CRM implementation: more qualified leads in 4 months [case study]

Performance marketing isn't just about managing ad accounts. Very often our work has to move into business consulting and general advice on how to bring order to certain marketing matters, both to make our clients' work easier and to improve the results on the accounts we manage.

That was, and in fact still is, the case with our partnership with one of our clients in the automotive industry. In the case study below, we show how implementing a CRM helped us with both of those things.

Outlining the problem

Our client is a company operating in the automotive industry, serving customers with high transaction values. Its business is based on importing cars from the United States to a Polish customer's special order. The sales team was operationally strong, but lacked a stable technological foundation that would let them genuinely assess the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and prioritise their work on leads.

The challenge the client came to us with was clear:

the company was generating leads, but couldn't reliably assess which channels and campaigns led to real, closed deals.

In practice, this looked like:

• no central system for running sales processes,
• salespeople working mainly through email and spreadsheets,
• no visibility into which marketing channel delivered the best return,
• budget decisions made on gut feeling rather than data.

Our client's target audience is people interested in car brands that can be imported from the United States at a much better price than they sell for in Poland. Some of these are luxury brands, some less so, but regardless, the sales process demanded a fast response, high-quality follow-up and well-organised communication.

Our hypotheses

At the start, we set out a few key assumptions:

▶️ Centralising leads in the Pipedrive CRM would make it much easier to manage and handle them

▶️ Full integration between the CRM and advertising channels would allow campaign effectiveness to be assessed on hard data, not gut feeling

▶️ Better visibility of marketing data would let the client optimise their budget, so more money would go into the channels that actually close sales

▶️ Standardising the pipeline would make reporting and controlling the sales process easier

The hypotheses were bold, but testable, and, crucially, they could be quickly disproved in a real sales environment.

Process description

Analysis

Before implementing anything, we carried out a full audit:

▶️ a review of the current lead acquisition and handling process,

▶️ analysis of traffic sources: how leads reached the company and how they were "passed on" from there,

▶️ conversations with the client to understand the real operational problems,

▶️ identifying gaps, including a complete lack of visibility into which campaigns were generating closable leads,

▶️ an audit of the forms, pages and marketing tools involved.

All of this let us understand that our problem wasn't lead volume, but the lack of a system connecting marketing with the real results of signed deals. In simpler terms, we were missing the information about which channel and which ad messages mobilised better-quality leads, and as a result we didn't know which pot to keep topping up with budget, and where optimisation was needed instead.

The plan

Based on the analysis, we built a plan whose goal wasn't just to implement a CRM, but to carry out a genuine transformation of the sales process:

▶️ Implementing Pipedrive as the main sales management system.

▶️ Helping connect the whole sales path with marketing, so we could measure not just ad effectiveness at the lead level, but also deal closure rates.

A necessary improvement, without which none of this would have worked properly, was sorting out UTM tracking. We managed to achieve this together with the client. On the agency's side, it was our job to look after the scripts that automatically "attach" the right UTM parameters to the URLs in each campaign. The client then rolled the whole thing out at the CRM level, so we could all be clear about where specific leads were coming from.

Rollout

The rollout itself happened in several stages. It wouldn't have been possible, though, without close cooperation between the agency and the client. After all, it was on their side to adapt the existing sales process to working with the newly implemented CRM.

The difficulty landed especially on the sales team, whose workflow inevitably had to change somewhat. At the same time, as a co-initiator of this process, we kept trying to point the client toward what to watch out for and offer advice whenever it was needed. Thanks to that, each stage, from rolling out the pipeline, through the integration, to reporting, went smoothly.

Even so, this was the first time all the data on leads and their statuses ended up in one place.

After the first few weeks of work, we started seeing the team's real behaviour and the flow of data. On that basis, we began working with the campaigns, which let us genuinely assess the leads and the quality of enquiries coming from each advertising activity, and then how that translated into the cost of acquiring a valuable customer.

Thanks to that, in the next stage we managed to move from assessing the number of leads from each campaign to their quality, and to focus our attention, and as a result our ad budget, where it could actually translate into more closed deals.

This part let us turn the first version of the rollout into a system that genuinely supports managing sales and marketing activity.

Results (and disproving the hypotheses)

In just four months from implementing the CRM, the client gained full visibility into where their best leads were really coming from, and, most importantly, which of them ultimately closed.

Key results:

▪️ visibility of the user journey from ad to closed deal,

▪️ a significant increase in the number of qualified leads:

▶️ February: number of leads 244, closed leads 3, cost per lead €14.43 ▶️ March: number of leads 261, closed leads 6, cost per lead €6.37 ▶️ April: number of leads 327, closed leads 6, cost per lead €8.65 ▶️ May: number of leads 368, closed leads 10, cost per lead €8.93

▪️shorter response times from the sales team

▪️higher lead-to-SQL conversion

▪️genuine optimisation of the ad budget, since the client could finally see which campaigns were closing sales.

Key takeaway

The lack of a CRM wasn't a technical problem; it was a strategic one, one that made it impossible to make good budget decisions. Today we're operating at a much higher level, thanks to a far more precise analysis, not just of how many enquiries there are, but of what quality they are.

Client comment

"Working with JustIdea has let us manage our marketing budget much more effectively. Implementing the CRM helps us allocate funds better, because we finally know which campaigns bring us the best-quality leads. As a result, with every passing month we're more precise about the marketing decisions we make, and the data we now have access to is helping us grow the business better."

Summary

If you want to know which campaigns are actually delivering valuable leads, not just clicks, and you want to connect performance marketing with sales in one coherent process, we can help you with that. Get in touch with us if you want to be sure your marketing agency looks further than just the results it produces on your ad accounts.