Your Funnel Does Not Leak in the Middle. It Leaks at the Seams.
Marketing-to-sales, sales-to-success: the two handoffs where most B2B companies quietly lose a third of their revenue — and the operating rhythm that closes them.
Ask a CRO where revenue is lost and they will point at conversion rates. But conversion rates measure stages, and stages are usually fine. The losses concentrate at the seams — the moments where one function hands a buyer to another and accountability briefly belongs to no one.
The marketing-to-sales seam
MQLs rot because sales does not trust them, and sales is often right. The fix is not a better lead score; it is a shared pipeline definition. One meeting, both leaders, one question: what evidence makes an account worth a seller's time? Write it down. Route on it. Review misses weekly.
The sales-to-success seam
The deal closes, the AE moves on, and everything they learned — the champion's real motivation, the promised outcomes, the political map — dies in a handoff call that never happened. Expansion revenue is won or lost in the first 30 days post-sale. Treat the handoff as a deliverable with a template, not a courtesy.
Instrument the seams
Add two metrics to your weekly review: acceptance rate (what share of marketing-sourced accounts does sales actively work?) and time-to-first-value (how long from signature to the customer's first realised outcome?). Both are boring. Both predict revenue better than any stage conversion rate you currently track.
Want this applied to your revenue system?
The Revenue Diagnostic gives you a clear picture of your AI visibility and growth gaps in 4–6 weeks.