Cutting B2B SaaS lead qualification from 18 minutes to 40 seconds
An HR-tech SaaS was losing 38% of inbound leads to slow first-response. We replaced their manual qualification with an AI agent that reads, scores, and routes leads in under a minute — including booking the first call.
- Client
- B2B SaaS in HR-tech (name withheld)
- Size
- £2.4M ARR, 18 employees
- Service
- AI Automation
- Duration
- 8 weeks build, ongoing operating retainer
The challenge
Where they were.
An inbound lead would land in HubSpot, sit in a queue, wait for an SDR to read it, get manually scored against ICP, get either disqualified, nurtured, or booked. Average time from form-fill to first response: 18 minutes during work hours, 14 hours overnight. Leak rate (leads gone cold before contact): 38%. The founder did not want to hire more SDRs — they wanted the system to do the work.
The approach
How we worked.
Workflow audit
Half-day on-site watching the SDR team work. Mapped the full qualification decision tree on a wall. Found 7 'decisions' that were actually mechanical lookups against firmographic data.
Agent design
Designed a 3-stage agent: enrich (Clearbit-equivalent data fetch), score (against ICP rubric with confidence threshold), route (auto-book, auto-nurture, or hand to human). Ambiguous cases route to humans by default.
Build + integrate
Built on Next.js API routes + Supabase + OpenAI. Hooked into HubSpot via API. Slack alerts for the ambiguous-cases queue. Live in 6 weeks including a 1-week shadow period where humans reviewed every AI decision.
Tune + scale
Weekly tuning sessions for the first month. Tightened the confidence threshold once we saw real data. Added a 'why' field so SDRs could see the AI's reasoning on every routed lead.
The outcomes
What changed.
- 40 seconds
- Average response time (was 18 min)
- 4%
- Lead leak rate (was 38%)
- 3.1x
- Demo bookings per 100 leads
- £780
- Monthly AI cost — fully predictable
“We hired Drift and Forge to make us faster. They made us a different shape of business. Our SDR team now spends their time on the leads that actually need a human, and the rest of the funnel runs while we sleep.”
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