Mandy Hornaday: Ever heard of the pipeline black box — or thought about GTM like a factory? I hadn't either, until today's guest explained why it matters so much.
Mandy Hornaday: Hey everyone, welcome back to Growth Activated. I'm your host, Mandy Hornaday, and today I'm joined by Carolyn Dilks — 4x marketing leader turned Co-Founder at Passetto and co-host of the GTM Live podcast. Carolyn helps revenue teams expose what's really working and what's wasting resources before opportunities are created, so leaders can make smarter, faster GTM decisions.
Mandy Hornaday: In this episode we cover: the pipeline black box — what it is, why most orgs can't see it, and how to instrument it without ripping out your stack. Attribution myths — where attribution helps, where it misleads, and the first-principles metrics to run your GTM factory. And system-level ownership of pipeline — aligning Marketing, Sales, and RevOps around the same levers and time-to-pipeline milestones. This one is packed with practical ways to move from vanity metrics to measurable growth you can feel in the pipeline tomorrow. Let's get into it.
Mandy Hornaday: Welcome to Growth Activated. We're so excited to have you here today.
Carolyn Dilks: Hey, I'm pumped to be here. Just coming off a Labor Day weekend — great way to start a new week.
Mandy Hornaday: Absolutely. Thanks for starting your week with us. I'd love to dive into your background. Tell us about your career and where you are today.
Carolyn Dilks: For sure. I've been in the B2B tech world — actually started in the VC space — for coming up on about 15 years. I've been exposed over the years to a lot of different scale-up B2B tech companies. Right now I'm the CEO and Co-Founder of a company called Passetto. It's one of Chris Walker's companies. We've been operating for about 14 to 15 months, helping to solve some really critical problems that B2B SaaS companies are struggling with.
Mandy Hornaday: Interesting. And when you were at all of those tech startups, what did you specialize in?
Carolyn Dilks: Head of marketing. I'm a four-time head of marketing, most recently VP of Marketing at a Series B GovTech company.
Mandy Hornaday: Amazing. And what led you to make the shift to running Passetto? That's a big move out of marketing — although I know it's not specifically a marketing agency.
Carolyn Dilks: No, not specifically marketing. We work with revenue teams across the board. But marketing leaders are really the people who feel the problems and the symptoms of a dysfunctional GTM the most. I certainly did. About four years ago I was VP of Marketing at a rapidly growing technology company. We had gotten multiple rounds of funding while I was there — Series A, Series B, a second Series B. There's a lot of pressure with investment like that, especially from the board and investors. You get all this money and then it's: now grow fast. That was my role for a while — new bets, build brand awareness, ramp up revenue in a short amount of time.
Carolyn Dilks: With that comes a lot of challenges. When you're making new investments, you need a way to show whether those investments are having an impact. We didn't have the data architecture needed to answer that — what was working, what was not. I brought on Chris Walker's former agency, Refine Labs, to help accelerate our demand engine. We were pouring new dollars into brand awareness and demand conversion programs — and the pressure was on: where are my leads? We hear that all the time in marketing. Leads are the gold standard of marketing performance, but they are a terrible metric. I really needed new ways to show my investments were having a positive impact, but leadership was very much glued to legacy lead volume measurement. That's when I started consuming Chris Walker's content heavily and really feeling that problem in my soul. I went on instinct and reached out. He happened to be starting Passetto and was looking for someone to join the team. Divine timing — the stars aligned.
Mandy Hornaday: That's amazing. I'm a big fan of Chris Walker's content too. For those who may not know him — can you give a quick snapshot?
Carolyn Dilks: He has a huge presence on LinkedIn and was really known for B2B marketing strategy and demand strategy. He coined the term the MQL hamster wheel. He was the founder and owner of Refine Labs — running that from around 2019 until he sold his remaining shares just a few months ago. His reputation comes from really pushing back against the status quo in demand gen. He spotted problems in marketing much earlier than the rest of the market, which made his approach feel provocative and counterintuitive. But it stirred up a lot of important conversation in B2B marketing and B2B tech.
Mandy Hornaday: Absolutely. So fast forward to today — you're CEO of Passetto. Tell us more about what you specialize in and when Passetto comes into a revenue organization.
Carolyn Dilks: Passetto is part advisory, part instrumentation software — we bring the two together to help companies solve what we've coined the pipeline black box. It's this period of time before an opportunity is created that is very poorly tracked. I have yet to see a company that actually tracks this stage well, if at all. We help companies start to see the data they cannot see before an opportunity gets created, so they can very clearly answer the question: what is working and what is not working in my GTM? Every company that comes to us is either dealing with decelerating pipeline, being measured on the wrong metrics, or seeing growth slow down while nobody can answer what seems like the simplest question. They can't measure it because they're measuring the wrong things. They're not measuring what's inside the pipeline black box. We expose that and give companies the data they need to make smarter strategic decisions and optimize their pipeline factory.
Mandy Hornaday: So the pipeline black box is specifically about how pipeline gets created — before an opportunity exists. Can you unpack that a bit more?
Carolyn Dilks: Yes. Think about what happens in a go-to-market organization every day. You've got your SDR team, your AEs, a mix of people, tech, and now AI, all doing this thing that is basically trying to get a meeting — get people on the phone with your target market. Millions of interactions. Millions of emails sent, phone calls logged, LinkedIn messages sent. Marketing is over here sending emails. There's a massive amount of activity happening across sales and marketing. We might track touch points in marketing. We track leads generated. But in terms of all the activities that happen to try and book a meeting — that is very poorly tracked. It's spread across multiple tools and systems with no unified view.
Carolyn Dilks: What we need is a simplified, stitched-together view of all of that to show exactly what's happening before an opportunity is created. Why did we think it was a good idea to reach out to this person? What was the trigger? How long did it take us to connect? How long did it take to disqualify them, and why? How long did it take to book that first meeting? It sounds simple, but there are so many breadcrumbs of absolutely critical data at that stage that go completely untracked. So when leads are up but pipeline is down, the answer is hidden in plain sight — we just don't have the tools to see it. We generated 3,000 MQLs but only 1% converted to pipeline. Did we know that? How many prospects did our SDR team work? How many converted to pipeline? What happened in between? There is a causal map of patterns that produce pipeline. But when pipeline is down, we can't answer why.
Carolyn Dilks: We use the manufacturing factory analogy. If you're running a car manufacturing plant, you have a rigorous process to track everything on the line — production, quality assurance, testing — and you produce the same quality output over and over. Why is pipeline any different? We have the ability to engineer and manufacture pipeline the same way, but instead we throw a bunch of activity into the factory, hold our breath, and hope it comes out the other side as pipeline. When it doesn't, we have no ability to figure out what's broken on the line to fix it. What we want is to give teams the visibility to engineer pipeline on a recurring, predictable basis.
Mandy Hornaday: Yeah, that's probably the number one pain point I see in organizations. I'm curious — when you talk about the causal map, are you looking at that trigger point, or are you also looking at activities that may have led someone to take that trigger action?
Carolyn Dilks: That's where a lot of people get us confused with attribution. We get many marketers coming in saying they need help figuring out where to put their 2026 investments — more events? Less paid search? More paid social? They think attribution is going to give them that answer by weighting all their marketing activity. That's not us. We are not an attribution platform. But more importantly, attribution is not going to give you the answers you're looking for. It's secondary.
Carolyn Dilks: The first thing you need to do is figure out: do you have a marketing problem? Take scored MQLs as an example. Teams hit MQL targets. They go to events, get names, do things to get someone to reach a score threshold. Then they pass them to sales. And pipeline is down. Marketing is pointing fingers at sales saying they're not working the leads. Sales is pointing fingers at marketing saying the leads are garbage. Do we actually know if the MQLs are garbage? Do we know what's actually leading to meetings? We've worked with a plethora of companies where MQLs make up the largest share of what the team is working — and some of those MQLs have conversion rates to meetings so low it's staggering. Marketing teams have no idea. Sales teams have no idea. The go-to-market leader has no idea. That is the first thing to isolate. Before you fight over which channel to put budget into, you need to see how well that prospecting engine is actually operating. Then work backwards from there.
Mandy Hornaday: Can you give us some examples? What are some of the most interesting learnings from recent clients?
Carolyn Dilks: One client that comes to mind — a $100M CLM platform. Pipeline was decelerating, somewhere between slow decline and plateau. Like every company that comes in, they were using a three or four funnel source model: marketing-sourced pipeline, sales-sourced pipeline, SDR-sourced pipeline. And they couldn't figure out why pipeline was down while CAC was going up and growth was slowing. Marketing was hitting MQL targets. Every team was showing up to board meetings defending themselves.
Carolyn Dilks: When we got in, we first confirmed they had no visibility into what was happening before an opportunity was created. We exposed their pipeline black box and started measuring it. We learned pretty quickly that this company had a fairly solid marketing engine — their MQLs were converting to qualified pipeline at about 16 or 17%. A little room for improvement, but much better than a lot of companies we look at. Their handraisers were converting at over 40 to 50%. Great. How do we get more of those? We looked at what those leads were doing before becoming an opportunity versus randomly scored MQLs, and noticed really strong patterns in the signals those people had. We also saw cold outbound driving a huge volume of prospects being worked by the sales team — with a very low conversion rate. Extremely inefficient. And then we could see that handraisers were moving through the funnel in about 12 days, while scored MQLs were taking around 130 days. When your team is spending enormous time working leads that take multiple months to convert at a low rate, the whole system becomes inefficient. The goal is to help the team see GTM as a factory — not as separate marketing and sales silos — and understand: as a system, we need to do less of this, more of that, and be comfortable with MQL volume going down because we're shifting how we operate. MQLs might go down, but win rate goes up. The volume of people you have to work to get a meeting goes down. These are systematic changes.
Mandy Hornaday: Super interesting. What are the major KPIs everyone should be looking at? And are organizations naturally tracking them?
Carolyn Dilks: First things first — we don't encourage teams to rip out their existing metrics. We layer in new ones. The immediate thing we challenge is how pipeline is being measured. It's very difficult for Passetto to work directly with a marketing leader unless that leader is responsible for pipeline as a whole. So we tend to channel up to whoever owns pipeline across both sales and marketing. And we challenge the status quo: stop looking at pipeline by department source. Whether it's last touch, first touch, whatever — remove the department source lens. Just look at total pipeline generated.
Carolyn Dilks: Then inside the pipeline black box, we want to understand: what was the sales trigger — what actually got the meeting? Time from working to connected. Connected to meeting booked or held. Number of days to becoming qualified pipeline. Qualification rate to pipeline. Disqualification rate. What sequence or channel did the prospect respond to — email, phone call, LinkedIn DM? From all of that, we want to identify two or three recurring patterns of things that happen fast and consistently before pipeline is created that we can put on autopilot. That's engineering predictable pipeline. We also want to identify resource drains — where are we leaking pipeline because we're focused on the wrong things? And of course we look at downstream metrics: win rate, sales cycle length, ACV, closed-won revenue.
Mandy Hornaday: From a marketing perspective, what's the first recommendation you'd give B2B marketing leaders to start doing immediately?
Carolyn Dilks: Some level of accountability. Marketing leaders have one of the toughest jobs in GTM because they often lack the metrics to arm their decisions — they're going off gut feel or metrics that worked a decade ago and don't anymore. The most impactful thing a marketing leader can do as a responsible executive is to assume some accountability and ask: maybe the MQLs I'm creating are not good quality. Approach it with curiosity instead of defensiveness. Ask whether the metrics you're looking at are actually doing this business any favors when it comes to pipeline.
Carolyn Dilks: Second: challenge attribution. If you have an attribution tool and you're not getting your answers, that's a signal. Bring in your CRO or CEO and get them curious too. Say: there's this layer of data we might not be looking at — we should go get it. And it doesn't have to mean a full CRM restructure or a retooling project. Sometimes the answers are hidden in plain sight. You just have to approach it with curiosity and go find them.
Mandy Hornaday: I was doing a marketing assessment recently and talking to a director of demand gen who told me 80% of the leads he drives convert to MQLs. I asked how many of those MQLs convert to pipeline. He didn't know. So I think going that extra mile to understand what's happening — and being open to the answer — is really the point.
Carolyn Dilks: Exactly. And the biggest unlock is that as soon as you have visibility into prospecting efficiency — all the activity happening to get a meeting before an opportunity is created — it is absolutely illuminating what a company can learn. It changes everything.
Mandy Hornaday: I keep coming back to brand as I'm listening. I know you do a lot of brand-type marketing activities — LinkedIn, a podcast — and I'm sure it drives pipeline for Passetto. How do you personally think about the brand side when you're entering these pipeline conversations? Or is that a completely separate equation?
Carolyn Dilks: It's really important to me personally, but it's not what Passetto is selling. There are amazing companies out there that solve that problem — Refine Labs being one of them. They know how to build and execute brand campaigns that build market awareness. That is the marketer's superpower. I don't think marketers should be caught in the web of trying to figure out all the pipeline data — that's what you bring in RevOps, GTM engineers, and companies like Passetto for. But brand and messaging and positioning absolutely matter. Buyers are now doing their own research. They're going to Reddit, to ChatGPT, to LinkedIn. They want to educate at their own pace and talk to sales when they're ready. Clarity around message and how we show up to educate prospects — those things are vital. They're just harder to track. I've heard of a tool called My Telescope that can give you a sense of how much people are searching for you, though I haven't used it personally. Naturally, when brand is working well, you'll see a lift in pipeline creation, pipeline velocity, and win rates. But that is a different problem from lead creation. Two separate things.
Mandy Hornaday: Fascinating. Any final pieces of advice with annual planning right around the corner?
Carolyn Dilks: I've had a lot of conversations with VPs and CMOs in the last couple of weeks and I'm seeing very similar trends. First: if you're measuring by department source or last-touch attribution and you're struggling to make smart decisions going into next year, challenge that. You are at a disadvantage if you don't have better data. Second: challenge the belief that attribution is going to solve your problem. I was that person — I personally believed attribution was going to help me understand my impact on pipeline. It is a secondary layer you add on once you have the basic operational pipeline data tracked. Get that first.
Carolyn Dilks: And third: if you're a marketing leader who knows something isn't working — don't be afraid to challenge the status quo. Sit down with your CRO and say: I don't think the metrics we're measuring are doing us any favors. I want to make data-informed decisions. There's a better way. Create groundswell around it. Your instincts are probably right. The biggest obstacle is inertia — especially at companies over $150M to $200M in revenue, where legacy thinking and organizational complexity make it hard to change how things are measured. But the companies that push through that are the ones that figure out how to engineer pipeline on a predictable, recurring basis.
Mandy Hornaday: Absolutely. I know you have your own podcast — tell everyone where to find you.
Carolyn Dilks: Our show is GTM Live and I host it with my two co-founders, Trevor and Amber. Come check us out. And you can find Passetto at passetto.com, or reach out to me directly on LinkedIn — I'm Carolyn Dilks. I love when people come to say hello and start a conversation.
Mandy Hornaday: Awesome. Thank you so much, Carolyn. This has been wonderful. I learned a lot and I really appreciate your time today.
Carolyn Dilks: Thank you. I love chatting with people in marketing. That was great.
Mandy Hornaday: Absolutely. See you soon.
Mandy Hornaday: Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of Growth Activated. I hope this conversation sparked new ideas, challenged your thinking, and gave you practical tools to help elevate your impact as a marketing leader. If it did, I'd love for you to pass it along to a friend or colleague in B2B marketing. The more we grow together, the more we raise the bar for what marketing leadership can look like. And as always, keep activating growth for yourself and your company. See you next time.
