Roadmap

A scorecard turns a missed number into a specific question with a specific owner.

The reason it works is that every target on it came out of the model. Your account goal produced your quarterly win requirement. Your win rate produced your pipeline requirement. Your conversion rate produced your lead requirement. So when a line comes in short, you already know what it feeds and what has to change upstream.

That is what makes the numbers usable for a business development team. Nobody on that team works in expansion rates or acquisition ratios. They work in leads, opportunities, and closed accounts, on a monthly cadence, against thresholds everyone watched get built.

Green means the line is on pace. Yellow means risk is developing. Red means you are going to miss unless something changes now.

Two things follow from running it this way:

◆ You find problems while the quarter can still be saved rather than after it closes
◆ You debug the model instead of debating the team, because the shortfall points at a stage rather than a person

Steve Whittington closes out the two-part series on our podcast, Driving Growth, with how the six components come together into a scorecard. Part two is live now:
https://hubs.li/Q04wZRhR0

A marketing scorecard tells you what a company holds marketing accountable for.

At most B2B manufacturers, that scorecard tracks activity: leads generated, cost to generate them. At HeatMaster, that was true too, until the leads coming in stopped matching the revenue going out, and both marketing and the CEO started asking why.

The result was a rebuilt scorecard, now tied to:

◆ Lead quality
◆ Leads sent to the dealer network
◆ Touch points required to qualify a lead

Marketing also moved from receiving a revenue target to helping set one, working backwards from the number alongside the CEO and sales manager.

This is what Steve Whittington means when he talks about fixing the structure between sales and marketing: a scorecard that ties one function's work to the other's outcome.

Steve's full conversation with Mel Animalla, Marketing Manager at HeatMaster, "Fixing the Sales and Marketing Silos," is live now on Driving Growth: https://hubs.li/Q04xCqf50

Not controlling the outcome isn't the same as having no part in it.

Mel Animalla, Marketing Manager at HeatMaster, could have used "I don't set the revenue number" as a reason to stay out of the revenue conversation.

Instead, he recognized how much control he did have: the leads coming in, and the budget behind them.

When HeatMaster's CEO started asking what that marketing budget was delivering, Mel decided the scorecard needed to level up.

Cost-per-lead stayed. Alongside it, he added:

◆ Lead quality
◆ Volume of leads sent to dealers
◆ Touch points required to qualify a lead

The result was a scorecard tied to the same revenue target the whole business was accountable to, and a marketing function with a stake in hitting it.

Mel Animalla's full conversation with Steve Whittington, "Fixing the Sales and Marketing Silos," is live now on Driving Growth: https://hubs.li/Q04xCpW60

Where does marketing's job end?

At HeatMaster, it used to end the moment a lead was delivered. Cost-per-lead was the number they tracked, and once a lead was handed off, marketing considered the job done.

That never sat right with Mel Animalla, Marketing Manager at HeatMaster.

So, he started asking why the leads coming in weren't turning into the revenue the numbers said they should. That question led him to build out pipeline visibility so sales could see exactly where every deal stood, treating the delivered lead as the starting point for marketing's impact on revenue instead of the finish line.

Mel Animalla's full conversation with Steve Whittington, "Fixing the Sales and Marketing Silos," is live now on Driving Growth: https://hubs.li/Q04xFJyb0

You don't set your revenue number. You build the model that produces it.

That model runs on four inputs: what you spend to acquire an account, what you spend to keep one, whether your existing book of business is growing or eroding, and how efficiently each motion creates opportunity. Work on those and the revenue follows.

Most planning cycles never touch them. The target gets set, and the inputs are left to whoever owns the quota.

Here is what working on them looks like:

◆ Calculate acquisition cost by motion instead of averaging it across all of them
◆ Measure what you spend retaining the book of business against what that book returns
◆ Pull your expansion rate from the P&L rather than estimating it
◆ Track how many opportunities each motion creates and what each one costs to run

Do that, and you get decisions you couldn't make before. Move a 25% close rate to 50%, and you double output on the same spend. Find a motion running at a 300% cost of growth, and you can shut it off without losing revenue.

Steve Whittington covers all six components across the last two episodes of our podcast, Driving Growth. Part two is live now: https://hubs.li/Q04wZQLM0

An eight-account target and a 20% growth target ask for the same revenue.

Only one tells a sales team what to do on Monday.

The difference is where the number came from. A percentage skips the arithmetic.

Working from the book of business does the arithmetic, and what comes out is a count of accounts.

Here is that math on a $1 million book of business:

◆ Historical expansion rate of 10% puts next year at $1.1 million with no new business
◆ Against a $1.5 million target, new business owns $400,000
◆ At a $50,000 average account value, that is eight new accounts
◆ Eight accounts is roughly two per quarter

Two per quarter is something a revenue team can plan around. Twenty percent is not.

On a recent episode of our podcast, Driving Growth, Steve Whittington runs that example end to end and continues the cascade into pipeline coverage, lead volume, and per-motion efficiency.

Listen here: https://hubs.li/Q04wZQyh0

Who does your team call when they need to talk through a growth problem?

They call you.

But who do you call?

For most revenue leaders, that answer is complicated. The people around them understand the target but often don't understand the work it takes to hit it. Talking through it internally likely means navigating politics before you can even get to the problem. You're expected to have the answers.

The Growth Table was built for leaders working through these challenges. It is a peer advisory group for B2B revenue leaders, bringing together five to seven people from non-competing companies ten times a year to work on delivering growth together.

🎯 5 to 7 revenue leaders per cohort, all from non-competing companies
📅 10 facilitated sessions per year
💡 Education, member sharing, group problem-solving, and clear actions every session
💰 $295/month, all-inclusive

Built for VPs of Sales, Sales Directors, Revenue Leaders, and Owner-Operators carrying the revenue mandate in a B2B organization.

One seat remaining in the next cohort, facilitated by Steve Whittington. Apply here: https://hubs.li/Q04wZ_0x0