+219% MQL → SQL in nine months.
A late-Series B vertical-SaaS in the developer-tools space. They came in cold on paid social, with three SDRs running a single sequence and a content calendar written by an intern. We rebuilt the paid-funnel content system, paired it with an AI-led MQL scoring layer, and ran it for nine months.
+219%
MQL → SQL rate, paid acquisition
47d
average CAC payback on paid channels
$3.2M ARR
influenced in 9 months
The engagement
Before, across, and after — the shape of nine months
Before
Nimbus had a single inbound form, a single SDR sequence, and a content calendar that ran on autopilot. Paid spend went through one global campaign that targeted every ICP at once — paid MQLs landed in the same queue as everything else. Sales was rejecting three in five MQLs on the first call; nobody could tell whether paid social was the problem or the only thing that was working.
Across the engagement
We split paid into per-ICP ad sets, rebuilt the inbound form into a five-question qualifier wired into an AI-scoring layer, and shipped a Monday benchmark that the SDRs actually used to pick which thread each MQL came back on. Vort ran weekly creative review against MQL → SQL rate — not against vanity engagement — and every post published had a documented hypothesis about which ICP it converted.
After
Nine months in, paid MQL → SQL was +219% vs the baseline quarter. CAC payback on paid dropped to 47 days, down from 113. $3.2M of net-new ARR in the next nine months was attributed to the paid-influenced pipeline, and the Monday benchmark became the standup that the SDR team refused to skip.
What we shipped
The three things that moved the number
Per-ICP paid acquisition, not global campaigns
Every paid ad set named the ICP it targeted, the channel it ran on, and the MQL score the leads came back with. The SDRs stopped sorting noise because the pipeline stopped sending it.
AI-scored MQLs with a Monday benchmark
The same AI that scored inbound form fills also produced the Monday competitive benchmark the SDR team used to choose the next call. One source of truth, two consumption surfaces.
Weekly creative review against SQL rate
Once a week, every post published was reviewed against pipeline contribution, not engagement. Posts that underperformed were recycled inside the same week, not three months later in a retrospective.
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