Arman Avagimyan on the main mistake companies make in marketing: the problem is not in leads, but in conversion
We talked to marketing efficiency expert Arman Avagimyan about one of the most underestimated problems of modern business — why an increase in the number of leads does not always lead to an increase in sales and how systematic work with conversion can give a greater effect than increasing marketing budgets.
A common mindset has long existed in marketing: more leads means more sales. That is why a significant part of marketing budgets is directed to attracting new potential customers. However, practice shows that between the received application and the actual income there is a whole system of processes, and it is within these processes that businesses often lose a significant part of the potential result.
According to Arman Avagimyan, companies often concentrate on the wrong stage of the sales funnel. In their quest to get more leads, they ignore their quality, qualification principles, speed and logic of further work with a potential client, the relevance of the commercial offer and the reasons why some of the prospective contacts never turn into sales.
Avagimyan is one of the nationally and internationally recognized Ukrainian specialists in the field of marketing efficiency and business growth management. His professional activities include work with large companies, including MHP, Ukrnafta, Metinvest and DTEK, and in 2021 his professional achievements were recognized as part of the international ‘Entrepreneur of the Year», TOP-500. In his work, he develops an approach that shifts the focus from simply increasing marketing activity to managing the entire system of transforming potential demand into commercial results.
The practical effectiveness of Avagimyan’s approach is confirmed by the results of his work with digital market companies. In particular, after cooperation with Netpeak, one of the leading Ukrainian agencies in the field of digital marketing, and the implementation of the changes proposed by him, the conversion from a potential client to an actual sale increased by approximately 20–30%, the share of regular clients increased by approximately 15%, and the number of financially unprofitable projects decreased significantly. At the same time, the impact of Avagimyan’s work was not limited to improving individual indicators: the changes affected the very logic of management, in particular the assessment of client potential and the approach to decision-making, which became more systematic and focused on a measurable commercial result.
It is this result, according to Avagimyan, that demonstrates the limitations of the approach in which marketing is evaluated primarily by the volume of engagement.
“Companies love to count leads. This is understandable: there is a figure, it is easy to show it in a report. But a lead is not a sale. If out of a hundred applications, two become customers, the business should think not about how to get two hundred applications, but about why ninety-eight people did not buy. This is where the real growth opportunities are most often hidden,” the expert explains.
According to him, a significant part of the losses occurs after the potential client has entered the funnel. The final result is influenced by the quality of the lead, the speed of its processing, qualification criteria, the interaction of marketing and sales, the structure of the offer and how well it meets the needs of a particular client.
Therefore, two companies with the same number of leads can demonstrate radically different financial results. For Avagimyan, conversion in this sense is not just one of the marketing coefficients, but an indicator of the quality of the entire system of working with a potential client.
“I often see a situation where a business tries to solve the sales problem by increasing the advertising budget. But if the system of working with leads is ineffective, additional traffic does not solve the problem. It only makes it more expensive,” Avagimyan notes.
A similar effect is observed in Avagimyan’s work with Promodo, another Ukrainian digital marketing agency. When assessing practical results, the company received an improvement in a number of key indicators, including the conversion of commercial offers, the accuracy of assessing client potential and the stability of customer retention. At the same time, the result of his work was not only the growth of individual metrics: the very approach to analyzing problems changed. Instead of looking for the reason only in the advertising channel, creative or budget, the company began to systematically evaluate the structure of the offer, the process of processing leads, the quality of client communication and the logic of prioritizing opportunities.
It is precisely working with such problems that has become one of the directions of the author’s approach, which the expert has been developing since 2018. Its logic is to consider the path from attracting a potential client to the sale as an interconnected system: to analyze not only the number of applications, but also their quality, potential value, prioritization criteria, commercial offer and the probability of successful completion of the deal.
For Avagimyan, this is a fundamental shift in how businesses should approach marketing. Instead of asking “how to get more leads?”, a company should consistently analyze which leads it needs, how to determine their potential, what happens to them after they are acquired, and at what stages the largest part of future sales is lost.
“Sometimes increasing conversion by a few percent gives a company a greater financial result than doubling the advertising budget. But it is less visible work than launching a new campaign, so it is often underestimated,” he notes.
As a result, the number of leads in itself is less and less indicative of the real effectiveness of marketing. Much more important is the company’s ability to manage the entire path from first contact to sale and understand where exactly the losses occur. That is why, according to Avagimyan, one of the biggest opportunities for business growth may lie not at the top of the funnel or in additional advertising budget, but among those potential customers the company has already paid to attract.
Text by Maria Gorbenko
