Spooky, Scary Skeletons in Your Marketing Pipeline
My almost-three-year-old is obsessed with Halloween. Her favorite song right now is "Spooky, Scary Skeletons," the one that's all over TikTok. It's on repeat at our house. So spooky skeletons are top of mind. They're fun in October, but a lot less fun when they're hiding in your marketing stack.
Earlier this year, we were auditing a B2B client's CRM and decided to trace one contact from start to finish. They registered for and attended a live webinar—a great sign! Webinars were one of the main ways this client brought in high-quality business leads, which meant this was a person the sales team really wanted to hear about. Only, the prospect didn’t open the next couple of marketing emails. And because the client’s engagement score only counted only email opens as proof of interest, it marked the very promising prospect as unengaged, and 16 days after the webinar, a workflow cut them off from all marketing emails. Sales never even had a chance to connect with them.
And it wasn't just that one person this happened to. When we looked closer, new leads were put in the "unengaged" segment as soon as their record was created, before anyone had even emailed them. About 42% of the client’s entire database was sitting in that segment. The workflow that suppressed them was also stuck in a loop, so 550 contacts kept getting re-enrolled, averaging 54 times each.
The client had several different workflows that were built at different times, across several years and a couple of CRM migrations. Nobody had gone back to check how they worked together. That's pretty common. When someone changes roles or an agency relationship ends, the next person usually builds on what's already there.
It's never fun finding these kinds of (very spooky) skeletons. You get that gut feeling when you find out leads were dropped, or worse, MQLs were lost, because you know that's missed revenue. That client was doing good work getting people to show up to webinars and then they were inadvertently hiding those same people from sales. They're not the only ones, either. In Validity's 2026 report, 62% of companies said bad CRM data costs them revenue.
If your team has gone through an agency change or turnover, I'd bet your CRM has a few skeletons lurking too. Karla and I both wrote blogs about them this month, so be sure to check out those links below.
For a quick DIY test, open your CRM and look at a contact that attended your last event. See what emails they get next and what happened to them after that. If you find some skeletons, let us know. We’d be happy to lend a hand or give quick direction if it's something your team can handle on their own.
Happy Halloween!
