A firm had two long-term marketing vendors. Combined spend: $6,600 a month. Nobody was asking hard questions.
One vendor was forwarding lead inquiries through a free email service that stopped working. They did not notice. Six months of leads went into a blackhole while the invoices kept coming.
The second vendor, when asked to show what the spend had produced, said they would need a week to pull the numbers together.
This is not unusual. The pipeline does not fail with an alarm. It fails quietly, while the invoices go out on schedule.
Before we touched anything else, we built the reporting. If you cannot measure it on day one, you cannot manage it on day sixty.
What we fixed
A pipeline with visibility at every step
- Every lead has a source, a timestamp, and a follow-up trigger
- Calls after hours reach a live person
- Vendors report on a 30-day cycle against specific numbers
- If something breaks, it surfaces within 24 hours
Both vendors were replaced. The pipeline was rebuilt with a single owner, defined checkpoints, and reporting that does not require a week to find.
The question worth asking: when did someone last verify your leads are actually arriving?