Solved: Getting Leads vs. Closing: What's the Tougher?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! That's a really common question, and it gets right to the heart of what most businesses struggle with. You've basically described the two leaky buckets that sink most companies: either not enough water (leads) coming in, or the water that does come in just pours straight out the bottom (unqualified, no-show leads).

Honestly, the way I see it, you're probably asking the wrong question. It isn't a choice between which one is 'tougher'. They are both symptoms of a much bigger, much more fundamental problem that almost everyone gets wrong. If you're struggling with either of these, it means your entire approach to finding and talking to customers is likely broken from the start.

I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and walk you through how I'd look at this. It's a bit of a different way of thinking, but it's what separates the campaigns that struggle from the ones that scale profitably.

You're probably paying to attract non-customers...

Let's tackle the first part of the problem head-on: "not having enough people coming in the door." Most people's first instinct is to launch a 'brand awareness' or 'reach' campaign on Facebook or Instagram. The logic seems sound: "I need more people to know about me, so I'll tell the platform to show my ad to as many people as possible."

Here is the uncomfortable truth: when you do that, you are giving the world's most powerful advertising algorithm a very specific command: "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price."

The algorithm, being the ruthlessly efficient machine it is, does exactly what you asked. It scours your target audience and identifies the users who are the absolute least likely to click, least likely to engage, and most definitely least likely to ever pull out a credit card. Why? Because those users aren't in demand. No one else is bidding for their attention, so their attention is cheap. You are actively paying Meta to find you the absolute worst possible audience for your product. It's like going to a car auction and specifically asking for the one that won't start.

This is why you get a flood of low-cost impressions and maybe some vanity likes, but no real business. The bucket is empty because you've aimed the hose at the wrong people. The best form of brand awareness, especially for a smaller business, is a competitor's customer switching to your product and raving about it. That only happens through conversion. Awareness is a byproduct of solving a real problem, not a prerequisite for making a sale. You must switch your campaign objective to a conversion goal, like sales, leads, or appointments. Anything else is just burning cash for ego.

We'll need to look at your ICP, and I don't mean demographics...

So if conversion campaigns are the answer, why do so many people still get terrible results? Because they point these powerful campaigns at the wrong people. This brings us to the biggest mistake in all of marketing: the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

Forget the sterile, demographic-based profile your last marketing hire made. "Companies in the finance sector with 50-200 employees" or "Women aged 25-40 who like yoga" tells you nothing of genuine value. It's a lazy shortcut that leads to generic, boring ads that speak to no one and get ignored by everyone. To stop burning cash, you have to define your customer by their pain. Their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare.

Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state. Let's make this real:

• Your Head of Engineering client isn't just a job title; she's a leader terrified of her best developers quitting out of frustration with a broken, inefficient workflow. That's the nightmare.
• For a legal tech SaaS, the nightmare isn't 'needing document management'; it's 'a junior partner missing a critical filing deadline, exposing the entire firm to a multi-million-pound malpractice suit.' That's the nightmare.
• For a fractional CFO service, the nightmare isn't 'needing better financial oversight'; it's the founder staring at the ceiling at 3 AM, one bad month away from a payroll crisis while their competitors are confidently raising their next round of funding. That's the nightmare.

When you understand the nightmare, everything changes. You're no longer selling a product or service; you're selling a solution to a deep, emotional frustration. This emotional connection is what drives action. This is the only way to cut through the noise.

Once you've isolated that nightmare, your targeting becomes surgical. You don't just target 'Head of Engineering'. You find the niche podcasts they listen to on their commute, like 'Acquired' or 'Software Engineering Daily'. You identify the industry newsletters they actually open, like 'Stratechery' by Ben Thompson. You target users of the SaaS tools they already pay for, like HubSpot, Salesforce, or Jira. Are they members of the 'SaaS Growth Hacks' Facebook group? Do they follow specific influencers like Jason Lemkin on Twitter (now X)?

This intelligence isn't just data; it's the blueprint for your entire targeting strategy. You have to do this work first. If you don't, you have no business spending a single pound on ads. It's the most important piece of work you can do, and it costs nothing but time and thought.

I'd say you need to understand what a customer is actually worth...

This leads us to the second leaky bucket: "leads sign up but never actually show up and turn into paying clients." This is almost always a result of chasing cheap leads, which stems from not knowing what a good lead is actually worth. The question isn't "How low can my Cost Per Lead (CPL) go?" The real question is "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?"

The answer lies in its counterpart: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). This is the single most important metric in your business, and almost no one calculates it properly. It tells you the total profit you can expect to make from an average customer over the entire duration of your relationship.

Here’s how you calculate it. It’s simple maths:

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month (or year)?
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after accounting for the cost of goods sold (COGS) or cost of service?
• Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month?

The calculation is: LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

Let's use an example. Say you run a SaaS company:

• ARPA: £500/month
• Gross Margin: 80% (common for software)
• Monthly Churn: 4% (meaning you lose 4 out of every 100 customers each month)

LTV = (£500 * 0.80) / 0.04
LTV = £400 / 0.04 = £10,000

In this example, each customer is worth £10,000 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. Now you have the truth. A healthy business model often aims for a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means you can afford to spend up to £3,333 to acquire a single customer and still have a very profitable model. If your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified leads into a customer, you can afford to pay up to £333 per qualified lead.

Suddenly, that £250 lead from a perfectly targeted CTO on LinkedIn doesn't seem expensive, does it? It looks like an absolute bargain. Meanwhile, the 100 leads you got for £5 each from a broad 'awareness' campaign, none of whom converted, cost you £500 for nothing. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth. It frees you from the tyranny of cheap leads and allows you to focus on value.

I've built a little calculator for you below so you can play with your own numbers. This is probably the most valuable exercise you can do for your business this week.

You probably should stop asking for the demo...

Now we arrive at the most common failure point in all of B2B advertising, and the single biggest reason why "leads don't show up": the offer. The "Request a Demo" button is perhaps the most arrogant Call to Action ever conceived. It presumes your prospect, a busy C-level decision-maker who is solving a nightmare, has nothing better to do than book a 30-minute slot in their diary to be sold to by a junior sales rep. It's high-friction, low-value, and instantly positions you as a commoditised vendor, just like everyone else.

Your offer’s only job is to deliver a moment of undeniable value—an "aha!" moment that makes the prospect sell themselves on your solution. It must solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing.

What does this look like in practice?

• For a SaaS founder: The gold standard is a free trial (with no credit card details needed) or a generous freemium plan. Let them use the actual product. Let them feel the transformation from their nightmare to a better reality. When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a formality. You aren't generating Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) for a sales team to chase; you are creating Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) who are already convinced. I remember one B2B software client who couldn't get traction with a demo offer. We switched to a free trial model and generated 1,535 trials on Meta ads because the friction was gone.
• If you're not a SaaS company, you're not exempt. You must bottle your expertise into a tool, content, or asset that provides instant value. For a marketing agency, this could be a free, automated website audit that shows them their top 3 keyword opportunities. For a data analytics platform, a free 'Data Health Check' that flags the top issues in their database. For a corporate training company, a free 15-minute interactive video module on 'Handling Difficult Conversations'. For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy, it's a 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns for free.

The offer is everything. A weak offer to the right audience will fail. A strong offer to the wrong audience will fail. But a strong, value-first offer presented to the right audience at the moment of their pain? That's unstoppable. That's how you get leads that not only show up, but show up excited to talk to you because you've already helped them.

You'll need a campaign structure that actually finds buyers...

Okay, so we've defined the customer by their nightmare, we know what they're worth, and we have a value-first offer. Now, how do we put this all together into an ad campaign that works? You need a structure that aligns with how people actually buy things.

I usually break this down into a simple funnel structure for Meta ads: Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu).

1. Top of Funnel (ToFu) - Prospecting:
This is where you find new people who've never heard of you. Your campaign objective MUST be 'Conversions' or 'Leads'. Here, you're testing audiences based on your Nightmare ICP research.

• Audiences: Start with detailed targeting. Test interests, behaviours, and lookalike audiences. The best lookalikes are built from your highest-value customers, not just all website visitors. I'd prioritise them like this: Lookalikes of purchasers -> initiated checkout -> added to cart -> all website visitors. If you're starting out, you gotta build data with interest targeting first.
• Ad Message: Use the "Problem-Agitate-Solve" or "Before-After-Bridge" frameworks. Call out their nightmare directly. For example, for a FinOps platform: "Your AWS bill just arrived. It’s 30% higher than last month, and your engineers have no idea why. Another fire to put out. (Problem). Imagine opening your cloud bill and smiling. You see where every dollar is going and waste is automatically eliminated. (After). Our platform is the bridge that gets you there. (Bridge)."

2. Middle of Funnel (MoFu) - Nurturing:
This is for people who've shown some interest (visited your website, watched a video) but haven't taken that key step yet. The goal here is to build trust and overcome objections.

• Audiences: Retarget website visitors from the last 30-90 days, people who watched 50%+ of your video ads, or people who engaged with your social media profiles. Crucially, you must exclude anyone who has already converted (e.g., purchased or filled out the lead form).
• Ad Message: Show them something different. Case studies, testimonials, a different angle on your offer, or an explainer of a specific feature that solves a key part of their pain.

3. Bottom of Funnel (BoFu) - Closing:
This is for people who got very close to converting but dropped off. They added to cart, started the checkout, or visited the pricing page. They are your hottest leads.

• Audiences: Retarget people who initiated checkout or added to cart in the last 7-14 days (excluding purchasers). This audience is small but incredibly valuable.
• Ad Message: This can be more direct. A simple reminder, a special offer, or a message addressing common last-minute concerns like security or implementation time can work well.

If you're on a small budget, you can combine MoFu and BoFu into a single 'Retargeting' ad set to ensure you have a large enough audience. The main thing is to have a seperate campaign for prospecting and one for retargeting, with different messages for each. I've seen this kind of structure take eCommerce stores to incredible results. One women's apparel client hit a 691% Return on Ad Spend, and a cleaning products company saw a 633% return. It works because it mirrors the customer's journey instead of just shouting the same message at everyone.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To wrap this all up, the challange isn't a simple choice between getting leads or converting them. It's a strategy problem. If you fix the foundations, both 'leaky buckets' will fix themselves. You'll get fewer, more expensive, but far more qualified leads coming in the door, and a much higher percentage of them will turn into paying clients because you're solving a problem they actually have.

Here’s a summary of the actionable steps I’d recommend you take:

I know this is a lot to take in, and it's a very different approach from what most people will tell you. Executing a strategy like this takes expertise, constant testing, and a deep understanding of how the ad platforms work. It's not just about pushing a few buttons; it's about building a predictable system for growth.

If you feel this approach makes sense but are unsure how to implement it for your specific business, we offer a free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session. We can take a quick look at what you're currently doing, discuss your goals, and give you some specific, actionable advice you can use right away. It's a good way to see if expert help might be the right next step for you.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh