LeverOps is new. I'm not.

I have spent a decade inside tech startups, close to the operating detail, including two startup exits. I currently work as a vendor to a private-equity-backed software company, rolling out AI with guidance from its PE partners.

LeverOps has no client case studies yet, and I will not dress that up. What follows is the same work done inside a much larger company: where I looked, what I found, and what I built. The company is not named. The numbers are real.

How to read the numbers. Counts and percentages are measured from the company’s own systems. Dollar figures are the size of the problem found, not money recovered. Where something is an estimate, it says so.

Problems I found

Leads were waiting more than a day

I measured what happened to every new lead after it arrived. The median lead waited 27 hours for its first touch. Only 8.9% were touched within an hour. 17% never got any action from a rep at all. The dashboard had not shown it, because it only counted the leads that were worked.

Most leads never reached a salesperson

Only 16.2% of the leads created were ever assigned to a rep. Nearly all conversions, 99.8%, came from one stage of the process, which converted at 89.2%. Another 46,295 leads sat in a stage converting at 0.43%, and 54,751 sat in one converting at zero.

Open deals had gone quiet

133 qualified, open deals worth $31.3M had no recent activity and no one chasing them. The fix is an alert, the cheapest item on the list. It pays for itself with one recovered deal.

Lost deals nobody went back to

$92M of pipeline was sitting closed-lost with no process for revisiting it. At the company’s own win rate that pool is worth roughly $15M in bookings. That figure is an estimate.

“Rep behaviour” that was a scheduled job

Leads appeared to be reworked by reps 19.6% of the time. 44% of those reworks landed on exactly day 66 of a lead’s life: a scheduled sweep, not a person’s judgement. 88.9% of ownership changes were bulk operations. The team had been managing a behaviour that did not exist.

Lead cost varied 237 times by source

One purchased data source supplied 56.5% of all leads at $7.54 each. Leads from chat and support cost $1,785 each. And 82% of revenue had no lead source recorded, so nobody could say which spend was working.

A build I stopped

The plan was to make reps fill in required discovery fields before a deal could advance. Before anyone built it, I tested the idea against 2,027 past deals. Deals with none of the fields filled were won 15.8% of the time. Deals with three or four filled were won 8.5% of the time. The build was dropped before it cost anything.

Sometimes the right answer is to change nothing. I will tell you when it is.

Numbers I took back

Three of my own early estimates did not survive a second check: a dead-pipeline model and two renewal figures. I withdrew them before anyone acted on them. If I cannot defend a number, you will not see it in a memo.

What I built

A research agent for the sales team

About 35 business development reps were researching each new lead and account by hand. I built a hosted automation that does the research and hands the lead to a person whenever the AI cannot make a confident call. Run it twice on the same lead and the output is identical.

My estimate is about 10 minutes saved per lead. Across roughly 1,000 leads a month that is about 2,000 hours a year, close to one full-time person. That is an estimate, not yet a measured result: the agent is in preview and account matching is still being improved.

Call records tied to deals

Matched 99.5% of 15,338 recorded sales calls to the deal they belonged to, so managers could see what was said on the deals they were forecasting.

A forecasting tool in software the team already owned

Built in Excel and Power Query, with nothing new to buy or learn.

What this means for a business your size

The numbers are bigger there. The problems are the same ones: leads that wait, work that gets re-typed, a report nobody trusts, a fix that would not have helped. Finding them takes the same method, which is to follow the real work and count.

That is what a Workflow Snapshot does for one workflow in your business, for $950 in a week. Book a free operations review to talk it through, or see every price.

Last updated 2026-10-13