Your Marketing Agency Can’t Fix What Hasn’t Been Built Yet

A company hires a digital agency, and for the sake of the story it makes no odds whether they’ve hired a good one or a shower of chancers.

The expectation is the same either way, and it’s a fair one… money goes in at the top, leads come out the bottom, and eventually revenue turns up in a report that makes the whole thing feel like it was worth doing. A neat closed loop, the sort you’d happily draw on a whiteboard. A Scalextric track with the car going round and round and never once coming off the rails. (Yes, I’m showing my age…)

What gets left out of that picture is that the loop was never finished being built.

So the leads come in, and then they fall into a gap. I don’t mean that as a figure of speech. There’s a real, structural hole where the follow-through was meant to be, usually because the CRM got set up once, years ago, by someone who has since been promoted or left or simply stopped touching it around the time the evenings started drawing in.

The pipeline stages were sketched out in a workshop the guts of two years back, and nobody has looked at them since. The sales team, who are perfectly good at selling, have meanwhile built their own way of working out of gut feel, a WhatsApp group and whatever they can hold in their heads. Which holds together grand until the morning somebody asks them for a proper report.

That morning tends to arrive about three months in, when someone finally says it out loud. We can’t see the ROI.

The frustrating part is that nobody in the room is lying. The agency did bring the leads in. Sales did close a handful of them. The piece that connects those two facts was simply never built, so there’s no honest way to show what worked, what didn’t, and where the budget went. It’s the flatpack wardrobe you assembled with half the screws still in the bag. Everybody did their job, and the wardrobe still parts company with the wall at three in the morning.

The plug and the socket

Here’s the bit I don’t think gets explained clearly enough, and I’ll put my own hand up as much as anyone’s.

Digital marketing plugs into your business. It was never going to become your business, or finish off the internal process you never quite got round to building, and it was certainly never going to magic up the reporting layer you’d need to follow one person from an ad click to a signed contract eight weeks down the line.

Set up properly, what it does is get the right strangers to the top of your funnel and coax a hand into the air, a yeah, go on then, I’m interested. Everything after that moment, the following up, the chasing, the “did anyone ever ring him back,” the actual closing, runs on machinery that belongs to you. An agency can’t run machinery it has no access to, and half the time that machinery isn’t even fully bolted together.

I understand why people assume the agency will hand back a complete, end-to-end view of the customer. It’s implied in every pitch deck and most case studies. And in fairness, agencies, mine included over the years, have not always been great at saying plainly where our responsibility runs out and yours picks up.

We’re very comfortable talking about results, and a good deal less comfortable saying the awkward part, which is that none of it works unless the setup on your side is ready to catch what we send you.

So take this as me saying the awkward part, in the cold light of day.

What the agency should be measuring anyway

Before this starts to sound like me quietly excusing agencies, it isn’t at all. Any agency worth the invoice needs to be measuring everything that happens on its own turf: the sales, the form fills, the taps on a phone number, the brochure downloads, the moment someone opens a live chat. If it counts as a conversion on your website, it should be tracked, reported and improved from the first week.

That much is table stakes, and if your agency isn’t managing even that, then the CRM isn’t your problem and we should probably talk about the agency instead.

You can run very good marketing with only those things in place, and plenty of businesses do exactly that. You’ll know how many leads arrived, what each of them cost, which channel sent them over and which ads pulled their weight. That’s real, usable information, and you can make sound calls off the back of it, putting more behind what’s working and cutting what isn’t.

Nobody is suggesting you need a spotless CRM before you’re allowed to switch on a single Google ad. This is the part we own, and the part I’d cheerfully go on about all day! Clean conversion tracking and data and analytics you can trust, even on the days the numbers are telling you something you’d rather not hear.

The catch is that stopping there means giving up a certain kind of question. You can’t reasonably ask what your overall ROI is when the data goes dark the second someone makes an enquiry. You can’t ask which campaigns are bringing in your best customers if nobody is feeding the closed deals back into the system. And what a sale really costs you is unanswerable when the sale is sitting in a rep’s head rather than anywhere you can count it.

Those website interactions are one chapter of the story, and a very good chapter at that, well worth reading on its own. They were never the whole book. The version that ties your spend to money landing in the bank needs the internal plumbing I keep coming back to. The agency gives you the opening half of the sentence, and your CRM and your sales process are what finish it.

The dull bit that has to come first

I’ll tell you what the companies who manage to measure their ROI tend to have in common, because I’ve worked alongside a fair few of them and the difference is not remotely subtle. It has nothing to do with bigger budgets or better products, and everything to do with the fact that at some point one person inside the business, usually the slightly obsessive one everybody else wishes would relax, sat down and mapped out what happens when a lead comes in.

They gave their pipeline stages names that map onto real events, so there’s a meaningful gap between “Proposal Sent” and “Verbal Yes” and “Waiting for Boss to Approve” and “Stuck In Legal For Reasons Nobody Can Explain”. They made sure every deal carries a value, a close date and the name of whoever owns it. They wired the CRM into the marketing platform, so that when a lead comes through, there’s a place for it to land and something keeping score from the first touch to the final signature.

None of that is glamorous. You will not win an award for setting up deal stages correctly, and it will never turn up in a case study. It is, though, the work that gives everything else its meaning. Without it, your cost per acquisition is a guess with a decimal point bolted on for confidence, your pipeline velocity is a work of fiction, and your quarterly report is a mood board with the brand colours on it.

With it, you can trace the whole line from ad click to money received, every step accounted for, and the relationship with the agency changes character entirely, from “we think this is probably working” to “we know it’s working and here is exactly how.”

I’m not being precious about it either. When Validity looked into the state of CRM data, they found that 1 in 4 companies experience a 20% or greater drop in annual revenue, with roughly a third of them admitting that poor data had held up the very work that brings the money in. It’s a filing problem that has put on a suit and started calling itself a strategy, and there’s nothing more exotic to it than that.

The conversation nobody has soon enough

In most companies, the relationship between marketing and sales is the one you have with the neighbour whose bins keep blowing into your garden. There’s no villain in it. Everyone is getting on with their own job perfectly well. It’s the system between the two of you that was never designed to work, so it doesn’t, and one day somebody ends up leaving a slightly frosty note taped to the shared recycling.

Marketing brings the leads in and hands them over the fence. Sales picks them up and tries to close. When the two sides have never agreed on what a decent lead even looks like, or the exact point where the handover happens, or how the information is meant to travel between their systems, both of them end up aggravated. Marketing can’t prove its value, sales feels like it’s being fobbed off with rubbish, and the agency stuck in the middle keeps producing top-of-funnel figures that nobody believes, because there’s no way to connect them to a euro of real revenue.

It’s worth sorting for reasons that go well past everyone’s blood pressure. Forrester’s figure is that businesses who get sales and marketing properly pulling the same way grow around a fifth faster, and run more profitably, than the ones who leave them at odds. That’s a fair bit more than a warm word about collaboration. It’s the price tag on the bins.

At any rate, this is a plumbing failing more than a marketing or sales one, and you sort the plumbing before the taps go on, ideally while the ceiling is still dry and not leaking onto your auntie’s head when she’s trying to watch Fair City.

A few things to sit with before you hire anyone

Before you spend a cent, or the next cent if you’re already in the thick of it, it’s worth sitting down and answering a few questions with the kind of honesty you’d only really use at the end of a rough week, when a friend asks how it’s all going, and you can’t be bothered dressing it up for the boardroom.

• Does your sales team use the CRM as a matter of course, every deal, every time, and not only when somebody is standing over them at quarter end?
• Are the pipeline stages built around real milestones, or are they still the placeholders from whenever the thing got set up?
• And when a lead lands from a form on your website, what physically happens to it next, in reality, as opposed to in the process document nobody has opened since March?

If sitting with those makes you shift in your chair a bit, that’s completely normal, and most companies are in the same spot. There’s nothing shameful in it. The internal build just never climbed to the top of the list, which is hardly a surprise because you were busy running the actual business. Nobody starts a company out of a burning desire to configure deal stages in HubSpot. People start companies to do the thing they’re good at, and turning into an accidental CRM administrator is rarely part of the plan.

But this the work that unlocks the rest of it. Get the CRM right, map the pipeline out, and train the team so the thing feels like a help rather than a punishment, so that a lead arriving in your world has a clear, trackable route from that first moment to the day they either buy from you or walk.

And if it’s any comfort, the CRM rollouts that fall over mostly don’t fall over on the software. Gartner’s read is that when these projects stall, the root cause is nearly always the quality of the data going into them rather than the technology itself, which is oddly encouraging, since data is the sort of thing you can go and fix.

After that you can ring the agency, spend the money, and for once watch the numbers tell you something true.

Digital marketing was never really the answer to your ROI problem. If anything, it’s the question, and unless you’ve built something on your side that can take that question, hold onto it and hand you back a decent answer, then even the best agency going is just producing very tidy data with nowhere to live.

If your leads are landing somewhere and going cold, that’s the part worth fixing before you put another euro behind an ad. Come and have a straight, jargon-free conversation with us about it.