Case study · Anne Jansson

From EUR 3.59 leads that don't buy to EUR 20 leads that close in 5 days.

Two years of lead magnets that looked cheap in the dashboard, one of those years with me on the account. One quarter of foundation work later: 407% ROAS, five days from webinar to close, and a launch motion her team can repeat.

Client Anne Jansson

Industry Health business coaching

Stage Mid six-figure annual revenue

Engagement No Guesswork Growth Protocol, implementation, Paid Social Ad Lab

407%

ROAS in the first quarter after the No Guesswork Growth Protocol

5 days

Sales cycle from webinar to close

EUR 20 CPL

that closes, instead of EUR 3.59 that did not

~700

Qualified leads per launch · EUR 2,500 contract value

Before · Context

When organic stops being a strategy.

Anne did what most founders do when something works. She squeezed it.

Organic Instagram had been her engine for years. Some months mid five figures, others low four figures, and in between she was refreshing Stripe like it owed her money. Same offer, same effort, wildly different results.

She teaches health coaches how to get clients through organic Instagram. It works, but it does not scale and is not stable enough for higher revenue goals. Stability was exactly what she wanted: a pipeline she could plan around, without betting on whether this month's Reels decide to behave.

So she tried paid ads, several times: performance marketers who went straight into execution without ever talking strategy, then running the ads herself and losing budget to technical mistakes, then calculators and cheat sheets, the whole catalogue of "download this free thing". Two years of trial and error, five figures into courses, ad budget and services.

The leads came in cheap. Really cheap, EUR 3.59 per lead at one point. They did not buy. Or they bought three months later, which is the same thing when you are trying to plan revenue.

The real blocker

Cheap leads are expensive when they don't close.

When Anne came to me in February 2023, the pattern was predictable. The leads were cheap, but without buying intent, outside her target group, from industries she did not want to work with. Sales through ads barely existed.

That produces the familiar spiral: you stare at the lead price, change too much too fast, and nothing builds on anything. Underneath it lay the real problem. Ads were being asked to fix a message and targeting problem. They cannot.

All through 2023 I ran her campaigns myself. We tested lead magnets and optimised for cost per lead, because that is the number that looks good in the dashboard and that almost every client is keen on. It was the wrong number. EUR 3.59 per lead sounds great, until it becomes clear that those leads are window shoppers. Then the cheap lead becomes the most expensive one you ever bought: it costs sales time, fills the CRM and crowds out the leads that would have bought.

We had to stop guessing and start measuring.

Q1 2024 · The rebuild

How we removed the guesswork.

In the first quarter of 2024 she was ready to do something different. We switched the ads off and built the foundation first, in three phases.

Phase 1 · Q1 2024

The No Guesswork Growth Protocol

What we did:

Interviews with Anne's best customers.
Pulled the real pain points, triggers and phrasing out of those conversations and built a buyer persona we could write to without guessing.
A messaging matrix: pains, desires, objections and triggers, in the words the customers actually used.
Aligned the lead strategy to her average contract value, for intent, not volume.
Sharpened the offer so that the webinar pitch is the natural next step.

Why it mattered: who gets addressed and what gets said now came from the people who had already bought, not from assumptions about people who might.

What changed: for the first time Anne had an answer to "who is this for" that was not "health coaches who want to grow".

Phase 2 · Q1 2024

The implementation: webinar, landing page, ads

What we did:

Wrote the webinar script as a one-to-many sales conversation, direct response, no "inspire and hope".
Landing page copy that makes the right person feel recognised and the wrong person sort themselves out.
Ad copy from the messaging matrix, not hooks we thought were good.

Why it mattered: the webinar was not a presentation, it was a sales system. Every sentence had the job of moving someone from "I have this problem" to "I need this now".

What changed: the funnel became a qualification machine. Whoever sat in the webinar had already recognised the problem and wanted to see the solution.

Phase 3 · Q2 2024

Paid Social Ad Lab

What we did:

Three launches, one webinar a month, a one-week pause in between.
One single variable changed per launch: the creative first, then the price, then the landing page.
What got measured was what moved revenue, not what looked good in Ads Manager.

Why it mattered: optimisation without chaos. Change one thing at a time and you know what worked. Change everything and you are guessing again.

What changed: a repeatable system that got better with every launch, instead of starting from zero each time.

The turning point

When expensive leads became the smart play.

First launch in the second quarter of 2024, ads live, average cost per lead EUR 19.76. If someone had shown me that number in 2023, when the leads cost EUR 3.59, I would have panicked. The difference: five days from webinar to close. Around 700 leads per launch, EUR 2,500 contract value, and the people who came actually bought. Over the full quarter the cost per lead settled at EUR 20.01, at 407% ROAS, and the strategy and creative investment was recouped in the first month.

Most case studies skip this part, so I will say it directly: even at four times ROAS, the lead price can mess with your head. It did here too. When you are used to seeing EUR 3.59 in the dashboard, EUR 20 feels expensive, and your brain shouts "optimise this down". That is the wrong game. EUR 3.59 leads that do not buy are infinitely more expensive than EUR 20 leads that close in five days. That is why I settle before the first euro what number "good" means. Otherwise you end up arguing with a dashboard while the business is doing fine.

The outcome

What actually changed.

The headline is 407% ROAS in the first quarter after the No Guesswork Growth Protocol. Anne's biggest win was predictability.

Before

Revenue swinging between low four figures and mid five figures a month.
Dependent on the Instagram algorithm.
Two years and five figures in trial and error.
EUR 3.59 per lead: looked great, did not buy.

After

A paid social pipeline that does not depend on the algorithm's mood.
Five days from webinar to close.
Around 700 qualified leads per launch at EUR 2,500 contract value.
EUR 20 per lead that actually closes.
Strategy and creative investment back in the first month.

"Some months are great, some are scary, nothing is predictable." That is no longer true.

Anne now has a working sales system built around an online webinar, instead of hoping organic has a good month.

What follows for you

Why lead cost is a trap, and what gets measured instead.

Anne's business is coaching. The trap is the same in every company of ten to two hundred people, and it always looks the same:

Marketing celebrates EUR 5 per lead.
Sales says the leads are no good.
Management freezes the budget.
Everyone blames each other, and the channel.

The channel is not broken. The message is. Optimise for lead price instead of buying intent and you teach the algorithm to find clickers instead of buyers. That is why Anne's EUR 3.59 leads did not buy and her EUR 20 leads closed in five days.

The fix is unspectacular: a real persona from customer interviews, the message in their words, and tracking that follows every ad to the sale before the budget goes up. What was different between 2023 and 2024 was the foundation and the number we were working toward. The ads were run by the same person.

If your version is "we get leads, but sales says they are no good", you are measuring the wrong number. Measure the cost per closed deal, not the cost per lead.

Your move

Start where Anne started in 2024: with the number that counts.

Up to 45 minutes. We qualify fit and work out whether what you are missing first is the foundation or the tracking, even if you then hire someone else. I offer the No Guesswork Growth Protocol to everyone. It is not a prerequisite.

Book a Discovery Call → Read about positioning Read about campaign management

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