How Passbolt cut its cost per lead by 45% with paid media and Sales Ops

Passbolt, a software company in the cybersecurity market, increased lead generation from paid channels by 24% in six months, while bringing its cost per lead down by 45% over the same period. Its new sales pipeline is used by 100% of the sales team. These results come from a setup deployed by Growth Room since February 2026, combining paid acquisition (LinkedIn Ads, Google Ads), outbound prospecting, nurturing and a rebuild of the sales process in HubSpot.

About Passbolt

Passbolt publishes software for companies in the cybersecurity market. Its business is B2B: it sells to organisations, not to individuals. The product is technical, and the teams who will use it evaluate it before adopting it.

In this market, a purchase involves several people: those who use the tool day to day, and those accountable for the company's security. The decision builds over time. An inbound lead is not a customer, it is the start of a qualification cycle.

The starting point

The stated need was to accelerate acquisition. Not simply to generate more contacts, but to increase the flow of qualified leads without the sales team losing control of how those leads are handled.

That acceleration required reliable CRM and operational foundations. As long as sales stages and CRM tracking are not stabilised, raising the volume at the top only loads a pipeline nobody can read. The two projects were therefore run together: acquisition on one side, structure on the other.

Growth Ads: LinkedIn Ads and SEA

LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn Ads is used to address identified profiles and companies, in a market where the relevant audience is narrow. Targeting is built on the job functions concerned by the subject, not on a broad audience.

SEA

SEA captures demand that already exists: people searching for an answer to a problem they have already identified. The two channels play different roles and are not traded off against each other.

Steering on cost per lead

Campaigns are steered on two figures read together: lead volume and cost per lead. That pairing is what allows one to improve without degrading the other. Over six months, lead generation from paid rose by 24% while cost per lead fell by 45%.

Outbound and nurturing

Outbound prospecting covers the accounts that never raise their hand. It is steered on SQLs: a contact is only passed to sales once the need and the decision maker are qualified.

Contacts that are not ready are not dropped from the database. They enter nurturing sequences and return to the qualification flow when their situation changes. Leads generated by paid feed the same circuit.

Sales Ops: rebuilding the process and the pipeline

Structuring the sales process

We defined the stages of the sales cycle and the criteria for moving from one to the next: what makes a lead an SQL, what makes an SQL a customer. The same rules apply across the team, which makes one period comparable with another.

Rebuilding the sales pipeline

The pipeline was rebuilt in HubSpot around those stages. A pipeline is only worth something if it is used as designed: this one is used by 100% of the sales team. That adoption is what makes pipeline data usable for steering acquisition.

Results

• +24% leads generated by paid channels over six months.
• -45% cost per lead over the same six months.
• 100% adoption of the new sales pipeline by the sales team.

The engagement has been running since February 2026, with the same approach: campaigns judged on the qualified leads they produce and on what those leads cost, and a single pipeline shared by the whole sales team.

Looking to generate qualified B2B leads?

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