RawData is an all-in-one B2B SaaS that combines machine learning predictions, satellite images, face recognition, and multi-role collaboration via web and mobile apps.
They was targeting mid-market to enterprise, but had a go-to-market problem: not enough leads, plus they were coming in spikes. So our job was to create a sustainable lead acquisition engine, and did so in great part with PPC and Sales.
We started with Google Ads and got initial channel validation by getting customers out of it. After that, we started building an Inbound Sales team from scratch (hiring AE, SDR, sales process building and refining...) to hand off all the work one of the founders was doing at the time.
But soon, all you could hear from the Sales team was leads weren't qualified. Which is easy to expect in a low-awareness market.
And when everybody is telling you that your ad campaigns are wrong, it's easy to believe so. However, we talked to the people involved and listened to call and meeting recordings. It became soon clear it wasn't a lead quality problem. It was a customer journey one.
We ended up growing SQLs by 4x without changing the source of leads. Here's how.
1. Made the sales funnel transparent
You know when a customer churns saying "It's too expensive"? It's rarely about money. And a similar situation was happening with our lead acquisition: There was no silver bullet and we needed to tweak many small adjustments.
We implemented a more granular data-driven pipeline because the initial stages were not enough:
Lead → MQL → SAL (Sales-Accepted Lead) → SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) → Opportunity → (...).
Each stage had clear entry and exit criteria, and we redefined what an MQL is and how we enrich companies and contacts.
Salespeople tended to use the same arguments over and over, so we built sales analytics dashboards, both team-based and individual ones, to verify all claims with data, and also fix issues before we heard them. An objective source of truth.
For example, since we started tracking time-to-first sales touch, to benchmark sales agents and bring it up to the our internal meetings, the numbers dramatically improved within two weeks.
Migrating to HubSpot Sales was a helpful move thanks to its advanced features vs. our previous CRM. For example, agents couldn't move or discard deals without filling specific fields.
Also, sales representatives were often spending more time than needed to qualify leads, to we simplified the lead qualification process. An example was to typically focus on the most important pain point only even though potential customers shown signals for multiple. The change was from field "Pain Points" to "Main Pain" and "Secondary Pains".
2. Encouraged leads to qualify themselves before Sales
After a prospect had filled out a contact form, we shown a short self-qualification survey with a simple promise: complete it, get a call faster. Everybody we spoke to doesn't believe that a high 83% of people submitted it.
From there, we built a tiered routing system based on ICP fit.
- Tier 3: High-fit leads were prompted to book a meeting directly.
- Tier 0: Unqualified leads received a rejection email redirecting them to the self-serve path.
- Tier 1-2: Low and mid-tier leads entered a prioritized queue, ranked by a combination of data points (such as lead score and time since lead submission) obtained either directly or indirectly, so Sales always worked on the highest potential customers first.
This meant SDRs stopped wasting calls on clearly unqualified prospects, and got more bookings.
3. Paid SDRs for what actually mattered
We started getting more meetings booked than our Account Executive team could handle, which is a good problem to have. Yet surprisingly, it was the AE's time to complain about lead quality.
A key decision was changing the SDRs' commission model from meetings booked to SQLs confirmed as opportunities by AEs.
We can't this this wasn't popular, but it improved knowledge transfer, the close rate, and successful SDRs ended up earning more in commissions.
After all, alignment is not only a marketing-sales matter, but must be addressed in different dimensions, such as SDR-to-AE.
4. Built education into the sales process
In a low-awareness market, many prospects aren't ready to talk to Sales even if they want to.
Technically speaking, you could let salespeople talk to leads for a long time to educate them. However, the unit economics risk and cost of opportunity could be too high.
So we introduced two layers of self-education.
First, leads who completed the self-qualification survey were shown short transformation stories (important: this is NOT case studies) while still on the website.
Second, we built persona-based nurturing email campaigns targeting the specific pain points of each ICP, segmented by role, company size, sub-industry, and primary module of interest. These sequences ran in sync with the sales process, pausing or advancing based on where the prospect was in the pipeline.
This meant that by the time a lead got on a call, they already understood the problem, knew more precisely what they actually needed, and had seen proof it could work for them.
5. Pretty landing pages don't convert
We ran multiple A/B tests on PPC landing pages and found something counterintuitive: beautiful visuals don't move the needle.
What worked were self-descriptive creatives that gave readers an "aha" understanding without even reading the text of the page. And if you think about it, that makes sense because people scan more than read.
So we went from visuals to pretty creatives to conversion-first ones. And that changed alone increased visitor-to-lead conversion rate by 102%.
Results
Within months, we grew SQLs by 4x from the same lead sources. None of these changes required increasing ad spend or changing targeting.
This inbound engine was a key piece of a broader growth effort that grew the customer base by 3x to over 60 enterprises and 10,000 users. Today, more than 1.3 million people have been managed through the company's platform.