Plan Meets Pipeline — Northbridge's Revenue Engine

A four-round, intermediate B2B go-to-market simulation set inside Northbridge Systems Inc., a Mississauga-based B2B industrial-software company (CAD 64M annual recurring revenue, growth halved from 22% to 8%, win rate slipped to 18%). You play the new marketing director with one board mandate: make marketing and sales operate as one customer-centric revenue engine, not two warring departments — on a budget the board has FROZEN flat at CAD 9.6M, with reallocation, not new money, as the only lever. The simulation is structured around Sirsi's signature framework "Marketing Led, Sales Driven": marketing leads the strategy (segment choice, positioning, value proposition) and sales drives its disciplined execution (qualified pipeline, value-selling, fit-based coverage), with the two operating as one system. Round 1 DIAGNOSE: build the funnel waterfall, find the largest leak (the marketing-to-sales handoff where 78% of 2,000 leads/quarter are never touched), quantify the revenue bleeding through it, and name the root cause — definitions, incentives, or information. Round 2 BUILD THE MARKET PLAN (Marketing Led): choose 2-3 priority segments by fit/value/winnability, set the positioning posture (customer-centric vs product-centric), set a demand target, and state what marketing will STOP doing to fund the focus — customer-centric means choosing customers, and refusing to deprioritize defaults reps to the easiest logos. Round 3 ALIGN SALES EXECUTION (Sales Driven): define a shared qualified-lead definition + two-way SLA, redesign comp to reward fit over raw logo count, set the value-selling motion, and negotiate the skeptical Sales VP's buy-in against the "your leads are tourists" objection — a plan sales does not own is a slide, not a strategy. Round 4 REALLOCATE & RECOVER: reallocate the frozen CAD 9.6M across trade shows, brand/content, digital demand-gen and SDR capacity to follow the chosen segments (not channel fashion), project the conversion lift, CAC and LTV:CAC, and commit to a SINGLE shared marketing-sales scorecard rather than siloed departmental KPIs. The math rewards alignment-over-volume, segment focus, sales-owned execution, segment-followed spend and a joint scorecard — and punishes the five classic errors: a polished plan sales never owns, chasing more leads while ignoring the 78% untouched and a 9% conversion, refusing to deprioritize any segment, channel-fashion budgeting, and siloed scorecards. Final KPIs track Alignment Index, Conversion Health, Projected Growth %, and Revenue Lift.