Is Marketing working?

Pipeline. Across three calls I had this week, it was the big GTM issue that needed to be fixed. Quickly. Different companies, different deal sizes and different stages.

Pipeline is now such a consistent issue that I’m surprised when a CEO doesn’t immediately raise it.

It wasn’t that long ago when win rate, deal size and sales cycle were metrics that were the focus, that were underperforming. Not now. Nearly every conversation I’m having, pipeline is the constraint to revenue growth. There isn’t enough pipeline being created, and the leading Marketing metrics are down.

As CRO at Elucidat, my mantra to everyone in GTM was ‘pipeline is destiny’. We had a good product, decent sales processes and the right people in the right seats. We consistently closed a good percentage of deals we were in. We just needed to be in those opportunities. That hasn’t changed. What’s changed is how people are buying. And almost nobody’s playbook has caught up.

Everyone is trying to improve the

dashboard numbers

Digital pipeline (and lead) attribution is a lie, or at best a gross oversimplification. Calling it oversimplification is being very generous. What is even worse is that Marketing leaders have codified the data points they can track into how they communicate their value to their company and boards.

Someone has opened some emails, visited the website and downloaded a white paper? Call it an MQL and tell Sales to close the business. This approach has led to wasted effort and resentment in many a GTM function.

What got lost was that none of it was ever quite true. Digital attribution captured the last click, or the first click, or some weighted average across the touches a tag could see. It never saw the podcast someone listened to on the drive home. It never saw the LinkedIn post a peer shared in a private DM. It never saw the conversation in a Slack community where someone said “we use these guys, they’re solid.” It saw what it could tag. And it called that the whole picture.

Digital attribution has led to Marketing teams focusing their efforts on what they can track, then working on how to claim credit for pipeline and sales.

CROs and CMOs are presenting the pipeline and top of funnel metrics to their boards. Pipeline volume is down, there are quality concerns because salespeople are progressing opportunities they wouldn’t normally. SEO traffic is down. Paid CPCs are up. MQL volume is soft. The SDR team is sending more sequences than ever, and reply rates keep falling.

The conversation with their team and the board is focused on how they will improve each of the metrics that are not hitting target. Update the messaging. Refresh the landing pages. Re-score the lead model. Add another nurture track. Tighten the SDR cadence. The whole motion is about going back to what was working and making it work harder.

It won’t.

Time to stop looking backwards

The conversation CROs and CMOs need to be having is that buying has changed.

Individually, we all know that AI has changed how we buy. More and more people are using LLMs as their front door to the internet. We are increasingly connecting with people we trust through events, communities and content they create. We are not scrolling through a Google Search results page to go to a vendor website and provide our contact details to download a PDF.

So why do some Marketing leaders still use content forms and count MQLs based on engagement? It is because they show up in the dashboard. The board got used to those numbers. Marketing got used to defending them.

At every board meeting, marketing leaders relied on digital attribution reports. UTM-tagged campaigns, form-fill conversion rates, cost per MQL, pipeline contribution by channel. It was a beautiful story because it was a measurable story, and boards love things they can track quarter over quarter. Data that could be used to improve specific parts of Marketing was being used to prove that Marketing worked.

And here we are.

There is a declining number of people buying the old way. You won’t win by trying to get a larger slice of that shrinking pie. You might be doing your best SEO work ever, but that will not remove the impact of AI overviews. You can’t make up the gap from declining search engine traffic with traffic from LLMs. People used to click through from the Google results page. Now they stay in the LLM. Untrackable and completely invisible to you.

Now is the time to retire your trusty playbook.

Start with the first principles of GTM

Here is timeless advice for a new problem. My love of GTM came from my Dad. He ran UK Sales for a big US tech firm. He taught me that people love starting in the details, which leads to friction and failure. People get too focused on individual items, whether you’re selling a new service or you’re trying to change something internally. Agree on the principles first. Specifics get easier once everyone is aligned on what you’re actually trying to do.

Let’s start by setting out the principles of GTM.

Go To Market is all about connecting your customer with your product. This starts with being clear and aligned to your customer. If that is an issue for you, I suggest reading ‘Why the AI era has made GTMalignment worse (and how to fix it)’.

Pipeline is a measure of how many qualified sales opportunities you currently have. As long as you have a clear qualification framework and sales process, this is easy to measure.

How you create pipeline is by potential buyers at Ideal Customer Profile accounts engaging with you when they might buy. That could be when they recognise a pain, or it could be when they have decided to make a change.

The million-dollar question is, how do you make that happen?

If you can’t answer that question based on live customer insight, you are in trouble.

From Dashboards to the Customer Insight

Flywheel

Here’s what I install when I come into a company facing this. It isn’t a tool or a tech stack decision. It’s a four-step operating rhythm that puts the buyer back at the centre of how the GTM team makes decisions. Listen, map, show up, learn. Quarter on quarter, it gets sharper. That’s the flywheel.

Listen. This is the whole GTM team, sales and marketing and customer success, talking to customers and engaged prospects on a standing cadence. Not surveys. Conversations. How did you decide to look at this? Where did you go for information? Who did you talk to? What made you trust the people you trusted? And the one question every hand-raiser should be asked at first contact, every time: where did you hear about us? You then review what you’re hearing as one team. Not marketing reviewing its own customer research in a silo. Not sales hoarding the call recordings. One GTM team, one set of conclusions, segmented by industry, country, and size, because buying behaviour is not uniform.

Map. Out of the listening, you build an influence map. Where does your ICP actually spend its attention? Which podcasts, newsletters, creators, communities, events, LLMs, peers? Then you overlay it with where your current pipeline is finding you. The gap between those two maps is the most important diagnostic you’ll run all year. That’s where your future pipeline is hiding. Take it to the board. It’s a story about where your buyer is, which is a fundamentally different conversation from where your leads came from.

Show up. Two motions, running together. Out of market: brand and distribution, no digital attribution tax. Add email open tracking and you tank deliverability for the sake of a data point you didn’t need. Focus on being present, useful, and memorable in the places your buyers told you matter. In market: commercial intent, LLM visibility, a hand-raiser experience that doesn’t punish people for being ready to buy. Underneath both motions sits something most B2B companies have stopped doing, which is building a brand future buyers know, like, and trust before they need you. When they decide it’s time to solve the problem, you want to be on the shortlist they bring into the room. Not the vendor they discover after the shortlist is set. That only happens if you’ve been showing up consistently, with a point of view, in the places they actually pay attention to. This only works if you are memorable. Forgettable B2Bland is the hidden killer, especially with the surge of AI produced content.

How do you know if what you are doing is useful and memorable? You test it with your market first. You get feedback from the same persona at your customers. You use a research service like Wynter to access those same people at prospects. Rich, qualitative feedback from the right people.

Learn. Every conversation, every hand-raiser, every campaign that worked or didn’t, goes back into the listening loop. The map updates. The show-up motion adjusts. The team’s understanding of the buyer compounds. This is the flywheel. The advantage isn’t that you found the perfect channel. The advantage is that you’re learning faster than your competitors about a market that’s changing faster than any of you can fully track.

The rest of the company and the board also need to learn. It is down to you to educate them on how people buy, what you need to do for them to buy from you, and what you can’t measure. Lead with customer insights, not digital attribution charts.

The new Board reporting for Marketing &

pre-pipeline GTM

Your board is made up of smart and accomplished people. The easy part is educating them about how buying has changed and why the data points previously used to measure pre-pipeline are no longer valid.

So what replaces the traditional dashboards? You still need to answer the same questions:

“Is Marketing working?”

“Are we reaching our ICP accounts?”

“Will we hit our pipeline creation targets?”

“What do we need to improve?”

There are still key metrics to capture and report on. Here are some that I would lead on:

1. Pipeline created - Volume and value. The Marketing leader should own this number. Irrespective of channel and whether the pipeline is new business or expansion. You might disagree with me on expansion, but if your marketing is only focused on new business and leads you are leaving NRR on the table. They need to be optimising everything they do to generate qualified pipeline, both short and long term.
2. Sales Qualified Leads - For a Sales Led motion, the definition is a meeting booked to discuss a potential opportunity with an ICP prospect or customer. For a Product Led motion, the definition is a sign-up. These are the earliest data points in the buying journey you have full visibility of.
3. SQL to opportunity conversion rate - Potential sales opportunities need to be qualified and progressed. A lack of focus on the outcome of first sales meetings is common and leads to lower pipeline and win rates. Sales leadership usually focuses on forecasted deals and relies on opportunity records in the CRM. Meanwhile, SQLs are tracked on contact records and often left open.
4. CAC Ratio - GTM costs divided by new ARR. This measures the efficiency of your GTM engine. The key here is to also split out your different GTM functions, so you can track the CAC ratio for Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success. Investors can provide benchmarks from other portcos.
5. Execution vs plan - What did you deliver versus your plan for the month? The board don’t need to know all the operational detail of the Marketing plan each month. What they do need to know is that you had a plan and how much of it you delivered. This doesn’t show whether you delivered quality work that had impact, but it shows if you have a plan and if you are shipping.

Here’s the big change. The board discussion on pre-pipeline GTM uses a ‘Market Heatmap’. Where you have distinct segments, you will need to produce different versions. The Market Heatmap shows:

Influence - Where your target market engages and learns. AI, communities, influencers, events, podcasts, etc. Only include what comes up consistently. Show weighting, so everyone understands the importance ranking.

Marketing plan - Where your current Marketing is reaching.

Quality test - The feedback from customer and prospect research on the quality of the Marketing.

Direct attribution - Where your new SQLs are reporting they heard about you. The conversion to pipeline and sales.

The Market Heatmap is easy to create and understand. Simply create a column for each area, with the first column being the highest priority. Each column contains:

1. The name of the influence
2. Summary of insight
3. The GTM activity
4. The quality test scores
5. Direct attribution SQLs, pipeline and sales

The commentary covers the changes in insight and the actions being taken to address any quality issues and to align the marketing plan to where your target market engages and learns.

The Market Heatmap answers these questions:

1. Where are our prospects and customers looking?
2. Is our Marketing reaching our prospects and customers?
3. Is our Marketing any good?
4. Are our marketing efforts leading to pipeline?
5. What has changed?

Five things to do this quarter

1. Run buyer conversations across sales, marketing, and CS in the next thirty days. Not surveys. Conversations. Same questions. You might need to segment by industry, size, and country. Feed transcripts into the AI project and synthesise them as one team. This will also highlight if some of your GTM have knowledge gaps.
2. Add one question to your hand-raiser intake. “Where did you hear about us?” Capture it. Track it. Put it on forms and ask when you meet someone. Compare it to your old digital attribution reports. Notice the gap.
3. Create the Market Heatmap. Build the influence map and overlay it on your current Marketing strategy and pipeline sources. Where is your buyer? Where is your pipeline coming from? The delta is your investment thesis for the next two quarters.
4. Take the attribution conversation back to the board. Reframe it. Show what digital attribution can and can’t see. Replace the old vanity metrics with the core metrics and the Market Heatmap. Make sure everyone understands and can defend it.
5. Reduce spend on the channels that show up well in digital attribution but don’t show up in your buyer conversations. Please tell me you are not paying for paid ads to show up when someone enters your company name into Google? Reinvest in brand, distribution, and being present where the map says the buyer actually is. Spend more time speaking to customers and getting qualitative feedback. This will feel uncomfortable, or even wrong, for more than a quarter.

What life looks like after the fix

Expect discomfort first. You’re operating with fewer trackable data points than you had before. That feels exposed. It is exposed. The replacement isn’t more dashboards. It’s more conversations, more judgement, more closeness to the market. It’s being able to tell the live story of your customer segments to the board. The teams that win this period are the ones that get comfortable with that trade.

Then the friction goes. Once the GTM team is operating from a shared understanding of the buyer, sales and marketing stop arguing about lead quality, because nobody’s relying on the lead score anymore. You start arguing about the buyer instead, which is the right argument to be having. That’s the operating dividend of the flywheel, and it’s the answer to the diagnostic I wrote about a few weeks ago on why AI made GTM alignment worse.

What’s left is creative work. When you can’t out-spend your competitors on ads, you have to stand out from them. The work becomes about being memorable, having a point of view, and being specific enough that your ICP can describe what you do without checking the website. That’s the new bar. The flywheel gives you the buyer understanding. The creative work is what turns that understanding into pipeline.

Board meetings have richer and more strategic discussions. CEOs and GTM leaders no longer have to provide commentary on weakly correlated metrics. The conversation is rooted in customer insights and how well the team are translating them into effective marketing.