Real estate · Residential
Halved cost per site visit by ignoring most of what the ads produced
Fourteen thousand leads in a year and a sales team that had stopped trusting any of them. We rebuilt the funnel around site visits and let volume collapse.
Demo requests vs qualified opportunities, indexed
Five quarters, base = 100
- Sales-qualified opportunities
- Demo requests
- Client
- Residential real estate developer
- Industry
- Real estate · Residential
- Region
- Gurugram & Sohna Road
- Engagement
- Lead generation and automation, 10 months
- Ad budget
- ₹4.5 lakh monthly ad spend
The challenge
What was actually going wrong.
Usually not the thing the business thought it was.
Around 14,000 leads had come in over the previous year across portals, Google and Meta. The sales team's view was that fewer than one in twenty was worth calling, and they had largely stopped trying.
Nobody could prove them wrong, because nothing downstream of the lead form was measured. The ad platforms optimised toward form fills, portals were paid per lead, and the CRM recorded outcomes that never travelled back to the campaigns.
Response time was the second problem. Leads arriving in the evening or on a Sunday were often first contacted two days later, in a market where buyers enquire with several developers in one sitting.
The third problem was honest positioning: the ads implied a price point below what was actually available, which produced enormous volume and enormous disappointment.
The approach
What we did, in sequence.
Services involved
- 01
Made the site visit the conversion event
Completed visits imported back into Google and Meta as offline conversions, so the platforms could finally optimise toward the only thing the business cared about.
- 02
Put the price in the ad
Configuration and starting price stated up front. Enquiry volume fell by more than half almost immediately and the sales team's opinion of lead quality changed within a fortnight.
- 03
Automated acknowledgement and routing
Instant WhatsApp reply with project details and a visit booking link, plus round-robin allocation to whoever was actually available, including weekends.
- 04
Separated portal leads from owned channels
Portal and direct leads measured separately for the first time. The comparison changed how the following year's budget was split, and not in the portals' favour.
- 05
Fed sales feedback back into targeting
A weekly thirty-minute session on which leads were real. That feedback shaped audience and keyword decisions every week rather than every quarter.
The result
What moved, and what caused it.
Cost per completed site visit fell 51% across the engagement. Total lead volume fell by roughly 60%, which was the intended outcome and still required explaining more than once.
Median time to first contact went from just under seven hours to four minutes. Visit booking rate from evening and weekend enquiries roughly doubled as a direct result.
Stating the price in the ad was the single most effective change and the hardest to get agreed. It cost volume, improved every downstream number, and had been resisted for two years.
Portal spend was reduced by about 40% at renewal in favour of owned channels, on the basis of visit-level data that had not existed before.
Measured outcomes
- lower cost per completed site visit
- 51%lower cost per completed site visitComparing months 6–10 against the five months preceding the engagement, measured in the developer's CRM at the visit-completed stage.
- median time to first contact
- 4 minmedian time to first contactDown from a median of just under seven hours, following automated WhatsApp acknowledgement and round-robin routing to available sales staff.
“Our lead count halved and the sales team thanked us. I would not have believed that if I had not watched it happen.”
Next step
Bring us a problem shaped like this one.
Forty-five minutes, no slide deck. We will tell you which of these engagements yours most resembles, where we think the bottleneck sits, and what it would realistically take to move it.
Or call +91 93060 49784 and email support@exponentialy.com — we reply within one working day.
What the call is
- 01
45 minutes, no slide deck
You talk to the person who would run the work, not a salesperson.
- 02
Your numbers on the table
What a customer is worth, where enquiries come from, and what you have tried.
- 03
A written plan afterwards
What we would fix first, and in what order. Yours to keep either way.