Pipeline was unpredictable and CAC kept climbing. We made growth a system, not a guess.
An Indian-built vertical SaaS selling to global mid-market had lumpy pipeline and rising acquisition costs. The fix was not more SDRs — it was a GTM that actually compounded.
Client identity and absolute revenue figures are withheld at the client's request. Every percentage and KPI movement below is real and drawn from the engagement.
The situation
Where they were when they reached us
A post-Series-A vertical SaaS company — built in India, selling to global mid-market buyers — had a pipeline that swung wildly. Some months were strong, others nearly dry. Forecasting was guesswork, and the board was noticing.
Acquisition cost was rising across every channel: LinkedIn, Google, and content all getting more expensive while none of them compounded. The instinct in the building was to hire more SDRs and spend more. The CEO suspected the real problem was structural.
They were right. You cannot out-hire a broken go-to-market system; you just make the leaks more expensive.
Connecting with WSD
Why they came to us — and what they asked for
The CEO wanted a diagnosis of the entire go-to-market motion, not a band-aid. They had had agencies before and gotten activity, not outcomes.
They came to us specifically because we start with diagnosis, not execution — and because the brief was strategic: figure out which system to fix first, before spending another rupee scaling the ones that were already leaking.
Every engagement starts with diagnosis — not execution.
The audit
What the diagnostic actually looked at
Our Strategic Diagnostic traced the full funnel from first impression to closed-won. We examined lead scoring (there was none), CRM hygiene, attribution across a long and fuzzy sales cycle, and — critically — the handoff between marketing and sales.
We sat in on sales calls, read the CRM record by record, and mapped where high-intent leads were actually dying. The leak was not at the top of the funnel. It was in the middle, where the two halves of the company met.
The gaps we found
Three layers, three sets of problems
Real growth problems are rarely in one place. We consistently find them split across three layers — strategy, systems, and management. This engagement was no exception.
🧭Strategy gaps
- Spray-and-pray across six channels with no ICP clarity — budget diluted equally across great-fit and poor-fit prospects.
- Content was being produced but never compounded: no distribution strategy, no topical authority, no SEO compounding.
- Positioning was feature-led rather than problem-led, so the messaging attracted browsers instead of qualifying buyers.
⚙️Systems gaps
- No lead scoring — a tire-kicker and a ready-to-buy committee lead were treated identically by sales.
- CRM hygiene was poor: ~40% of records missing key fields, and source attribution barely existed.
- No SLA on lead follow-up. High-intent inbound leads routinely waited days for a first touch.
🎯Management gaps
- Marketing and sales ran in silos with two different definitions of a "qualified" lead.
- Nobody owned the GTM number end-to-end — marketing optimized MQLs, sales optimized closed-won, and the bridge between them was orphaned.
Same shape of gaps in your B2B pipeline? Free 30-min Strategic Diagnostic with Rishabh — no slides, no pitch.
Book the diagnosticThe growth plan
What we actually built
Sharpen the ICP
Killed three of the six channels and doubled down on the two that actually produced qualified pipeline. Concentration beat dilution immediately.
Score, route, and respond
Built lead scoring, automated routing, and a strict follow-up SLA. Cleaned the CRM so the data could be trusted enough to act on.
A compounding content engine
Rebuilt content around problem-led topical authority so inbound would compound over time instead of resetting every month.
Install a RevOps cadence
One shared pipeline definition, a weekly marketing-sales sync, and a single GTM dashboard everyone trusted. The bridge finally had an owner.
Systems that compound — not campaigns that fizzle when we leave.
The challenges
What made it hard
Sales-marketing alignment is political
Getting two teams to agree on what "qualified" means required CEO sponsorship and a few uncomfortable meetings. Worth every minute.
Attribution across a 3-6 month cycle
Long B2B cycles make attribution inherently fuzzy. We built a model that was directionally trustworthy rather than chasing false precision.
The results
What changed, measured
from channel concentration
faster qualification + routing
Seven months in, the company was generating leads for a third less, converting more of them, closing faster, and — for the first time — forecasting pipeline within a tight band. CAC payback nearly halved, which changed what the board was willing to fund.
None of this came from a new channel or a bigger team. It came from sharper focus, a system that scored and routed leads, and a single owner for the number that mattered.
“We didn’t need more leads. We needed to stop wasting the ones we had — and know which ones actually mattered.”
More work
Other case studies
Scaling ad spend was quietly killing profitability. We rebuilt the system underneath it.
A founder-led D2C personal-care brand had doubled ad spend expecting linear growth. Instead, margins eroded and ROAS slid. The problem was never the ads.
Read case studyCheap leads, brutal enrollment. We fixed the gap between the click and the customer.
A cohort-based upskilling business had a fine cost-per-lead and a terrible lead-to-enrollment rate. The leak was the 48 hours after the lead — not the lead itself.
Read case studyGo deeper
Related reading
~₹10
messaging cost / customer / yr
10×
return on retention (illustrative)
86 paise
per WhatsApp marketing message
The Customer Retention Systems Checklist for Indian D2C Brands
If your revenue runs through Blinkit, Zepto, Instamart or Amazon, the platform owns your customer — you get the order, they get the name and the next purchase. This is the systems checklist to win them back: capture off-marketplace, one clean CRM record, WhatsApp + email flows, data-driven segmentation, the seven numbers to track, and the retention economics. Tick them off as you build.
September 30, 2026
4
gears that must stay aligned
3x
min LTV:CAC to compound
10-15%
brand lift we look for
Are You DTC — or DQC? Why Smart Founders Still Fail at Retention
Half your "D2C" revenue quietly comes from Blinkit, Zepto and Amazon — yet you measure retention only on your website. This is a teardown of where retention actually leaks for a scaling Indian brand: DQC dependence, misalignment, RTO, discounting — and the one lever that closes each leak. Includes the brand lift test and the four-gear alignment system.
September 22, 2026
0
coffee imprint in 1970s Japan
~1 gen
the imprinting long game
70%
Nescafé's eventual share
How Nestlé Taught a Nation to Crave Coffee — And Why Most Founders Get the Lesson Backwards
In the 1970s Nestlé could not sell coffee to tea-drinking Japan. A French psychoanalyst found the reason — and the fix took a generation. The famous imprinting story, the psychology underneath it, and the one diagnostic that decides whether any of it applies to your ₹10-50 Cr brand (it probably does not, and that is the point).
June 13, 2026
What's holding back your scale?
Every engagement starts the same way — with a diagnosis. Run the free Aditor audit, or take the direct line to Rishabh.