Case Study · Client name used with permission
A 34-person fleet-telemetry SaaS in Halifax, a messy CRM, and one engagement where the boring fixes did most of the work. We'll tell you what we changed, in what order, and which parts of the result we don't deserve credit for.
The client
Cartage Labs sells fleet-telemetry hardware and software to mid-size trucking and logistics companies across Canada and the U.S. northeast. Average deal: $62,000, sales cycle eight to fourteen months, nineteen sellers split between Halifax and a small office in Moncton. When they called us in January 2025, they'd missed plan three quarters running and their board had stopped asking polite questions.
Their VP Revenue had just left. The interim head of sales, Marc Lefebvre, had been the director of sales ops for four years and knew exactly where the bodies were buried — which helped. Half the engagement's success is a client who tells you the truth in week one.
We pulled fourteen months of CRM history. Four things stood out:
• Stages had no exit criteria. A deal could sit in "Evaluation" for nine months with no demo, no pricing call, nothing. 41% of open pipeline by value was in stages with no activity in 60+ days.
• Three sellers owned 61% of the pipeline — and all three covered the same GTA territory, while Atlantic Canada, their home market and easiest logo wins, had one part-time seller.
• Outbound was one sequence, written in 2022, sent from the main domain, with links that tripped spam filters about one email in four. Reply rate: 1.1%.
• The forecast was a mood. Commit was whatever the Monday meeting felt like. Which meant the board heard numbers nobody could defend, which is how boards start hiring consultants.
Order matters more than people think. You can't rebuild outbound on top of a CRM that lies to you, because you can't tell a real signal from a ghost. So:
| Month | Change | Result by month 7 |
|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | Stage exit criteria rebuilt with the sellers, not at them. Every stage now requires named evidence (demo done, pricing sent, security review booked). Dead deals killed — $4.8M of pipeline deleted in one very tense Thursday meeting. | Pipeline down 38% and everyone miserable — then forecast accuracy went from ±40% to ±12% by month five |
| 2–3 | Territory rebalance: two sellers moved to Atlantic Canada, one to New England. Marc approved comp adjustments so nobody took a pay cut for the privilege. | Atlantic region went from 4 closed-won in 2024 to 11 by month 7 |
| 3–5 | Outbound rebuilt on a separate subdomain, three sequences by persona (fleet manager, CFO, ops director), deliverability cleaned up (SPF, DKIM, DMARC — see our cold email deliverability post for the checklist). | Reply rate 1.1% → 4.7%, meetings booked per month up 3× |
| 5–7 | Weekly forecast cadence with evidence rules per stage; Marc ran it, we watched and coached. Deal desk checklist for the $80k+ tier. | Slipped-deal rate (deals pushed twice or more) cut roughly in half |
| Metric | Jan 2025 | Aug 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Qualified pipeline | $6.1M | $14.3M |
| Median stage age (active opps) | 96 days | 41 days |
| Outbound reply rate | 1.1% | 4.7% |
| Forecast accuracy (commit vs. actual) | ±40% | ±12% |
| Sellers at/above quota | 6 of 19 | 12 of 19 |
Cartage's board got the same table in month eight, minus the editorializing. We checked in again in March 2026: pipeline has held between $13M and $16M for two quarters. Retention of the new stages is the real win — most pipeline fixes decay in one quarter because nobody owned them after the consultant left. Marc owned this one.
We'd love to tell you every number above came from our brilliance. Here's the fine print:
• We got lucky on timing. Cartage's largest competitor had a well-publicized telemetry outage in April 2025, mid-engagement. Our rebuilt outbound landed in inboxes the same month a lot of fleet managers were quietly shopping. We did not schedule the outage. We'd have been fools not to mention it in the sequence, though, and we did.
• Deleting pipeline made month three look terrible and one seller very nearly quit over it. If your board can't stomach an ugly quarter for a true one, say so before the engagement starts, not after.
• The territory move worked because Atlantic Canada was genuinely underserved. We've run the same rebalance elsewhere and gone sideways, because there was no demand, just geography. The audit told us which one Cartage was; it doesn't always.
• Marc was unusually good. An interim sales leader who actually knows the CRM is a gift. Your mileage will vary with yours.
A pipeline audit plus outbound rebuild, list build and 30 days of tuning, Canadian dollars, excluding HST and one trip to Halifax (the February one — we won't do that to ourselves again). If you want the same starting point, book a review and bring your ugliest CRM export. We like the ugly ones.
More client results and quotes → · Notes from the notebook →