If you run a service business you’ve probably seen a marketing report with all the right upward arrows and colourful charts, yet noticed that your bookings stayed flat. It’s a frustrating disconnect, and it happens when marketing is rewarded for activity, not outcomes.
Metrics like impressions, clicks, and followers are easy to generate, but they can give a false sense of progress. Unless your marketing is built to drive the kind of leads your sales process can close, you’re just filling a pipeline with fluff.
The fix is straightforward: sales and marketing need to be aiming at the same target, using the same language, and measuring success in the same way.
TL;DR: Sales and Marketing Need the Same KPIs
For service businesses, the fastest way to waste marketing dollars is to let sales and marketing chase different goals. Aligning on the definition of a “qualified lead,” focusing on KPIs that predict revenue instead of vanity metrics, and creating a feedback loop between the people running campaigns and the people closing deals ensures your digital marketing strategy produces real customers, not just nice-looking reports.
Why Sales–Marketing Alignment Matters
Small businesses don’t have the luxury of campaigns that “kinda work.” Every dollar you put into advertising needs to move you closer to a paying customer. Without alignment, it’s common to see campaigns attracting the wrong audience entirely.
Picture an Oakville landscaping company running ads for “lawn care tips” because the keyword is inexpensive. The campaign gets clicks, but the audience is mostly DIYers who were looking for answers to their questions, but were never planning to hire a crew. Now, the sales team ends up chasing ice cold leads while marketing claims the campaign is a success, and the disconnect continues.
This is an example of why sales and marketing need to be on the same page.
Alignment starts with agreeing on three things:
- Who do you want to attract?
- What makes them worth pursuing?
- Which offers do you most want to sell right now?
Defining the Funnel Together
Laying out a simple customer journey or marketing funnel can eliminate a lot of confusion. In a home services business, the path might look like this:
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): A prospect fills out your “Request a Quote” form.
- Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): Sales confirms the location and budget are a fit, then an appointment or site visit is booked.
Closed Won: The contract is signed.
Mapping out these stages allows everyone in a revenue generating role to see the sales cycle from the same point of view. This also gives sales reps a way to provide better feed back on the quality of pipeline coming in from the lead generation activities so marketing can refine targeting and messaging.
Choosing Lead Generation KPIs That Predict Revenue
The numbers that deserve your focus are the ones that tell you if your lead generation is profitable.
Cost per qualified lead shows how much you’re paying for opportunities that meet your criteria.
Speed-to-lead is the time it takes you to contact a new inquiry. Keeping this metric as low as possible can dramatically influence close rates. For most industries, customers expect a reply in under fifteen minutes.
Contact rate is the number of leads that you are able to establish 2-way communication with (expressed as a percentage). So, if you generate 10 leads and are only able to get a hold of 3 of them on the phone or by email, you have a 30% contact rate.
Appointments set, show-up rates, and your overall closing rate give you visibility into the health of your sales process. If you’re having a lot of leads no-show your appointments, then you know to look closer at your follow-up process. Are you fully qualifying the leads you bring in before you book them? Are you sending reminders and calendar invites or just relying on the other person to show up?
Then, once you understand how many demos or consultations you need to have in order to close a sale, you can work backwards to figure out how many appointments you need in your calendar to hit your revenue goals.
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) and customer lifetime value (LTV) are the ultimate measures of marketing funnel health. Together, these metrics give you the CAC-to-LTV ratio which will tell you if those new customers you are closing are worth the investment you’re paying to get them.
These KPIs give you a much clearer picture than impressions or clicks ever could. They show not just whether people are seeing your ads, but whether they’re turning into paying customers.
Stop Obsessing Over Vanity Metrics
Impressions, reach, likes, and even click-through rate can be useful diagnostics, but they’re not the scoreboard you should be playing to. A high reach doesn’t matter if it’s outside your service area. A high CTR is meaningless if those clicks come from people who will never buy. Social growth without conversions is just a popularity contest – and you can’t deposit likes at the bank!
SLAs and Marketing Funnel Reporting
As a revenue leader, or business owners, one of the most effective tools for alignment is a service level agreement (SLA) between sales and marketing. This is a written commitment to follow up with all leads that come in within a set timeframe. This timeframe can vary by industry, but ideally, you are able to follow up with every lead in no more than fifteen minutes.
The sales team should also commit a regular report back to the marketing team to inform the marketers of how many leads made it to each stage of the marketing funnel and how much revenue was generated from how many closed won opportunities. Depending on the velocity of your lead flow, this report can be weekly or monthly. This feedback loop lets you quickly cut underperforming ad sources and double down on the ones that work.
Making Tracking Work for You
You don’t need a corporate tech stack to keep everyone honest. Tag each lead with their source so you can see where they’re coming from. This way you can see how each channel is performing relative to each other channel. Use different phone numbers for different campaigns. Record why a lead was disqualified in your CRM so that you can analyze all closed lost opportunities in an attempt to identify trends. Over time, this builds a single source of truth that both sales and marketing trust, and it makes your decisions about budget allocation far less subjective.
If you don’t know where to begin with tagging your lead sources, lead routing, or connecting your marketing tech to your sales CRM, then you should give Playbook Digital Marketing a call. We are a digital marketing agency in Oakville, Ontario that specializes in marketing automation, Google Ads, SEO, and web design.
What Happens When You Get It Right
Small changes can create big wins. You can cut wasted ad spend by removing out-of-area clicks or cut unqualified leads in half by adding budget and timeline questions to your online form. If you’re going to pay for lead generation, then it makes sense to have someone on call over the weekend to follow up and book jobs as soon as quote requests come in. None of these tactics required doubling the marketing budget. The only thing you need to do is start by creating better alignment between the people responsible for lead generation and the people accountable for closing.
Taking the First Step
If you’re ready to stop chasing the wrong KPIs, start by defining what a good lead looks like for your business. Agree on a short list of sales-focused KPIs to track, and pause any channel that can’t prove it’s producing the right kind of opportunities. We’ve written before about how to know if your digital marketing is working and how much you should spend on Google Ads. Both of those articles will help you dig deeper into tracking and budgeting for better results.
At Playbook Digital, we build lead generation strategies designed to connect directly with your sales process. If you want to cut the noise and focus on the numbers that keep your schedule full, our 16-point Advertising Analysis is the right place to start.
