A mid-market cybersecurity company cut manual prospecting and lifted conversion 30%
Two teams, one pipeline, no agreement on who earned it
SDRs and AEs at a mid-market cybersecurity company were sourcing prospects by hand in Sales Navigator, then loading them straight into Salesforce with no check against the company's ideal customer profile. Qualified and unqualified leads landed in the same pipeline. Outreach worked the same way: exports from Salesforce to Outreach were manual, with no automated cadence and no way to test which messages actually converted.
The cost went beyond wasted hours. Marketing and the SDR team were both claiming credit for the same pipeline, and there was no single source of truth to settle who was right.
A gate in front of Salesforce, and a standard everyone could point to
Stone Meridian put a gate in front of Salesforce. Every Sales Navigator export and every inbound marketing lead now runs through Clay for an ICP match and routing logic before it's allowed to load. Clay also builds and A/B tests the outreach sequences that follow, so message performance gets measured instead of assumed.
Stone Meridian also brought in Gong to automatically score call sentiment and disposition on every call. Underneath all of it, a new SDR playbook set clear, objective qualification criteria and defined which channel gets credit for which lead, replacing the ongoing argument with a standard everyone could point to.
Stone Meridian evaluates qualification playbooks the same way we score every RevOps Health Score: against a shared, outcome-driven standard, not a surface-level judgment call. That means naming the real situation, the pain behind it, its business impact, what's forcing a decision now, and who actually decides. The new SDR playbook's objective criteria were built to hold up against exactly that standard.
15 hours a week back, and one shared number
SDRs got 15 hours a week back each, hundreds of hours across the department in total. Conversion rates rose 30%, from better-matched prospects and outreach that was actually tested instead of guessed at. Marketing and sales opportunity reports now agree with each other, because Salesforce is the single source of truth for who gets credit for what.
What reclaimed time and resolved credit are worth
Reclaimed SDR hours are not simply fewer late nights. Outreach's 2026 research on sales teams found that when reps got time back, most of it went straight into revenue-generating work: more accounts worked, more follow-through on warm conversations instead of abandoning them for the next cold list. The reps in that research got back 7 to 8 hours a week. This client's SDRs got back 15, nearly double, freed up by ICP gating and tested outreach instead of manual sourcing and guesswork. That's capacity most companies have to hire for. Here, it came from fixing a process instead.
Attribution disputes like this one are common enough to be the norm, not the exception. In a 2026 survey of B2B marketers, Ruler Analytics found that more than a third say poor sales-and-marketing alignment is what makes attribution hard to get right, and nearly six in ten treat alignment as the whole point of doing attribution at all. Before the new playbook, marketing and the SDR team were both claiming credit for the same pipeline, with no objective standard to settle it. A shared standard replaces two competing stories about what worked with one Salesforce record both departments can point to.
Sources: Outreach, AI Agent Productivity Impact Report (2026); Ruler Analytics, B2B marketing attribution survey (2026).
The engagement began with an assessment and expanded into full project work. The company is now an ASCENT customer.