Marketing presents the quarter with the lowest cost per lead of the year. Sales opens the CRM and scrolls down the disqualification column: "no budget", "no budget", "student".
Google, LinkedIn and Meta only see the form. They have no idea what happened next, so they go looking for more people like the ones who filled it in fastest. Until someone tells them which leads reached a meeting, they will keep buying the easy lead, and your spend will keep ending up in that column.
Five questions to ask before hiring a B2B paid media agency
Under each one, what we do. So you can compare.
1. What do you count as a lead?
We keep two things apart. A lead is anyone who fills in the form. A qualified lead fits your ideal customer and your sales team accepts it as an opportunity. We agree that definition with sales before anything goes live, and reporting is built on the second one.
2. Do you feed what happens in my CRM back to the platforms?
Yes. These are called offline conversions: we upload to Google, LinkedIn and Meta which leads became opportunities and which ones signed, each step with its own value. The platform finally gets the signal it was missing: who bought.
3. How do you measure when a deal takes months to close?
By acquisition month. We group leads by the month they came in and follow each group through to contract. That way you can see a March campaign that brought in revenue in September, even if it looked expensive in April. The maths is in our piece on the LTV to CAC ratio.
4. What do you use to decide how much goes to LinkedIn, Google and Meta?
Cost per opportunity for each one, taken from your CRM. LinkedIn lets you pick by job title, industry and company size, and clicks are expensive; Google picks up people already searching for something like yours; Meta keeps you in front of people who already know you. None of them is judged on cost per lead.
5. Will you talk to my sales team?
In the first week. They know which leads close, and without that the campaigns are optimising blind.
What you can do today, before talking to anyone
Open your CRM and filter the leads that came from ads in the last 90 days. Count how many sales accepted as an opportunity. Divide your ad spend for that period by that number: that is your real cost per opportunity.
Then enter your close rate and contract value in the maximum CPL calculator. It tells you how much you can pay per lead without losing money. Your data never leaves your browser.
If the gap between those two costs bothers you, request an audit of your accounts. We match your campaigns against your CRM and tell you what to fix first.
Frequently asked questions
How much does it cost to work with you?
It depends on how many platforms we run and how much work it takes to connect the CRM. We quote after we have seen the accounts.
What happens to our account history if we are moving from another agency?
It stays, because the accounts are yours. We keep what works and change campaign goals in stages so the platforms don't relearn from scratch.
Does our CRM need to be perfect before we start?
Access is enough, plus a sales team that marks the status of each lead. Connecting offline conversions is part of the first weeks, and we build it on the CRM you already use, whether that is HubSpot, Salesforce or Pipedrive.
How many of this quarter's leads made it to a meeting?
Request the audit. We match your campaigns against your CRM and tell you which campaigns bring opportunities.
Specific actions for your sales pipeline.