How Marketing Agencies Can Improve Client Lead Conversion

Most agencies know this call. The client says the leads are rubbish. You open the account and the cost per lead looks fine. Neither of you can prove anything, because each lead disappeared into the client's phone the moment it arrived.

If you only control the ads, you carry the blame for something you can't see. The plan below gets you that visibility in about 30 days, without turning your agency into a sales team. Start with one client: the one with the biggest spend, or the loudest complaints.

Before day one: get agreement to look

You're asking to see how a client's business treats its own customers, so ask in a way that shares the goal.

"We're happy to be judged on lead quality. To do that fairly, we need to see what happens to each lead after it arrives. Can we spend the next month looking at that together?"

Check that your contract covers access to the client's lead data, and be clear about who on your team will see it.

Week 1: Find out what really happens

Pull the last 30 days of leads from the ad platforms and ask the client what happened to each one. If they can't say, that's your first finding, and the reason for the rest of this plan.

Sort them into a simple table: never contacted, tried but no conversation, spoke and not suitable, spoke and quoted, won, lost.

Test the response. With the client's agreement, send two or three test enquiries at different times: a weekday morning, a weekday afternoon and an evening. Tell them you'll test at some point this month without saying when. Record how long a reply took and what was said. Treat the results as a sample, because a single test on a bad day proves very little.

Say a PPC agency has a roofing client who's unhappy with last month's 42 leads. The count shows 11 were never called, 9 were outside the area, 8 got one attempt and nothing more, and 14 were reached and quoted. That gives each side something to do. The agency tightens its location targeting and adds a postcode question to the form. The roofer needs cover for the afternoons, when he's on site. It's a far better conversation than "the leads are rubbish".

Week 2: Fix delivery and alerts

Most of this is your territory, and none of it takes long. Work through this list for the client.

• Every lead source posts automatically to one place. Nobody has to download anything or log in to an ad platform to find a lead.
• Each source has been tested from start to finish with a real submission.
• Alerts go to the phone of the person who will call, rather than a shared inbox.
• Each lead carries its source and campaign, so you can report on them later.
• Someone has been named to check the route after any change to a form or an automation.

This week also deals with quiet data loss. Meta makes leads available to download for up to 90 days and Google says it stores lead form leads for 60 days, so don't let a client's process depend on someone remembering.

Week 3: Agree the rules

Write one page that both sides sign off. Keep it short enough to pin on a wall.

The client agrees to:

• Make a first attempt within an agreed time during working hours. Choose a number they can hit on a busy day.
• Make an agreed number of attempts in the first week. Our follow-up guide has a cadence to start from.
• Update each lead's status by the end of the next working day.
• Record a value for each won lead and a reason for each lost one.

The agency agrees to:

• Look at the lost reasons each month and change targeting or forms in response.
• Test the lead route after any campaign or form change.
• Report in plain English, with one recommendation.

Lost reasons: agree a short list, and decide who acts on each. This is the most useful part of the page, because it stops the blame going round in circles.

Lost reason	Who looks at it first
Outside the area	Agency: location targeting, form question
Wrong job	Agency: keywords, ad wording, form question
Not a real enquiry	Agency: form type, spam checks
Budget	Both: the offer and who it's aimed at
Went elsewhere	Client: speed, quote follow-up
No response	Client: attempts, times of day

Week 4: Run the first review

Thirty minutes, the same agenda each month.

1. Leads by source. How many, and did they all arrive?
2. Contact. How many got a first attempt in the agreed time? How many got none?
3. Pipeline. How many are contacted, quoted, booked, won and lost?
4. Money. Spend, won value and cost per won job.
5. Lost reasons. One action for the agency and one for the client.
6. Before next month. Who is doing what, by when.

Numbers about a client's team can feel personal, so lead with your own. Start with what the agency got wrong: "Nine leads were outside your area, and that's on us. We've changed the targeting." You've now earned the right to raise the next point, and you can raise it as a question: "Eleven leads didn't get a call. Were there days when nobody could answer?"

That question usually matters more than the number. It's often an honest problem with staffing or cover that the client can solve, and they'll solve it faster if nobody has been accused of anything.

Making it work across all your clients

Once it works for one client, make it a standard part of how you work.

• Standardise the setup. One checklist, one list of statuses and one list of lost reasons, used for every client.
• Budget the time. Allow an hour to prepare and 30 minutes for the review, per client, per month. If that's more than you can afford, start with your top five.
• Decide how you charge. You can include it in the retainer or sell it as an add-on. Either is fine, but it's real work, so make the decision on purpose.
• Know the limit of your role. You can show the numbers, fix delivery and coach. The client still has to make the calls.
• Write down what you can't judge. If a client won't update statuses after two reviews, say in writing that you can't report on lead quality without that data. It protects you both.

How LeadCentre supports this

LeadCentre's agency platform gives each client a separate account, with its own leads, users, connections, pipeline, app access and figures. Data is kept separate between clients.

• Set up: an Agency Admin adds clients, with an emailed invite or later if you'd rather set them up first. Snapshots save one client's setup so you can apply it to a new client, which suits a standard process.
• Connect: each client gets a webhook URL on its own account. Google Ads lead forms post straight to it, and Facebook and Instagram leads go through Zapier or Make.
• Control: you choose per client which features the client's own people can use (Team, Instant Replies, Custom Fields, Connections) and which standard fields show on its leads.
• Staff: Agency Users see and manage only the clients assigned to them.
• Client's team: the Android app gives them push notifications, one-tap contact, statuses and follow-up reminders. Marking a lead Won asks for its value and marking it Lost can record a reason, which is what your review needs.

Be clear about reporting. Today it means opening a client and looking at its Home dashboard, pipeline, follow-ups and won values, as described in agency reporting. There's no cross-client report and no agency-wide dashboard of figures yet. That's on our Coming Soon list, so for now you'd prepare each review from each client's own account.

For more on how this fits your kind of agency, see our pages for PPC agencies and marketing agencies.