A mid-market manufacturer thought they needed more leads. They needed sharper pricing and tighter ops. We fixed both.
The brief, when we arrived, was specific. The founder wanted a lead generation review, ideally a new outbound motion, and a pitch deck that could close faster. Revenue had flattened at around ₹12Cr after three years of steady climb, and the sales team was busy but tired. They were losing deals on price and winning ones that felt thin in the P&L afterwards.
On paper this looked like a classic demand problem. Not enough qualified pipeline, long cycles, rising discounting. The kind of thing a bigger sales team and a new CRM fixes. The CFO had already priced two agencies to help.
We asked to see the last 200 invoices before we signed the engagement letter. That is almost always where the real story sits.
Three things came out of that review. First, the company was running eleven distinct price lists across regions and customer tiers, most of them inherited and none of them actively managed. Second, the top twelve customers, who drove 46 percent of revenue, were also the ones getting the deepest unreviewed discounts, an average of 18 percent off list. Third, the cost to serve those same customers, once we allocated logistics and returns correctly, was roughly 22 percent higher than the average.
The discounts had started years ago as goodwill during a supply shock. Nobody had ever pulled them back. Meanwhile raw material costs had risen 14 percent over the same period and only half of that had been passed through.
They were not losing on price. They were giving it away to their best customers and then chasing new ones to plug the hole.
The sales team was working hard. The pricing system was working against them.
We split the work into three tracks, run in parallel over six months. Track one was pricing. We collapsed the eleven price lists into three, tied them to volume and payment terms instead of legacy relationships, and wrote a discount approval matrix that put anything over 8 percent in front of the COO.
Track two was cost to serve. We re-allocated freight, packaging, and returns down to the SKU and customer, which let us see for the first time which accounts were quietly unprofitable. Four of them got renegotiated. One got walked away from, which felt dramatic at the time and turned out to be the cleanest quarter they had ever had.
Track three, almost as an afterthought, was the pitch. We rewrote it around total landed cost rather than unit price. That single reframe did more for close rates than any outbound motion would have.
Six months in, gross margin was up 34 percent. Revenue moved from ₹12Cr to ₹16Cr over the following year, but the margin gain showed up inside the first quarter, which was the point. The CFO described it as the first time in a decade the finance review had been shorter than the sales review.
We kept a light advisory retainer for the next year to hold the discount discipline. That is usually where these programs unwind. The playbook works once. Keeping it working is a different engagement entirely.
The lead generation problem, when we finally looked at it, turned out to be real but small. They needed roughly 15 percent more qualified conversations, not a new sales function. We introduced them to a specialist, stepped back, and watched the business do the rest.