More closed deals with fewer irrelevant leads

This is what we worked on with Tomáš Lendacký to help his company, ZIZA, grow more effectively. The agency reports made the marketing look successful, but the reality was different. We needed to identify where money was being lost, where the marketing system was flawed and how to put it right.

It started with a feeling most CEOs know: “Something in our marketing doesn't add up.” Everything looks fine from the outside, but there is a “BUT”. This hard-to-define feeling is familiar to most CEOs whose companies invest in marketing without seeing the financial results they expect. So we sat down with the data and worked through the three core stages of Grow Up:

1 - Analysis

We began with the hardest part: facing the facts. We reviewed marketing costs, the company's online and offline presence, service operations, representatives' availability and workload, the length of onboarding, cost per lead compared with the cost of acquiring a paying client, and many other metrics. Fortunately, as an experienced sales professional, Tomáš had recorded data in a CRM and kept additional spreadsheets. These saved us a great deal of work and gave us a solid foundation.

We quickly established where marketing was genuinely helping and where it was simply accelerating the chaos.

For example, lead numbers looked fantastic, but many of those leads were irrelevant, creating a heavy workload for the internal sales team. Advertising spend was rising steadily, and so were leads, but sales results from marketing were not keeping pace. As a result, the ultimate cost of acquiring a paying customer through marketing was too high.

2 - Setting realistic goals

Defining the goals went smoothly. Tomáš had a clear vision of where he wanted to take the business. Since the numbers now showed us the acquisition cost, the length of the sales cycle and the work involved in serving each client, we set realistic SMART goals. ZIZA was already investing enough in marketing for its needs, so one of the main goals was to improve the efficiency of the whole process: to fix the system that was struggling to keep up.

3 - Strategy and plan

The Grow Up framework gave our strategy its structure. We knew where we needed to get to, at what cost and with what return for it to count as real growth, rather than chaos on steroids. Once the strategy was agreed, I created a plan: the steps to take, the division of responsibilities and the necessary system changes, all in a specific order designed to make the change sustainable.

What were the results?

It has now been almost six months since we completed Grow Up. Tomáš and I continue to work together through ongoing support, with me acting as ZIZA's fractional CMO. What have we achieved?

Direct marketing investment, including advertising, media spend, content creation and other activities, is under control, and direct customer acquisition spend has fallen by more than 30%. Despite reducing the budget, improving the system helped us acquire twice as many customers from the same activities and cut irrelevant leads to 50% of their previous level.

Summary after approximately 6 months:

• 30%lower acquisition costs
• twice as many deals closed per month
• 50%fewer irrelevant leads

The activities are the same, but the marketing system is different. Marketing was not the problem. The problem was the system it operated within.

What does this mean for ZIZA in practice?

A better approach to acquisition = fewer irrelevant leads

Fewer irrelevant leads = more time for sales

A better acquisition system = less spend needed for direct acquisition

More high-quality leads = shorter onboarding and scope to close a higher proportion of deals each month

Grow Up is not about doing more marketing. It is about making marketing make sense at last.

What did Tomáš say?

“Grow Up helped us understand the actual state of our marketing, which we had thought was fine. It was burning through a large budget, and we lost a year. It cost us not just money, but also clients and profit we missed out on. Grow Up showed us new possibilities and the hidden potential of what we can still achieve. We gained an expert perspective, precise instructions and a path that points us in the right direction.”

Tomáš Lendacký – CEO · ZIZA