A few years back, I started working with a billion-dollar building products company generating more than 20,000 inbound leads a year.
At first glance, that seems like a good problem to have.
But those leads ended up in more than ten different follow-up paths.
Different teams.
Different tools.
Different processes.
Some leads were contacted within hours.
We checked Salesforce and found some sat for weeks while others were never touched at all.
When we started asking what seemed like a simple question, we found out something important:
No one could clearly explain what happened to a lead after it entered the system.
Marketing was generating leads.
Sales was closing business.
But what happened between those two points was surprisingly difficult to see.
The dashboard showed the numbers, but not the cause.
Most B2B companies have some version of a funnel.
Inquiry.
MQL.
SQL.
Opportunity.
Closed-won.
These stages are helpful because they let you track progress and conversion.
But knowing that conversion dropped between two stages doesn’t tell you why.
Did the right leads get routed to the right people?
How quickly did someone follow up?
Was there agreement about which leads Sales should work?
Did the salesperson know why the buyer had raised their hand?
What happened when a lead wasn’t ready to talk?
Who owned it then?
You won’t always find answers to those questions on a dashboard.
But they can have a huge impact on what eventually becomes revenue.
We followed the leads
Rather than launching another campaign or trying to create more demand, we focused on what was already going on.
We traced leads through the process.
That’s when we started to see the gaps.
No single clear path existed from interest to sales.
There were more than ten.
Different teams handled leads differently.
Ownership wasn’t always clear.
Follow-up varied.
Leadership also didn’t have a clear, shared view of what was happening between lead generation and revenue.
The problem wasn’t that people weren’t working hard.
The process made it too easy for good opportunities to slip through the cracks.
The funnel wasn’t the problem
People often say the traditional B2B funnel is broken.
I don’t think that’s quite right.
A funnel is a useful way to measure movement from one stage to another.
But the funnel itself isn’t what drives that movement.
The system is everything happening underneath those stages:
- How you define a qualified lead.
- How leads get routed.
- Who owns the next step.
- How quickly follow-up happens.
- What information travels with the buyer.
- What happens when someone isn’t ready.
- How leads get recycled or nurtured.
- How leadership knows when something falls through.
You can call the model a funnel, flywheel, bowtie, or something else.
Changing the diagram doesn’t fix what’s happening underneath.
Once we could see the gaps, we could fix them
We created clearer definitions for what should happen at each stage.
We clarified ownership and handoffs.
We improved routing and follow-up expectations.
We also made it easier to see what was really happening to leads after they entered the system.
One of the most important results wasn’t just another marketing metric.
Untouched leads dropped by 85%.
They didn’t need thousands more leads.
They needed to do a better job with the demand they already had.
A segment leader later summed up the change in a way that stuck with me:
“Now I can finally tell what happened to a lead.”
That might sound simple.
But it wasn’t.
Can you follow a lead all the way through?
Here’s a question worth asking your team:
Can you trace what happens to a lead from the moment someone raises their hand until they either become revenue or don’t?
Not what the process diagram says should happen.
What actually happens.
Who gets it?
How quickly?
What do they know about the buyer?
What happens next?
Where does it stall?
And if it goes nowhere, do you know why?
If those questions are hard to answer, getting more leads might not be your top priority.
You might need to figure out what’s happening with the leads you already have.
Find out what’s limiting growth
When there’s a lot of activity but revenue isn’t growing, the problem you see isn’t always the real issue.
The first step is to figure out where to look.
Not sure where the problem is? Start with the GTM Maturity Assessment.
Take the GTM Maturity Assessment →
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