How Zone & Co grew paid leads 6x at 92% lower cost

The challenge

Zone & Co makes financial operations software that runs inside NetSuite. More than 4,500 finance teams use it to automate billing, AP, payroll, treasury and reporting without leaving their ERP, and for FY26 the company set itself a mandate it called Finance Without Friction.

Delivering that needed a demand engine running in every region at once, which is where we came in.

Zone's marketing team was clear-eyed about the gaps going into the year. Paid social had no internal owner and no coverage at all in North America or APAC. HubSpot had grown faster than anyone could maintain it, leaving broken workflows, inconsistent naming and routing nobody fully trusted. Reporting sat in fragments across tools, so two people could ask the same question and get two answers. None of that is unusual for a company scaling this quickly, and all of it meant the FY26 plan needed more hands than the team had.

The paid accounts told the same story once we opened them. Our audit of the LinkedIn account we inherited found 98% of its spend serving outside LinkedIn altogether, against placements and job titles nowhere near a finance buyer, and a cost per lead more than twelve times what the same lead costs today.

Zone asked us to take paid social globally, steady the HubSpot foundation underneath it, and make the numbers trustworthy enough to steer by.

Our approach

We embedded from 10 November 2025, working inside Zone's Slack, HubSpot and weekly call rhythm instead of reporting in from outside. Five workstreams ran in parallel.

• Paid social, rebuilt from the audit up. We cut the off-platform placements absorbing almost all of the legacy spend, then restructured the account around 6sense account tiers, finance personas and three regional campaigns for North America, EMEA and APAC. Every campaign got one job, so budget could keep moving to whichever ones were earning it.
• A content engine at the top of the funnel. The 2026 Controller Report came first, then the AI Impact vs Hype report, each tested across document and single-image formats. Document ads won clearly, coming in 71% cheaper per lead than single-image ads carrying the same offer.
• The HubSpot and RevOps foundation. We audited every live workflow, form and dashboard, retired the broken ones, and set the naming and UTM governance campaigns still follow. We also carried campaign operations through a marketing ops staffing gap, with lifecycle and scoring staying where they belong, under Zone's own RevOps team.
• Landing pages built for the ads pointing at them. New pages for AP Automation, Billing Management, Solution 7 and Zone's NetSuite-native positioning, each designed around the campaign that feeds it rather than reused from the main site.
• Google Ads on the same scoreboard. HubSpot became the conversion source inside the ad platform, reporting moved onto the same weekly rhythm as social, and budget shifted toward what was already converting. AP Automation conversions rose 39% on flat spend by June.

Every creative had to name a moment a controller would recognise, because finance buyers do not reward vague. A filing deadline closing in, an invoice stuck outside the ERP, a board meeting nobody felt ready for.

Zone's paid pages had been leading with the form, giving most of the first screen to fields before anyone had a reason to fill them in. We rebuilt them the other way round, so the positioning, the proof and the objections come first and the form is something the page has earned. The one below sits behind the NetSuite-native campaign.

The impact

Eight months in, the paid engine reads differently at every stage. Top of funnel lead generation costs 92% less per lead than it did on the account we took over, and the last two months carried the highest lead volume of the engagement.

The clearest version of that is on LinkedIn, where monthly lead volume grew roughly six times between December 2025 and June 2026 while cost per lead fell every quarter. June was the strongest month the account has had on volume and cost together. North America, historically Zone's weakest paid region, cut its cost per lead 79% between April and June and passed EMEA on efficiency for the first time. None of it was bought with more budget, because June's monthly spend came in below the month we arrived.

MQLs across Google and LinkedIn doubled between March and June on flat combined spend, and qualified leads reached their highest month of the year.

Making HubSpot the scoreboard mattered as much as the media buying did. Conversions import into both ad platforms and land in one weekly report, so budget decisions now run on numbers the team trusts rather than on whichever dashboard happened to be open.

#zone-tojupiter

Kelsey BowdenApril 1st at 10:26 AM

And here is a snapshot on inbound lead gen performance for EMEA last quarter - great job!!

For H2 the same discipline moves further down the funnel. LinkedIn now optimises against qualified leads and pipeline, not lead cost alone. A nurture layer is going in behind the gated reports so leads have somewhere to go once they land, and the rebuilt Google Ads structure points budget at the campaigns that create deals.

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