Your marketing may not be the problem

Sometimes that diagnosis is correct. But sometimes the marketing is doing exactly what it was supposed to do. It generated attention, created demand and delivered a genuinely interested customer. The business simply failed to turn that opportunity into revenue.

That distinction matters because the customer journey does not end when someone completes a lead form. A lead still has to reach the right person, be contacted quickly, qualify for the product, be handled by someone capable of selling, complete any application or verification process that follows, transact successfully, and ultimately generate an acceptable margin. Revenue can disappear at every one of those points.

Consider what happens within a typical lead-generation business. Marketing generates 1,000 leads, and management sees only 100 sales. The immediate conclusion might be that the business needs better leads or more of them. But what if 150 leads were never called, another 100 were contacted too late, 80 were called only once, and dozens more spoke to agents who failed to overcome fairly ordinary objections? Perhaps customers were approved but never completed the transaction, or arrived at a store only to find the advertised product unavailable. None of those failures makes the original lead bad.

This is why I think businesses need to stop looking at marketing performance in isolation. There is an entire commercial system sitting between the first advertisement and the money eventually arriving in the bank account. Advertising, landing pages, tracking, lead generation, routing, CRM, call centres, sales, applications, approvals, payments, fulfilment and retention are not separate journeys from the customer’s perspective. They are one journey, and every handover creates another opportunity for revenue to leak.

Measurement itself can create another problem. Businesses frequently optimise towards the easiest event to measure rather than the event that creates economic value. A lender should ultimately care about disbursed loans, not simply applications. A retailer needs completed, profitable transactions, not shopping carts. An optometrist does not ultimately need appointment requests; it needs customers who attend and purchase. When we optimise towards an intermediate metric and stop there, we can become exceptionally efficient at producing activity without becoming any better at producing revenue.

Artificial intelligence makes this even more important. Google and Meta are extraordinarily capable optimisation systems, but they optimise towards the signals we provide. Tell an algorithm that a completed form represents success, and it will find more people likely to complete forms. Unless the business feeds actual sales, revenue and customer quality back into that system, the algorithm has no way of knowing which of those leads eventually became valuable customers. Bad business signals can create very sophisticated bad optimisation.

The same problem exists inside the organisation. Marketing knows where the customer came from, the CRM knows what happened to the lead, the call centre knows whether somebody answered, operations knows whether the product could be delivered, and finance knows whether any money was actually made. Too often, those systems do not know what the others know. Management is effectively trying to optimise one customer journey using several disconnected versions of the truth.

At Offernet, we describe this connected commercial ecosystem as the Offer Network. It stretches from the customer’s first interaction with an organisation through to revenue, margin, retention, and lifetime value. More importantly, the information should flow back in the opposite direction. What happened in sales should improve marketing. What happened in fulfilment should influence the offer. Which customers have become profitable should influence which customers the business acquires next.

This changes the question executives should be asking. Instead of asking, “Is our marketing working?”, ask, “Where are we losing revenue between the money we spend acquiring demand and the money that eventually reaches the business?”

Sometimes the answer will be advertising. Sometimes it will be the website. Sometimes it will be fake or low-quality leads. But it could just as easily be lead routing, response time, call centre capacity, objection handling, an unnecessarily difficult application process, stock availability, payment failure, poor follow-up or a broken data connection between systems.

That is why simply spending more on advertising can be the wrong response to disappointing revenue. If the underlying commercial system is leaking, increasing media spend simply pours more customers and more money into the same holes. Before buying another thousand leads, it makes sense to understand what happened to the thousand you already bought.

For me, this is where the next evolution of performance marketing lies. It is no longer enough to optimise the advertisement. Businesses need to optimise the system that converts advertising into profitable revenue by using consistent processes, connected data, and measurable commercial outcomes.

Your marketing may not be the problem. The real question is whether you are monitoring your entire Offer Network.