Revenue Operations: Top of Funnel Clarity

The Challenge

Reddit’s advertising organization was in a period of rapid growth, but its sales and marketing funnel lacked cohesion. Marketing efforts were not clearly attributed to revenue, and sales teams weren’t documenting or progressing opportunities in a consistent way. This created blind spots across the funnel:

• Marketing couldn’t tell which efforts were generating qualified leads
• Sales had inconsistent handoffs and pipeline tracking from prospect → opportunity → win → upsell/renewal.
• No clear mechanism existed for identifying upsell opportunities or re-engaging accounts that had churned or gone quiet.
• Internal teams lacked the reporting to confidently answer: Is our funnel generating the right revenue?

These are common challenges for newer media/ad sales organizations or advertising arms within larger companies, especially when systems, skills, and resources are still evolving.

The Approach

We took a cross-functional, systems-aware approach to rebuild Reddit’s funnel with minimal disruption to existing workflows.

• Held working sessions with sales, marketing, CS, media operations, and systems ops teams to map the current process, understand pain points, and surface each team’s ideal outcomes.
• Aligned those needs with broader business metrics: what the org needed to report to leadership, forecast, and grow
• Audited the tools (Salesforce, HubSpot), the resources available, and the operational gaps
• Developed a phased strategy that connected high-level business goals to tactical execution, while minimizing added work for already-stretched teams

The Solution

• Created a new end-to-end lead lifecycle that flowed cleanly from MQL to opportunity to win, with logic to re-engage existing or churned accounts
• Updated field structures and automations in both Salesforce and HubSpot to support that lifecycle
• Designed and implemented dashboards that gave sales and marketing a unified view into lead source, funnel progression, and revenue impact
• Provided documentation and training to ensure each team knew what was changing, why it mattered, and how to work within the updated system

Most importantly, we automated what could be automated—ensuring that teams didn’t feel like the rug had been pulled out from under them. The process worked with their habits, not against them.

The Results

The new funnel and attribution strategy gave Reddit clarity on where leads were coming from, where they were getting stuck, and how to unlock more revenue from both new and existing clients.

It also gave sales clarity on pipeline, and allowed them to identify opportunities faster.

• ~10–15% estimated improvement in MQL-to-SQL conversion
• ~20–25% of closed revenue became attributable to marketing sources
• Sales teams reported smoother handoffs and a better understanding of how to progress and revisit accounts
• Marketing finally had the data it needed to prove ROI and guide budget planning