Snapshot
Industry: Real estate / construction SaaS Channels: Google Ads + Email marketing Monthly spend: INR 5,00,000 Duration: 4 months (INR 20,00,000 total) Outcome: 600 SQLs, 120 customers, INR 60 lakh in revenue, 3:1 ROI
About the client
A SaaS platform that helps real estate developers and construction firms manage sustainability compliance. Think IGBC certifications, GRIHA standards, ESG reporting. The kind of work that currently lives across consultants, spreadsheets, and email threads.
Average ticket size of INR 50K. Selling into three distinct buyer segments:
- Large builders. Enterprise developers managing ESG reporting across multiple projects at once.
- Mid-sized developers. Regional players with sustainability mandates but no in-house compliance teams. Heavy consultant dependency.
- EPC firms and contractors. 500+ employee companies where green certifications are now showing up as bid requirements.
Geography was metro tier-1. Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad.
The challenge
The product solved a real problem, but the market did not know it existed as a category. Nobody searches for a tool they don't know is a tool.
So this was never a lead generation problem. It was a demand generation problem. The market needed education on sustainability ROI before it would ever fill a form. A single-channel, single-touch approach was going to burn budget and produce MQLs that sales would reject.
One more constraint. Before committing to scale, we needed proof the addressable market was deep enough. We set a validation gate of 2,000+ qualifying organizations across the three segments. If the TAM didn't hold up, the plan would change.
The approach
We split INR 5,00,000/month across two channels.
Google Ads took INR 4,00,000/month. Search campaigns only, targeting problem-aware queries. Sustainability compliance software, green building management, certification tools. People already mid-problem, actively looking. This was the intent capture layer.
Email took INR 1,00,000/month. This covered data sourcing, enrichment, verification, and deliverability infrastructure. We built a verified list of 2,000+ ICP accounts, roughly 6,000 decision-maker contacts, and ran segmented sequences. This was the education and nurture layer.
The segmentation did the heavy lifting. Same product, three different problems:
→ Large builders got the multi-project ESG reporting angle. Centralized dashboards at enterprise scale.
→ Mid-sized developers got the consultant dependency angle. Automated compliance workflows that cut external costs.
→ Contractors got the bid requirement angle. Certified sustainability processes as a competitive edge in tenders.
The phasing
Weeks 1 to 6 were baseline.
Three audience tests live, benchmarks established, TAM validated. No SQL targets in this window, and none of the numbers below include it. We committed to telling the client what wasn't working before promising what would.
Weeks 7 to 12 were optimization. Budget moved to top performers, creative refreshed, weakest cohorts cut. Target was a 20% gain in cost efficiency.
Weeks 13 to 18 were scale. Winning segments and sequences pushed to maximum velocity.
The numbers
Monthly performance during the post-baseline period:
→ Google Ads: ~5,800 clicks at INR 65 to 70 CPC, ~440 MQLs, ~110 SQLs
→ Email: ~140 MQLs from segmented sequences, ~40 SQLs
→ Combined: ~150 SQLs per month
Across the 12-week performance window that produced 450 SQLs. The optimization uplift from Phase 2 onwards added another 33%, roughly 150 more.
The results
→ 600 SQLs generated
→ 20% SQL-to-close rate
→ 120 customers acquired
→ INR 60 lakh in revenue against INR 20 lakh spend
→ 3:1 ROI, before any LTV effect
Why it worked
Email did not work because email is magic. It worked because the list was 2,000 named accounts, not a spray across 50,000 randoms, and because each segment got messaging written for its specific pain.
Google did not work because search is back. It worked because we only paid for clicks from people already inside the problem.
And the baseline phase, the part clients resist most, is what made the scale phase possible. You cannot optimize what you never benchmarked.