Lead Generation
Your cost per lead went down. That is usually bad news.
Optimised to pipeline and closed revenue, not to form submissions.
-41%
Reduction in cost per sales-qualified lead
The problem
A bidding algorithm optimising towards form submissions will find you the people most likely to submit forms. Those are not the people most likely to buy. Within weeks, cost per lead falls, volume rises, and the sales team quietly stops working the queue because the quality has collapsed. The marketing dashboard shows improvement and the pipeline does not move. This is not a failure of execution — it is the system working exactly as instructed, on an instruction nobody meant to give.
Process
How we approach it
Close the loop back to the CRM
The fix is structural: lead outcomes have to travel back from your CRM into the ad platforms as conversion signals with values attached. Sales-accepted lead, qualified opportunity and closed-won each get imported with a value reflecting what they are worth. Then the algorithm optimises for revenue instead of for volume of enquiries.
Define the stages before measuring them
Marketing-qualified, sales-accepted and opportunity mean different things in most organisations, sometimes different things to different people in the same organisation. We agree the definitions with sales in writing at the start, including who owns each transition and what disqualifies a lead. Unglamorous and it prevents most of the arguments later.
Make friction work for you
Longer forms, qualifying questions, budget and timescale fields and phone-first routes all reduce lead volume and raise lead quality. Whether that trade is worth making is an economics question, not a preference. We test form length and qualification depth against downstream conversion, not against submission rate.
Treat speed to first contact as a media variable
Response time to a new enquiry has a direct effect on conversion, which means it is part of media performance whether or not the agency controls it. We measure it, report it, and factor it into what we advise on channel mix and lead volume — there is no point buying more enquiries than the sales team can reach quickly.
Deliverables
What you get
Lead stage definitions agreed in writing with your sales team, covering marketing-qualified, sales-accepted, opportunity and disqualification criteria
Offline conversion import from your CRM into Google Ads, Microsoft Ads and LinkedIn, with values assigned per stage
Bidding reconfigured to optimise towards sales-accepted leads or opportunities rather than form submissions
Call tracking implementation with call outcome recorded against source where telephone is a significant enquiry route
Cost per sales-accepted lead and cost per opportunity reported by campaign and by channel, alongside cost per raw lead
Lead quality review against sales feedback, with campaign and keyword-level action taken from it
Form and qualification testing programme, measured on downstream conversion rather than submission volume
Industries
Where we run this
SaaS
Demand capture and creation for B2B software, measured on payback duration rather than lead volume.
Finance
Acquisition for regulated firms, where the advertisement is itself a regulated document.
B2B
Paid acquisition for considered purchases with long cycles, small keyword universes and offline conversions.
Frequently asked
Our CRM is messy. Does this still work?
It works to the extent that the CRM records outcomes at all. If opportunities are logged inconsistently, the first phase is fixing the minimum viable data — a reliable stage field and a reliable source field. We can work with imperfect data. We cannot work with absent data, and we will tell you which one you have.
Sales say the leads are bad. Marketing say sales do not work them. Who is right?
Usually both, which is why the closed-loop data matters more than the argument. Once lead outcomes are tracked by source, campaign and keyword, the conversation moves from impression to evidence. Sometimes it exonerates the media. Sometimes it does not.
Will lead volume drop?
Very likely, at first, and that is the intended effect. If cost per lead rises while cost per opportunity falls, the programme is working. We agree that trade with you before we make it, and we report both numbers throughout so nobody is surprised.
Do you handle lead nurture and email as well?
We handle the acquisition side and the handover point. Nurture sequences, lifecycle email and sales enablement we will advise on and coordinate with whoever owns them, but we do not claim them as our discipline.
Start with the audit.
It has a defined scope and a defined deliverable, and it is deliberately separable from anything that follows. If the audit says your current setup is fine, that is a legitimate outcome and we will say so.