Marketo overhaul → 3x MQL volume in 90 days

This case study is a composite based on a real engagement. Industry, revenue stage, and the headline result are real. Specifics (company name, exact numbers) are anonymized to protect client confidentiality. Named-client references are available on request under MNDA.

The situation

Series B B2B SaaS, ~$30M ARR, ~80 employees, ~400k contacts in Marketo. Marketing leadership had turned over twice in 18 months. The Marketo instance was inherited from a predecessor and had received only ad-hoc maintenance for three years. Symptoms:

• Database bloat: ~35% duplicate records, no decay rules, opt-in tracking inconsistent
• Inflated scoring: 60% of contacts scored above MQL threshold; Sales ignored MQLs because too many were unqualified
• Slow campaigns: 4-week campaign turnaround due to tangled folder structure and dependency chains
• Broken Salesforce sync: 1,200 sync errors per day, mostly silent
• No attribution: marketing couldn't prove contribution; Finance was questioning the marketing budget

What we did

Weeks 1–2: MOPs Audit

Standard 2-week audit (see MOPs Audit service page). Output: 47 issues identified, 12 prioritized as critical or high, 30/60/90-day roadmap delivered.

Weeks 3–6: Foundation Fixes

• Database cleanup: deduplication, opt-in normalization, decay rules. Database shrunk from 400k to 285k clean, deliverable contacts. Email engagement rates jumped immediately.
• Salesforce sync remediation: field mapping rebuilt, sync errors dropped from 1,200/day to under 50/day.
• Scoring model rebuild: behavioral + demographic + firmographic scoring with proper decay. MQL threshold recalibrated based on historical SQL conversion data.

Weeks 7–10: Lifecycle & Nurtures

• Lifecycle redesign: stage definitions, conversion criteria, and SLA enforcement built in Revenue Cycle Modeler.
• Nurture overhaul: replaced 14 stale, disconnected nurture programs with 4 streamlined journey-based nurtures (use case, role, stage, intent signal).
• Routing & SLA: rebuilt round-robin routing with territory rules; integrated SLA alerts into Slack so unrouted leads escalated within 5 minutes.

Weeks 11–12: Reporting & Handover

• Attribution dashboards: source-of-pipeline reporting rebuilt; first/last/multi-touch attribution available to leadership.
• Team enablement: 8 hours of recorded training, written runbook, weekly office hours for 30 days post-launch.

The results — 90 days post-overhaul

Why it worked

Three things, all standard MOPs blocking-and-tackling — but the team had been too busy fighting fires to do them:

1. Clean data before clever tactics. Most MOPs problems look like sophisticated marketing problems but are actually data problems. Fixing the database fixed half of the symptoms.
2. Recalibrate scoring against actual conversion data. Inflated scores destroy Sales trust. The fix is calibration, not more rules.
3. Sales ↔ Marketing alignment via routing & SLA. Marketing's pipeline contribution doesn't happen in Marketo; it happens in the handoff.

What it cost

12-week project engagement, fixed-price at ~$65K. Followed by a 6-month standard retainer ($18K/mo) to operate the new setup while the team hired a permanent MOPs lead. Total first-year cost of the program: ~$173K — vs. estimated incremental marketing-sourced pipeline contribution of $14M+ over the same period.

See more case studies on the Case Studies index or read about our MOPs audit service.