Speed-to-Lead: How We Cut Response Time from 24 Hours to 2

A London SaaS company was losing deals to competitors who responded faster. We rebuilt their lead routing in three weeks. Here's exactly what we changed and what happened next.

The situation

A B2B SaaS company in London — 80 employees, $12M ARR, Series A — was seeing strong inbound volume but a conversion rate that didn't match. Leads were coming in from the website, content downloads, and webinars, but the pipeline wasn't reflecting it.

When we mapped the lead journey from form submission to first sales contact, we found the average time was 23 hours. In some cases, leads were sitting for 48–72 hours before anyone reached out.

What was breaking

The root cause was a fragmented routing process. Leads from the website went into Marketo. From there, they were scored (loosely) and moved to Salesforce. In Salesforce, leads were assigned to a round-robin queue. SDRs checked the queue manually twice a day.

The scoring model had no urgency signals — a lead who visited the pricing page three times had the same score as a lead who opened a newsletter. The routing had no prioritisation — a hot inbound demo request waited in the same queue as a cold content download.

There was also no notification system. SDRs only knew about new leads when they checked the queue. Nobody was being alerted when a high-intent prospect hit the site.

What we built

Week 1: Rebuilt the lead scoring model to weight high-intent behaviours — pricing page visits (3x points), demo page visits (4x points), returning visits within 48 hours (2x multiplier). Integrated Clearbit for real-time company enrichment at the point of form submission.

Week 2: Built a priority routing system in Salesforce with three tiers. Tier 1 (score 80+, ICP match) — immediate Slack alert to designated SDR with full enriched profile. Tier 2 (score 50–79) — routed to queue with 2-hour SLA alert. Tier 3 (below 50) — standard nurture queue.

Week 3: Built Slack integration that fired an instant notification to the assigned SDR the moment a Tier 1 lead submitted. The notification included: company name, size, role, what page they came from, and a pre-written personalised opener.

What changed

Average time-to-first-contact: 23 hours → 1h 47min. Inbound conversion rate: 2.1% → 4.8%. In the first quarter after go-live, the team sourced more pipeline from the same inbound volume than in the previous two quarters combined.

The SDR team, initially resistant to the new process, became its biggest advocates within three weeks — they were calling prospects who were still on the website.