How Criteria Unified Sales and Marketing With a Lifecycle-Driven Funnel

Criteria was scaling fast, but systems weren’t keeping up. Sales, SDRs, and Marketing were all operating in different lanes — and none of them could see the full funnel.

Here’s what wasn’t working:

• MQLs were tracked at the Lead level; SQOs were tracked on Opportunities
  
• SDRs manually checked for duplicates and tracked leads in spreadsheets
  
• Custom contact creation triggered constant duplication errors
  
• Sales reps had no standard cadencing process
  
• No lifecycle reporting that made sense — or helped drive strategy
  
• Attribution wasn’t connected across systems
  

The result? A lot of effort… without a clear picture of what was working.