The 5 GTM Metrics That Actually Matter

You're measuring the wrong things. And your boss is celebrating.

MQL count is up. Impressions are strong. The dashboard looks great in the QBR deck. Meanwhile, win rates are flat, sales cycles are getting longer, and nobody can tell you exactly where deals are dying.

I've spent 15+ years in B2B marketing and influenced over $20M in pipeline. In that time, I've watched smart companies drown in data they don't need while ignoring the five numbers that actually predict revenue.

Here are the metrics I pull with every client. They're not glamorous. They're not easy to track. But they tell the truth.

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Win Rate by Sales Stage

Your funnel is lying to you.

Deals enter. Deals leave. Somewhere in between, something is broken. Most teams don't know exactly where because they're looking at the whole funnel, not each stage.

Win rate by stage tells you where the cliff is. Pull it from your CRM monthly. Calculate what percentage of deals advance from demo to evaluation, evaluation to proposal, proposal to close.

When the same stage drops month after month, that's not a sales problem. That's a positioning problem. Deals dying after demos? Your messaging isn't landing. Falling apart in evaluation? Your enablement is weak.

Find the cliff. Fix what's underneath it.

Healthy targets: 40-60% demo to eval, 50-70% eval to proposal, 60-80% proposal to close. If you're not hitting these, you have your diagnosis.

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Average Sales Cycle Length

A longer sales cycle usually isn't a timeline problem. It's a clarity problem.

When buyers take longer to decide, it means they're uncertain. Uncertain about value. Uncertain about differentiation. Uncertain whether what you do is worth what you charge.

Track it monthly. Use the median, not the average. Outliers will skew the average and hide the real signal.

If your cycle length is creeping up, buyers can't see the value clearly enough. That's almost always a messaging or ICP problem in disguise.

Watch for wide variance too. Deals closing in 30 days and 180 days in the same quarter means your messaging is inconsistent or your ICP is too broad.

Benchmarks: SMB 30-60 days, mid-market 60-120, enterprise 120-180. Know where you stand.

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Attach Rate

This one is underrated. Most companies don't track it. The ones who do often find uncomfortable truths.

Attach rate is the percentage of customers who buy a second product after the first. It's the cleanest signal of whether your product ecosystem actually makes sense to buyers.

Low attach rate (under 20%) is almost never a product problem. It's a positioning problem. Buyers didn't realize they needed Product B because nobody made the case that Product A was incomplete without it.

Here's a real example. We hit 77% attach rate on a cross-sell initiative by doing one thing: repositioning the add-on from "nice to have" to "necessary for realizing ROI on your primary purchase." No product changes. No pricing changes. Just messaging that connected the dots.

Sales enablement followed. The numbers followed.

Track it quarterly. Set targets by product combination. If you're under 20%, start there.

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Sales Velocity

This is the only metric that tells you whether your GTM is actually working.

The formula: (Number of Opportunities x Average Deal Size x Win Rate) / Sales Cycle Length

It accounts for everything at once. Volume. Deal size. Win rate. Speed. If velocity is increasing, something is working. If it's flat or declining, something is broken.

The useful part is the math. Here's a quick illustration:

20 deals x $50K average x 60% win rate / 90 days = $6,666/day

Improve win rate to 70% through better enablement, and you're at $7,777/day. That's a 17% increase from one lever. No new headcount. No new product features. Just tighter positioning and better sales tools.

Calculate it monthly. Segment by product, region, and rep. The segments where velocity is highest tell you where your GTM motion is working. The ones where it's lowest tell you where to look.

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Pipeline Influenced (Not Generated)

Marketing-sourced pipeline is a vanity metric. It rewards volume over quality and encourages campaigns that generate leads nobody closes.

What matters is where marketing helps sales win.

Pipeline influenced is the total deal value in closed-won opportunities where marketing played a meaningful role. Not "first touch." Played a role. Battle card used in a competitive deal. Case study shared before a final decision. ROI calculator presented in a negotiation.

I tracked $20M+ in influenced pipeline by adding one field to Salesforce. Sales tagged every deal where they used a marketing asset. Not complicated. Deeply useful.

It shifted the conversation in every exec review. From "marketing generates leads" to "marketing helps us close." That's a completely different value story.

Target 40-70% of closed-won deals with marketing influence. If you're below 30%, sales isn't using your content. That's an enablement problem. Fix it.

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What to Stop Tracking

Stop celebrating these numbers. They're not the signal you think they are.

MQLs. They don't predict revenue. They incentivize volume over quality. Every quarter, marketing hits MQL targets while sales complains about lead quality. If this is happening to you, MQLs are the problem.

Website traffic. Fine for SEO visibility. Useless for GTM strategy unless it's converting to pipeline.

Content downloads. Measures interest. Has nothing to do with intent.

Social engagement. Fun to report. Irrelevant to revenue.

Email open rates. Click-through is the signal. Opens are noise.

None of these are terrible to look at. They're just terrible to optimize for. Know the difference.

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How to Use These Five Metrics

Once a month. One hour. That's all it takes.

Pull all five numbers. Find the biggest gap between where you are and where you should be. Diagnose the root cause. Is it positioning? Enablement? ICP definition? Run one experiment. Track it next month.

Only one experiment at a time. Change multiple variables and you'll never know what worked.

Example: Win rate is dropping at demo stage. Hypothesis: positioning isn't resonating. Experiment: rewrite the demo intro to lead with customer outcomes instead of features. Track win rate at that stage for 30 days. Move on based on the result.

Simple. Disciplined. Repeatable.

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Your GTM is only as strong as the questions you're willing to ask.

These five metrics don't make you look smart in a dashboard. They tell you where the work actually needs to happen. That's more valuable.

If you're struggling to move these numbers and want an outside perspective, let's talk.

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