Case Study — SWS
A full acquisition-to-conversion funnel we built and still run today in a heavily regulated UK vertical — turning 325 introductions into more than 250 closed deals.
Overview
SWS is a UK accountancy firm operating in a heavily regulated sector. It's a market where the rules are tight, the compliance bar is high, and getting in front of the right customer legally is a job most people can't do.
Acquisition here is hard, and it's expensive. The firms that operate in it spend real money getting a single qualified person to raise their hand. That's the context for everything below — every lead in this funnel cost something to earn.
The challenge
In a regulated UK vertical, a qualified lead is expensive and hard-won. So the worst thing you can do is let one sit. That's exactly what was happening across the sector.
Introductions would arrive, then go cold before anyone worked them properly. A pipeline full of people who'd put their hand up, dying because follow-up was slow, inconsistent, or never came at all.
Here's the part that stings. Every one of those leads was already paid for. The money to earn them was spent up front. Then they leaked out the back of the funnel, unchased, and the spend went with them. Money in, nothing out.
The instinct in that situation is always the same: get more leads. It's the wrong instinct. The problem was never the top of the funnel. It was everything that happened after a lead arrived.
What changed
We made one change that reframed the whole thing. Stop asking "how do we get more leads?" and start asking "why is a single lead we already have allowed to die?"
That's the entire idea. The leads were fine. What was missing was the discipline of what happens after one arrives: how fast it gets worked, how relentlessly it gets followed up, and what happens to it when it doesn't close first time. So we built the system that does that — and never lets go.
How we run it
A lead goes cold fast. So this funnel responds the moment someone raises their hand — not an hour later, not the next morning. First contact happens while intent is still hot, every time, seven days a week.
No introduction dies unchased. Every lead gets structured, persistent follow-up until it either closes or gives a clear no. The gaps where leads normally leak out — the second attempt nobody makes, the message nobody sends — are closed.
A lead that didn't close in week one isn't dead. It's just older. The system goes back through aged leads systematically and pulls out the deals still sitting in there. This is where the money nobody else collects gets collected.
The re-activation proof
of deals closed in a recent two-week window came from leads that first entered the funnel 4 to 8 weeks earlier — introductions everyone else would have written off as dead.
A third of the closed business, in a two-week window, from leads you'd already given up on. The leads you already paid for are worth more than the ones you're chasing next. This is the number that proves it.
"The funnel doesn't just bring people in. It closes them, and it keeps closing the ones we'd have written off. A third of what we're signing now came in weeks ago."
Robert — SWS
The results
This isn't a campaign that ran once and got screenshotted. It's live. It runs seven days a week and it closes at a rate of 15 a day.
Put the numbers together and the picture is simple: 325 introductions into the funnel, more than 250 of them closed. Present-tense, still going, still closing.
And 15 a day isn't the funnel's ceiling — it's the client's. The system delivers more than the firm can currently process. When your funnel outgrows what the business can handle, that's the strongest signal there is that the machine works.
Why it works
Anyone can generate a lead. The money was never there. It's in what happens in the minutes, days, and weeks after one arrives.
Speed, so intent doesn't cool. Follow-up, so nothing dies unchased. Re-activation, so the leads you already paid for get worked again instead of forgotten. And underneath all of it, a refusal to let a single paid-for lead leak out the back.
That discipline is the whole product. It's not specific to this client or this sector. It's the exact system PowerOps installs on any pipeline where leads are leaking out faster than they're closing.
The bridge to you
You've seen what it did here. Now think about your own funnel. The enquiries that never got called back in time. The quotes that went quiet. The leads from six weeks ago that everyone assumes are dead.
They're not dead. They're just unchased. Same leak, different business. The system that plugged it here plugs it for you.
Get started
Give me 30 minutes. I'll walk your funnel with you, find every place a paid-for lead is leaking out, and put a figure on each one.
The audit is $1,500. If you go ahead with the build, every penny comes off the price — so if we fix what I find, the audit costs you nothing.
Book my audit. $1,500, credited in full