Why does my CRM say radio and TV don’t work?

Why does the CRM show almost no revenue for broadcast and radio?

Because most contractor CRMs credit a job to the last source the homeowner named, and a homeowner who heard the radio spot in March and searched the company name in May gets booked as “Google.” At the eight-figure Toledo exteriors company where I direct marketing, three years of streaming TV showed $0 attributed, and the zero-cost lines showed $3.4M.

How does the CRM decide which source gets the revenue?

Lead Perfection, the CRM we run, has one source field per lead, and the call center fills it from whatever the homeowner says when asked how they heard about us. That is a reasonable rule and it is also a last-touch rule, which means every channel that works by making the next channel work gets nothing. Radio makes the truck get noticed. The truck makes the yard sign get read. The yard sign makes the homeowner type our name into Google, and Google gets the job.

I am not arguing the rule is wrong, because the alternative is a call center guessing at multi-touch journeys it cannot see. I am saying the report it produces has a known shape, and a budget built on that report without knowing the shape will do a predictable thing.

What did three years of streaming TV look like in our CRM?

We spent $63,030 on OTT (streaming television) in 2023, $9,000 in 2024 and $64,350 in 2025, which is $136,380 over three years, and the Cost of Marketing report shows $0 net revenue attributed to it in every one of those years. Not a small number. Zero. No homeowner in three years said “I saw you on Hulu,” or if they did, the call center booked it as something else.

If I judged that line the way I judge Google Ads, it would have been cut after month two. It was not cut, and it is still running, and the reason is the next section.

Where did the money show up instead?

On the lines with no cost against them. In 2025 the same report shows Google organic at $1,210,844 of net revenue with no media spend, repeat customers at $866,796, customer referrals at $928,524 and yard signs at $396,837 on $7,181 of spend, which is a 1.8% cost of marketing. Add those up and $3.4M of 2025 net revenue sits on lines that cost almost nothing, according to the CRM.

The real cost of those lines sits elsewhere on the same report, under SEO ($36,758), social media management ($16,411), marketing wages ($97,751) and branding ($57,325), all of them showing $0 attributed. And some unmeasured share of the broadcast and streaming spend is in there too, because TV at our company has run between 32% and 41% cost of marketing every year since 2022 as attributed, and I do not believe for a second that is what it actually returns, in either direction.

What happens if the budget follows the report?

It over-funds the last-touch channels and starves the ones feeding them, slowly, in a way that looks like discipline. Cut the radio because the report says 25%, watch Google organic soften nine months later, and the report will show organic softening with no cause, because the cause was never on its row. I wrote about the opposite case in Detroit, where a $20,000-a-month broadcast buy really did not work and the agency’s “you’re just not showing up for branded searches” was an excuse (Your Best Channel Is Lying to You). Both things are true. Some broadcast is halo the CRM cannot see, and some is money on fire, and the CRM cannot tell them apart.

Where this is wrong

When the channel really does not work, and there is a way to know: branded search volume and direct traffic should move when a reach channel is on and flatten when it is off, and a geographic holdout, boards in three zip codes and none in the matched rest, shows the lift or the absence of one. Without either of those, “it’s halo” is just the vendor’s version of the CRM’s “it’s zero,” and I have been on the wrong side of both. The measurement setup is its own note (How to measure a billboard, YouTube or radio buy before you fund it).

What to do

• Tonight: on the cost-of-marketing report, list every line with revenue and no cost, and every line with cost and no revenue. Those two lists are the same story told twice.
• This quarter: pull branded search impressions by month from Search Console next to the broadcast flight dates. If they do not move together, the halo argument is not available to the vendor.
• Ongoing: never cut a reach channel on the CRM row alone. Cut it on the CRM row plus the branded-search line plus a holdout, or keep it and admit the number is a guess.

Sources: Lead Perfection “Cost of Marketing by Source,” Toledo, 2023 to 2025 full year, first party. Streaming line labeled OTT in the CRM. Attribution rule as configured in the author’s CRM; other systems differ.

Related notes