Sales pipeline ×2.4 in 90 days — performance agency · Warsaw
Great ads, leaky funnel.
Halo runs paid acquisition for B2B SaaS clients across Poland and the DACH region. Their ads worked — they were generating 180+ inbound leads a week through gated content, paid LinkedIn and the website. The problem started after the form submission.
A two-person new-business team was triaging leads from a shared Gmail. Replies came an average of 4 hours 22 minutes after submission, and 0% on weekends. By the time someone replied, the prospect had often booked with a competitor — Halo were finding this out months later in win/loss interviews.
CEO Karol said it directly: "We don't need more leads. We need the leads we already have to feel like the agency answered them at the speed our ads sold us at."
Contract number: qualified meetings booked per week ≥ 30 (vs. 16 baseline), measured rolling 4 weeks from Day 30.
Halo's ICP, in eleven rules, in three languages.
B2B sales is not used-cars. The agent had to do something Halo's salesfloor did intuitively: read a company's website, sniff out whether it's a startup running their own ads or an in-house team that just wants benchmarks, and qualify accordingly. We added Clearbit + Apollo enrichment behind the agent so that by the time it sent the first reply (median 11 seconds), it knew firmographics already.
The eleven rules were co-written with Halo's commercial director Anna over two long workshops: company size, in-house team yes/no, current ad spend bracket, growth stage, vertical fit, decision-maker title, geography, urgency signal, budget phrasing, competitor evaluation, and the soft "is this a real lead or a curious agency".
The agent drafts a one-page brief in Notion before the meeting — pulling enrichment, conversation, ICP score and three suggested talking points. The new-business call starts where the agent left off, not from scratch.
| Day | Stage | Output | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Day 0 | Brief | ICP defined · 11 rules drafted · KPI co-signed | Vlad K. · Karol · Anna |
| Day 1–3 | HubSpot + Calendly | Bidirectional sync; ICP score field added; held-slot mechanic working | Olha B. |
| Day 4 | Enrichment | Clearbit + Apollo wired; firmographic cache established | Marko Y. |
| Day 5 | Tone with Halo's writers | Three language variants; brand voice document signed | Iryna S. |
| Day 6–10 | Shadow mode | Agent drafts; new-business team sends. 217 conversations evaluated. | All |
| Day 11 | Brief generation review | Notion brief format settled · 3 talking points format · win/loss field | Iryna S. · Anna |
| Day 12–13 | Live · ramp | 20% → 100% of inbound · daily 17:30 metrics call | Marko Y. |
| Day 14 | Hand-off | KPI measured rolling 4w from Day 30. Move to ongoing service. | Kateryna L. |
Contract said ≥ 30 meetings/wk. We averaged 38.
Same lead volume as before. Same ad spend. Different funnel. The biggest win was the weekend recovery — Halo's most lucrative DACH leads tend to fill out forms on Sunday evenings, and prior to the pilot they were responded to on Tuesday.
- ×2.4 qualified meetings/week — 38 vs. 16 (4-week rolling avg, months 2–3)
- +€340k pipeline value created in 90 days post-pilot
- 11-second median first reply (was 4h 22min). Weekends went from 0 → 24 meetings/mo.
- 0.21 lead → meeting conversion (was 0.07 — nearly 3×)
- Brief docs in Notion — Halo's commercial team rated them 4.5/5 vs. their own pre-call notes
What we got wrong. Initial ICP scoring was too binary — 70+ went to the calendar, <70 went to nurture. Halo lost a few mid-tier leads who would have closed if a human had jumped in. We added a 50–69 "warm review" bucket pinged into Slack twice a day. That bucket's conversion is now 0.14 — surprisingly profitable.
We thought we needed more leads. We needed the agency to actually answer the leads we had. Three months in and our new-business team's main complaint is that the calendar fills up too fast.
Ads work, funnel leaks? Let's draw the patch.
A 30-minute call, your ICP in 11 rules, the qualified-meeting number that goes in your contract.