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B2B marketing KPIs connect qualified accounts with accepted opportunities, sourced pipeline and customer acquisition costs. Compare equally mature cohorts from campaign, CRM and finance exports, with a worked example and checks that keep open deals visible.
B2B marketing KPIs connect marketing-sourced accounts to sales acceptance, opportunities and eventual customer economics. For a long sales cycle, compare cohorts at the same age and show the opportunities that remain open. Current-month spending divided by current-month wins usually mixes different acquisition efforts and answers a different question.
Start with unique buying accounts that first met an agreed qualification rule during the acquisition period. Contacts are supporting records, not additional qualified accounts. Keep the original cohort membership fixed so an account cannot disappear from the denominator when it fails to progress.
Use an approved originating campaign for sourced reporting. If an account attended an event after entering through search, that later touch does not automatically become another sourced opportunity. The marketing attribution guide covers assigning credit; this report applies the chosen rule consistently.
Set a common follow-up age. For the illustrative US equipment supplier below, every account is observed for its first 180 days after qualification. Compare results only when each account has reached that age. A rolling cohort can require waiting until its latest qualifying account has completed the window.
Timing matters even inside a single source system. Google Ads explains conversion delay: outcomes can arrive after the interaction that generated them, affecting reported values. Your CRM cohort needs its own explicit clock rather than assuming a campaign report and a customer record use identical timing.
Bring a campaign cost register, an account qualification file, opportunity records and an approved sales cost allocation. Finance should confirm which costs belong to acquiring this cohort, including relevant labor and agency costs under the company's policy.
The account file needs a stable account ID, originating campaign, qualification date and sales-acceptance date. The opportunity file needs a unique opportunity ID, account ID, creation date, original amount and status at the common follow-up age. Use separate dated outcome records if the current CRM export cannot reproduce that historical view.
The table below shows the first handoffs. In this example, each account creates at most one opportunity, and all opportunity-creating accounts were accepted by sales first. Those assumptions make the accepted-account opportunity conversion a count of eligible accounts; businesses with several opportunities per account must count distinct accepted accounts for that rate.
| Source | Qualified accounts | Sales-accepted accounts | Accounts creating an opportunity | Marketing acquisition cost (USD) | Allocated sales acquisition cost (USD) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Events | 60 | 40 | 20 | 30,000 | 25,000 |
| Search | 80 | 40 | 16 | 40,000 | 32,000 |
| Partners | 40 | 20 | 14 | 20,000 | 13,000 |
| Total | 180 | 100 | 50 | 90,000 | 70,000 |
Keep acquisition volume, commercial progression and cost measures separate. The first measures establish whether marketing's qualification rule produces accounts that sales accepts and develops.
Sales acceptance rate = Sales-accepted accounts / Qualified accounts
Accepted-account opportunity conversion = Accepted accounts creating an opportunity / Sales-accepted accounts
Acceptance is 100 / 180 = 55.6%. Accepted-account opportunity conversion is 50 / 100 = 50.0%. These are cohort rates, not ratios of unrelated monthly activity totals.
Next, summarize the opportunities at the common follow-up age. Original sourced pipeline is the opportunity amount recorded at creation, before later changes. Open pipeline today would be a separate measure.
| Source | Original sourced pipeline (USD) | Won opportunities | Lost opportunities | Open opportunities |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Events | 400,000 | 6 | 4 | 10 |
| Search | 320,000 | 4 | 4 | 8 |
| Partners | 280,000 | 7 | 3 | 4 |
| Total | 1,000,000 | 17 | 11 | 22 |
Sourced pipeline is 400,000 + 320,000 + 280,000 = $1,000,000. It measures the original commercial opportunity associated with the cohort; it is neither a revenue total nor a guarantee that those amounts will close.
Resolved-deal win rate = Won opportunities / (Won opportunities + Lost opportunities)
The resolved-deal rate is 17 / (17 + 11) = 60.7%. By contrast, 17 / 50 = 34.0% of all created opportunities have won by this age. Both calculations are valid, but their denominators answer different questions. The remaining 22 opportunities explain why a resolved-deal rate is not a final cohort outcome.
For this example, every win represents a distinct new customer. Customer acquisition cost uses the approved combined cost pool:
Cohort CAC = Cohort marketing and sales acquisition costs / New customers acquired from the cohort
| Source | Combined acquisition cost (USD) | New customers | Cohort CAC (USD) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Events | 55,000 | 6 | 9,166.67 |
| Search | 72,000 | 4 | 18,000.00 |
| Partners | 33,000 | 7 | 4,714.29 |
| Total | 160,000 | 17 | 9,411.76 |
The total is (90,000 + 70,000) / 17 = $9,411.76. Percentages are rounded to one decimal place and dollar ratios to cents; calculations use unrounded inputs. Use the customer acquisition cost guide for the full cost-definition discussion.
The opportunity status check is 17 + 11 + 22 = 50, equal to the opportunity-creating accounts in the first table. Each source also reconciles: Events has 6 + 4 + 10 = 20; Search has 4 + 4 + 8 = 16; Partners has 7 + 3 + 4 = 14. The cost check is 55,000 + 72,000 + 33,000 = $160,000.
Partners has the lowest observed CAC in this example. That supports investigating its capacity and customer quality before increasing spending. It does not establish that its next customer will cost the same, or that Search's open opportunities will never convert.
Google Ads defines a conversion window as the period after an ad interaction during which a conversion is recorded. Record such source-specific settings when using advertising exports; their attributed totals may cover a different window from the CRM cohort. Covirage is not affiliated with Google.
The B2B marketing analytics guide covers interpreting these patterns. The sales-team KPI guide owns wider sales performance measures beyond marketing sourcing and qualification.
Bring campaign costs, account qualifications, opportunity outcomes and the approved acquisition cost allocation. Covirage maps the columns; its tools compute and check the cohort comparisons, and the external AI model explains the results with every figure traced to its rows. Create a free Covirage account and bring a sample of your own data.
See Covirage for sales teams for the supporting approach to analyzing commercial exports.
Choose measures that follow the handoff from qualified accounts to sales acceptance, opportunities and customers. Sourced pipeline and acquisition cost add dollar context. Keep cohort age and open-deal counts beside the results so incomplete outcomes are not mistaken for poor performance.
Group accounts by their first qualifying event, then compare outcomes after the same elapsed follow-up period. Preserve the original cohort membership and show open opportunities. A recent cohort's early progress should not be ranked against an older cohort's completed revenue results.
Sourced pipeline assigns each opportunity to its approved originating source. Influenced pipeline records qualifying marketing touches under a separate rule. The same opportunity may be influenced by several campaigns, so those campaign amounts cannot automatically be added to obtain unique company pipeline.
Marketing operations should own sourcing and qualification rules, while sales operations confirms acceptance and opportunity status. Finance approves the cost pool and revenue basis. A named business owner should resolve disagreements before the reporting team compares channels or changes budgets.