A sales-led company was booking inbound demos on availability rather than fit. We rebuilt qualification and routing around lifetime value and cost to serve.
The company was hitting bookings and quota while profit stayed flat. Rather than add pipeline, we reconciled customer value across its systems, located where margin and selling time were lost, and rebuilt the qualification responsible for the loss. The rest of this document follows those three stages.
| Customer | LTV | CAC | Cost/serve | Gross margin | ICP-fit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Northwind | $210k | $61k | $38k | 82% | strong |
| Vantage | $96k | $24k | $18k | 81% | strong |
| Harbor Co | $21k | $12k | $10k | 52% | weak |
| Dunmore | $14k | $13k | $9k | 36% | weak |
| 1,836 more rows | |||||
LTV came from subscription and billing history, CAC from marketing and sales spend, cost to serve from support, onboarding, and infrastructure. Fourteen sources, reconciled to one record across 1,840 accounts.
of lifetime value came from the top 18% of customers.
Those accounts retained at 95% a year against 69% for the rest. The pattern stayed hidden until value, cost, and usage were joined into one model.
Enterprise contracts ran 10 to 20 times a small account but only 3 to 5 times the cost to deliver and support. After cost to serve, gross margin was 82% at the top of the book and 36% at the bottom.
Enterprise cohorts retained 106% of revenue at 24 months. Small-deal cohorts fell to 46% and crossed below CAC payback near month 14. About 40% of small accounts churned before breaking even.
With no SDR layer, AEs qualified inbound during the demo itself. Of every 100 hours of demo time, 25 reached strong-fit accounts, 55 went to small, churn-prone deals, and 20 to leads disqualified on the call.
"My calendar is full of low-value junk I have to disqualify myself."
Account executive, sales team
The data located the loss. Interviews explained why it persisted: reps had no way to filter inbound before it reached their calendar.
Each inbound is enriched and scored on fit in the time the form takes to submit. An LLM classifies the lead; deterministic rules handle the edges. Strong-fit accounts reach a rep faster than before. The rest route to self-serve, partners, or a decline.
Acquisition efficiency and selling time both improved while support headcount held flat.
If your team is busy but margin is flat, the cause is often in data that has never been joined. We reconcile it, locate the constraint, and propose the change before any larger engagement.
Reconcile the data, find the constraint, change the system.
SystemsGo