What I Tell CEOs Who Say "Marketing Doesn't Work"

"We tried Facebook ads. Didn't work."
"We tried Google. Waste of money."
"We hired an agency last year. Nothing happened."

I hear this constantly.

And 9 times out of 10, here's what actually happened:

→ The ads worked

→ The leads came in

→ Nobody did anything with them

I had an exploration call last week with a CEO who spent $47,000 on ads in 2025.

"Total failure," he said. "We got leads, but none of them converted."

I asked to see his CRM.

418 leads.

I started clicking through them randomly:

"No contact attempt" - 186 leads

"Called once, no answer, never followed up" - 127 leads

"Scheduled call, no-show, never rescheduled" - 63 leads

Actually worked through a real sales process - 42 leads

Of those 42, he closed 19.

That's a 45% close rate.

"So your ads didn't work, or you didn't work the leads?"

Silence.

Here's the truth:

Marketing is the easy part.

Running ads? I can train someone to do that in a week.

Building a landing page? Done in a day.

But the system that turns a form submission into a customer?

That's where businesses fall apart.

If you think marketing doesn't work for you, I'd bet money your problem is one of these:

You're not contacting leads fast enough

You're not following up enough times

You don't have a system - you have chaos

You're measuring the wrong things

Fix those, and suddenly "marketing works" again.