There is a standoff I’ve sat in the middle of many times. Marketing says leads are up forty per cent and the cost of each one is down. Sales says the leads are rubbish and they have stopped calling them. Both are telling the truth.
The trouble is the word “lead”. Marketing is counting form submissions. Sales is counting people who might buy. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where a lot of budget disappears.
Cheap leads are easy
If the target is cost per form fill, I can halve it for you in a month. Shorten the form to a name and an email. Offer a free download. Use the platform’s built-in lead forms that fill themselves in with one tap. Widen the audience. The number will look superb.
The sales team will then spend its week ringing students, competitors, people who don’t remember filling anything in and people who wanted the free guide and nothing else. Nobody intended that result. The campaign was pointed at the wrong target and it hit it.
The machine can’t tell the difference unless you show it
Ad platforms learn from whatever you report back as a success. If every form counts the same, a serious enquiry from a business that can afford you and a junk entry look identical. The system then finds more of whichever is cheapest to get, which is never the serious one.
This is the part that gets skipped, because it needs marketing, sales and whoever looks after the CRM to cooperate. The fix is to send the outcome back:
- When sales marks a lead as qualified, the ad platform is told.
- When a lead becomes a quote, or a sale, it is told that too, with a value.
- The campaigns are then set to chase qualified leads or sales, not forms.
Once that loop is closed, the automation starts working for you. It goes looking for more people like the ones who bought, and it loses interest in the ones who didn’t.
The measures I’d use
- Cost per qualified lead, using a definition of “qualified” that sales and marketing wrote together and both signed.
- Lead to sale rate, by source. Often the channel with the dearest forms has the cheapest customers.
- Speed of first response. A good enquiry left for two days is a wasted enquiry, and no campaign can fix that.
- Revenue against spend, over a period long enough to cover the sales cycle.
Cost per form can stay on the report. It just shouldn’t be the number anyone is praised or blamed for.
It is usually a plumbing problem
When I look into a “bad leads” complaint, the campaign is rarely the only fault. The form goes to an inbox nobody owns. The CRM has no field for where the lead came from. Spam isn’t filtered. There is no agreed stage called “qualified”, so there is nothing to send back. Half the job is building that plumbing so the campaign has something true to learn from.
What I’d do
Get sales and marketing in a room for an hour and agree what a good lead is. Record the source of every enquiry in the CRM. Feed qualified and won outcomes back to the ad platforms. Then make the form a little harder, not easier, by asking the one or two questions that separate buyers from browsers.
You will get fewer leads. The sales team will start answering them again, and that is a better result than a cheaper form.