B2B software: 230% of pipeline target.
A B2B software company selling to analytics leaders across North America and Europe had just missed its pipeline target. Its ad reports showed 1,815 conversions that quarter, and only 145 of them were real leads. Two quarters later, pipeline reached $4.4M against a $1.9M target.
230%
Pipeline vs target, quarter two
2.6×
Google leads, in one quarter
47%
Lower cost per lead on Google
The reports said 1,815. Sales saw 145.
On paper, the Google account was having a great run. Reported conversions had more than doubled in a quarter, from 859 to 1,815, while the company missed its pipeline target.
The gap came from what was being counted. A single low-cost campaign was adding page views to the total, and they made up more than nine in ten conversions that quarter. Take them out, and real leads had actually fallen 16%, to 145 at $568 each. Nobody could see which campaigns were bringing in buyers, so the budget could not follow them.
What the account reported
Conversions doubled. Real leads fell 16%.
What we changed
Count only real leads
Page views stopped counting as conversions, and the ad accounts were connected to the CRM. From then on, every campaign was judged by the leads sales accepted.
Back the offer buyers wanted
An independent analyst report was bringing in leads at about half the cost of other non-brand campaigns. We gave it the budget, added a second report, and filtered out the small businesses sales kept turning away.
Cut what wasn’t working
Broad category keywords were taking 40% of the budget and returning few leads. We cut that spend and moved the money to the report campaigns.
Where judgment changed the plan
AI recommendations are a starting point. On four decisions that shaped these two quarters, what sales was seeing in the CRM changed the call.
Four calls behind the result
4 recommendations · 4 reshaped
What the model recommended
What we did
What the model recommended
Scale the top performer, the analyst-report campaign
What we did
Scaled it, but filtered out small-business searches first. It drove 64% of MQLs and 88% of the leads sales turned away.
Cut brand campaigns to fund non-brand
Kept brand running. Sales disqualified none of its leads, and they were the cheapest MQLs in the mix.
Keep funding broad category keywords
Cut that spend 43%. Those leads were costing more than $1,000 each.
Raise the Google budget now
Raised it 55%, but only after monthly leads had more than doubled.
Two quarters · Google and Microsoft
The result: more leads, lower cost, and pipeline well past target
In the first quarter, Google leads grew from 145 to 379 and the cost of each one fell from $568 to $338. In the second quarter we spent 4.5% less and still brought in 7% more leads, at $302 each. The analyst-report campaigns alone produced 520 leads across the two quarters.
The CRM told the same story. Marketing-qualified leads came in at more than twice the goal in both quarters, and pipeline went from a missed target to $4.4M against a goal of $1.9M.
Google leads and cost per lead
By quarter
Pipeline against target
The quarter before, pipeline missed its target
Sales disqualified none of the brand leads. Most rejections from the report campaigns came back marked “account too small.”
Quarter by quarter
| Quarter | Before | One | Two |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pipeline | Missed | $2.8M | $4.4M |
| Pipeline vs target | n/a | 161% | 230% |
| MQLs | n/a | 172 | 219 |
| MQLs vs goal | n/a | 253% | 238% |
| Google spend | $82K | $128K | $122K |
| Google leads | 145 | 379 | 405 |
| Google cost per lead | $568 | $338 | $302 |
| Microsoft conversions | 94 | 321 | 461 |
What we did next
With leads running at more than twice the goal, the work shifted from rebuilding to refining. In the quarters that followed, we made small refinements to the program and launched campaigns to test the company’s new initiatives.
Microsoft got the same discipline as Google. Its conversions had grown from 94 to 461 a quarter, and we refined what counts there to exclude the less qualified ones, so the budget keeps following leads sales wants.
Let’s find what your account has been missing.
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