Performance Marketing Programme for a B2B SaaS Company — Cost Per SQL Reduced by 61%

"We were spending money optimising for a metric that did not matter. Celumai connected our media investment to actual revenue and showed us where we were wasting money and where we were underinvesting."

— Chief Marketing Officer, B2B Enterprise SaaS Company

Our paid media was generating leads. The problem was that sales did not trust them. The cost per SQL was over four thousand pounds and half the SQLs did not convert past the first meeting. Marketing was optimising for MQL volume. Sales needed SQL quality. We were measuring different things and pointing fingers at each other.

The paid media programme was optimised for lead volume rather than lead quality. Google and LinkedIn campaigns were generating clicks and form fills from audiences that looked like buyers but did not behave like them. The disconnect between marketing's metrics and sales outcomes was undermining the relationship between the two teams.

We started by working backwards from the closed-won data. Which MQL sources, audience segments, and ad formats were actually producing closed revenue — not just SQLs? When we connected HubSpot MQL data to closed-won outcomes, the picture was clear: LinkedIn intent-based targeting was producing 40% of closed revenue from 18% of MQL volume. Google brand was producing 25% from 8% of volume. Most of the spend was in the wrong places.

We restructured the media mix based on revenue attribution data, reallocating spend toward high-converting segments and formats. Campaign content was redesigned around the problems that closed-won customers described, not the features the product team wanted to promote. A new MQL qualification process using HubSpot scoring replaced the previous form-fill threshold.

Cost per SQL reduced from £4,200 to £1,640 — a 61% reduction. MQL-to-SQL conversion improved from 18% to 44%. Total monthly media spend was reduced by £40K while revenue from inbound grew by 28%.

Is this familiar?

HubSpot challenges in SaaS & Technology — what we see most often

B2B performance marketing that optimises for lead volume produces lead volume. It does not reliably produce revenue. The disconnect happens because the metrics used to optimise campaigns — clicks, conversions, cost per lead — are upstream of the commercial outcomes the business actually cares about.

Connecting media investment to revenue attribution — using CRM data to trace which campaigns, audiences, and ad formats produce closed revenue rather than just MQLs — reveals a very different picture of where money should be spent.

Celumai runs performance marketing programmes for B2B companies that are optimised against revenue attribution data from the CRM, not MQL volume metrics that can diverge significantly from commercial results.