A sales-tech SaaS platform was spending heavily on paid social, converting almost none of it, and had no outbound motion at all. Six months later the cost per lead had fallen by 75% and the qualified-to-sales rate had gone from 6% to 41%.
The company sold a sales engagement platform into mid-market revenue teams. On paper the numbers looked survivable: leads were arriving, the marketing team was hitting its MQL target, and paid social spend was growing month on month.
Underneath, the economics were failing. Cost per lead had climbed to $380 as paid social audiences saturated. Only 6% of leads were being accepted by sales, which meant the real cost per qualified lead was above $6,000 — well beyond what the average contract value could support. There was no outbound motion at all, so every lead came from a single channel.
The HubSpot instance had accumulated four years of drift: 40+ unused custom properties, three overlapping lifecycle definitions, and lead scoring built almost entirely on job title. A VP who had never visited the site scored higher than a manager who had read the pricing page five times.
The most damaging consequence was invisible: because scoring was wrong, sales had learned to ignore MQLs entirely and worked their own lists. Marketing and sales had effectively stopped operating as one funnel.
Figures measured over the engagement period and reconciled against the client CRM.
| Metric | Before | After six months |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per lead | $380 | $94 |
| Qualified-to-sales rate | 6% | 41% |
| Effective cost per qualified lead | Over $6,000 | Approximately $230 |
| Active acquisition channels | 1 (paid social) | 4 (paid, ABM, outbound, organic) |
| New pipeline generated | Baseline | $2.1M over six months |
| Sales acceptance of MQLs | Effectively zero | Routine, SLA-tracked |
Figures reconciled against the client's HubSpot instance at the end of month six. Pipeline is new opportunity value created during the engagement window, not forecast or influenced revenue.
Rebuilt the ICP from closed-won data before any channel work started.
HubSpot rebuild — lifecycle, scoring, routing and attribution.
40 named accounts with full committee mapping.
Cold email and SDR calling, first meetings in week five.
Restructured from top-funnel social to bottom-funnel intent capture.
Speed-to-lead and routing fixes that raised acceptance rates.
First outbound meetings landed in week five. Cost per lead began falling in month two once paid was restructured. The full six-month picture required the CRM rebuild in months one and two, which produced no pipeline by itself but was the precondition for everything after it.
Rebuilding lead scoring on behavioural data rather than job title. It sounds like a technical detail but it was the cause of the 6% acceptance rate — sales had rationally stopped trusting a queue that was ranking non-engaged senior titles above engaged evaluators.
The audience was saturated. Cost per lead was rising while quality fell, which is the signature of an exhausted audience rather than a creative or targeting problem. Reducing spend on that channel improved both cost and quality at the same time, and freed budget for channels with headroom.
No, and we would not present it as a benchmark. This company had an existing product with real demand, a 12-person sales team with spare capacity, and a single fixable bottleneck. Results depend heavily on those preconditions, and we say so during scoping rather than after.
We can walk through the detail on a call under NDA, including the parts that did not work — the first ABM messaging round underperformed and was rewritten in month three. Client identity is withheld by request.
Figures on this page are reconciled against the client CRM at the end of the engagement window. Client identity withheld at their request.
The free pipeline audit covers exactly the diagnosis that started this engagement: channel economics, scoring model quality and where acceptance rates are really failing.
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