75% Faster Order-to-Cash & 8x SDR Conversion
How structural alignment and ruthless qualification criteria transformed a scaling SaaS revenue engine.
A Scaling SaaS Company With a Fragmented Tech Stack
The company had grown quickly, but its revenue infrastructure hadn't kept pace.
What looked like a scaling problem on the surface was actually an architecture problem underneath.
Sales and Finance were siloed.
The order-to-cash process was highly manual, with handoffs between teams creating errors at every stage and delaying revenue recognition by weeks.
There was no single source of truth — the CRM said one thing, the billing system said another, and leadership couldn't trust either.
Meanwhile, top-of-funnel SDRs were pushing unqualified volume.
Qualification criteria were vague enough to let almost anything through, flooding Account Executives with low-intent pipeline.
The result: a dismal 2% SDR conversion rate and a sales team wasting time on prospects that were never going to close.
The company wasn't short on tools. It was short on architecture, governance, and someone who had seen this pattern before and knew how to fix it.
System Architecture & Operator-Led Governance
Nicholas Gollop led a focused engagement to redesign the revenue architecture from qualification through to cash collection.
The work moved in two parallel tracks:
1. System Architecture: Stripping Out Redundant Tech
The existing tech stack was creating data silos, not solving them.
Nicholas stripped out redundant SaaS tools that duplicated functionality and introduced conflicting data.
He rebuilt the contract-to-cash workflow to create a single source of truth between the CRM and the billing engine — eliminating the manual handoffs between Sales, Finance, and Operations that were causing errors and delaying revenue recognition.
The handoff from signed contract to first invoice became a single automated trigger rather than a chain of emails, spreadsheets, and hope.
2. Incentives & Governance: From Volume to Quality
The SDR strategy was broken at a structural level.
The team was incentivised to push volume, not quality.
Nicholas shifted the approach by implementing strict, operator-led qualification gates with explicit criteria tied to buying signals, budget authority, and timeline.
The result: SDRs stopped flooding Account Executives with bad pipeline.
AEs stopped wasting cycles on prospects that were never going to close.
The entire top-of-funnel became a filter for quality, not a firehose of noise.
The approach was advisory-led with selective execution.
The structural decisions and architecture came from Nicholas.
The day-to-day implementation was owned by the internal team, with validation at each stage to prevent costly missteps.
75% Faster. 8x Conversion. Trusted Data.
The redesigned architecture delivered measurable results within weeks:
- 75% reduction in order-to-cash time — What previously took weeks from signature to first invoice now happens in days. Manual handoffs eliminated. Revenue recognised faster.
- SDR conversion rate increased from 2% to 16% — Strict qualification gates meant SDRs focused on the right prospects. Account Executives received pipeline they could actually close.
"The efficiency gains were incredible... My Order to Cash time dropped by 75%, and he took my SDR conversion rate from a mere 2% to 16%." — Mike R., Head of Operations
The results weren't the product of new technology.
They came from better architecture, clearer ownership, and structural decisions grounded in having seen what works and what doesn't across dozens of B2B SaaS revenue environments.
Revenue is an Operating System.
If your systems are siloed and conversion rates are flat, we need to look at your architecture.
Let's talk.
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