Yes, I said it.
Teams obsessively track impressions, clicks, website visits, form fills, event registrations, content downloads, and MQLs to try to scientifically associate those behaviors with what drove a customer to become a customer.
This is ridiculous. We sell six-figure software. Your ad, email, event or phone call did not in itself convert that company into a customer.
We do this because we want to connect it to revenue, show our value and prove our worth.
I have been guilty of this. Early in my career, I fought hard to convince leadership that my MQLs were perfect and that it was only a matter of time before they converted. I was wrong. The reality is that these activity metrics (by themselves) did not predict revenue.
What actually matters? Account progress.
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What account progression really means
Before any sales activity (meetings, demos, proposals, bookings) takes place, something else has to happen first. And something for that otherwise must happen.
This sounds obvious when you say it out loud. But most GTM teams don’t really measure it, let alone understand it.
Account progression means defining stages that indicate where an account is in the buying journey, and tracking how accounts move between these stages over time. The stages I typically use are: unconscious, aware, involved, qualified, ready to sell and customer.
Each phase has clear criteria. An account goes from unconscious to conscious when multiple contacts from that account have interacted with your brand (i.e., impression saturation begins to show). They move from aware to engaged when these contacts start interacting with your content or campaigns (i.e. traffic, content consumption). They qualify if they meet your ICP criteria and show buying signals from multiple contacts in the account. They are ready to sell if they demonstrate purchase intent.
The beauty (and simplicity) of this model is that it creates a shared language between marketing and sales. Everyone knows where an account is and what needs to be done to move it forward.
The problem with traditional statistics
Traditional contact-based demand-gen metrics are designed under the assumption that individuals make purchases in a linear funnel, with leads flowing from marketing to sales in a predictable order.
That’s not how B2B purchasing works.
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Gartner research shows that buyers complete more than half of their purchasing process before ever speaking to the seller. Purchasing committees can consist of eight to ten stakeholders, sometimes more. The journey is not linear. It’s messy, multi-threaded, and spans months.
When you measure individual lead activity in this environment, you miss the forest for the trees. You may see that Jane from Acme Corp has downloaded a whitepaper, but you have no idea if Acme Corp as an account is actually getting any closer to buying.
Worse yet, lead-based metrics create perverse incentives. Marketing teams optimize lead volume because that’s how they’re measured. They fill the top of the funnel with cheap leads that will never convert. Sales gets frustrated because MQL quality is crap. The relationship between marketing and sales is disappearing.
This ends the same way every time. A marketing team proudly reports that they generated 500 MQLs last quarter. Sales responds that 400 of them have been rejected. Marketing blames sales for not handling leads properly. Sales blames marketing for not understanding what a qualified opportunity looks like.
Everyone loses.
Why attribution becomes irrelevant
Most GTM teams complain about attribution all the time. They can’t figure out which channels are working. They cannot link campaigns to revenue. They argue about first-touch, multi-touch, and last-touch models.
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Attribution doesn’t matter when you measure account progress.
Think about it this way: When you can see campaign-, channel-, and tactic-level data for every account at every stage, you eliminate the need to argue about which touchpoint gets credit for a conversion. You can see how the group of activities that contributed to an account moves from one stage to another.
You can measure that accounts in your target list that were exposed to your LinkedIn campaign moved from aware to engaged twice as fast as accounts that weren’t. You can see that accounts that attended your webinar went from engaged to qualified 40% faster than average. You may find that direct mail is most effective at moving accounts from qualified to ready to sell.
When you track account progress, you create a baseline for what it typically takes to move an account from the early stage to the later stage. How many touches? Which channels? What order? Then you measure each campaign against that baseline.
Instead of arguing about whether the whitepaper or demo request should get credit for the deal closed, ask a much more useful question: Did this campaign accelerate your account progress?
The double funnel approach
That doesn’t mean you should completely throw away lead-level lead tracking. You still need to measure individual contact engagement. But you have to think of it as two funnels running parallel.
The first funnel is your contact or lead funnel. This follows the traditional flow: research leading to MQL, to SQL, and to opportunities won. You need this to understand individual engagement and route leads appropriately.
The second funnel is your account funnel. This tracks account progress: unconscious, aware, engaged, qualified, ready for sale, ready for the customer. This is your North Star for understanding whether your marketing is actually driving purchasing decisions.
The magic happens when you connect these two funnels together. You can see which accounts have multiple engaged contacts. You can determine when an account has reached a qualification threshold by checking its purchasing group coverage. You can trigger sales activities when enough contacts from a target account show intent signals.
Most importantly, you can measure marketing effectiveness at the account level and use that data to ultimately predict revenue.
How to implement account progress tracking
Doing this well requires investments in your data infrastructure. You must be able to link contact-level activities to account-level records. You need clear definitions for each phase. And you need a way to calculate when an account meets the criteria to move forward.
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Here’s a practical approach:
Define your phases clearly. What does it mean for an account to be informed, engaged, or qualified? Write this down. Make it measurable. Ensure that marketing, sales and operations align with the definitions.
Build your account scoring model. Determine which signals indicate progression. This may include the number of contacts engaged, the types of content consumed, intent signals from third party data, website behavior, event participation and sales activities.
Set thresholds for progression. An account can move from aware to engaged when three or more contacts have engaged with marketing content in the last 90 days. An account can qualify if it meets the ICP criteria and shows active buying signals. Document these thresholds.
Track progress over time. This is where most teams fall short. You need to record not only what stage an account is in today, but also when it entered that stage and how long it took to move on from the previous stage. This will give you speed statistics.
Measure campaigns based on progress. Instead of asking how many leads a campaign generated, ask how many accounts made progress as a result of the campaign. Which accounts went from aware to involved? Which one went from engaged to qualified?
The alignment problem has been resolved
The attribution debate is actually a symptom of a deeper problem: marketing and sales are not aligned on what success looks like.
When marketing is measured by leads and sales by revenue, conflict is inevitable. Marketing optimizes for volume. Sales wants quality. Neither side can prove its point because they are looking at different data.
Account progress gives both teams a shared metric to rally around. Everyone can see the account funnel. Everyone understands what needs to be done to move accounts forward. Marketing focuses on moving accounts forward. The sale is made when the accounts are ready.
I’ve seen teams transform their go-to-market effectiveness by simply adopting this shared vision. The finger pointing stops. The discussions about lead quality disappear. Instead, you’ll have productive conversations about how to accelerate your account progress.
What to measure
Once you’re tracking your account progress, here are the metrics that really matter:
- Phase distribution. How many accounts are currently in each stage? Is your funnel healthy or are accounts stuck?
- Progress rate. What percentage of accounts move from one stage to the next? Where are the biggest declines?
- Progress rate. How long does it take for accounts to move between phases? Are certain segments faster than others?
- Impact of the campaign on progress. Which campaigns are most effective at promoting accounts? At what stages?
- Buy group coverage. How many purchasing committee contacts do you reach within involved accounts?
These statistics give you actionable insight into whether your GTM movement is actually working. They predict sales in a way that the number of leads never will.
Stop measuring activity. Start measuring progress.
Account progress is the most important metric for GTM teams because it captures what really matters: whether target accounts are moving closer to customership. It eliminates attribution debates by providing a holistic view of account engagement. It aligns marketing and sales around a common goal.
Yes, implementing account progress tracking requires investments in your data infrastructure. Yes, it requires aligning marketing, sales and operations based on definitions and thresholds. Yes, it’s more complicated than counting MQLs. But if you want your GTM function to actually predict and drive revenue, this is the way forward.
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