We have leads, but no money

Names change, titles change, agencies change. The only thing that never changes is the result.

Over the years I have seen plenty of companies replace agencies, marketers, heads of sales, marketing directors, ad platforms and budgets. The problem stayed exactly where it was, because you cannot fix a system problem by replacing one more person.

The cycle repeats again and again, because nobody touches the root of the problem: the system.

That is why I write these articles. Not to talk about traffic, and not to discuss CTR, CPC, reach and all the other acronyms the marketing industry likes to hide a lack of results behind. And not for the endless debate over whether marketing or sales is to blame.

These articles are about how marketing turns into revenue, how companies lose serious money without noticing, and why most problems start long before the search for a new marketer, head of sales or marketing director.

If you are an owner and this is your third search in a few years for a marketer, a head of sales or a marketing director, you are in the right place.

If you have ever been fired from one of those roles, even more so.

If you are a marketer tired of measuring CTR, CPC and leads instead of real business results, you are in the right place too.

You will find the next marketer. The next head of sales, too. The only question is when you will finally find the problem.

In 16 years of digital marketing I have seen enough companies, marketers and sales teams to learn one uncomfortable thing: every side is often right in its complaints and wrong in its conclusions at the same time.

I have seen dozens of conflicts between business owners, marketers, heads of marketing, marketing directors and heads of sales. And every time, everyone was sure the problem was definitely not them.

The owner says: we pay salaries, we give you an ad budget and we expect customers. What we get is pretty reports, stories about reach and yet another request to raise the budget.

The marketer answers: I was promised one thing and got another. The CRM is not connected to the accounting system, end-to-end analytics either doesn't exist or works incorrectly, the landing pages can't be seriously changed, integrations between the website and other systems keep breaking, goals in Google Analytics fire incorrectly because of JavaScript errors on the site, the sales team is slow to handle leads and answer website chat messages, and some of the data later used to judge marketing simply can't be collected correctly.

The sales team has its say too: the leads are low quality, customers find it expensive, competitors are cheaper, and half the inquiries never buy anything.

And you know what? Usually each side is right in its own way.

The company loses money, the marketer loses motivation, sales loses trust in marketing, and a few months later the company fires the marketer, the head of the department or the marketing director. Then it hires someone new, six months or a year later the story repeats, names and titles change, and the result stays the same.

But that is not the real problem.

Everyone is trying to measure something: leads, conversions, CTR, CPC, ROMI, sales plan completion, number of calls, average check. And then the owner opens the bank account and sees there is no more money than before.

This is where it gets interesting.

The problem is almost never the leads, not the marketing, and far from always the sales team. The problem is the system: how analytics is set up, how results are measured, how decisions are made, and how marketing, sales and money are connected to each other.