Lately, we’ve been redeveloping our business model, jumping off from Scott Galloway’s comments on his Office Hours podcast.
“But every year, their business gets smaller and smaller and shittier and shittier…So what happens to the whole domain of traditional marketing? Pain.” [Then he cuts to — you guessed it — a read-over ad.]
I didn’t need Galloway to tell me this, but it made for a useful distillation of what we all know is happening. He's describing the death of activity-based marketing. The fix isn't to do less marketing — it's to measure it differently.
For us, that means building machines, workflows, and training our people to effectively operate said machines and workflows. We want to squeeze the maximum performance juice from the AI frontier models we use. This allows us to do more and build a financial model around performance at the Tier 3 and Tier 4 layers of performance reporting.
Most marketing reports are a confidence trick. Not intentionally — but structurally.
Impressions. Click-through rate. Social engagement. These numbers are always trending somewhere, they're easy to produce, and they feel like progress. The problem is they have no direct connection to revenue. A campaign can generate 50,000 impressions and zero pipeline. A LinkedIn ad can hit a 0.65% CTR and still produce nothing a salesperson would recognize as a lead.
This is a measurement architecture problem. And it's fixable.
The four tiers — and where most firms get stuck
The Metric Hierarchy arranges marketing metrics by one criterion: how close are they to business impact?
Tier 1 is activity. Impressions, clicks, engagement. Diagnostic signals, not outcomes. We track them. We don't optimize for them in isolation.
Tier 2 is conversion. Form completions, cost per lead, visitor-to-lead rate. Closer to meaningful, but still one step removed. A firm can generate hundreds of leads per month and still miss its growth targets if lead quality is poor.
Tier 3 is pipeline. MQL volume, MQL-to-SQL conversion rate, SQL targets. This is where the conversation should live. The industry average MQL-to-SQL conversion rate is 13%. Top performers run at 20 to 40%. That gap, for a professional services firm where a single engagement is worth $50K to $500K, isn't incremental — it's transformational.
Tier 4 is revenue. Pipeline contribution, CAC payback, win rates. The real scoreboard. Getting here requires CRM access, shared attribution methodology, and alignment across marketing, sales, and finance. It's where the value lives and where most marketing relationships never go.
Why firms stay stuck at Tiers 1 and 2
It's how engagements get set up.
An agency or internal team starts reporting on what's easy to capture. Early on, that's all that's available. Over time, a disconnect sets in — revenue isn't moving at the rate the reports suggest, but there's no Tier 3 baseline to diagnose why. No framework for accountability. No shared definition of what a qualified lead even is.
The measurement architecture should be agreed on before the first campaign launches.
How we weight performance for B2B professional services
For clients with long sales cycles and high deal values, the weighting looks like this:
SQL Volume — 40% (Tier 3)
MQL-to-SQL Conversion Rate — 30% (Tier 3)
Pipeline Contribution — 30% (Tier 4)
70% of the weight sits at Tier 3. These are metrics marketing can directly influence through targeting, content quality, lead scoring, and nurture sequences. Pipeline contribution involves sales execution too, which is why it carries the highest alignment value but not the highest weight.
This structure creates a clear contract: marketing is accountable for filling the pipeline with qualified opportunities and ensuring those opportunities convert at above-market rates.
What "control" has to do with it
Marketing avoids Tier 3 and 4 metrics for an obvious reason: you can't fully control them. A sales team that takes five days to follow up on a hot lead will collapse your MQL-to-SQL rate regardless of how well the campaign ran.
But control isn't the point. Influence is.
The firms that measure what matters to the business — and are willing to negotiate shared accountability for it — are the ones that retain marketing partners for years instead of months. They also see better results, because everyone is looking at the same scoreboard.
Get started
If your current reports live at Tiers 1 and 2, you have a measurement problem before you have a performance problem. Getting to Tier 3 requires three things: shared CRM access, agreed definitions for MQL and SQL, and a 90-day baseline period before performance metrics activate.
These aren't unreasonable asks. They're the foundation of a marketing relationship that connects to revenue.
The question isn't whether your marketing is generating activity. The question is whether it's generating pipeline.
What I'm reading:
HubSpot State of Marketing 2025 — Good benchmark data on MQL-to-SQL rates across industries, useful for calibrating where your funnel stands.
Gartner on B2B Marketing Attribution — Honest about how hard multi-touch attribution is in practice; worth reading before you build your dashboard.
The $3M Marketing Problem — Related: I wrote last month about why professional services firms at the $1M–$5M stage almost always hit the same growth ceiling.