The situation
A UK-based B2B HR technology company (Series B, £12M ARR, targeting HR Directors and CHROs at 500-5,000-employee firms) was running LinkedIn and Google Ads at £45,000/month. The campaigns were generating SQLs but at a cost - £3,200 per SQL - that was making their unit economics difficult to justify. The pipeline quality was good; the acquisition cost was the problem.
The challenge
The challenge was audience precision. The ICP was well-defined (HR leaders at mid-to-large UK companies) and LinkedIn's targeting could reach them accurately - but the campaigns were reaching the right personas at the wrong time. Most HR Directors in their target market weren't in an active buying cycle for new HR technology at any given point. Spending £45k/month to reach all of them equally, regardless of buying intent, meant most spend was wasted on buyers years away from a purchase decision.
Our approach: intent-gated prospecting
The programme redesign centred on a single principle: allocate outreach and paid media investment in proportion to buying signal strength, not in proportion to account list size. Every element of the programme was reoriented around this principle.
The first 30 days were spent building the infrastructure, not running campaigns. Bombora intent topics were selected based on retrospective analysis of the client's closed-won accounts — specifically, which Bombora topic categories those accounts had been surging on in the 60 days before they became opportunities. This produced a validated list of 14 topics with high predictive value for this specific ICP, versus the broader list of 40+ generic category topics the client had been using.
Bombora signals were connected to HubSpot via the native integration. Accounts showing intent spikes on validated topics automatically triggered: (a) an SDR task to review the account and prepare outreach, (b) elevation to Tier 1 in the ABM programme for LinkedIn and programmatic display, and (c) a Slack alert to the relevant account owner. The entire trigger-to-task flow completed in under 15 minutes of signal detection.
LinkedIn and programmatic display campaigns were restructured from fixed monthly account lists to dynamic lists that updated weekly based on intent signal status. Accounts surging on validated intent topics received 2.5× the baseline impression frequency. Accounts with no recent signal were moved to a lower-cost awareness cadence. This shift — without changing total paid media budget — produced a 23% improvement in account-level engagement rate within 90 days.
SDR outreach sequences were rewritten to reference the buyer's likely research context without explicitly citing the intent data. Opening lines shifted from generic value propositions to contextually relevant observations: "Given the focus many [sector] companies are placing on [relevant challenge] right now..." This framing — accurate to the buyer's research activity without being surveillance-adjacent — consistently outperformed generic cold outreach in reply and meeting rates.
Internal analysis showed that SDR outreach to accounts within 48 hours of an intent spike achieved a 4.2× higher meeting acceptance rate than outreach to the same accounts outside an active signal window. This single insight — that the timing of outreach matters as much as the content — drove the entire programme design.
Results
Reduction in cost per sales-qualified lead over the 9-month programme, from £3,200 to £1,880 - achieved through intent-based audience targeting rather than increased spend.
Increase in sales-qualified lead volume alongside the CAC reduction, demonstrating that intent targeting improved both efficiency and output simultaneously.
Specific evaluation-stage intent topics used after narrowing from initial broad category topics - precision topic selection was the highest-impact optimisation in the programme.