Good product. Leaky funnel.
An Australian B2B payments SaaS was scaling its SDR team and generating demos — but conversion from demo to proposal was stuck at 18%. CAC was climbing. Sales leadership blamed the product. Marketing blamed qualification. Neither was right.
Agni was brought in as fractional marketing leadership to diagnose and fix the mid-funnel. The brief: stop the bleed, accelerate pipeline, don’t rebuild everything from scratch.
Where deals were dying
- No structured demo framework — reps improvised
- Proposal templates were generic, not buyer-specific
- No post-demo nurture sequences
- Lead scoring treated all demos as equal
- Sales and marketing operating with different ICP definitions
The mid-funnel rebuild
- Unified ICP definition across sales + marketing
- Demo framework: discovery, proof, commercial commitment
- Buyer-type proposal templates (CFO, CTO, Ops)
- 5-email post-demo nurture cadence by persona
- Behavioural scoring: demo depth + follow-up engagement
From stall to momentum in 8 weeks
Within two months, demo-to-proposal rate climbed from 18% to 30%. Average sales cycle on the deals that followed dropped from 67 days to 39 days. The gain came not from generating more leads, but from converting the ones they already had. The operations team now runs the same system autonomously.
“We’d been trying to fix this for two quarters. Agni diagnosed the real problem in week one and had us running differently by week three.”
— VP Sales, B2B Payments Platform
Every number on this page, with its definition.
- Demo-to-proposal, 18% → 30% (+67%). The share of demos held that led to a proposal. Source: the client's CRM stage history.
- Sales cycle, 67 → 39 days (−41%). Average days from first demo to closed-won, won deals, before and after the new demo framework.
- 8 weeks. From the start of the engagement to demo-to-proposal holding at 30%.