they fired the whole sales team. then they called us.

Before this client called us, they'd just fired their entire sales team.

Not one rep. Not a manager. The whole team.

The reason: lead volume had dried up. The leads weren't coming in fast enough to keep reps on the phone. And if the reps aren't on the phone, you can't justify the payroll. So the team went.

Here's what they'd been doing before that.

They were running paid Meta ads with UGC creators. Tens of thousands in creator fees. A fast start — the first month looked great. Then the leads dropped off a cliff and never recovered.

The agency before us kept pitching more UGC. New creators. New formats. New hooks. None of it worked.

We took over and did the opposite of "more creators."

We split their audience into five very specific verticals — truckers, roofing contractors, food truck owners, commercial cleaning, and veteran-owned businesses. Each one got its own creative suite written from inside that operator's daily reality. Not "small business loans." Engine overhauls. Storm season payouts. Payroll due Friday while insurance claims sit for 60 days.

Then we layered an AI voice agent on top of the lead form so the moment a lead came in, they got a call within minutes. Qualified leads got transferred live to the (rebuilt) sales team. Cold leads got filtered before anyone wasted a minute on them. And on the backend, every qualified prospect ran through an application funnel that did the rest of the heavy lifting before a rep ever picked up.

Four months in:

12,765 leads. $4.48 blended cost per lead. 329 live call transfers handed straight to the sales team. This doesn’t include self service or sales team direct efforts.

The veteran campaign hit $1.75 per lead at a 57.9% conversion rate. Financial services industry average is $15–50 per lead. We came in 88% below.

Here's the lesson.

When leads dry up, most founders look at the sales team. "These reps aren't converting." So they fire reps. Hire new ones. Try again.

The sales team is almost never the problem.

The problem is one layer up — the targeting and the speed-to-contact. If you're aiming at "small business owners" instead of "veteran-owned operators in storm season," every ad dollar gets diluted. And if your follow-up takes hours instead of minutes, the leads you do get go cold before a rep can dial.

You don't fix that by firing salespeople. You fix it by getting specific and getting fast.

If you've got a sales team that's underperforming and you suspect the leads are the real issue, grab 20 minutes here: [link]

— Dez

P.S. What gives us the edge is our data, in the beginning it was our talent and experience. Now its the fact that we launched over 7000 custom ads targeting almost every way life in the US and we have insider data that makes our creative process have a strategic advantage. And we are just getting started.