Your Q2 Reality Check

6 Weeks Until Q2 Ends

Most marketing teams won't run the audit that decides whether the back half of the year hits plan.

A B2B team ran their first Q2 audit last May, found a $180,000 channel that had been quietly underperforming since February, reallocated, and hit Q3 numbers 11% over plan. They didn't catch it earlier because the monthly dashboard reviews kept showing "performance steady."

Your monthly dashboard tells you what's happening. The Q2 audit tells you whether what's happening will land you anywhere near year-end.

This post breaks down the 6 metrics worth auditing at the mid-point, the 2 metrics you can skip until Q4, the forecast trap that fools every team that doesn't catch the trick, and the May conversation with sales that decides whether the audit actually changes anything.

Key Takeaways

• 6 metrics catch the truth at mid-year. 2 metrics lie at mid-year.
• The Q3 pipeline forecast looks great as a stage-weighted total and very different as a source-confidence-weighted total. The two numbers can be 60% apart on the same pipeline.
• Flat Q2 numbers compared to Q1 mean you're already losing. Marketing budgets compound; audience definitions don't.
• The May conversation with sales is one question, asked before June 1, that surfaces leaks the dashboard hides.
• Most teams run a "Q2 review" and call it an audit. Reviews summarize. Audits change decisions.

The 6 Metrics Worth Auditing

These 6 are the ones that catch trend reversals at the mid-point, early enough to do something about it before Q3 starts.

1. CAC Trend Across Q1 + Q2

Pull customer acquisition cost by month for the first 5 months of the year. If the trend line is flat or down, you're holding ground. If it's walking up, your back half is going to feel heavier than your front half did.

A 12% CAC drift over 5 months sounds small. Compounded over Q3 + Q4, it's a 20%+ delta on your annual CAC plan.

The diagnostic: month-over-month CAC for the channels you spend more than 10% of budget on. Anything walking up by more than 5% per month is a yellow flag; more than 10% is red.

2. SQL-to-Close Rate by Source

Pull last 6 months of SQLs by lead source. Pull closed-won attribution back to source. Compute the conversion rate per source.

If your top source's SQL-to-close rate has dropped more than 15% over Q1 + Q2, the leads are still coming in but the quality is degrading. The fix is at the source (audience drift, creative fatigue) before it shows up as a CAC problem.

A SaaS team's LinkedIn SQL-to-close dropped from 22% to 14% across Q1 and Q2. They held spend, blamed sales for "soft closes," and didn't catch the audience drift until Q4. Cost them $400K in misallocated Q3 spend.

3. Pipeline Coverage for Q3

This is the metric the forecast trap lives in. There are two ways to compute it, and they can be 60% apart on the same pipeline.

The stage-weighted forecast: sum your pipeline by stage, weight each stage by its historical close rate. Most teams stop here.

The source-confidence-weighted forecast: take the stage-weighted total and discount it by source-specific historical slip rate. If LinkedIn pipeline has slipped 30% on average over the prior 4 quarters, discount LinkedIn-source pipeline by 30%.

A SaaS team forecasted $4.2M in Q3 pipeline using the stage-weighted method, hit $2.7M, and spent August wondering what changed. Nothing changed; the forecast was the bug. The source-weighted view would have called $2.9M from the start.

If you only audit one Q2 number this quarter, audit the source-weighted Q3 forecast.

4. CPR by Channel (Not CPL)

CPL tells you how much you paid for a lead. CPR (cost per revenue) tells you how much you paid per dollar of closed-won revenue.

A channel can have a great CPL and a terrible CPR. A channel can have a high CPL and a great CPR.

Pull spend by channel for Q1 + Q2. Pull closed-won revenue attributable to each channel for the same period. Divide spend by revenue; that's your CPR.

The Cost per Revenue calculator does this math for you. Plug in the numbers; it ranks channels by per-dollar revenue contribution and flags the ones where the trend has rolled over.

For more on why CPL alone is the wrong metric for the Q2 audit, see Stop Measuring Cost Per Lead. Start Measuring Cost Per Revenue Dollar..

5. Win Rate on Your Top 3 Sources

Pull win rate (closed-won / total opportunities) for your 3 highest-spend channels.

If win rate has dropped 5+ points across Q1 and Q2, the channel is generating opportunities that look like opportunities and don't close like opportunities. That's a lead-quality problem.

If win rate is flat or up but volume is down, you have a top-of-funnel problem. If win rate is down and volume is flat, you have a quality problem. The two get fixed with different tactics, and the Q2 audit is when you get to tell them apart.

6. Sales-Cycle Length WoW

Pull average days-to-close for the leads who closed in Q2. Compare to Q1.

If sales cycle is lengthening week over week, your top-of-funnel composition is shifting toward less-ready buyers. This usually leads CAC and SQL-to-close changes by 4-8 weeks.

A 9% sales-cycle lengthening across Q2 is a Q4 forecast problem you can prevent right now.

The 2 Metrics You Can Skip Until Q4

Brand impressions and total leads.

Both look like progress and tell you almost nothing useful at the Q2 mark.

Brand impressions move on creative cycles, paid-media flighting, and platform algorithm shifts that don't show up in pipeline for 2-3 quarters. The Q2 audit's job is to catch problems that affect H2 numbers. Brand impression trends affect Q3 of next year, which is too late to inform this year's H2 planning.

Total leads is a vanity metric at any review cadence, but at the Q2 mark it actively misleads. A channel with rising lead volume and falling SQL-to-close is generating worse leads. The 6 metrics above catch that; total leads buries it.

Audit those two in October. They're better Q4 metrics than Q2 metrics.

The Mid-Round Scorecard

Halfway through 18 holes, every player checks the scorecard.

Q2 is the marketing version of the turn. The back nine plays differently from the front nine; pin positions move and wind shifts.

A scorecard at the turn isn't optional in golf because the data tells you whether to play conservative on the back nine or chase. Same logic at Q2. The spend curve from Q1, channel performance, pipeline coverage for Q3, and CAC drift are the back-nine pin positions.

Teams that don't audit at Q2 find out at the 18th why the number didn't land. By then the year is over. The explanation goes in the post-mortem deck.

Flat Is Down

If your Q2 numbers look flat compared to Q1, you're already losing.

Marketing budgets compound. Audience definitions don't.

If you spent the same and reached the same and converted the same, your CPM rose, your CPR rose, and your back half is going to feel heavier than your front half did. The math gets uglier each quarter because the audience pool you bought into in Q1 has saturated by Q2; you're paying more for the same impression, and that flows downstream.

A retail team's Q2 came in 3% above Q1 and they called it stable. Q3 landed 18% below plan because spend per conversion had been climbing the whole time, hidden under flat top-line numbers. The audience pool had saturated in late Q1; by Q2 the channel was buying lower-intent traffic at higher prices.

The 3 numbers that catch this at mid-year: spend-per-MQL trend, MQL-to-SQL trend, blended CPR.

If any of those are walking up while top-line is flat, you're paying more for the same result. Audit the trends. Totals miss this entirely.

The May Conversation With Sales

There's one conversation that decides whether your Q2 audit actually changes anything.

Most teams skip it because it's awkward.

The conversation: walk into the sales VP's office before June 1 and ask one question.

"Of the leads we sent you in Q1, which sources felt usable when you actually called them?"

The dashboard answer says they all converted the same, or shows the obvious winner. The felt answer surfaces the leaks the math hides.

A B2B sales VP told a marketing team that 60% of their "qualified" LinkedIn leads asked the wrong intro question on the first call. The leads were converting on the dashboard because the SDRs were closing the easy ones. The hard ones got marked "no fit" and dropped from the funnel, silently, without any flag in the pipeline.

That's a $400K leak hidden inside what the dashboard called conversion.

What to do with the answer: take the sources sales rated "didn't feel usable" and pull their CPR. If the CPR is also weak, you have a fast kill candidate. If the CPR looks fine but the felt answer is "no," you have an attribution problem masquerading as a performance problem.

For more on that diagnostic, see Your Attribution Model Is Lying to You.

The Q2 audit catches the math problem. The May conversation with sales catches the leak the math hides. Both have to happen before June.

Failure Modes (What Goes Wrong If You Skip This)

Running the audit without the sales conversation. You catch the math, miss the lead-quality drift sales has been swallowing for 4 months. The kill decisions you make are 60% right and 40% miscalibrated.

Running the sales conversation without the audit. You hear the felt complaints and react emotionally. Without the metric backing, you cut a channel that was actually performing. Sales just didn't like the lead style.

Auditing brand impressions instead of CAC trend. You confirm what feels good (brand is up) and miss what's expensive (CAC drifting). The Q3 surprise lands on time.

Using stage-weighted forecast only. You walk into Q3 with a $4M number that's actually a $2.7M number. The CFO finds out in August.

Auditing once a year (in December). By December the year is over. The Q2 audit's value is the action window between June and Q3 ramp. December's audit informs next year's plan, which is useful but a different artifact.

Skipping the audit because "everything looks fine." Flat is the tell. If Q2 numbers look stable next to Q1, run the trend lines; the drift is hiding under the totals.

Run the Audit This Week

Block 3 hours on the calendar. Pull Q1 + Q2 data on the 6 metrics above, by channel.

For each channel, score it on each metric:

• CAC trend: holding, drifting, accelerating
• SQL-to-close: stable, soft, broken
• Pipeline coverage: confidence-weighted forecast vs raw forecast
• CPR: stable, drifting, rolled over
• Win rate: stable, soft, broken
• Cycle length: stable, lengthening, contracting

Channels with 0 or 1 yellow flags are healthy. Channels with 2-3 are watch-list. Channels with 4+ are wind-down candidates (if you've decided to kill, see When to Kill a Channel for the 30-day wind-down plan and the 4-line CFO brief).

Schedule the May conversation with sales for the same week as the audit. The two artifacts cross-reference each other.

Teams that run the Q2 audit on a quarterly cadence have lower Q3 surprises than teams that wait until October. By October, the year is decided.

Frequently Asked Questions

What's the difference between a Q2 audit and a regular monthly review?

A monthly review summarizes what happened. The Q2 audit asks whether what's happening will land you anywhere near your end-of-year number, with enough lead time to change course.

The 6 metrics in the audit are trend-detecting: CAC drift, SQL-to-close drop, source-weighted forecast, CPR rollover, win-rate softening, and sales-cycle lengthening. None of those show up cleanly in a monthly snapshot. The audit is the systematic mid-year course correction; the monthly review is the daily-driver.

What's the source-weighted Q3 forecast and how do I compute it?

Take your stage-weighted Q3 pipeline forecast (the standard sum-by-stage-weighted-by-close-rate computation). Then for each lead source, look up the historical slip rate from the prior 4 quarters (slip = pipeline that didn't close in the forecasted quarter). Discount that source's pipeline by its slip rate.

Sum across sources; that's the source-weighted forecast. The two numbers can be 60% apart on the same pipeline because some sources slip 5% and others slip 40%, and the stage-weighted view averages them.

What if my sales VP is too busy for the May conversation?

Send the question by email. "Of the leads we sent you in Q1, which sources felt usable when you actually called them? Top 3 and bottom 3, no analysis required, just the gut answer." 5 minutes of their time, written.

The async version loses 30% of the signal a face-to-face conversation surfaces, but it captures the binary felt-good / felt-bad sort, which is the most valuable input to the audit. If the answer comes back with one-line context per source, that's the same information as a 20-minute meeting.

Should the CFO be in the Q2 audit?

The CFO joins after the audit completes. The audit is marketing's tool for catching its own problems. The CFO sees the output: the kill decisions, the reallocations, the source-weighted forecast.

If your audit produces a kill candidate, the 4-line CFO brief is the artifact that turns the marketing decision into a finance approval. The CFO weighs in on the reallocation conversation downstream of the diagnosis.

Further Reading

On Professor Leads

• When to Kill a Channel (And Explain It to Your CFO): if your Q2 audit produces a wind-down candidate, this is the 30-day plan that protects pipeline during the exit and the 4-line CFO brief that gets the kill approved.
• Stop Measuring Cost Per Lead. Start Measuring Cost Per Revenue Dollar.: CPR is one of the 6 audit metrics. CPL alone won't catch the rollovers the Q2 audit is looking for.
• Your Attribution Model Is Lying to You: if your attribution is unreliable, the source-weighted forecast and the May sales conversation will give contradictory answers. Fix the attribution model first.
• The Cost per Revenue Calculator: plug in spend and closed-won by channel; the calculator returns per-dollar revenue contribution and flags channels where the trend has rolled over. Use this for metric #4 in the audit.

On Forbes (by William DeCourcy)

• Why Chasing Metrics Is Killing Your ROI (And How To Fix It): the Q2 audit is what disciplined metrics work looks like at the mid-point. Total leads and brand impressions are the metrics this article warns against chasing; CAC trend and CPR are the ones it argues you should anchor on.
• Why Your Sales Funnel Is Leaking (And 5 Ways To Fix It): the May conversation with sales catches the leak the dashboard hides. This article walks through where leaks usually live and how to spot them before the funnel-stage data reveals them.