SALES OPS · 2025

4 minutes to qualify a lead.
Down from 9 hours.

A 14-day engagement that rebuilt how inbound leads flow from the website into sales — with an agent doing the qualification the founder used to do at midnight.

+40%Qualified-to-closed conversion
9h → 4minTime to first response
15hFounder hours reclaimed per week
14dFrom kickoff to production

Who they are.

A 22-person performance marketing agency in the US serving D2C brands. Inbound comes from content and referrals — typically 60–120 qualified forms per week. The founder was personally triaging every lead because no one else knew the ICP well enough.

What was broken.

Every inbound form went to the founder’s inbox. She read it, scored it against an implicit ICP, enriched it manually in LinkedIn and Clearbit, then routed to the right AE. She did this at 7am and 10pm because there was no other time.

Leads that arrived outside those windows waited up to 24 hours. The team’s own data showed conversion dropped 3× after 4 hours. They were leaving real money on the table.

Prior attempts with Zapier + ChatGPT produced scored leads, but the scoring drifted over weeks and 1 in 5 routed incorrectly. Sales stopped trusting the system.

The solution.

01

Enrichment pipeline

Webhook on form submission triggers company lookup (Clearbit fallback to Apollo), LinkedIn profile match, and tech-stack detection via BuiltWith.

02

ICP scoring agent

Structured prompt with the agency’s ICP encoded as a rubric. Outputs a typed score object: fit (0–100), reason, top 3 signals, disqualifiers. Evaluated nightly against a golden set to catch drift.

03

Smart routing

Tier A (score ≥75) → paged to on-call AE in Slack within 60s. Tier B → queued for next business day. Tier C → automated nurture sequence. All logged in HubSpot with full reasoning.

04

Human-in-the-loop

Scores within ±5 of the tier boundary are flagged for founder review. Rare (≈7% of leads) but kept trust high during week 1.

05

Observability

Weekly report: leads scored, conversion by tier, drift metrics, agent cost. Founder sees it Monday 8am without asking.

What changed.

+40%
Conversion

Qualified-to-closed-won lifted from 19% to 27% over 90 days. Faster response is the dominant factor.

4 min
Response time

Median time from form submission to AE reach-out dropped from 9h to under 4 minutes.

0
Routing errors

Zero incorrectly-routed Tier A leads in 90 days. The prior Zapier setup averaged one per day.

$140k
Projected ARR added

Based on the lift in conversion on 2024 volume — recovers setup + 12 months of retainer in quarter one.

“The founder got her evenings back. That alone was worth it. The 40% lift is a bonus we still can’t quite believe.”

Sarah M.Founder, Growth Digital Agency

The stack.

OpenAI GPT-4on8nClearbitApolloHubSpotSlackSupabaseVercel
Similar problem?

Let’s talk about yours.

Free 30-minute scoping call. Bring your messiest process.

Book a call