−44% Cost per lead

Situation

A B2B SaaS platform selling into mid-market companies was spending across Google and LinkedIn at $310 per lead — and sales qualified fewer than one in five. The marketing team pointed at lead volume; the revenue team pointed at lead quality. Nobody could prove which channel, campaign, or keyword produced customers rather than form fills.

Diagnosis

• Bidding optimized on form submissions, so the platforms dutifully bought more of what sales rejected.
• Brand and non-brand search shared campaigns and budgets, hiding the true cost of growth behind cheap branded conversions.
• Roughly $9K per month was going to queries that had never once produced a qualified opportunity.

System built

The decisive fix was closing the loop: CRM stages were imported back into Google as offline conversions, so bidding learned what a qualified opportunity looks like instead of a form fill. Search was rebuilt around intent clusters with brand strictly separated from non-brand, each with its own budget and target. Query-level waste was cut in the first month and kept out by an ongoing exclusion discipline.

Reporting moved from platform dashboards to a pipeline view: spend per channel against qualified pipeline created, reconciled with the CRM monthly.

Results

Cost per lead fell 44% while lead quality rose — the SQL rate improved by more than half. Qualified pipeline attributed to paid tripled within two quarters, and the marketing–revenue argument ended, because both teams now read the same number.

Before / After

Case studies are anonymized to protect client confidentiality. Metrics reflect actual account performance over stated periods.