The 10-Point Go-To-Market Leak Finder

The short version. The full argument follows.

Revenue doesn’t usually disappear in one dramatic failure. It leaks, a few points here, a few weeks there, across ten places most CEOs never look at side by side because they sit in different people’s dashboards. This is the one-page version of that side-by-side view. Ten checks, ten benchmarks, run through your own numbers in under twenty minutes.

Picture a mid-market CEO reviewing a board deck. Revenue is up. The team is busy. Nobody’s lying in that meeting. But underneath the top-line number, a lead sat unanswered for two days last month, the pipeline going into this quarter was 2.1× coverage instead of 3×, and the last renewal cycle quietly lost four accounts nobody flagged until they were gone. None of these show up as a single line item anywhere. Each one, alone, looks like a rounding error. Stacked together, they’re the entire growth-rate gap between this company and the one just ahead of it in the market.

Why does revenue leak across the funnel?

Because most companies are still built for a push world in a market that runs on pull. Every one of the ten leaks maps to one of three pull levers: access, attract, or achieve.

These ten leaks show up together instead of in isolation for a reason. In The Power of Pull, John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison argued that most organizations are still built for a push world: forecast demand, then build a standardized process to meet it, then stockpile the resources needed to run that process. That model rewards predictability. It has almost nothing to say about speed, magnetism, or getting better through participation, exactly what a market running on pull now requires instead.

The authors named three levers for operating in a pull world:

• Access: pulling in resources the moment you need them, instead of stockpiling them in advance.
• Attract: becoming a magnet for the right opportunity, instead of chasing it down.
• Achieve: getting better by participating in a live flow of knowledge, instead of repeating a fixed process.

Every leak on this list sorts cleanly into one of the three, which is the tell that they were never ten separate problems. They’re one structural mismatch, showing up in ten places.

What are the 10 go-to-market leaks and their benchmarks?

1. Speed to first response (Access)

Time from a lead’s first inquiry to a human’s first reply. Benchmark: under 1 hour, ideally under 5 minutes. If your average sits anywhere near the 42-hour industry norm, this is very likely your single highest-ROI fix, and the cheapest one on this list to act on this week.

2. Lead qualification clarity (Attract)

Ask your Head of Marketing and your Head of Sales, separately, to define what makes a lead sales-ready. If you get two different answers, that gap is where good leads quietly die in a handoff nobody owns. There’s no external benchmark for this one: either the two definitions match, or they don’t.

3. Pipeline coverage ratio (Access)

Total open pipeline value divided by the quarter’s revenue target. Benchmark: 3 to 4× coverage. Below that, you don’t have a closing problem yet. You have a pipeline-generation problem that will show up as a closing problem next quarter.

4. Win rate by segment (Achieve)

Closed-won divided by total qualified opportunities, split by deal size. Benchmark: 25-35% at SMB, 12-18% at enterprise. A win rate meaningfully below your segment’s benchmark usually means the deals entering the pipeline were never well-qualified in the first place, which routes back to Leak 2.

5. Sales cycle length versus benchmark (Achieve)

Median B2B sales cycle now runs about 84 days and has lengthened roughly 22% since 2022, mainly because deals now involve six to ten decision-makers instead of two or three. If your cycle is well above benchmark for your deal size, the question isn’t “why is sales slow.” It’s which of those six to ten stakeholders isn’t getting the material they need to say yes internally.

6. CAC payback period (Access)

Fully loaded sales and marketing cost to acquire a customer, divided by the gross profit that customer generates monthly. Benchmark: under 18 months, under 12 for top-tier efficiency. The most common way this number gets flattered is by quietly excluding SDR salaries from the calculation. Include them, the real number is the only one worth knowing.

7. Content distinctiveness (Attract)

Pull your last four pieces of published content next to your closest competitor’s. If a reader couldn’t tell whose is whose without checking the logo, your content isn’t losing to a better competitor. It’s failing to register as a distinct choice at all. This is the AI-era version of a positioning problem.

8. AI answer engine visibility (Attract)

Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini to recommend vendors in your category and see whether you’re named. AI answer engines typically surface only a handful of brands per response, not a full page of results, and buyers increasingly trust that shortlist. If you’re not on it, you’re losing deals before your sales team ever hears about them.

9. Martech stack data readiness (Access)

The average enterprise stack runs 91 tools and actively uses only 49% of them. Before adding one more AI tool to the stack, check whether your CRM data is clean enough for the tools you already own to work properly. This is usually the highest-leverage item on this list for a company that’s already bought more tools than it uses.

10. Post-sale revenue retention (Achieve)

Revenue kept and expanded from existing customers over the trailing twelve months. This is the leak CEOs feel latest and regret most, because by the time a churn number looks bad, the damage was already done a full renewal cycle earlier. If nobody in the company can produce this number inside of five minutes, that itself is the finding.

How should a CEO run the leak audit?

Run it this week, fix the cheapest leak first, and put one person in the room who can see all ten numbers.

Takeaway 01: Run the audit this week, not next quarter

• Block 20 minutes and pull the actual number for each of the 10 leaks, not an estimate from memory.
• Where a number doesn’t exist yet, like Leak 2’s qualification definition or Leak 10’s retention figure, write down that it doesn’t exist. That’s a finding, not a gap in the exercise.
• Compare each number against the benchmark listed for it, not against your own result from a year ago.
• Circle the three leaks furthest from benchmark. Those three are worth more of your time this quarter than the other seven combined.
• Put a single owner’s name next to each of those three leaks before the meeting ends, not a team or a department.

Takeaway 02: Fix the cheapest leak first, not the most interesting one

• Rank your three worst leaks by how much it costs to fix each one, not by how exciting the fix sounds.
• Speed to first response (Leak 1) and lead qualification clarity (Leak 2) are almost always the cheapest fixes on this list and often the highest-leverage.
• Start there even if a bigger strategic leak, like Leak 9’s stack cleanup, feels more urgent. Momentum from an early win buys you room to tackle the slower fix.
• Set a 30-day check-in on the cheap fix specifically, before starting the expensive one.
• Only move to the next leak once the first one shows a measurable change, not just a completed task.

Takeaway 03: Put one person in the room who can see all ten numbers

• Name one person, not a committee, who receives all 10 numbers on the same report, on the same day, every month.
• That person doesn’t need to own every function. They need visibility across marketing, sales, and customer success at once.
• If that person doesn’t exist in your company today, that absence is itself the biggest leak on this list.
• Give that person the authority to flag a leak directly to you, the CEO, without it being softened by whichever department it makes look bad.
• Re-run the full 10-point audit every quarter, on the same day, so leaks get caught while they’re still cheap to fix.

None of these ten leaks require a bigger budget to find. They require someone who’s actually looking at all ten at once, on a schedule, instead of discovering them one at a time, in board meetings, after the quarter that mattered has already closed.

Frequently asked questions

Statistics on this page link to the sources cited when this essay was first published. First-hand results are from Dean Reid’s own engagements.