From 14 hours of manual triage to 30 minutes a day
How a 60-person SaaS team replaced manual lead qualification with a scoring system that runs in their CRM and produces better-qualified leads at a fraction of the cost.
27/week
Manual hours saved
+34%
Lead-to-MQL conversion
-82%
Time to first response
Where they were stuck.
The sales team was spending more than 14 hours a week on manual lead qualification: looking up companies, checking fit signals, scoring leads against an internal rubric, and routing to the right rep. The work was tedious, the rubric drifted between people, and the time-to-response on inbound leads was hurting conversion.
What we built.
- 01
We mapped the current rubric across three weeks of historical data, talking to the SDRs doing the work to surface the unwritten rules they actually used. Half the rubric was undocumented.
- 02
We built a scoring model trained on the team's own closed-won data, surfacing the fit signals that mattered (industry, size, tech stack, growth signals) and discarding the ones that did not (despite being on the official rubric).
- 03
We integrated the scoring into HubSpot so leads were enriched, scored, and routed automatically on entry, with the SDR notified in Slack. The model's confidence is exposed to the rep so they know when to second-guess it.
- 04
We added a continuous evaluation loop: every closed-won and closed-lost deal feeds back into the model with a monthly recalibration cycle, so the scoring stays calibrated as the market changes.
What happened next.
The team went from 14 hours a week of manual triage to 30 minutes a day reviewing the model's lower-confidence calls. Lead-to-MQL conversion is up 34% because the SDRs now spend their time on real conversations instead of admin. Time-to-first-response on inbound dropped from 4 hours to 41 minutes, which the marketing team credits with a measurable lift in win rate.