When Christopher Willis started as chief marketing officer at Acrolinx in 2017, his mandate was to help the Berlin-based content software company grow beyond its European footprint. Five and a half years later, Acrolinx has a strong customer base in the U.S.—thanks in part to Willis adding the role of chief pipeline officer in 2020.

Willis said he “lives two quarters ahead” of sales, putting special emphasis on sales velocity—a “piece of fancy math” that helps predict revenue. He meets with the sales team regularly to ferret out what deals are stuck in the pipeline and gives his marketing team latitude to experiment while holding them accountable to one overall metric.

Why did you add the role of chief pipeline officer?

What we set out to do was balance the today with the tomorrow. So, in Q4 for example, sales is 100 percent focused on the now, on closing the year. But the thing is there’s another year coming. There’s a Q1 that’s going to follow a Q4 and somebody in the organization needs to live with that.

It makes sense that it’s also the person that runs marketing because marketing impacts the future. Not so much the now, but largely the future from a demand gen standpoint. So, I live two quarters ahead. I’m looking at creation and progression of opportunities to make sure that we’ll be in great shape going into the next quarter, so that our chief revenue officer can focus 100 percent on the now, getting deals progressed to a point of closure this quarter.

Was it difficult to get the role up and running?

For the first six months, we weren’t really sure what we were doing. I did reach out to another person on LinkedIn with the title chief pipeline officer and got some ideas. But a lot of this was just feeling it out and progressively getting more data to paint several different stories and identify what we care about and how we were going to measure the success of not just the role, but the company.

Which metrics matter most?

Driving up our sales velocity. It’s a piece of fancy math: The number of opportunities entering the pipeline times the average deal size times the win rate, over the average sales cycle length.

It’s measured in dollars per day. I’m looking for this number to go up quarter-over-quarter. The way that you do that in execution with the sales organization is by putting more opportunities in their pipeline. I have some control over that because I also own the marketing organization, so they’re a lever for this.

How does marketing factor into sales velocity?

There’s the obvious content marketing, syndication, all the demand gen and the events that we do that feed directly into this model. But the things that I wasn’t thinking about feed into it as well, all of which have been created so that we sell more business faster. This is the year that we’re hopefully going to pop into a category, and we’re going to spend money around that to create awareness. My objective in doing that is to make it easier to generate first meetings. So, if I don’t see an increase in meetings, for example, I’m going to wonder why our awareness isn’t working.

As this whole model flows all the way through the deal, I’m doing things to lubricate the process. If the process doesn’t get easier, we don’t get faster; if I’m not seeing an increase in velocity, I’m wondering why my awareness isn’t working because that should be the outcome.

How do you analyze the data?

We’re looking at all this data on an annualized basis—so a rolling four-quarters model. It’s not just a quarter at a time; we’re looking at a full 12 months’ worth of data on a repetitive basis to uncover the trends that we want to impact.

We’ve set some service level agreements around how long deals should sit in different stages. We’re doing exception reporting on a monthly basis, and I meet with the sales organization to go through their pipeline and look at deals that aren’t progressing. That progression helps to drive that sales cycle length. Each piece of this can be chipped away to increase that velocity over time.

What about things you can’t measure?

Go do whatever you want and make it as unmeasurable as you want, but it needs to come back to: Did we get the number of leads that we would have expected at the price that we would have expected? That’s allowed us to do some really interesting things.

For instance, if I was going to spend money on billboard advertising, how do you directly tie that back to value from a B2B standpoint, enterprise purchase? How do I get an ROI out of that? I’m sure that somebody could tell me a story about it, but really, it’s lubricating that sales process. And if velocity is not increasing, it’s probably not working

How are sales and marketing aligned?

Digging into pipeline, you would think that the sales organization would push back on this conversation coming from me, but it hasn’t been that way. It’s really been very well accepted, and the idea of bringing them forensically through their pipeline on a monthly basis to help them to see where they have soft spots has been incredibly valuable to the business.

Marketing and sales are aligned through both the end goal of the business and compensation to make this seamless. Now we’re in a position where we’re essentially calling our shots. We’re hitting our numbers. We’re walking into next quarter ready to do business in a healthy position from a pipeline standpoint. We just need to execute. We know how to do that moving forward and we know how to scale that, and it’s a great place to be.