KESTREL
Making B2B lead volume defensible
A Western European B2B SaaS with growing lead counts and a sales team that did not believe the numbers.
Challenge
Marketing reported lead growth; sales reported the same amount of pipeline. Attribution stopped at form submission, so nobody could tell which campaigns produced revenue.
Strategy
We moved the optimisation target from leads to qualified opportunities by closing the loop between ad platforms and CRM, then rebuilt targeting around the segments that actually converted downstream.
Execution
CRM-to-platform conversion pipeline, redefined event schema, offer testing across gated content, demo and trial paths, plus a programmatic layer for account coverage.
Result
Reported as cost per sales-qualified opportunity, opportunity-to-close rate by source and sales cycle length, replacing cost per lead.
Learnings
Two of the three cheapest lead sources produced almost no pipeline. Optimising on cost per lead had been actively funding the wrong audience for a year.