RevOps Champions Newsletter #41

His marketing drove an 8x increase in average deal size. His company blew out its revenue number. The shift up-market they'd been chasing? It was working.

Then bonus time came. And Ryan didn't get one.

Because he missed his MQL goal.

I've been thinking about that story since I listened to this recent episode of RevOps Champions. Not because it's unusual. Because it's so common. Ryan did everything right for the business and got penalized for it, because the metric and the mission were pointing in different directions.

The reality is that most of us were taught to measure activities, not outcomes.

Sales coaches taught us to track call volume, follow-up cadence, emails sent. Marketing teams were held to leads generated, downloads, website visits. The logic made sense. Activities are what you can control. You can never guarantee a deal is going to close, but you can guarantee that your rep did the activities that could lead to a close.

And over time, optimizing for what's controllable instead of what actually matters creates an expensive gap between what our teams are doing and what our business actually needs.

Ryan put it plainly: "When you measure activity instead of impact, marketing is looked at as a cost center. And when it's time to reallocate budgets, marketing gets the short end of the stick."

In most of our businesses, while effort is appreciated, it’s not enough. At the leadership level, people are not judged on their level of effort. The investors, board members, and CEOs care about impact. And outcomes.

When we set goals at the beginning of a quarter, we're declaring what we believe success looks like. If marketing is chasing MQL volume while our sales team is pursuing bigger deal sizes, we haven't aligned our teams. We've pointed them at different targets and hoped they'd somehow arrive at the same place.

That's not a marketing problem. It's a leadership problem.

Here's what I know to be true: clients don't hire us for activities. They hire us for results. There's rarely a proven formula for results. We start with experience, which gives us a thesis of what should work, and then we iterate smartly to get to the desired outcome as fast and efficiently as possible.

In marketing's case, Ryan's argument is that it should be measured on dollars of pipeline generated, not lead volume. I agree, and that's how we do it ourselves. That shift forces a different conversation. It asks: is what we're doing actually influencing revenue? Are the right people entering the funnel? Are they moving through it faster because of what marketing has already done?

At Denamico, we spend a lot of time helping revenue teams move toward what we call Insight Maturity. What many companies don't realize is that implementing a CRM is just the beginning of the journey.

To get real value out of a CRM, leadership needs to be able to see what's working, make confident decisions, and stop second-guessing their data. When we work with clients beyond implementation, that's exactly what we're building toward. They get not just a CRM, but a true revenue operations system, and with it, a faster path to Insight Maturity. Companies that get there are more predictable. And a more predictable company is a more valuable company.

Are your goals this quarter measuring what your business actually needs or what's easiest to count?

Cheers to outcomes over activity. None of us need to work harder.

Kristin