If your company is missing targets, don’t blame the closers. Fix the top of your funnel.
Missed revenue targets are often symptomatic of a weak go-to-market engine. Companies blame their Sales team for poor execution when results fall short of expectations.
Yet an important root case is often with Marketing and Indirect Sales, which own the top of the funnel. It’s hard for Sales to close the numbers with a sales pipeline that isn’t consistently fed qualified, high-fit opportunities.
Root causes of a weak top of the funnel
A weak top of the funnel is often a multi-prong issue, stemming from a combination of:
Foggy Ideal Customer Persona: Frequently observed. When companies lack a precise Ideal Customer Persona, they chase anyone with a pulse and budget, filling the sales funnel with poor-fit prospects who waste precious sales time and rarely close.
Weak Inbound Marketing Motions: Often a big culprit. Looking just digital marketing motions, it can be because:
- The website is not optimized for lead generation;
- Search engine optimization is not delivering organic clicks, because the domain authority is too low;
- Content marketing is not focused on topics of interest to clients; not helping to strengthen domain authority; not published at sufficient frequency in suitable channels
- Search engine marketing is not well tuned, resulting in companies paying for false positives.
- AI agents are not recommending your services because the website and content marketing are not designed for this channel
Weak Outbound Marketing Motions: Since COVID, cold sales calls have gotten harder, because reaching the right person has gotten harder. Companies have yet to adopt outbound lead generation at scale, which allows them to reach their entire universe of prospects. Account-Based Management still does not have critical mass in many companies.
Misaligned Metrics: Marketing and Sales too often do not work in tandem. Marketing Qualified Leads are often designed differently from Sales Qualified Leads, leading to poor handovers and a situation where the respective teams optimize for activity, not outcomes.
Effects of a weak top of sales funnel
Weak top of funnel issues drive value destruction beyond the revenue line.
- Cost of Sales: First, your cost to acquire customers balloons as Sales teams burn cycles on unqualified leads. Poor conversion rates drag down EBITDA and make growth unpredictable.
- Talent: Sales talent churns; top reps won’t stay if the funnel is broken. They will go make their money elsewhere
- Exit valuation: For portfolio companies of private equity firms, the exit timeline stretches, and valuation suffers. Every quarter spent with a leaky funnel is a quarter of enterprise value lost. According to Bain, 67% of PE-backed companies miss post-acquisition growth targets, often due to underpowered GTM fundamentals.
What to do about a weak top of funnel
The solution isn’t “work harder”, it’s to rebuild your go-to-market engine.
- Start by defining crisp, evidence-based Ideal Customer Persona using real customer data.
- Align Sales and Marketing on a single definition of a high-value lead and enforce it. No more finger pointing between the two teams about who’s dropping the ball.
- Architect scalable inbound and outbound marketing motions, automating them where possible and where it makes sense.
- Establish a short interval of control cadence that keeps every commercial team member in Sales and Marketing accountable to shared outcomes.
So yes, if your company is missing targets, don’t blame the closers. Fix the top of your funnel.
Reach out if you have any questions on how to rebuild your top of funnel to hit your numbers.
Mores articles on Go-to-Market here and on Revenue here
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