When a regional marketing team discovers a tactic or insight that works, the odds of that discovery ever becoming company-wide knowledge are surprisingly low. A survey of 600 marketers tracked what happens after a local team finds a successful tactic, following it through six stages from local discovery to being scaled globally. The drop-off is steep and consistent at every stage, and by the time a local win could realistically become global strategy, 97% of them have already fallen out of the pipeline.

Essential Statistics

• 100% of local discoveries start the process, but only 71% get shared with anyone outside the discovering team.
• Only 51% of shared discoveries get formally documented.
• Only 31% of documented discoveries get evaluated for broader use.
• Only 15% of evaluated discoveries get retested elsewhere.
• Only 3% of local discoveries are ultimately scaled globally, a 97% loss from the starting point.

Key Takeaways

• The steepest single drop happens between local discovery and sharing, suggesting the very first step, simply telling someone else what worked, is already where most potential value is lost.
• Documentation and evaluation both losing roughly 20 percentage points suggests a lack of formal process, not lack of interest, is likely limiting how far most insights travel.
• Only 3% of local wins ultimately scaling globally suggests most organizations are sitting on a large amount of untapped intelligence that never leaves the region where it was discovered.
• The consistent drop-off at every single stage suggests this isn’t one broken step but a systemic pattern across the entire pipeline from discovery to global rollout.
• This data suggests the growth opportunity for global organizations isn’t generating more local insights. It’s building systems that let existing insights travel further than they currently do.

Actionable Insights

• Build a lightweight, mandatory sharing step immediately after any local team identifies a successful tactic, since the biggest single drop-off in this data happens right at the sharing stage.
• Create a simple, standardized documentation template for local wins so more of them survive past the sharing stage. This data shows nearly half of shared discoveries never get documented at all.
• Assign a specific owner or team responsible for evaluating documented local wins for broader applicability, since this stage also shows a significant drop-off that a lack of clear ownership likely contributes to.
• Set a goal for what percentage of local wins your organization retests elsewhere within a defined time period, and track it as its own metric rather than assuming good ideas will surface naturally.
• Treat this data as a benchmark for your own organization’s local-to-global pipeline, and identify which specific stage is losing the most value for your team before deciding where to invest first.

‘Ninety-seven percent of local wins never make it anywhere. That’s not bad luck. That’s a broken pipeline, and pipelines are fixable.’ – Neil Patel