Your Ads Aren’t the Problem
An insurance company we work with had their highest-ever month for leads and sales in January.
The marketing team thought it was the ads. Someone assumed we’d tightened the targeting. Someone else was sure it was the new landing page we’d been testing.
It was none of those things.
The ads were identical. The landing pages unchanged. The budget the same as December. Not a single marketing variable had moved.
The sales team had changed how they worked the leads.
What Actually Changed
They implemented split dialing. Parallel calling — where instead of one agent trying one lead at a time, you’re running multiple simultaneous attempts across your pipeline. They also increased the number of dial attempts per lead.
That’s it. No creative refresh. No headline A/B test. No bid strategy overhaul.
Record month.
And here’s the thing — this happens more often than most marketers want to admit. The leads were always good. They were sitting in the CRM getting one or two call attempts before being written off as dead. The ad was doing its job. The system downstream wasn’t doing its job. And everyone was looking at the ad.
Makes my blood boil, honestly. Not at the client — they figured it out and fixed it, and fair play to them. It makes my blood boil at the industry. At the obsession with ad performance as the universal conversion lever. At the assumption that if revenue isn’t growing, the solution lives in the ad account.
Sometimes the ad account is the last place you should look.
Where Marketers Spend Their Time
Performance marketing has a bias problem. We are trained to see the world through the lens of the tools we manage. Google Ads dashboard. Meta Ads Manager. The analytics platform. These are our instruments, so we optimize what our instruments can measure.
Click-through rate? Optimize it. Cost per lead? Drive it down. Landing page conversion rate? A/B test it into submission.
These are all legitimate levers. I’m not saying they don’t matter.
But there is a whole other set of levers — operational ones, downstream ones, sales-team ones — that marketing almost never touches, because they live outside our dashboard. They’re somebody else’s problem. The CRM is the sales team’s domain. Dial attempts per lead? That’s a sales manager conversation. Speed-to-lead response time? Also sales.
And yet those levers often have a bigger impact on revenue than anything we’re doing in the ad account.
A well-trained sales team with better processes can 2-3x conversion rates overnight. No new creative. No budget increase. No landing page rebuild. Just better operational execution downstream from the marketing handoff.
So why do we keep staring at the ads?
The Lead Quality Blame Game
Here’s how this usually plays out. The sales team is underperforming. Revenue is down. Leadership asks questions. The sales team says lead quality is the problem. Marketing defends the leads. A finger-pointing match begins. And somewhere in that argument, everyone misses the actual issue.
I’ve been in those rooms. The sales manager tables a conversion rate — lower than it should be — and points at marketing. Marketing pulls the lead volume data and the CPL figures and defends the quality of what they’re sending over. And everyone leaves the meeting having agreed to “optimize further” without agreeing on what exactly needs to be optimized.
Nobody asks: how many times is the sales team actually calling each lead? What does the speed-to-lead look like — are reps responding in 5 minutes or 5 hours? Are leads being abandoned after two attempts because the CRM workflow says so, or because that’s just how it’s always been done?
These are operational questions. But they have massive commercial implications.
In this case, the insurance company didn’t have a lead quality problem at all. They had a dial attempt volume problem. The leads were converting once someone actually worked them properly. A simple change to the sales process — more attempts, parallel dialing — delivered a record month.
The ads didn’t change. The strategy didn’t change. The operations changed.
What Good Performance Marketers Do
The best performance marketers I know treat the entire revenue system as their problem — not just the part they can attribute in a dashboard.
That means understanding what happens to leads after they arrive. Knowing the sales team’s process, their tools, their capacity. Knowing the average number of dial attempts before a lead is abandoned. Knowing what the speed-to-lead looks like on a Tuesday afternoon vs. a Monday morning.
It means being willing to have an uncomfortable conversation with the sales manager: not “your team is bad” but “here’s what the data suggests about where leads are getting lost, and it’s downstream from our handoff point.”
That conversation doesn’t always go well. Sales and marketing have a long history of not being in the same room, let alone looking at the same data. But if you’re a marketer who’s willing to go there — who will follow the lead all the way through to a closed sale and ask honest questions at every stage — you become more valuable overnight. Not because you’re doing more, but because you’re looking at the right things.
The clients I enjoy working with the most are the ones who want that honest conversation. Who don’t want marketing to be a black box that produces leads of uncertain quality at a cost-per-lead metric that everyone debates. Who want to understand the whole system.
The Marginal Return Problem
Here’s something I tell clients when they want to squeeze more performance out of a mature campaign.
Most significant performance marketing optimizations are marginal. You’ve been running the account for 12 months. You’ve done the bidding tests. You’ve cycled through the creative. You’ve optimized the landing page. At some point — and that point comes sooner than most people think — the next 10% improvement in performance requires 90% more effort in the ad account.
That’s not where the leverage is anymore.
The leverage might be in the follow-up sequence. It might be in what the sales team does with the lead in the first 15 minutes. It might be in whether the pricing structure makes sense. It might be in whether the product itself is converting at the rate it should on warm traffic.
None of those things live in the ad account. All of them affect revenue.
I’m not saying ads don’t matter. Ads absolutely matter, and getting them wrong is expensive and demoralizing. But a great ad feeding into a broken follow-up process is just an efficient way to waste money. You’re generating demand faster than your operations can absorb it.
Fix the operations. Then run the ads.
What to Look At Instead
Next time you’re frustrated with conversion performance, before you open the ad account, ask these questions:
What is the average number of contact attempts per lead before we give up? If the answer is two, that’s a problem.
What is speed-to-lead — the time between a lead submitting and a rep making first contact? Under 5 minutes is gold. Over an hour is a lead-killer. Over 24 hours and you might as well have not run the ad.
Are leads being lost at the handoff point — between marketing delivery and sales pickup — because of a process gap or a tool gap?
What does the sales team say is the most common reason leads don’t close? If the answer is “lead quality”, push harder. What does “poor quality” mean specifically? Wrong geography? Wrong income bracket? Wrong intent? Or just that the lead doesn’t convert when someone calls once and leaves no voicemail?
You won’t always find a quick fix. Sometimes lead quality is genuinely the problem. But in my experience, the operational issues are more common — and more fixable — than the marketing issues. Because marketing is usually already being optimized by someone whose job it is. Operations often isn’t.
The Record Month
The insurance company that had their best January ever didn’t spend an extra rand on ads. They didn’t change their creative. They didn’t brief us on a new strategy.
Their sales manager looked at the process and changed how leads were being worked.
That’s the whole story.
And the point isn’t that advertising doesn’t drive growth — it does. The point is that advertising is one variable in a bigger system, and when people treat it as the only variable, they leave a lot of revenue on the table.
The next time performance is disappointing, try looking downstream before you open the dashboard.
You might find your record month is hiding in the CRM.
