Pipeline is our North Star metric, supported by conversion rates and average contract value (ACV). These three levers are fundamental to hitting our targets – if pipeline numbers are low, we examine what we can do about conversion rates and ACV. While MQLs sometimes get a bad reputation, they still serve an important purpose in our operations. They help us maintain predictability and measure volume at the top of the funnel, indicating whether our awareness efforts and branding initiatives are reaching our target audience effectively. However, we don't report MQLs to the executive team – they're purely internal metrics used by marketing and sales teams to prioritize leads based on quality. What's important is tracking every touchpoint and helping sales teams prioritize based on demographics and activity, rather than just focusing on raw MQL numbers. As we continue maturing, we're increasingly focused on both sourced and influenced pipeline, recognizing that marketing plays a crucial role even in opportunities created by the sales team. This evolution reflects a broader shift in how we think about marketing's impact on revenue – it's not just about generating new leads, but about influencing and accelerating the entire buyer journey.

We've moved beyond the traditional focus on purely sourcing opportunities to recognizing the importance of influence throughout the entire buyer journey. This represents a significant shift from the days when all that mattered was whether marketing sourced X opportunities and sales sourced Y. Marketing works in parallel with sales, leveraging our broader channel mix – from email campaigns and website optimization to gifting platforms and events – to complement their one-to-one efforts. While sales excels at direct meetings and email communications, marketing can deploy a wider array of channels to reach and engage prospects. For strategic accounts, we collaborate closely with sales on targeted initiatives like virtual wine tastings or executive dinners, which serve the dual purpose of relationship building and message expansion. These events allow us to deepen relationships while broadening conversations about our solutions. We've also adapted our goals to encourage marketing team members to work on moving existing opportunities through the sales cycle and increasing ACV, rather than focusing solely on generating new leads. This has required a mindset shift – motivating teams to create marketing campaigns that influence existing opportunities even when they're not directly sourcing them. The key has been changing our goals to include metrics around moving opportunities through the sales cycle and working with sales to increase deal sizes. We run targeted advertising campaigns to accounts in the opportunity phase while sales conducts their direct outreach, creating a synchronized approach that maximizes our impact across all available touchpoints.