Last quarter, a B2B SaaS company came to us with a familiar complaint: “Our paid media isn’t working.”
We pulled their CRM data. 47% of paid leads from the previous quarter were still sitting in “open” status. Never worked. Never touched. Just... sitting there.
Their paid media wasn’t broken. Their system was.
The Usual Suspects
When paid underperforms, teams reach for the usual fixes. Restructure campaigns. Test new creative. Tighten targeting. Refresh audiences. Audit the bid strategy.
All good stuff. All stuff that matters. We do it too.
But here’s what we’ve learned after years of running paid for B2B companies: the campaigns are rarely the whole problem. Sometimes they’re not the problem at all.
Paid media is one node in a go-to-market system. And a channel can’t outperform the system it sits in.
Three Problems Disguised as Paid Media Problems
1. The Measurement Problem
Most teams measure paid on last-touch attribution. The demo request gets credit. The pricing page visit gets credit. That bottom-funnel retargeting ad gets credit.
You know what doesn’t get credit? The LinkedIn campaign that introduced them to you six months ago. The thought leadership that got them on your newsletter. The brand impression that made them recognize your name when they finally hit market.
Last-touch says TOFU doesn’t work. So you cut it. You shift budget downstream where the “conversions” are.
Six months later, pipeline is down 30% and nobody can figure out why. Market conditions, right?
No. You starved the top of funnel because your measurement told you it was waste. It wasn’t waste — you just couldn’t see what it was doing.
We had a client whose cost per MQL was $1,240. After we rebuilt their attribution — connecting Pardot to Salesforce properly, tracking influence across touches — that same campaign structure dropped to $216. The campaigns didn’t change. The measurement did. And suddenly leadership could see which channels were actually driving pipeline, not just which ones got the last click.
2. The RevOps Problem
Here’s a question: what percentage of your paid leads from last quarter actually got worked?
Not “assigned.” Worked. A human looked at them, made a call, sent an email, tried to start a conversation.
We’ve seen 40%. 60%. Sometimes worse.
These aren’t bad leads. They’re unworked leads. They got routed to the wrong rep. Or routed to a rep who’s cherry-picking and ignoring anything that isn’t a hand-raiser. Or they sat for five days before anyone touched them and by then the buyer had moved on.
One client had contacts being marked as MQLs just for opening an email. Support tickets were triggering sales alerts. The sales team couldn’t tell the difference between an opportunity and a tire-kicker because the system was lying to them.
Your paid media looks inefficient because lead activation is broken. Your CAC is high not because acquisition is expensive — but because you’re paying to acquire leads you never actually work.
This isn’t a paid media problem. It’s a RevOps problem. But it shows up in your paid metrics.
3. The Feedback Loop Problem
When’s the last time sales told marketing which paid leads actually converted to revenue?
Not MQLs. Not SQLs. Closed-won deals traced back to the campaign that sourced them.
Most teams can’t answer this. Marketing optimizes toward leads. Sales works deals. Nobody closes the loop.
We worked with a company spending heavily on Meta. Lots of MQLs. Leadership was happy with the volume. But when we built reporting that tracked all the way to opportunities and closed-won — not just form fills — we found those Meta leads weren’t converting to revenue. The CPL looked great. The pipeline contribution was nearly zero.
They didn’t have a paid media problem. They had a “we’re measuring the wrong thing” problem. Once we shifted reporting to SQLs and pipeline, they reallocated budget to channels that actually drove revenue. Same spend, completely different outcome.
The Compound Effect
These three problems don’t just add up. They compound.
Bad measurement → wrong budget allocation → TOFU gets cut → fewer leads entering the funnel → RevOps atrophies because there’s less to work → less signal back to marketing about what’s working → even worse budget decisions.
It’s a death spiral disguised as “paid media efficiency problems.”
Compound GTM
We’ve started calling this way of thinking Compound GTM.
The core idea: execution alone doesn’t compound. You need a full stack where each layer reinforces the others.
Layer 1: Audience & Intelligence
Target accounts, CRM data, ICP definition. The foundation that tells you who to reach.
Layer 2: Orchestration & Activation
Ads, outbound, content, events. The tactics that put you in front of buyers.
Layer 3: Measurement & Operations
Attribution, reporting, lead routing, lifecycle management. The infrastructure that tells you what’s working and ensures leads actually get worked.
Most teams over-index on Layer 2. They optimize campaigns endlessly while Layers 1 and 3 are broken or missing entirely.
But when all three layers work together, the gains multiply. Better targeting means higher-quality leads. Better measurement means smarter budget allocation. Better operations means leads actually convert. Each layer amplifies the others.
10% improvement in campaign performance is nice. 10% improvement across all three layers? That compounds into something much bigger.
The Real Question
So when a team tells us “paid isn’t working,” we don’t start with the campaigns.
We ask: How are you measuring it? What happens to leads after they convert? How fast are they getting worked, and by who? Does sales ever tell you what turned into revenue?
Nine times out of ten, the campaigns aren’t the problem.
The question isn’t “how do we make paid more efficient?”
It’s “where is the system breaking down — and what would happen if we fixed all of it?”
Most agencies audit your campaigns. We audit your system.
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