The same system on three markets, three opposite results
In 2023, at Bboxx, we opened a digital sales channel on three West African markets with exactly the same system: paid social, a lead capture form, a call centre callback. Same product, same method, same group team behind it.
First-half conversion: 6.24 percent on the first market, 5.51 percent on the second, 0.12 percent on the third. A factor of fifty between best and worst, on an identical system. And cost per lead was fine everywhere, between $0.85 and $2.36.
A channel is not judged on its entry metric. It is judged on fully loaded cost per sale, callback labour included, and that number tells a completely different story.
The group sold equipment on instalments through a commissioned field sales force, market by market. The digital channel was meant to open a second route: cheaper, faster to stand up, measurable end to end. The system was designed at group level and deployed identically, which was the right call. Without a common standard, comparing three markets means nothing.
A digital channel is not a channel, it is a chain. An ad, a form, a lead base, a call centre, a delivery team, stock. Marketing owns the first third. The rest belongs to local operations, and that is where the result is decided. Add that the three markets had neither the same commercial maturity, nor the same stock, nor the same number of tele-agents. The system was identical; the conditions were not.
1 · Count the full cost, not the media cost.
For each market, I rebuilt the whole account: media buyer fees carried by the group, automation tools, call agents' time, actual media spend, call centre fees per call, agents' commissions. The full cost per sale comes out of that, and it ranks the markets in a different order from the cost per lead.
2 · Put the field force in the same table.
On the same page, next to digital, the field sales force of the same market over the same period, with its own average cost per sale. It is the only way to know whether the digital channel is really the cheapest, or only the most visible.
3 · Tighten the geography rather than the budget.
On the middle market, I cut the campaign in two zones and relaunched it in the one city whose indicators held. The budget was halved, and conversion went up. The lever was not the spend, it was the scope.
4 · Go and see the call-back with my own eyes.
I travelled on site to review the funnel with the telesales teams. The tracking file records it in black and white. Since then, the first question I ask about a paid channel is not how much it costs, it is who calls back, within how long, with what script.
5 · Stop the pilot that does not hold.
On the third market, the media delivered the leads and the organisation did not convert them: the assigned sales were barely delivered. I wrote the full account, put it in the same table as the other two, and recommended stopping rather than renewing. The market was relaunched a year later, after a rebuild, with a cost per lead divided by eight.
First half of 2023, three markets, one system.
- Conversion of 6.24%, 5.51% and 0.12% on the same system, three markets
- Cost per lead between $0.85 and $2.36 everywhere, including the failing market, which proves the entry metric says nothing about the outcome
- On the first market, the digital channel outsold the field force over six months, having existed for less than six
- On that same market, digital sold more than half of the year's phones in 2023
- Media budget halved on one market by tightening geography, with conversion up
- Pilot stopped on the third market, relaunched a year later after a rebuild, cost per lead down eightfold
- Group roadmap resequenced market by market: scale up, improve, full rebuild, hold
The same group tactic does not land the same way in every market. On the first market, digital sold more than half of the year's phones. On the third, it recorded one sale. Across the whole division, it stayed under a tenth of phone sales in the first half of 2024. A group can design one system. Each market still decides what it is worth.
That is why I recommend judging a channel market by market, never on a group average. And a low cost per lead is worth nothing if nobody picks up the phone. The only number that decides is fully loaded cost per sale, and it includes lines that do not belong to marketing: call centre time, stock availability, delivery capacity. If your paid channel is judged on cost per click, you do not yet know whether it works.
Is your paid channel judged on the right metric?
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