Insights

Notes from the ops room

Practical writing on lead lifecycle, data trust, and AI in revenue operations. Everything here comes from systems I’ve actually run — no thought leadership about tools I’ve never logged into.

Articles

  • MQL vs PQL vs SQL, explained

    An MQL is a lead marketing judges ready based on engagement. A PQL is a lead that’s shown buying intent by using your product, usually in a free trial or freemium tier. An SQL is a lead sales has accepted as genuinely worth pursuing. The difference is which signal earns the qualification: marketing

  • Building HubSpot lead scoring from zero

    Lead scoring works when it predicts which leads become revenue and sales believes it. Most scoring models fail the second test because they were built on guesses and never checked against outcomes. Here’s how to build one in HubSpot from a blank slate, step by step, with the trap in each step.

  • You don’t have a tooling problem, you have a handoff problem

    When pipeline underperforms, the instinct is to buy something — a better CRM, a routing tool, an attribution platform. It feels like progress. It rarely is, because the leak is almost never in the tool. It’s in the handoff between the people and teams the tool connects. New software just gives you a

  • Five symptoms of routing you’ve outgrown

    Routing that worked at ten reps quietly breaks at thirty. It rarely fails loudly; it just starts sending the wrong leads to the wrong people slightly more often until everyone’s built a workaround. Here are five symptoms that yours has been outgrown.

  • MQL→SQL conversion benchmarks for B2B SaaS

    For most B2B SaaS teams, MQL-to-SQL conversion lands somewhere between roughly 13% and 25%. Below that range, you usually have a definition or handoff problem, not a lead-quality one. Above it, your MQL bar may simply be set high. But the honest answer is that this benchmark is close to useless unti

  • Anatomy of a Lead That Never Gets Called

    Here’s a real one, anonymised. A demo request came in from a director at a company that matched the ideal customer profile almost exactly. High intent, right seniority, right size. Nobody called. Nobody emailed. The lead sat, then aged out, then quietly closed. Let’s take it apart, because the failu

  • What is a RevOps SLA?

    A RevOps SLA is a written, two-sided agreement that sets out what marketing owes sales and what sales owes marketing at the handoff — typically the quality and volume of leads marketing delivers, and the speed and depth with which sales works them. It turns “work together” from a hope into a contrac

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