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Client under NDA

A school's sales team stopped depending on any one advisor's discipline

An online school in the CIS selling B2C: inbound applications from marketing, a call with an advisor, a contract. Applications arrived from different sources and landed in the CRM with no shared logic.

Published: 2026-08-24 · updated: 2026-08-24

Two people in headsets going over something on a monitor
Illustrative photo of the working context, not a screenshot of the client's system

  • Progression to a second contact

    +22%

  • Overall conversion to a deal

    +5 pp

  • Advisor time spent on admin

    −70%

In short

  • Problem: applications with no priority, quality checked on a sample, follow-up from the advisor's memory.
  • Solution: a single inbound stream with scoring, every conversation reviewed against the sales book, automatic CRM summaries and follow-up with a due date.
  • Result: progression to a second contact up 22%, overall conversion up 5 pp, admin time down 70% (client figures).
  • Systems: CRM, telephony, messaging channels.

Context

  • An online school selling programmes B2C; name and exact segment under NDA.
  • Region: CIS.
  • Process volume: inbound applications from marketing, the whole path from application to closed deal.
  • Team: several advisors plus a head of sales.
  • Systems: CRM, telephony, messaging channels; some logic and scripts under NDA.
  • The constraint became visible as traffic grew: more applications came in, conversion did not follow, and the spread between advisors was not explained by workload.

Baseline

Baseline metrics with their sources. Without them, any later result has nothing to be compared against.
  • Applications have no priority — strong leads are lost in the queue
  • Conversation quality is checked on a sample
  • Follow-up depends on whether the advisor remembers
  • The manager spends hours listening to recordings
  • Before the work started we fixed: the share of leads reaching a second contact, overall conversion to a deal, the share of conversations reviewed, and advisor time spent on CRM operations.
  • Data source: the client's CRM and telephony exports.
  • The comparison stayed within the same funnel: traffic sources and the offer did not change over the period — otherwise the gain could not be separated from a change of audience.
  • There are no measurement dates, formula or approving owner behind the numbers, so they are published as reported results.

Diagnosis

Which hypotheses were considered, why this one was chosen, what was assumed, and the condition under which we would have stopped.
  • Three hypotheses were on the table: too few advisors, a weak offer, or quality lost at the first and second contact.
  • The third was chosen: applications were sufficient, and the conversion spread between advisors at comparable workload pointed at how the conversation was run and at follow-up discipline.
  • The assumption: the school's sales book describes practice that works. Tested against historical recordings: conversations that ended in a contract did match the criteria more often.
  • Stop criterion: if criterion-based review cannot separate conversations that closed from those that didn't, the hypothesis counts as unconfirmed and the work stops.

What we implemented

  • Data sources: applications from every marketing channel, call recordings, message threads, deal records in the CRM.
  • AI components: application scoring, review of calls and threads against the sales book criteria, a summary with the commitments made, a follow-up draft.
  • Business rules: the criteria are written by the business and live outside the code — the head of sales edits them, not a developer.
  • Integrations: CRM, telephony, messaging channels.
  • Human checkpoints: a review is support, not punishment. Contested cases go to the manager, whose decision overrides the system's assessment.
  • Monitoring: the share of conversations reviewed, and the gap between the system's assessment and the manager's. The second is the key signal: a widening gap means the criteria have drifted from practice.

How the process changed

Before

5 steps
  1. Applications arrive from different sources into one list
  2. The advisor takes the next in order
  3. A call; a free-form note, or none
  4. The manager listens to a few recordings a month
  5. Follow-up, if the advisor remembers it

After

8 steps
  1. Applications merge into a single stream
  2. Scoring and priority
  3. The advisor's call
  4. Review against the sales book criteria
  5. Summary and commitments into the CRM
  6. Follow-up as a task with a due date
  7. Second contact
  8. Deal closed

What was stuck

There was no priority, and strong leads were lost in the queue. Conversation quality was checked on a sample, follow-up depended on whether the advisor remembered, and the manager spent hours listening to recordings instead of working the bottlenecks.

  1. 1Applications merge into a single stream
  2. 2Scoring and priority
  3. 3The advisor's call
  4. 4Review against the sales book criteria
  5. 5Summary and commitments into the CRM
  6. 6Follow-up as a task with a due date
  7. 7Second contact
  8. 8Deal closed
  9. Measured result

Results

Progression to a second contact

+22%

Reported by: Client figures: before and after within the same sales funnel

Overall conversion to a deal

+5 pp

Reported by: Client figures: before and after within the same sales funnel

Advisor time spent on admin

−70%

Reported by: Client figures: their own measurement of CRM operations

Economic impact

  • The effect has two parts: additional revenue from higher conversion, and freed advisor and manager time.
  • The first part is less reliable: conversion depends on more than the initiative, and the comparison window is short. The second is firmer — CRM operations are directly measurable.
  • No money figure is published: average deal size and hourly cost are the client's commercial information.
  • Cost of ownership: the sales book criteria need recalibrating. Without it, six months on the review is judging practice that no longer exists.

Adoption

  • Follow-up became the standard rather than a matter of individual discipline.
  • Conversation quality levelled across the team: everyone gets a review, not only whoever's recording was listened to.
  • The manager stopped being the control bottleneck and moved to what only they can see.
  • The solution owner is the head of sales, who also owns the criteria.
«Everything is transparent now: I see the bottlenecks and the reasons for losses immediately, without hours of review. The team focuses on deals and I focus on where the growth is.»

Client under NDA — Head of sales, EdTech (NDA)

What's next

  • Scaling: extending to the school's second product, which has a different cycle length.
  • Next initiative: linking conversation review to each advisor's training plan — the criterion they dip on becomes the first session.
  • What we decided against: tying review scores to bonuses. The moment a score becomes money, the advisor starts talking to the system rather than to the applicant.

Have a similar workflow? Let's check whether the hypothesis transfers

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