Warning signals
- Lead quality is blamed entirely on the platform
- Customer acquisition cost is unknown
- Campaigns optimize for clicks or form fills only
- Sales follow-up is inconsistent
- The offer has not converted reliably without paid traffic
Self-audit questions
- What specific audience and buying event are being targeted?
- What is an economically acceptable acquisition cost?
- Can the conversion path work before traffic is added?
- Which event represents qualified demand?
- Who owns speed-to-lead and follow-up?
The 30/60/90 repair sequence
Days 1–30 · Establish truth
- Define the audience, offer, qualification event and unit economics
- Audit tracking from source through revenue
- Repair the landing and follow-up path
- Establish a no-scale threshold
Days 31–60 · Repair the mechanism
- Run one bounded campaign with one hypothesis
- Review lead quality with sales, not just platform metrics
- Document creative, audience and offer learning
- Fix the largest conversion leak before increasing spend
Days 61–90 · Prove and operationalize
- Scale only the proven unit
- Introduce controlled creative and audience tests
- Build a weekly acquisition economics review
- Stop channels that cannot produce qualified economics
Measures that matter
- Qualified acquisition cost
- Lead-to-opportunity rate
- Speed-to-lead
- Gross-profit return on acquisition spend
Decision gate
Do not add volume until the mechanism is becoming more reliable.
At day 90, continue only what has a named owner, a visible measure and evidence that the constraint is weakening.
Work through the constraint