Turn it up or down based on your team's bandwidth.

Treat your MQL/SQL definitions like a faucet.

"Wasting time" on a maybe prospect is better than wasting time doing nothing.

ANYTHING but sit on your hands and whine about about lead quality.

Ask for lower quality leads to get the volume, maybe find a needle in the haystack. Cold call. Go to local meetups.

If your team has time, they should be talking to more people.

Two.

Their reps doing 2 demos a week complaining about lead quality while making 20 cold calls a week.

Here is a real story of a company I worked with.

Often I find they arguing about lead "quality" when what actually matters is sales rep capacity.

Sales wants the MQL bar so high the prospect needs a notarized blood oath of purchase to qualify.

Marketing wants the MQL bar so low a kid addicted to fortnight who downloaded the Squad Synergy case study qualifies.

Sales and Marketing are fighting over MQLs again.

When you do, you don’t need 5x pipeline coverage. You need 3.1x and your cash conversion cycle shrinks.

Your job is to drive EP up and drop EV down.

2/ Execution Variance (EV): The swing in those odds from one rep to the next.

1/ Execution Probability (EP): The real-time odds any deal will close, based on actual sales behaviors. (basically predicted win rate based on THAT specific deal).

Two numbers matter now.

It’s the high variance of that win rate.

The real enemy isn’t the win rate.