The dashboards were green. Marketing had hit every number: more leads, more MQLs, more activity than any quarter before. Everyone was happy. And the actual pipeline, the money that would become revenue, had stopped moving.
That gap, between what the dashboard measured and what the bank account measured, is the thing I’ve spent the last few years fixing. It’s why the first thing I now do with a company is kill the MQL.
Not because leads don’t matter. Because measuring marketing on activity teaches four teams to optimize four different things that don’t add up to revenue. Marketing chases volume. Sales chases whoever’s loudest. Customer success inherits customers who were never a fit. Everyone hits their number, and the number that actually matters leaks out of the seams between them.
The company that grows is almost never the one with the better campaign. It’s the one where positioning, marketing, sales, and customer success are wired into a single system: the message a prospect reads is the message the rep opens with, is the promise CS actually delivers on. Where a CEO can watch money move through the whole thing in one view, not four dashboards blaming each other.
Most companies don’t have that. They have four departments and a stack of green metrics measuring activity instead of money. That is not a marketing problem you fix with a campaign. It’s a commercial system problem.
Which is why this newsletter has a new name that says what it’s actually about: Commercial Systems.
Two and a half years ago it was called “B2B Marketing with a Bit of Funk.” Good name, wrong altitude. I was writing about the tactics that sit on top of the machine, back when I should have been writing about the machine. Same me, same inbox if you’ve been here since 2022. From here forward, every issue takes one seam in that machine and shows you how to close it.
If you want to see where yours is leaking before the first issue lands, I built a 4-minute diagnostic that puts a number on it.
Take the Commercial System Leak Audit
The first issue lands this week. After two years of silence, it won’t be rare again. If you know someone running a B2B company drowning in green dashboards and flat pipeline, forward this.
Nemanja