38% lower cost per opportunity after fixing SaaS attribution
Marketing was hitting its MQL target every month. Sales said the leads were worthless. Both were right.
The problem
What was going wrong
A 60-person SaaS company measured marketing on MQLs. The number looked healthy, but only 6% of MQLs became opportunities and the CRM could not tell which campaigns produced the ones that did. Budget was allocated to whatever produced the cheapest form fills, which was systematically the worst traffic.
The work
What we did about it
- Rebuilt the HubSpot data model: lifecycle stages, source properties and a consistent definition of a qualified opportunity agreed with sales.
- Implemented offline conversion import back into Google Ads and LinkedIn so platforms optimised toward opportunities, not form fills.
- Killed two campaigns producing 40% of MQLs and 3% of pipeline, and moved that budget into comparison and alternatives search terms.
- Built a cluster of comparison, integration and use-case pages targeting the terms buyers use late in the cycle.
- Introduced a weekly pipeline review with sales, using the same dashboard for both teams.
We spent two years arguing about lead quality. It turned out to be an attribution problem, and it took six weeks to fix.
Services used
What this programme involved
Figures are taken from the client's own analytics and CRM over the stated period and are shared with permission. Client name withheld under NDA.
Portfolio
More work
Design, build and growth programmes we can talk about publicly — with the numbers the client signed off.
Next step
Your situation is probably not identical
But the method is. Send us the numbers and we will tell you which part of this applies to you.