Doubling Signed Contracts When the Funnel Leaked at the End
As commercial lead of Clevermann, I built a 20+ person marketing and sales organization, doubled monthly signed contract value and cut cost of sale from about 30% to below 10% of revenue, by finding and fixing where committed customers were still walking away.
- Increased: Monthly signed contract value doubled, from ~VND 2B to ~VND 4B (2025 average)
- Decreased: Cost of sale fell from ~30% to below 10% of revenue
- Increased: Signed contracts rose from ~10 to 20+ a month, peaking at ~40
Vietnam–Germany education and career programs · Clevermann
The context
Clevermann helps Vietnamese candidates build careers and lives in Germany: language preparation, degree recognition, visas and job placement. As CEO, my real job was commercial: marketing, B2C sales and B2B partnerships.
I started with about three people. Three years later the team had grown to 20+ employees across two offices in Ho Chi Minh City, about 40 including freelancers, with more than VND 200M in monthly ad spend.
Phase one: stop treating the lead as the finish line
In the early days, success was measured in leads. But a lead is only the start of a long journey: a chat reply, a phone consultation, an office visit, paperwork, follow-up, sometimes months of hesitation.
So we measured every step to the signed contract and fixed the drop-offs one by one: ad content, chat responses, phone and in-office consultations, follow-up and reactivation. Over three years we ran 85+ marketing and sales experiments.
Result: cost of sale (ad spend plus sales commissions) fell from about 30% of revenue to below 10%.
Phase two: the leak nobody was looking at
Then came a more uncomfortable finding. Some months, about 40 customers submitted their full application files, yet only about 10 signed.
These were not casual leads. Submitting a file meant phone consultations, a meeting and a stack of documents. Committed people were still walking away at the very end.
My diagnosis: the top of the funnel was strong, but the final decision lacked three things.
- Trust in the brand. I put Clevermann in front of universities and major education partners, and turned every event into content.
- Emotion and evidence. We filmed real customers at our office and their success stories, so people could see their future selves.
- A reason to decide now. Tailored offers with a clear time frame.
To keep hesitant customers close, we built community groups. When a prospect went quiet, the salesperson invited them in, and the right content kept doing its work, combined with engagement retargeting. Read the full story.
Result: signed contracts rose from about 10 to at least 20 per month, often 30, peaking near 40.
Results
| Area | Result |
|---|---|
| Monthly signed contract value | roughly doubled, from ~VND 2B (2023–24) to a ~VND 4B average in 2025, peak ~VND 6B |
| Cost of sale | from ~30% to below 10% of revenue |
| Signed contracts | from ~10 to 20+ per month, peak ~40 |
| Team | from ~3 to 20+ people |
Along the way, I also negotiated the German-Malaysian Institute’s first partnership with a private company in Vietnam. Read that case study.
What I learned
A strong top of funnel can hide a weak bottom. The most expensive customer is not the one who never clicks. It is the one who does everything right, submits the whole file, and still leaves.
Growth comes from the whole journey. No single fix does it; everything together does.
