How a recruiting firm doubled qualified leads in one quarter.
A boutique recruiting firm was generating volume — but the right kind of pipeline wasn't moving. Here's how we fixed it in 90 days.
Volume without velocity.
The firm was generating plenty of inbound activity, but the conversations rarely turned into engaged retainers. Their team was spending hours qualifying leads that should never have made it onto the calendar. Marketing claimed the pipeline was healthy. Sales claimed it was poisoned. The data, predictably, was on neither side.
By the time I joined, the founder had quietly stopped looking at the dashboard. That's usually the signal — when the numbers stop being a tool and start being a source of anxiety, something structural is wrong.
Reposition. Re-qualify. Rebuild the funnel.
We started where most consultants don't: positioning. Their messaging targeted "growing companies" — a category broad enough to attract everyone and convert no one. In two weeks of customer interviews, we identified a specific vertical and stage where their close rate was 4× higher than the average. Everything else came off the menu.
From there, we rebuilt the qualification scoring inside their CRM, killed three lead sources that were dragging down quality, and rewrote the discovery script so the first call disqualified faster. The sales team got more time on the right deals. Marketing got cleaner attribution. The founder got the dashboard back.
Pipeline that closes.
Within the first quarter, qualified leads doubled and the close rate on those leads jumped 38%. More importantly, the team stopped chasing the wrong fits — which freed up the senior partners to spend time on the engagements that pay for the firm. The dashboard came back out. The founder stopped flinching when she opened it.
Six months later, the firm hired a head of growth, using the scorecard we built during the engagement. The work outlived the consulting relationship — which, to me, is the only definition of "done" that counts.
Have a pipeline problem that won't quit?
A discovery call is the fastest way to find out whether it's a positioning issue, a qualification issue, or a tooling issue. Usually it's two of the three.