're sort of encouraging you to approach it really differently. Maybe it's not really differently. Yeah. And just what we've seen to be the trends of what elite revenue organizations are doing now and differently. Yeah. So gonna be a good episode to really challenge, I think, conventional thinking around pipeline generation. Anything you want to add to that, Amber, to kick us off? Yeah.

[B]

I think this is a timely discussion if you are a leader that's responsible for pipeline creation or supporting a team that is responsible for that. Because that is really the name of the game right now is creating pipelines. So let's get into it.

[A]

Yeah. So just to build on that, I think this episode is really perfect. So, like, if your marketing pipeline is down, or you're just trying to figure out, like, how do I get more pipeline? Perfect for you. But if you're also seeing what we're seeing, which is your playbooks that you have relied on over the last few years or breaking down, especially with the disruption of AI, good episode for you to listen to. If your org is still operating in silos, meaning marketing gets measured on marketing source pipeline, and SDRs gets sourced on SDR pipeline, and so on and so forth. Or if you're measured still on legacy metrics, like marketing source pipeline is the status quo, we don't think it's enough. We would consider that a Legacy metric. Maybe MQL's generated is another one. And most importantly, if you have the urgency to do something differently, like, if you're feeling like, I gotta do something to fix this or to generate better results, I need more growth, then, like, tune in. I think you're gonna learn a lot from this.

[B]

Yeah. This is for the unconventional thinkers who are ready to push the envelope further.

[A]

Yeah. So I think we talked about this in the last episode. If you haven't listened to it yet, go back and listen to it. But basically, Every either, like LinkedIn DM that we get or inbound call for people that want to work with Passetto, they come to us saying, if they're a CMO or vp, they come to us saying, listen, my pipeline is down, or I'm like, X percent towards Target, like, I need to do something differently, like help me figure out or you guys tell us what we should be doing in the market with the rise of AI. Like these specific channels aren't performing the way that they should. And like our marketing source pipeline is down. What do we do about it? So that's the same question we get over and over and over again. And what CMOs think they need is an objective third party point of view from somebody like Passetto or Refine Labs or, you know, a strategy consultant who has a 30,000 foot view of the market and is going to tell them, yeah, put more into paid search, oh, scale out your CTV budget, whatever. That's what they're thinking they need. It's like, how do I fire up the engine to get more marketing source pipeline? Our perspective is that's the wrong question to ask. And you can go down that path. There's plenty of people in this space who make money off telling you what to do. But our perspective is that is experimental at best. It's not rooted in any sort of data or science whatsoever. And I have seen that fail time and again with companies that do that and then come to us a year later saying, oh fuck, we tried that, it didn't work. We should have done this a year ago. Like, tell us what to do now. So that's sort of my stance on this. Amber, what's your take? Like, why is that approach flawed to begin with?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, you have to do that. You know, as a leader who's building pipeline, you constantly have to address where do we go from here? So it's not like you can stop doing that. But what we're seeing is that there's this big gap in terms of measuring what you already have and doing the most with what you already have to help inform your decisions about where you go and what you invest in next. And put. And doing the oh, what should we invest in? Like, where should we put our dollars first? Is literally putting the cart in front of the horse. Like, your measurement system is broken. We are iterating so fast, things are changing all around us. But we're using measurement and KPIs a decade old. So like, that is always going to drag you back down and continue to create misalignment across your teams. Even if you have a friendly relationship across marketing and sales, it is doing you no favors to continue to measure your pipeline creation with these old systems. So you know, when you make those decisions without having a new measurement framework to guide you, you're poking around in the Dark. And you are guessing, like, you really are guessing. It's not experimental because experimentation requires a scientific approach. And we don't have a scientific approach to pipeline creation. When we're looking at, oh, this is marketing source pipeline, or this is Salesforce pipeline, and that's literally it. And then you go measure the sales cycle, and maybe you're doing some, like, segmentation from there, but we're really lacking, like, where are the growth levers with what we're already doing and what we already have so that you can bolster that versus going and trying to just kind of pull all these levers and, you know, match whatever you see other people talking about is not strategic approach.

[A]

Yeah. And I think all of this is really centered around this idea of, like, volume. For so long, we've all been playing the volume game. I just saw it play out with a customer this week where it's like, okay, our contribution from SDRs is down. Like, let's go get more SDRs and make more, log more activities, and then we'll see that number improve. And it's sort of like the same thing with marketing. It's like, if you know that events are a big contributor to marketing source pipeline, what's the first instinct that you're going to have? Oh, let's go do more events. That could work. But it's, again, I would say, an educated guess. You don't really know. Because if you're in marketing and you've generated a lead that you know came from events as a channel and it made it to Pipeline, Cool. That's great. What you're not seeing, though, is what actually happened between. This is what we call the pipeline black box. But it actually happened between, like, when that lead was generated by marketing, it was. Every team has a prospecting process, so you've handed it over to an SDR or BDR or whatever in your organization needs to work the person to convert it to an opportunity we have no insight into. Like, what is the process that actually happened there? How many times did that SDR need to call that lead to get a meeting? How long did it take them? How long did it take them to become an opportunity? Like, how did they actually progress through that? And that matters because if you're looking to do more of X, Y and Z, you really want to understand, like, what actually happens on the factory line when it's being worked by an sdr. Because one segment of people that you're over here generating in marketing could move through that process three or five times faster and actually at a better conversion rate than another segment of people. But, like, that is the nuance. We need to understand what and why happens to our leads. And not just leads, anybody after they are kicked over to an SDR to be phoned and to be outreached to. Right?

[B]

And every factory is a little different. Your factory is going to perform a little different than, you know, even a competitor in your space and certainly another company of your size that's in a different space. And so it really is very specific to you in terms of how your factory should run optimally. Oh, I have a story. We talked to an executive recently who does run events, right? So events have traditionally been very impactful channel for them, and they put a lot of their marketing budget goes towards events. So they are looking at, well, how many opportunities are we driving? So what this executive had said to us was, we know that events have historically helped generate pipeline. However that is down. And we're looking at other ways to try to make those more successful like they used to be. But even then, we have leads that come in where the sales team will work them. And we're saying, oh, this is a sales source prospect. But if we dig in, as marketing always does, to see, was it really sales source or did something else happen? You're in the weeds having your team go look at each record to see how can we show some sign that marketing contributed to this sales source prospect. Well, they found that, right? They found that they had attended an event. However, the problem is that they're not measuring the piece of the factory that serves up that event prospect lead. What happened to that? And then separately serves up the other lead that the. We call it a prospecting record. Right? So like, whenever the sales team reaches out, what's prompting that to happen? So clearly there was a void of time and activity and engagement between the event that being served up to the SDRs and the SDRs going out on their own and saying, oh, we actually found this lead. So, like, what exactly happened in between there? You have no way of measuring the effectiveness of the first time that you prospected to them and why versus the second or third time that you prospected to them. And this is a huge black box. And companies specifically when it comes to prospecting cycles is that we're stuck in this old mentality of a lead comes in, we reach out to them, and that is your shot essentially to get them to an opportunity or not, and then you, like, throw it back over the line to marketing, and who knows if that'll ever come back. Nurture et cetera, et cetera. That is not how things are working today. Teams are working contacts multiple times and oftentimes they get lost in the shuffle as well because we have no way to understand where they are in the factory and don't have a clear line of sight into if they've been at this point in the factory before. We're just like literally overriding data. So anyway, long winded way of saying the outcome of that story is even if you have a good relationship across marketing and sales, you're still shooting yourself in the foot by measuring the source of this opportunity as a sales source or a marketing event sourced, et cetera. Because you can't see what's actually influencing them to take the meeting or not.

[A]

Oh, for sure. And I think that's also why it's really limiting to measure on like sourced. And sometimes you have teams that are really aligned and they don't compete over credit. But man, I see it all the time where if something gets tagged as SDR source, the marketing team is like, wait a sec, that lead came through an event. I'm going to like go spend all my time trying to justify that instead of like focusing on what I'm supposed to do and back channeling and updating the lead source record in Salesforce. But another good like storytelling analogy from what I've seen, very similar to what you're seeing, Amber. One company that's in our portfolio, what commonly happens is that an SDR identifies an account, starts working them, and then whatever defined period of time goes by and then that person ends up filling out like a book demo form on the website. And then SDRs are over here saying like, that's my deal, I sourced that, I went out and called them. And then marketing is saying, well, they just came through this channel and like that's the thing that happened before the opportunity was created. So like it's marketing sourced. But what we need to see is virtually every deal has an SDR working it, whether it's before a marketing signal happened or after. Right. What we really want to understand is like, what is that pattern of things that actually happen throughout that entire journey before an opportunity gets created so that we can start to replicate that and systematically engineer more pipeline that way. Now that we know, okay, if an SDR works something for two weeks and then they go fill out a demo request and they do X, Y and Z between them, that sequence of events converts to pipeline five times faster than just an SDR with like no marketing activity on it. I don't Know, I'm just making up an example, but that is the thing that we want to see is like, what happens inside the factory and what is that sequence? Or sort of like cause and effect of things that actually happen to produce pipeline versus just, oh, this was the last thing that somebody did, or this person sourced that. Like, how do you make that repeatable? Like you can. Yeah, it's very difficult.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely. And I keep thinking of it and seeing it and maybe we should make some visuals about this. But I see it as patterns. So you have patterns that are playing out in your factory. Some of them are good and some of them are wasteful, but that's what you really want to see is, like, what is the pattern and how do we amplify this? How do we put more good fit prospects in a position where they can follow this pattern?

[A]

Yeah, love that.

[B]

Which is different than saying, oh, they originally came to us from a live of a live event, or the last thing they did with us was looked at our LinkedIn page. Like, those are making you and your team do so much mental gymnastics to try to understand what the patterns are, and you're left with volume metric after volume metric after volume metric. And none of this is putting it together as a causal system for how these prospects are moving to pipeline in your revenue factory.

[A]

You're also just. I'm thinking of the mental gymnastics to actually produce that data, which would require a lot of stitching together of data from, like, different places when, like, you don't have to do that. There's obviously a more efficient way than trying to, like, piece together a story versus, like, once you just have this, like, data set that exists, like, you can see the patterns from that.

[B]

Yes. And then you layer in an attribution and then you layer in other SLAs around how do you want your team to perform? And what are these, like, benchmarks? You layer all of that on top of your factory. Yeah, because it's not that those things aren't important, but when we use them in these siloed, disconnected processes and systems, we miss out on the patterns that are driving success.

[A]

Yeah, I love that. Okay, so if you're listening, this is going to be on YouTube too, and I have a visual here that I'm showing. I've just pulled it up on our screen. So Amber and I are looking at it and it's a visual of the pipeline black box, which I know we've been talking about a lot lately, but I still think that it's like an analogy that's not terribly easy to understand. And so I think this visual makes it really easy. So I'm going to describe it. Okay, so this visual says the pipeline black box in your gtm. The pipeline black box hides the repeatable, consistent processes that manufacture pipeline. Okay, so you've got three things in an order. On the left you've got a conveyor belt and it says engagement in brackets. Marketing. Because marketing is in many situations responsible for getting, you know, engagement. And so you could see like a bunch of boxes flipping through a conveyor belt. You have, you know, leads from your intent data. You got partner referrals, you got demo requests, you've got list uploads, you've got event attendees, MQLs that reached a score threshold. You got a bunch of boxes bouncing around this conveyor belt, we like to think of these in like a factory. That's why we put the conveyor belt on here. These are your raw materials that your teams are throwing on the lines and thinking, okay, we're going to put these on the line, we're going to get our SDR team to work these and then like we're going to hope that these turn into pipeline. Maybe we'll throw a little bit more on there from events because we know that, you know, those convert at a higher conversion rate. Okay, so we've got a bunch of shit on the line bouncing around. It's messy. That's the reality for most organizations. And then what happens next before opportunity gets created? Okay, you've got your SDRs now picking up the phone, calling people, sending emails, LinkedIn, DMs, whatever. Prospecting. Every B2B organization has a prospecting function. I would say like 99% of the time we track that in sometimes in gong, in outreach, maybe we don't track it at all. But this black box of activity is the hidden failure point in every B2B organization. It's not just activities, by the way. We're going to unpack that in a second and then out the other side you have opportunities. The visual that's showing there is sort of like a more streamlined, I guess, conveyor belt of people moving through the conveyor belt faster. Because at that point an opportunity is created and now we systematically track that. For the most part we have an opportunity value appended to it. We've got an owner, an AE working that. We have definitive sales cycle stages. That process is pretty much like a well oiled machine for most organizations. Right. So I'm going to step ahead to the next slide. Now this says the system for repeatable growth. This is about measuring everything that makes it on the line to figure out exactly what suppliers and raw materials we need to engineer pipeline growth predictably. So you have engagement on the left, same conveyor belt with a bunch of stuff on it bouncing around. Now we've pulled the black box off of the prospecting, sort of the next chain of or sequence of events that happens inside a factory. Here you have this woman working a factory line. She's got stuff coming on the conveyor belt. Now she's picking it up and looking at it and doing her thing on the factory line. This is meant to reflect the SDR activity that we normally probably wouldn't track in any sort of systematic way. Okay. What we would want to surface there by actually illuminating and exposing the black box. Why exactly did your SDR pick up the phone and call them? Why did we think it was a good idea? Maybe they are a hand raiser. Maybe you know, they've reached a score threshold. Maybe your intent platform told you to do it. We want to know exactly what the reason was that they decided to call them. Maybe there's no reason at all. But we want to know that. When did the SDR activity start initially? Okay, from the very beginning. We want to know how long it took to get to the very first meeting. We want to know the number of days it took to get to the first opportunity. We want to know the number of activities that that SDR had to log in that entire journey. Was it 10? Was it 20? Was it 50? Right. Like we want to know that. Did they disqualify? Where did they disqualify and why exactly did they disqualify? So these are all really important KPIs that can illuminate so much in that prospecting process when your SDRs are on the line working those raw materials. And we can very quickly say, okay, well, an MQL that reached a score threshold only makes it to opportunity 2% of the time. Okay. But we had to call them 100 times each for each one that we passed along. And they disqualified because, I don't know, I'm just making up a reason here. They're not interested. Okay? We need to know that so we can stop feeding more junk into the line and taking up our SDR's time when they have to make a hundred calls per ten thousand contacts that you put on there only to get a handful of opportunities. Like, we need to know that so that we can fix that process. It's just one example. But once you have that now you can add more data to your pipeline. Like what is the performance by the different prospecting sales triggers? What is your performance based on the different activity or action that was logged? Maybe sequence A or phone calls resulted in x percent more pipeline than this other thing. Maybe you have different win rates based on those different sales trigger types. Maybe your sales cycle length is different based on those sales trigger types. Maybe your ACV is different based on those sales trigger types. There's a whole bunch of different nuances that we can now see. And then to Amber's point, we actually have like different sequences of patterns that happen to produce pipelines. So we can say, hey, these are like the three to five consistent patterns that result in pipeline. Here's now how we fix our supply chain or the raw materials that we're actually putting into the factory and fixing the whole process overall. Right. You can see now how it's not just a volume game, it's actually fixing the process.

[B]

Right. Which companies might think that they have that if you have a sales engagement tool or something where your sales team is very directly like measuring their success and what shows that they're going to have a high propensity to create a deal, close a deal, but that's where we see the big gap is actually tying that back to your go to market efforts and investments that happen before the sales cycle begins. And so I know you took the slide down, but I just want to say that woman that was doing prospecting in the slide is Lucy from I Love Lucy. And I used to watch that show like so much when I was a kid. Reruns obviously. But I feel like this is amazing that we're talking about I love Lucy at work. But yeah, so everyone knows the scene where Lucy's like shoving a bunch of chocolate on the conveyor belt in her mouth. And that is no shade to sales teams. Whether you have SDRs or AES, you know, working your prospects. That's what's happening at a lot of companies is that you are sort of haphazardly, you know, working them. And even if you're using lead status in HubSpot and like Lifecycle stage, you're still not seeing what's really happening. And these patterns that are leading to pipeline versus what's a huge waste of time. So if you already know, hey, we saw all this stuff was a huge waste of time for our sales team and we went and cut it. Great. Good for you. A lot of companies still don't have the data to back it up and make those Decisions. So this is a clear, you know, impetus to go do that. This is how you prove what is a huge waste of time and money. However, even if you still cut all that stuff out, great, good for you. Now you're left with pipeline shock, probably where you're like, oh, we have a lot less leads that the team's working. Maybe we're creating less opportunities now because we tightened up our opportunity creation criteria. So good on you. But now you have, you know, that pressure to follow up. Like, okay, now, you know, pipeline is down. You're saying that we're forecasting more accurately because our pipeline isn't inflated, et cetera, et cetera. So how do you go get more great pipeline? Okay, so here's where the factory comes in so that you can understand what is manufacturing that pipeline so that you actually can create collaborative systems between marketing and sales and demand to go get more of it.

[A]

But I think it's fixing, like, all of the. I just think of, like the. I love the factory analogy and picturing like the conveyor belt, because I think what this is illuminating is, like, where so much waste happens. We know that to go out and get leads, at least in marketing, it's fucking expensive. Like, if you're paying to run, you know, like a conversion ad on LinkedIn or whatever, you're paying for names of people who may or may not be in market at all, and you're throwing them into your factory. So it's like you're throwing all of these raw materials onto the line that possibly your SDRs or your Lucy person is, like, just taking them off and throwing them in the trash because they're like, oh, I'm not calling these people. These people aren't answering my calls. They're not a fit. They've told us that. So, like, I think about the factory analogy, and no factory would operate that way. Like, factories know exactly how many raw materials they need from what suppliers they're going to need them from. So they actually put, like, with near 100% accuracy, the parts on the line that are going to produce the final product. If you think about, you know, like a car manufacturing factory, they're not just going to put in a bunch of, you know, extra doors on the line. It's just not going to happen because we don't need those. They're not part of this system to producing these cars. And so why should GTM operate any differently when we know that there can be a science. Every organization's scientific system is going to be different depending on a number of different factors. But what we're saying is we can actually get to that level of precision. We've seen it and we're talking about win rates and things like that. And so when you shift this, obviously there might be that level of pipeline shock or MQL shock. Oh, we've reduced our MQLs by 30%. Well, what happens? And this is an actual data point from a Passetto customer. Your win rate on your opportunities goes from 13% to 24%. Now you're seeing incremental gains in what you're actually getting out the other side. You actually don't need to call as many people when you just call the ones that we know turn into pipeline. And then to your point now you can collaboratively start to engineer that. Well, if we know that that type of person is moving through the factory at this velocity with this conversion to pipeline, let's go get more of those people.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely. I love it. Let us know your examples and how you deal with this. I feel like teams are getting a lot more thoughtful about how they're measuring and there's this huge appetite that we see from go to market leaders of wanting a better measurement system. And so my background is in revenue operations and so I have set up the demand waterfall at so many different companies. And this used to be like the bible. Okay, what do you do when you have a marketing automation platform? You need to know how many MQLs and how many SQLs. And at this point I'm ready to like kill both of those because it's not doing anyone any favors. We need a different measurement system. And so that's what we have here at Passetto is our framework around the factory and prospecting as really the gold standard of what you need to measure. That's going to show you what your MQL SQL conversion rates never have and never will. Finally, in this age that we find.

[A]

Ourselves in, let's talk more about the shift in thinking because there's going to be this, like, camp of CMOs and executives and marketing that don't agree with us at all and they'll continue to make decisions their way. Cool. See you in a year when this doesn't work out for you. No shade on you. Just everybody sort of gets the unlock when they get the unlock. But for those who are like, this is resonating, this is making sense. Let's talk more around where the shift in the thinking needs to happen. And the way I'm sort of interpreting this and the thing that's jumping out at Me is that, well, when we're measured on sourced pipeline, Right. We selfishly focus on our own function. So if I'm a marketing leader and I'm responsible for marketing sourced pipeline, I'm now getting tunnel vision on that. I think the first thing that needs to happen is like, oh, I need to zoom out and to start thinking about this as a system and how the entire system comes together to create pipeline.

[B]

And.

[A]

And of course, you need to be in an environment that is supportive of that. Right. So if you've got a CEO who continues to press about marketing source pipeline. Yeah. Like, it's going to be difficult. Right. But I think that's the first thing that needs to happen is that you need to be aware that engineering pipeline today, in 2025 is a systematic process where one single thing that you did in marketing that were like stamping on the deal record is not an accurate lens into what created that pipeline. Okay. So like, that is the first, I think, realization or big shift that needs to fundamentally exist. It's like you really just need to zoom in and stop thinking just marketing and just protecting myself or my job or my team. Right. What else do you think, Amber?

[B]

Yeah, I think if you're in that sort of a situation where your leadership or the board, they're tied to these legacy metrics as a way to predict forecast, it is really tough and you can play the game while also making a case for changing to a revenue factory approach. But we have found that to be really tough because you have to actually see what's happening in the factory. And for one person, or a champion or even a department to be able to take outside look at what's actually happening right now in your black box is like near impossible. That is something also that we could help you with. If you're like, hey, I need somebody to like help give this outside look. But from there you actually have to go like, implement a system. And so then now you're introducing more friction around like our changing our systems. And so that's why this year we've really honed in on those as like two things that make it really hard to change from the status quo and because it just feels like a big lift. So we have resources on that and reach out to us if you're interested in learning more about what that is. But if you're in that sort of environment. Yeah, I think it is just hard to like prove when you don't have visibility and to make a case. That being said, if you're on a different scale where your leadership is reaching this culmination moment where they're feeling like we need to make a systematic change and you're exploring what that could be, then you're in the perfect position to consider the revenue factory approach. You don't have to start from scratch, you don't have to reinvent your whole revenue, everything that touches revenue. But you do need to have a very like, clear view on what you need to get out of this in order to make that change, to make an argument for it. So. But if you are in a position where leadership is open to measuring marketing as some on something other than last touch or first touch pipeline creation and you have some appetite on your team across go to market to work collaboratively, then that's all that you need to get started. That is not that complicated.

[A]

Yeah. And I think it's not just like you need to rip. I think we've said this before, like rip out these other metrics. But I think it's about having an appetite or an open mind to seeing new data that your organization probably is not used to seeing, layering that in and then allowing time to impact other really core metrics like win rate. Okay, we're going to do these things differently based on these new KPIs that we've never measured before. Now let's see the impact that that has on pipeline creation, on win rate, on sales cycle length. Like those are obviously gold standard metrics that when you do these shifts that we're talking about here, those metrics will be impacted whether it happens in a month or in two quarters from now. I have yet to see those core metrics, like not go up and to the right. They will because you're making more informed decisions. And then it becomes so much easier to go ask for more budget. I just saw this a couple weeks ago from one of our portfolio companies where their marketing team got a $2.2 million spend increase for the year. That is huge. How did they get that? Because they illuminated this pipeline black box they once had hidden and now they know we need to go do these things which we know have an insane conversion rate and move through the factory fast. We're going to go now, spend our dollars on that. And it was so easy for like the board to get behind because they had data to back them. It wasn't just like, oh, the ecosystem is changing. AI is disrupting that. Like we need more money to get our volume metrics up, which right. May or may not pan out to anything. Right now we're thinking scientifically about these things that we're going to do, right?

[B]

Yes. And another conversation recently around AI search and stuff like that. It's like even a company came to us also and they had already done some research because they have a very well versed SEO team. And so they had done the analysis to understand where they're ranking for which key terms, you know, in LLMs. And they can see that they're doing the work and that they are performing and they are ranking and they're showing up on, you know, the AI recommendations in Google for this one search term and everything is going great, but the traffic is still not converting from that search term into their website. So there's still that black box around. What are all of the different things that do contribute to pipeline? And that's one that's just is historically hard to track, but yes, yes, absolutely. And if you're listening to this and you're wanting to take some nuggets back to your team, maybe you have some revenue operators or GTM operators, somebody who's doing your systems, one question you can go ask them to quickly uncover the extent of this pipeline black box that you may be dealing with is, hey, do we know what percentage of our prospects that the sales team will work? Like what percentage of them are we tracking in one place? Like are we tracking all of everything that the sales team is working or we only tracking parts of it? That's one question to go ask that will be illuminating. Another question you could ask is, do we know what prompted them to reach out in every single case and the outcome of what happened in every single case? Follow up question. If you do know, do you keep that visibility if and when that prospect comes back another time or are you losing that visibility when they come back again?

[A]

Yeah, I think that that's huge. In fact, I actually don't know many organizations that track that in like that sort of transactional way. I've certainly been in house with an organization that had like extraordinarily long sales cycle timelines where we sold into public sector. And so sometimes like prospects or leads are on like a five year contract. Right. And so the prospecting process is like five years long, but it happens in spurts. Right. And so we want to know that like we want to know how many spurts, how long was each one versus just trying. Like when you're just only looking, I think at activities overall, it becomes really hard to make sense of what that journey really looked like. Yeah, I love that you had dropped in like some quick tips that people like if they're really wanting to think about this that they can bring back to their org. So thanks for saying that. I think one thing that I think is really incredibly important to acknowledge here, I certainly would take into account if I were to go back in house, is having the humility to acknowledge what might be broken when you can surface this. I think a lot of marketing leaders may or may not see how effective they are as an organization in terms of what they are passing to sales. Right. Like if you. I'm just going to use an example. Like if you're marketing sourced, I say that in air quotes. Pipeline or revenue, you know, a good chunk of it is coming from like, say like industry events or, you know, things like that. Right. And you see that show up on a lot of like your marketing source pipeline. Okay, cool. You might be going to invest in more of those. What ends up happening. You pass more names of people that you meet at an event that you've scanned their badge or from a list upload, you pass them to sales. You might be in shock to see how much of a resource drain those leads are to your organization in terms of how much effort and activity is required to work those people, how long it might take to work those people to a meeting compared to other types of prospects that your SDR team is working. And so it's sort of illuminating on how much waste, I think, can be contributing to the pipeline as a factory, when you look at it this way. And so I think it's really important to have the humility to be able to take that on. Like, oh, you know, maybe some of these investments that I thought were working aren't quite as efficient or effective as I thought they were. And like, that's going to inform your strategic decisions at that point. Right. Because when we're looking at marketing source pipeline, we're looking at a really small percentage of usually of the leads that marketing passed to sales that became pipeline. Right. And I know we're only getting like one facet of that story too. So really important from that vantage point to recognize there's a lot of waste that happened in that process. A lot of stuff that never went anywhere. You know, as responsible leaders, we need to see that and own that. I think that's really important. Yeah.

[B]

Can't settle for anecdotal evidence anymore in terms of, oh, well, they just weren't good leads. Right. Or oh yeah, well, we just never got ahold of them. So you need to be able to see that in the data consistently though.

[A]

I think it's really important that owning up to that or being able to highlight, like your team's inefficiencies is actually really important. Like, I think it's great if you can come to the table saying, like, hey, this is how we're wasting a bunch of our budget. You're going to earn a lot of respect, I think, at the table. But I think traditionally a lot of marketing leaders defend versus own the reality. I just think that can be such a big career accelerator for senior marketing leaders.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely. Great opportunity too, with more marketing leaders owning pipeline creation to get out of this old frame of reference, which is kind of like hand over the leads and then you like squint your eyes or close your eyes and just hope for the best because your team is being measured on that and there's another team that's being measured on revenue. And now we're in a place where we're seeing more leaders are starting to be accountable for pipeline creation. So it's a perfect opportunity to shift gears if you're shifting into that pipeline creation priority anyway, because this is really the old game of sales and marketing struggling to accelerate each other.

[A]

Yeah, I think too, like, we've now seen this play out many times with the orgs that have come through Passetto now that like, we can say it with complete confidence that like, this approach works. We've seen it now working. And so that's why we are so anchored to helping marketers try and approach this from like a new point of view, because it could be huge for their company if they're like stuck in this place that so many SaaS companies are stuck in right now. I think we covered off all of like the big topics that we wanted to talk about, but I thought just to close it out, we could do like a little bit of like rapid fire Q and A around some of the objections that a status quo marketing leader might have to this. And then we could just like, you know, riff around that. So cool if I ask you, Amber, the question?

[B]

Okay, I haven't seen these, so this will be fun.

[A]

Okay, cool. So I'm hypothetically a cmo. Okay. So I already know my marketing source pipeline is declining. Like, my conversion rate from MQL to marketing source pipeline is like, already not good. So, like, how is this going to fix that? I already know that. I already know what's happening. I already know my conversion rate sucks. What are you going to tell me?

[B]

Well, it's going to tell you what is working so that you can have that story and that pattern to start to build your programs off of what is working and making sure that your sales team is enabled with that, as well as it relates to your top of funnel programs and interactions.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And also it'll give you the data to prove once and for all what's not working. Because a lot of people might think, oh, we know it's not working, but you still do it anyway, so why are you still doing it?

[A]

Yeah. And then it does. Just to add to that, it doesn't tell you why. Right. I think without knowing why, you're just guessing on how to fix it. Okay, so if you fix the black box, here's the new information that would. We'd say in response to this question, are you targeting the wrong accounts or, like, the wrong account types or Persona types? Okay. Presumably, you know what type of buyer the contact is. Right. Like, most contacts in Salesforce or HubSpot or whatever have that on there. Hey, maybe we're seeing a pattern from this channel that have this Persona type that are failing. So maybe it's not like a whole channel thing. Maybe it's just a nuance within the channel. Underperforming. Right. Are SDRs not following up in time? Hey, maybe you've passed your SDR team this lead from this channel, but it's taking them two months to follow up. Maybe that's the issue that we need to surface. Is it a breakdown in the handoff process? Maybe not all of those leads are being even passed to or picked up by an sdr. Maybe those channels are driving volume, but not necessarily, like, quality prospects. So, like, those. To me, if somebody were to ask me that, say, you know, say that question, like, I already know it's declining. How do I fix it? Well, you're lacking a lot of nuance to understand why it's declining in the first place. Like, I would want to know that information.

[B]

Everybody wants more volume, but you don't need a high volume in order to run experiments and understand what's happening. Mm. You don't need a huge volume to understand what's happening and what is working to a better extent.

[A]

Okay. Right. Okay, cool. So that's one thing. What if my question is, okay, well, I'm a marketing leader, and, like, my tactics or programs that I normally run to generate MQLs, like, my MQLs are declining. I know a lot of marketing leaders don't really think now about MQLs as the gold standard, although some do. But, like, okay, I know that I need more volume in my MQLs to generate the pipeline, because I know that, like, anything that comes through a demo request form converts at 60%. I just need more of them. So, like, what do I do? Is this going to give me that answer? What's your take on that?

[B]

I think that without treating prospecting like its own piece of the factory, you're not going to effectively see your cause and effect relationships. And that's something that a lot of teams are just left doing manually. But you want to be able to see what's happening with your prospects weekly and monthly to be able to see those trends because there's so much that you do on the demand and brand side that has an impact on something like demo requests. But being able to really map those and layer those as a cause and effect is lacking because you're not tracking prospecting as its own life cycle.

[A]

Yeah. What about you? Yeah, I was just gonna say I think the real leverage isn't more supply. It's like you think you need more supply, but what you really need is to understand how your existing demand actually flows through the system. So I agree with you. It's like surfacing the insights that you didn't have to become better as a factory before you make incremental fixes. In fact, I maintain this idea that without actually seeing the system, all you are really doing is making incremental adjustments that are not going to have the impact that you want. And I can say that because I've seen it play out now dozens and dozens of times. I can think of a company specifically who didn't have, like, pipeline black box visibility. And the path that they went down was to invest in, like a demand agency to just basically turn over their demand strategy to an agency to say, like, okay, go fix this for me now. You guys are the experts. Okay. We're going to now invest more in this channel. In this channel. We're going to have an experimental budget. Like, this demand agency knows exactly what they're doing. It's going to get us gains. It was short lived, to say the least. Like, they really just came back to the fact that, like, oh, you're right, we need that visibility. We don't know how things are moving through the factory. We need to know that first right before we can do this other stuff. And I see that pattern happen so many times now that I have, like a really steadfast stance that, like, rubber meets the road for companies when they approach this from a different angle. Yeah. Yeah. All right, I think that's it. Thanks for jamming with us today. And as always. If you have any questions, hit us up on LinkedIn. Some of you actually have reached out over the last few weeks saying that you'd love to see some like examples of KPIs or you know, data in like a really strong board deck. So we're taking those suggestions and coming up with potentially a workshop or a webinar coming up in the next few weeks. So stay tuned. More information on that soon. But yeah, we're definitely all here to help you all be better as GTM leaders.

[B]

Yes. And if you're in YouTube or Spotify, leave a comment too to help us understand what stood out about this episode and what you'd like to learn more about. And we can keep bringing some tactical tips and insights for you. Yeah, just let us know what this makes you think of.

[A]

Cool. Yeah, great suggestion.

[B]

Until next time.

[A]

Yeah, until next time. Thanks we appreciate you guys and see you all on the next show. Sam.