Derby Management's "Competitive Edge" Blog

I'm bringing my SUV in next week. I drive over 30,000 miles a year-140 miles a day round-trip from the NH beach to Boston and a weekly trip to VT in the winter adds up, and as much as I'd rather skip the time and expense for this particular checkup, I know better. I must admit that I just might exceed the speed limit on 95 just a bit, but that's the car's fault since he tells me that he likes to run free and lets me know by its very quiet ride that "speed is just a number which is why they invented radar detectors".

An engine that runs that hard needs a consistent check-up. Not because something feels wrong; simply because peak performance doesn't maintain itself.

Your marketing operation is no different.

We're nearly six months into 2026. If you haven't looked hard at your marketing metrics recently, now's exactly the right moment. Not to admire what's working, but to find out what's quietly leaking performance before it costs you your revenue numbers for the second half of the year. 

Here's where I'd focus your own diagnostic:  

Start With the Engine: The Revenue-Connected Metrics

Everything else in Marketing is noise if it doesn't connect to revenue. In our sales and marketing work with customers, we work hard at making the complex simple, and in that definition, Marketing has only one job, and that's to produce highly valuable leads that produce that sales revenue at the price points that we all agreed to. To make that statement more emphatic, no CEO or board member is asking how many impressions you generated. That person is asking just three questions regarding Marketing: 

1. Are we producing the right leads?
2. Are those leads closing in right timeframe?
3. At what cost?

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) remains the foundational metric, but we need to measure it the right way. This is an important nuance that that we work on with our customers and it's what I teach my students every semester as they work through their marketing team projects.  Make sure that you split CAC between marketing expense spend (programs, tools, paid media) and marketing people (fully-loaded compensation). My experience is that many companies only measure one or the other and fool themselves on the true cost...or worse, they look at the total CAC including the Sales expense.  While that's an interesting high-level comparative indicator, it's meaningless in terms of the critical marketing metrics of what's healthy and what isn't.

Last year and more and much more in 2026, we're seeing AI-powered tools compressing the expense spend side of CAC significantly especially in automated content generation, campaign optimization, and predictive targeting. If your CAC isn't reflecting those efficiencies yet, you need to be much more deliberate and detailed in splitting your specific assessments of your marketing health...which comes back to detailed CAC. 

Marketing-Sourced Pipeline ($) is a critical primary this year. If you're still leading management discussions with your boss and peers only with MQL volume, it's really not that important.  You need to be much more detailed with the actual dollars of qualified pipeline that marketing created or heavily (>50%) influenced.  In our own case, using Claude linked directly into our Hubspot platform, we now measure the exact definition of when, where, and by whom that lead was created as the lead is exactly tracked from MQL to SQL through Discovery to a BUC ("Business Use Case"-our own definition of "proposal") to a closed deal.

The Transmission: Quality and Velocity

A high-performance car doesn't help you if the power isn't transferring efficiently to the road.

Cost Per MQL tells you how efficiently you're converting marketing activity into qualified interest. Create your own tracking breadcrumbs here by using AI-assisted content and personalization at scale. Very quickly, you'll see meaningful reductions in your cost per MQL, because you will be reaching the right buyers earlier in your marketing funnel with more relevant messaging.

MQL-to-SQL Conversion Rate is your quality check. A 15% conversion rate on tight, well-qualified MQLs is worth far more than 40% on a sloppy, high-volume list. If this number isn't meeting your plan, it's usually a signal of a misalignment between what marketing is calling "qualified" and what your sales team actually experiences. That could be as simple a fix as a redefined SLA between the heads of Sales and Marketing for the 2nd half of the year, or it could be something much more complex. Fix the definition first before taking apart the engine.

Funnel Velocity is the time it takes measured in days to move a defined lead in our own funnel acronym of A.C.E from Awareness to Consideration to Engagement to an MQL. This is where we see AI having its most dramatic impact this year. AI-infused nurture sequences, dynamic content personalization and real-time signal detection are compressing timelines that used to take months into weeks.

A simple conceptual thought you might want to think about a bit in this very busy week: If your marketing funnel velocity hasn't improved this year, my guess is that you're not yet using AI as an integral part of your engine, but just as an accessory or a decoration.

AI Is the Fuel System, Not an Add-On

I want to be direct about how to think about AI in the context of these metrics. AI in 2026 isn't a tactic you deploy for certain campaigns. It's the operating system powering your engine. Let's go back to my SUV analogy.  AI should be thought of as the entire power train of your car.  If that doesn't work for you, think of AI as the electricity in your recently remodeled house. It runs your targeting, your content, your lead scoring, your attribution modeling, your nurture sequences and both your inbound and outbound prospecting.

That's the tune-up. Not replacing what you have. Measuring it honestly, finding the leaks, and heading into the second half of 2026 with a machine running at peak condition.  T

To bring this down to reality, I spent 3 hours Saturday morning talking to Claude as we diagnosed and cleaned up our Hubspot database health simply to better assess the impact of this and future blogs 

The Bottom Line

Six months in, there's still plenty of time to dramatically change your Marketing for this year!  

-Measure your CAC.
-Measure your pipeline contribution in dollars.
-Check your funnel velocity.
-Run an AI diagnostic 

Have a superb week Marketing & Selling!  Give me a call if you want to kick around a few ideas.

Jack is Managing Partner of Derby Management, a strategy consulting firm, and is the founder of the Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts University, where he has been teaching for 20 years ago. Every semester's content is significantly updated with a heavy emphasis in 2025 and 2026 in AI's use in Inbound Marketing. At Derby Management, Jack and his managers architect and build business strategies heavily focused on sales and marketing processes, tools and tech platforms.  

"Writing the Winning Marketing Plan"
"Writing the Winning Sales Plan"
"Writing the Winning Business Plan"
www.derbymanagement.com
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts.

For those parents who have graduating students, you may want to send them this:
"The Marketing of Me"