# Which marketing brings in customers?

Quote: "I can't tell what marketing made us."
Canonical: https://fortitudemedia.ai/sound-familiar/cannot-tell-what-marketing-made-us
No. 19 of 20 in "Sound familiar?" (https://fortitudemedia.ai/sound-familiar)
Service: Growth Team programme (https://fortitudemedia.ai/#how)
Publisher: Fortitude Media Limited

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## How do I work out which marketing is bringing in customers?

In B2B, with long sales cycles and several people in each purchase, precise attribution is not available and chasing it wastes money. A simpler discipline works. Record the source of every first conversation, ask each new buyer how they found you, and review the answers monthly against spend. That shows which activity starts conversations and which starts none.

You spend on a website, some events, a PR retainer, a bit of LinkedIn. New clients do arrive. When your finance director asks which of those brought them in, your answer is part memory and part hope.

## Why the numbers will not join up

### Most of the buyer's research is invisible

Someone hears your name from a peer, asks an AI assistant about you, reads your LinkedIn, then types your address into a browser. Your analytics calls that a direct visit. Several things worked and the software credited none of them.

### Nobody writes down the source

The best moment to learn how a buyer found you is the first call, and it takes one question. In most firms the CRM field for it is blank, or says 'other'.

### The spend is scattered

Events sit in the sales budget, the website in IT, PR in something the MD signs off. With no single total, there is nothing to hold results against.

## What it is costing you

Pull every marketing cost from last year's ledger into one list: suppliers, salaries, software, stands, sponsorships. Beside each line, mark whether you can trace one sales conversation to it. Total the lines you cannot. For example, a firm spending £120,000 might find £70,000 on that side. That money is not necessarily wasted. It is being renewed every year without anyone knowing.

## Check it yourself in ten minutes

You need the ledger, the CRM and a phone.

1. Write down how each of your last ten new clients first heard of you. Where you do not know, ring three and ask.
2. Count how many of last quarter's new opportunities have a source recorded in the CRM.
3. Total last year's marketing spend from the ledger, every line, not just the marketing budget.
4. Check whether your enquiry form and your first sales call both ask how the buyer found you.

## What we would do in the first 90 days

Measurement first, because everything after it is a decision about where to put money.

- **Week 1:** Growth Review with a founder. We check your site, two competitors, and what Google and ChatGPT say about all three, then send three fixes in writing. Our platform starts asking ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google your buyers' questions every week, recording who is named.
- **Weeks 2 to 4:** We agree with you and whoever runs sales what gets recorded at every first conversation, and what counts as accepted pipeline.
- **Days 30 to 90:** One page arrives on the first Monday of each month: meetings held, pipeline accepted by sales, buyer questions where an AI assistant names you. Site changes are dated and logged, so a shift in enquiries can be matched to a cause.

The Growth Team programme covers all three services from £2,500 a month (most clients pay £5,000 to £8,000), all prices exclude VAT, and you can stop after any step.

## Questions founders ask

### Do I need attribution software?

Probably not. The expensive tools mostly produce a more confident version of the wrong answer, because they cannot see the peer recommendation or the question put to an AI assistant. One mandatory CRM field and the habit of asking on the first call tell you more.

### How do you track whether AI assistants recommend us?

By asking them, repeatedly. Our own platform puts the 40 to 150 questions your buyers ask to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google every week and records who is named. You can do a rough version yourself tonight with five questions and a notebook.

### What return should I expect from the programme?

We will not promise one, but you can work out the threshold. A firm whose average client is worth £15,000 at a 50% margin needs about ten new clients a year to cover a £6,500-a-month programme. Run that with your own figure and see whether it looks reachable.

## Related

- "The last agency sent reports, not customers." · https://fortitudemedia.ai/sound-familiar/agency-sent-reports-not-customers
- "Nobody has ever said 'I found you on your website'." · https://fortitudemedia.ai/sound-familiar/nobody-finds-us-through-our-website

Next step: a free 30-minute Growth Review with a founder, ending with three fixes in writing. https://fortitudemedia.ai/growth-review