Marketing reported one pipeline figure. Finance reported another. The gap was large enough that the board had stopped treating either as reliable, which meant marketing budget decisions were being made on instinct.
What we found
There was no single definition of a qualified lead. Marketing counted form fills that met a scoring threshold, sales counted anything that reached a first call, and finance counted only closed and invoiced revenue. All three were defensible. None of them reconciled.
- Three systems held overlapping records with no shared key
- Reporting arrived six days after the period it described
- Attribution was last touch, so content and events looked like they did nothing
What we did
We built a warehouse, agreed one written definition of a qualified lead with sales and finance in the room, and stitched the identity graph so a person could be followed across the site, the product and the CRM. Reporting moved to daily refresh with the lag stated on the page.
Where it landed
Qualified leads rose 18% on flat spend, mostly because the definition change surfaced sources that had always been working and had never been credited. The reporting lag fell from six days to one.
The argument about whose number was right had been running for a year. It ended in a two hour workshop and a written definition.
38% of spend was buying customers they already had
Attribution rework, then a rebuilt lifecycle programme. Blended cost per acquisition down by nearly half.