Tried to Fix Lead-to-Sale with Software. Here's What Actually Happened.

It wouldn’t be fair to write only about the things that worked out, so this is about a decision I got wrong.

The story starts with the COVID lockdowns.

Before the lockdowns, I had a stable business managing Google Ads. Then COVID happened, and everything got unstable fast.

I lost almost all my clients in a month or so because they couldn't operate. Either their industries shut down, their customers shut down, or they couldn’t get supplies.

The Project That Burned Me Out

I spent my free time doomscrolling and imagining bankruptcy, until one of my clients asked me to solve a problem.

I had built a lead-handling system for his business that transformed everything. He'd gone from reluctantly spending $8,000 a month on Google Ads to enthusiastically investing almost $200,000 a month because the system turned every ad dollar into $2.30 of profit.

He wanted my help doing something similar for the rest of his business.

It took about two and a half years to build the system. Six months after going live, they had a team in place, and I handed it over. By this time, I was completely burned out.

What the client hadn’t told me was that I was the fourth person to attempt the job. The other three were smarter than me and had walked away after a few months.

I won't go into all the details, but here's the gist: the client had about 300 employees using an ancient Oracle system. It held hundreds of millions of records, had no indexes or data validation, and had been cobbled together over 20 years by a parade of cheap and careless contractors.

The catch? My system had to replace it without any downtime.

Looking for What’s Next

After handing the project over, I coasted for a bit while thinking about what I'd like to work on next. I settled on solving the lead-to-sale problem.

Typically, only about one in every 20 Google Ads leads turns into a customer. With the cost of Google Ads going up every year, you can't afford to waste 19 leads just to get one sale.

I'd worked on this problem with a few clients and had come up with a repeatable approach for turning more leads into sales.

The idea seemed like a winner because everyone who advertises on Google has the same problem.

As part of solving this problem, I'd built custom lead-handling software for three clients. It turned the way their best salesperson would handle a lead on their best day into an automatic process. That way, every single lead was treated like gold.

A Seemingly Obvious Solution

There’s a reason they say when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Having seen how software could fix the lead-to-sale problem, I was blind to anything else.

The problem with custom software is that it's expensive. It's OK to spend $50,000 on software when you're getting 1,000 leads a month for a high-value sale. Not so much if you're a local waterproofing contractor.

My plan was to extract what I'd done for bigger companies into a tool that smaller companies could use. They'd get the same results without paying the development costs.

It took about six weeks to build a working system.

My Assumption About the Market Was Wrong

I thought I'd sell to businesses that were already getting leads from Google.

What ended up happening was people asking me for help getting the leads in the first place. They weren’t getting as many as they wanted. They were paying too much per lead. Or they were getting flooded with spam and junk.

Getting People to Change Is Harder Than It Looks

Humans hate change, even if they know it will make things better. I'd been insulated from the difficulties of getting people to use the software I'd built for my clients. The boss whipped or bribed their employees into using the system. In one case, a manager got fired because they refused to change.

But now that I was dealing with smaller businesses, I ran into this problem hard. Do you know what's almost impossible? Cajoling a small business owner into switching from Post-it notes to a programme. And where the business had employees, you'd think the owner could just crack the whip. Not so if your only employee also happens to be your spouse.

By the end of the first year, I had signed up a bunch of new Google Ads clients. But only two of them were actually using the lead-to-sale system.

In both cases, it took months of nagging and repeated training to get them onboard.

And although this didn’t turn out the way I expected, it doesn’t feel like a failure. I rebuilt my Google Ads business and learned that software is easy, but people are the hard part.

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