You are sitting in your monthly review. The marketing charts look perfect: traffic is up, and Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) are hitting the target. The graphs are all green, pointing up and to the right.
But the revenue number is flat.
This is the "Marketing Black Box" that keeps Founders awake at night. You see money going in and "activity" happening, but you cannot see how it connects to the revenue coming out. The problem isn't that marketing isn't working; the problem is that you are incentivizing the wrong KPIs.
When you obsess over traffic and MQLs, you force your team to prioritize volume over value. It is time to change the scorecard from vanity to velocity.
MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) are often considered "vanity metrics" because they measure volume rather than purchase intent. Focusing solely on MQLs encourages teams to acquire low-quality leads—such as users downloading a free PDF with no intention to buy—which inflates marketing data without contributing to actual revenue or business growth.
No, you cannot track every touchpoint in the modern B2B buyer's journey due to privacy regulations and "Dark Social."
For the last decade, marketers believed the lie that software could track exactly which ad led to which deal. That reality is dead. While data acquisition has increased, our ability to attribute it accurately has decreased.
The modern buyer's journey happens in places tracking software cannot see:
Here my take: “You can’t track a conversation between two peers recommending your product.” Yet, that conversation is worth more than 1,000 trackable clicks.
If you demand to know the exact "source" of every lead, you force your marketing team to invest only in easily trackable channels (like Google Ads) while ignoring the channels that actually build trust.
Pipeline Velocity is a metric that measures how quickly leads move through your sales funnel to become revenue. Unlike volume, which simply counts leads, velocity combines four variables—opportunities, deal value, win rate, and sales cycle length—to provide a holistic view of your growth engine's health and efficiency.
To move from vanity to value, you must report on the following four metrics.
Also: building a predictable pipeline is essential to boost your pipeline velocity. You can learn how here: Predictable Pipeline: The CEO's Guide to Systemic Growth.
Most founders focus on "How much is in the pipe?" But volume is useless without speed. This metric prevents marketing from celebrating "more leads" if those leads clog up the sales process.
The Pipeline Velocity Formula:
Example: If you double your lead volume (Opportunities) but your lead quality drops—causing your Win Rate to plummet—your Velocity stays flat. This exposes the truth behind "high traffic" reports.
While often viewed as a Sales metric, Win Rate is the ultimate Marketing quality check.
For SMBs or bootstrapped ScaleUps, Cost Per Lead (CPL) is irrelevant regarding cash flow. The only number that matters is the CAC Payback Period.
Definition:
"How many months does it take for us to earn back the money we spent acquiring this customer?"
Finally, the source of truth. Avoid "Marketing Influenced Revenue," which can be vague. Track Net New Revenue from inbound sources.
A CEO-level marketing report should move activity metrics (clicks, visitors) to the appendix and focus on business impact metrics. The primary dashboard must answer four specific questions:
Are we moving faster (Velocity)?
Are we closing better (Win Rates)?
Are we efficient (CAC Payback)?
And are we growing (Net New Revenue)?
The New Scorecard Format:
When you report on these numbers, you stop sounding like a marketer defending a budget and start sounding like a business leader managing an investment.
A deepdive into the metrics you as a CEO should care is available in this article: The 5 B2B Metrics That Actually Predict Revenue (And why your dashboard is lying).
A: Vanity metrics (like page views, likes, or follower counts) look good on paper but do not correlate directly to revenue. Actionable metrics (like conversion rates, CAC, and Pipeline Velocity) provide data that helps you make specific business decisions to improve profitability.
A: To calculate CAC Payback Period, divide your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) by the Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) multiplied by your Gross Margin percentage.
The formula is: $CAC / (MRR \times Gross Margin \%) = Months to Payback$.
A: Dark Social refers to private sharing channels (DMs, Slack, email, word-of-mouth) that web analytics tools cannot track. It causes attribution software to mislabel traffic as "Direct" or "Organic," leading companies to undervalue the impact of community and brand-building efforts.
A: There is no single benchmark as it depends heavily on deal size and industry. However, the goal is always positive growth. You should track your velocity month-over-month. If your velocity is increasing, your revenue engine is becoming more efficient.
