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TRACE —————— this visit only
Found through ads, search, community, or direct outreach.
Left contact details that turned out to be real.
Meets the written qualification standard.
Confirmed by a person on a phone call.
Recorded as won.
Still active after a set period.
The pipeline runs in six stages: Prospect, Lead, MQL, SQL, Closed, Retained. Prospect and Lead are live and carrying signal. MQL, SQL, Closed and Retained are drawn unlit, because they are still being built.
Systems Research builds customer-acquisition systems for firms in regulated financial services across North America, and then runs them. Paid media, search and content, community, and outbound prospecting feed a CRM; an outbound call centre works the leads by telephone. Each stage above has a cost attached to it and a conversion rate out of it, both measured rather than estimated.
The step from MQL to SQL is the one that is not software. A person rings the lead, and what happens on that call is written back into the CRM — which is what lets targeting, creative and landing pages change on the next cycle instead of the next quarter. The system is being built and instrumented at the moment. It is not being run at volume.
stage 03 → 04 · the mechanism is a person
The step from MQL to SQL on the diagram is somebody on a telephone. Voice Operations is that step: calling leads, qualifying them against a written standard, and recording what happened accurately enough that every number upstream means something.
upstream of stage 01 · everything that makes a prospect
Everything to the left of the first node. Paid media, search and content, community, and outbound prospecting — built so that each one can be judged on cost per stage rather than on impressions.
11 Two stages carry signal. The remaining four are the work.
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