Google and Meta can bring you a lead. But what happens after that inquiry arrives? Who calls the customer? How quickly? Does the person understand what the customer needs? And if the next step is a store visit, a demonstration, or an appointment, who makes sure it actually happens?
That is where a lot of marketing money gets wasted. Not because demand was missing, but because the business did not have an organized way to handle it.
A click is not the end of the acquisition funnel. It is often the beginning of the difficult part. My conversation with Nilesh Patel, co-founder of LeadSquared, kept coming back to this point: generating interest and converting interest are two different capabilities. Brands need to invest in both.
Key Takeaways
Track contact, qualification, appointments, and onboarding to find where your acquisition funnel loses customers.
Respond at a speed that matches customer expectations, then prioritize effort using engagement and product-fit signals.
Buy technology for operational efficiency and consider building where the experience genuinely differentiates your business.
CRM results depend on process redesign, team adoption, and business outcomes, not software deployment alone.
Table of Contents
Why Customer Journeys Became More Complicated
Multi-Step Selling Is Not New
What the BYJU’S Funnel Teaches About Lead Conversion
Fix the First Contact Before Buying More Leads
CRM Is Bigger Than Retention Marketing
How AI Can Improve CRM and Sales Execution
How Lead Management Changes Across Industries
Build vs. Buy a CRM: Differentiation or Efficiency?
Measure CRM Success Through Business Outcomes
Where LeadSquared Fits in the CRM Landscape
Efficiency and Customer Experience Are Not the Same Thing
The CRM Implementation Mistakes That Keep Funnels Leaking
A Final Lesson About Curiosity
Fix the Journey, Not Just the Lead Count
Why Customer Journeys Became More Complicated
I remember my father buying a Maruti 800 in the early 1980s. He waited about six months after booking it. He did not even know how to drive when he bought the car. Test drives and comparisons were hardly the main concern. Getting the car was.
That is a very different market from the one brands operate in today.
When demand exceeds supply, much of the work is fulfillment. When customers have plenty of alternatives, businesses have to create demand, explain their product, retain attention, and help people make a decision. A customer interested in your product is probably speaking to two or three competitors as well.
Nilesh identifies several forces behind the growing need for CRM and lead management systems, particularly in India.
More businesses spending to grow: New-age companies increased marketing investment, creating volumes of inquiries that could no longer be handled informally.
The shift to digital and mobile: Customers began leaving signals across websites, apps, advertising platforms, and other digital touchpoints.
The economics of serving demand: Rising people costs made automation and operational efficiency more attractive, while cloud software made it easier to get started.
Competitive pressure: Digital-first entrants forced established companies to improve their technology and processes. Discount brokerages such as Zerodha are a good example.
More consumer choice also means more competition for attention. Earlier, the customer might have turned up at the only available supplier. Now the supplier has to work much harder to earn that visit.
The requirement is not necessarily a particular CRM product. It is an organized system that captures demand and moves it forward productively. Otherwise, a larger marketing budget simply creates a larger operational problem.
Multi-Step Selling Is Not New
It is tempting to think that complex sales funnels arrived with the internet. They did not.
Eureka Forbes was doing multi-step selling long before digital lead generation became common. A salesperson would visit a home, demonstrate the vacuum cleaner, explain why it was useful, and follow up before a purchase happened.
I still remember a demonstration in our small rented home. The salesperson gathered seven or eight people, including neighbors, and spent around 30 to 40 minutes showing the machine. There were another one or two follow-ups before we bought it for roughly ₹4,000 to ₹5,000.
The funny part is that the machine then spent years gathering dust. My father liked the demonstration more than my mother liked the idea of using the product.
But the sales lesson is important. The salesperson had to create understanding before creating a sale. Books and encyclopedia bundles often worked the same way. A representative might knock on many doors and make repeat visits to sell a relatively expensive purchase.
The internet changed how demand is sourced. It did not remove the need for education, qualification, demonstrations, and follow-up. It made coordinating those steps at scale much more important.
What the BYJU’S Funnel Teaches About Lead Conversion
BYJU’S is a useful historical example of how digital demand generation connected with a large assisted-sales operation. This is a lesson about that acquisition process, not a judgment on every aspect of the business.
Nilesh recalls demonstrating LeadSquared to a senior person at BYJU’S around September or October 2014. The company was young and wanted to move quickly. As he remembers it, payment had arrived by the time he returned to his office. The next day, their team was there to work through how the process should be configured.
That detail matters. They did not just buy software. They invested time in defining how they wanted to operate.
On the demand side, BYJU’S put substantial effort into educational content, search visibility, free digital material, apps, and offline events. But behind each inquiry sat another journey.
From an inquiry to a completed sale
I experienced that journey as a parent. After booking a session, a representative came home, made sure my wife, my son, and I were present, and assessed my son with a few problems. He explained the learning gaps, demonstrated the product, and followed up over the next few days.
Eventually, I negotiated a six-year package for about ₹1 lakh. My son did not use it for even three years, although I appreciated the quality of the educational content. Again, acquiring a customer and sustaining product usage are different challenges.
Looking at that purchase from the business side, Nilesh outlined the kinds of steps required:
Capture the inquiry: Record the interest generated through content, an app, an event, or another source.
Route it appropriately: Match the inquiry to the right team based on factors such as region and language.
Establish contact: Reach the person and begin a meaningful conversation.
Qualify the need: Understand the student’s class, requirements, family context, product fit, and ability to pay.
Schedule a visit or demonstration: Coordinate the next interaction and the people who need to attend.
Follow up: Address questions and help the family reach a decision.
Collect payment: Complete the commercial process rather than leaving it at verbal interest.
Now imagine doing this for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of inquiries. At every step, some people will drop off.
Some will not answer the phone. Some were only casually interested. Some need a different product. Others may agree to a demonstration but never attend. The job of lead management is to make those transitions visible and reduce avoidable losses.
At high volume, selection becomes the problem
Not every inquiry deserves the same amount of human effort.
App engagement can provide useful signals about which people are more interested than others. Those signals help a business decide where to focus attention. When inquiry volume becomes very high, trying to qualify everyone equally can reduce the return on sales effort.
Sometimes the problem is not getting more leads. It is choosing which leads to spend time with.
Nilesh had a memorable reminder of the scale of this operation in December 2020. Driving toward his parents’ village near Indore, he stopped for tea in Dhule and started speaking to a motorcyclist. The rider turned out to be a BYJU’S salesperson.
They discussed his work, targets, and sales process before Nilesh revealed that he had started LeadSquared. The salesperson could hardly believe the coincidence. For Nilesh, it was a very human glimpse of how far the distribution network reached beyond a central office or a dashboard.
Fix the First Contact Before Buying More Leads
One of the simplest questions a business can ask is also one of the most useful: of all the inquiries we received, how many became actual conversations?
First contact rate tells you whether your business is successfully connecting with the demand it has generated. Alongside it, you need to understand response time.
Nilesh sees businesses taking hours or days to respond. Someone inquires today and receives a call tomorrow, or two days later. By then, the person may have lost interest, forgotten the inquiry, or started talking to another provider.
Based on LeadSquared’s internal findings and his experience, establishing contact within five, ten, or fifteen minutes, depending on the category, can improve the customer’s inclination toward the brand. I have also seen situations where moving from hours to minutes lifted conversion by as much as three times. That is an observed outcome, not a universal promise.
The broader importance of quick follow-up is also explored in Harvard Business Review’s research on online sales leads.
There is an important qualification, though. Faster is not automatically better in every context. For certain high-value purchases, an immediate call may feel intrusive. The response should fit the category and the customer’s expectations.
The practical point is to stop treating response time as an accident. If you work hard to generate an inquiry, work just as hard on what happens next.
CRM Is Bigger Than Retention Marketing
People use CRM to mean different things because businesses serve customers in different ways.
In one business, customer service is the most important requirement. In another, loyalty drives value. In a third, the biggest challenge is acquiring customers through a complicated sales journey.
CRM can therefore include:
Acquisition and lead management: Turning interest into a customer relationship.
Customer service: Handling requests, complaints, and ongoing support.
Loyalty and retention: Encouraging continued engagement and repeat business.
Social engagement and listening: Responding where customers express interest, satisfaction, or frustration.
Some platforms specialize in one area. Others span several. That is why comparing every tool under a single CRM label can be misleading.
The real question is: which part of the customer lifecycle do you need to improve?
The source channel is not the whole journey
A customer may discover a car brand through an Instagram advertisement, fill out a website form, continue the conversation on WhatsApp, speak to a representative, and finally visit a dealership.
The channel of origin and the channel of engagement are different. Neither tells the complete story on its own.
When businesses buy separate systems for every function, customer identity and journey information can become fragmented. A unified platform or customer data approach aims to bring those signals together. But simply owning more systems does not guarantee that the business recognizes the same person across them.
How AI Can Improve CRM and Sales Execution
Nilesh offers a refreshingly simple way to think about AI. He is careful not to present it as an exhaustive technical framework, but it is a useful starting point.
Do existing work better or faster.
Do work that previously exceeded your capacity.
Consider a business with a large database of people it would like to contact. It may not have enough employees to make all those calls. AI-enabled calling creates a possibility that was previously impractical at that scale.
Or consider loan underwriting. A person reviewing an application may need information from five, six, or seven places. AI can bring that material together and summarize it, helping the person understand the case faster. The person can still inspect the underlying documents and investigate further.
There is a less comfortable implication too. AI makes it easier to send more emails, reach more people, and increase outreach volume. But increased activity is not automatically increased value.
If demand generation accelerates faster than the business can respond, the funnel still leaks. And sending too many messages can push potential customers away. AI does not remove the need for prioritization or thoughtful engagement.
How Lead Management Changes Across Industries
The basic need is similar across sectors: capture interest, understand the requirement, coordinate the next step, and prevent unnecessary drop-offs. But the details change substantially.
Financial services: conversion is not the end
In banking, financial services, and insurance, Nilesh breaks the lifecycle into three broad areas:
Demand and conversion: Bring inquiries for different products into an organized process and handle them efficiently.
Onboarding: Complete the documentation, checks, and other steps needed after someone decides to buy.
Service: Support the person after they become a customer.
Insurance makes the distinction clear. Understanding a policy and deciding to purchase it is one stage. Supplying documents and completing medical checks may be another. Service requests come later.
A system that records only the sale misses much of the actual customer journey. Product-specific rules, lending capacity, and regulation also shape how the process must work.
Healthcare: capacity and appointments shape the journey
Healthcare has a constraint that looks different from many financial products: provider capacity. There are only so many appointment slots, clinicians, and facilities available.
A patient may research a specialty, compare nearby clinics through a platform such as Practo, book an appointment, and then visit the provider. Appointment coordination is therefore central to the journey.
The duration of the relationship also matters. A single consultation is different from maternity care, where the patient may remain with the provider for months. Longer journeys require more coordination between call centers, appointment teams, and staff at the location.
Digital consultations can reduce some unnecessary travel, but the discussion also included a caution about relying on tools such as ChatGPT for medical questions. Convenience should not be confused with dependable clinical care.
Consumer brands: online interest must connect to offline action
At Lenskart, I saw how complicated an apparently simple eyewear purchase could become. Someone might begin online, need a store eye test, consider a home eye test, and move between online and offline before buying.
That required much more than a contact list. It required appointment systems and coordinated handoffs. Lenskart ultimately chose to build its own systems because owning much of the technology was important to the company.
Similar needs appear in home furnishings, beds, jewelry, and automobiles, especially when purchase values are substantial or customers want to experience the product.
Getting someone to a store may involve a call, a location message, a scheduled time, and follow-up. A car purchase may involve booking a test drive and arranging for the vehicle to come home.
Still, it is a mistake to assume every high-value buyer wants the same experience. Some people are comfortable buying expensive jewelry or even a car online. Others want physical reassurance. An omnichannel business needs to accommodate customer preference, not impose one fixed route.
Apps: identity makes engagement more useful
Apps can help brands recognize customers and understand deeper engagement. Jewelry brands such as CaratLane provide useful examples of app-led experiences.
In the examples I have encountered, app login rates have been much stronger than website login rates. The exact percentage varies, but the operational advantage is clear: once the customer is identified, the brand can connect engagement with subsequent interactions.
Features such as product videos, 3D experiences, sizing tools, and push notifications can support that relationship. The business can also create cohorts based on engagement or customer value and tailor its next interaction accordingly.
An app is not equally important in every category, though. Purchase frequency and the reason to return both matter.
Households: the customer is not always one phone number
Weddings expose another weakness in simplistic customer data models. The bride and groom are only part of the purchase opportunity. Parents, relatives, and other family members may all be involved, and the person paying may not be the person using the product.
This is where householding, or recognizing a family as a connected entity, becomes useful.
The same need appears elsewhere. A lender may need to connect an applicant and co-applicant. An education provider serving two siblings needs to recognize their shared family relationship while keeping each student’s details distinct.
If the system assumes that whoever owns the phone number is the entire customer, it can miss how the real decision is made.
Education: sometimes demand is not the bottleneck
Education itself contains several different segments: preschools, schools, colleges, ed-tech, vocational programs, test preparation, and corporate training. Their enrollment journeys are not interchangeable.
Test preparation is particularly competitive, with local providers, large national brands, physical centers, digital programs, and increasingly hybrid models.
PhysicsWallah illustrates a different kind of funnel problem. Nilesh describes a business where demand is already substantial and many students buy programs themselves. The challenge becomes handling that demand, deciding who needs assistance, and prioritizing the right students for the right programs.
When I met Alakh Pandey, he gently corrected me after I used the word “customer” a few times. He preferred “students” or “children.” That choice of language says something about how an organization sees the relationship.
Our discussion also went beyond enrollment. Competitive exam seats are limited. If many students engage with a paid program but only some can enter their preferred course, how can the organization help the others find suitable career paths? That extends the relationship beyond a single conversion.
Build vs. Buy a CRM: Differentiation or Efficiency?
The build-versus-buy decision becomes clearer when you separate two objectives: differentiation and efficiency.
If a business is starting without much existing infrastructure, buying a platform can be a sensible first step. It lets the team learn what an organized system can do before attempting to design everything itself.
For established businesses, Nilesh suggests a practical rule of thumb:
Buy for efficiency: When the requirement is a broadly solved operational problem rather than a source of competitive distinction.
Consider building for differentiation: When the technology directly shapes why customers perceive your business as different.
Combine the two where appropriate: Build an important customer-facing experience while buying the systems behind it.
A mobile app may be an important repeated touchpoint where a brand wants control over the experience and its instrumentation. That does not automatically mean it should also build every back-end workflow.
Before deciding, map the customer journey on paper or a whiteboard. Include chat, calls, social media, stores, field visits, and all the handoffs between them. This often reveals complexity that the initial build estimate overlooked.
And remember maintenance. Building the first version is one cost. Keeping it useful as products, integrations, regulations, and processes change is another.
Implementation frustration can tempt a team to start building immediately. But the right question remains: will the gains justify the total investment?
Measure CRM Success Through Business Outcomes
A successful CRM implementation should improve the business, not merely replace one screen with another.
Nilesh recommends beginning with the metrics that matter to the use case:
Customer acquisition cost: What does it cost to acquire a customer?
Turnaround time: How quickly does an inquiry receive attention and move through the process?
First contact rate: How much of the incoming demand becomes an actual conversation?
Win rate: How effectively do opportunities become purchases?
Stage-level drop-offs: Where do customers stop progressing?
Cost of conversion: Once the inquiry arrives, what does the non-marketing work of converting it cost?
That last distinction is useful. The cost of generating an inquiry is not the same as the cost of qualifying it, arranging a demonstration, following up, and closing it.
Break the journey into stages and examine the economics of each transition. That is how you find out whether the system is reducing waste or simply documenting it.
Where LeadSquared Fits in the CRM Landscape
The CRM market is crowded. There are accessible self-service tools, customer support products, marketing engagement platforms, and broad enterprise suites. Picking the best-known name does not answer whether it suits the problem.
Nilesh describes LeadSquared’s strength as consumer acquisition at scale, especially across complex online and offline journeys.
Its early customers needed to manage high inquiry volumes, multiple products, phone conversations, digital interactions, and field sales together. That shaped the product toward coordinating multi-step acquisition processes.
A dealership inquiry that becomes a home test drive, an insurance inquiry that moves through several channels, and a student enrollment subject to local requirements all need more than a basic pipeline. They need a system that understands the operational steps.
The product emerged through customer problems
Before LeadSquared, Nilesh and his colleagues had built Proteans, a software services company that was acquired in 2010. They then wanted to explore a software-first business.
The timing coincided with rising digital marketing expenditure in India. They built inquiry capture and basic engagement tools, then worked on moving those inquiries down the funnel.
Education companies were among the initial customers. Their requirements connected digital inquiry processing with phone-based selling and offline centers. Later customers, including BYJU’S and Vedantu, helped deepen that direction.
Nilesh is candid that the team did not begin knowing exactly what the final product should be. Some hypotheses worked; others did not. Understanding the customer’s problem, language, integrations, and urgency helped reveal where they could do better.
Sudhakar suggested the LeadSquared name, as well as the underlying company name, Market Expander. By the time of our discussion, the business had broadened considerably: Nilesh estimated education at under 30% of the business, BFSI at roughly 25% to 30%, and the US at about 25% to 30% of revenue. Those were approximate figures shared at that point, not current operating disclosures.
Efficiency and Customer Experience Are Not the Same Thing
One of Nilesh’s observations about the US market is that businesses tend to place greater emphasis on customer experience and are more willing to invest in it. He presents this as a broad personal comparison, not a rule about every company in either country. India is improving too.
Local processes and regulations also differ. Student enrollment in India is not identical to enrollment in the US. Financial services software must reflect the applicable regulatory environment. A workflow that works in one market cannot simply be copied everywhere.
But the deeper issue is how a business defines success.
A process can be efficient internally and fragmented externally
Nilesh’s own term-insurance purchase involved approaching four or five insurers and receiving very different experiences. Some digital interactions did not work properly. Some providers made many calls. One sent a representative, but pricing ultimately led him elsewhere.
Even with the insurer he selected, the end-to-end journey was not seamless. Questions, emails, and onboarding steps did not always connect smoothly. Yet individual parts, such as scheduling medical tests, receiving reports, and issuing the policy, worked well.
That is an important distinction. The process was not entirely broken. It was fragmented.
A business may optimize for faster calls and more deals per representative while leaving the customer to coordinate the gaps. My own car-insurance experience with digital-first companies such as Digit and Acko has felt simpler, which shows why the whole journey deserves attention.
Experience starts with the promise
We also discussed NPS as a growth-oriented question: would the customer recommend the product or service to friends and family? It connects experience with the willingness to bring other people into the business.
But before measuring recommendations, brands should examine the expectations they create.
Imagine a ₹100 product marketed as delivering a ₹500 experience. Even if it delivers something worth ₹300, the customer may feel disappointed. The comparison is with the promise, not merely the price paid.
Set the right expectation, deliver on it, and add a little more. Overpromising to close the sale can damage the relationship immediately afterward.
The CRM Implementation Mistakes That Keep Funnels Leaking
1. Starting without understanding the scope
Readiness is not just having a budget. The business needs to understand the journey, the teams involved, and the process it wants to run.
If the full scope is unclear, the software implementation is being asked to solve an undefined problem.
2. Treating adoption as automatic
Business buy-in is essential. People need a process they can actually follow, supported by training and encouragement.
Training 100 people in one call center is different from supporting distributed field teams across several states. Employee turnover adds another layer: every new representative needs to become ready to use the tools correctly.
Adoption is therefore an ongoing investment, not a one-time launch activity.
3. Forcing a support process into a sales system
This is one of the biggest mistakes I have seen.
A company starts with a support tool and puts two people on sales. Two become four, four become ten, and eventually it needs a proper sales system. But when it moves, it tries to reproduce the old support-style workflow exactly.
The company changes the tool without rethinking the process. Then it wonders why lead-to-conversion performance has not improved.
A platform contains learning from other implementations. Use that as a starting point, then bring your own requirements and differentiation. Do not preserve every old habit simply because it is familiar.
4. Copying another category’s funnel unchanged
Learning from another business is useful. Copying it mechanically is not.
An education product costing a few lakhs, eyewear costing a few thousand rupees, and a Mercedes require different levels of explanation, assistance, and reassurance. Their conversion economics are different too.
The system must also allow experimentation. Fast-growing companies learn, make practical compromises, and revise their processes. A useful platform should support that evolution rather than freeze the first version.
A Final Lesson About Curiosity
Some of the most revealing parts of our conversation came away from dashboards and funnels.
Nilesh spoke about the lasting impression of Raymond’s advertising and his preference for a small number of familiar Bata formal-shoe styles. His discovery of Rare Rabbit was almost accidental: a flight-booking mistake left him staying in a city without spare clothes, so he went to a nearby mall and bought what he liked before paying much attention to the brand.
That is a useful reminder for marketers. Customer behavior is shaped by memory, circumstance, convenience, and product appeal, not just the neat path we draw in a presentation.
His curiosity also led him to try learning Arabic, partly because writing from right to left felt like an interesting challenge. Among books, he returns to Peter Thiel’s Zero to One and enjoys the wit of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
When I asked what he would take away from our discussion, his answer was modest: perhaps he could speak more and share more of what he has learned. There is a great deal of practical knowledge inside companies that rarely gets articulated.
Fix the Journey, Not Just the Lead Count
Before increasing the marketing budget, ask what happens to the demand you already have.
Can you establish contact at the right time? Route the inquiry to the right person? Recognize the customer across channels? Complete the appointment, demonstration, payment, and onboarding without losing context?
And does the process feel sensible to the customer, not just efficient to your team?
The goal of CRM is not to collect more records. It is to help people move through the right journey with less friction and less wasted effort. That requires technology, but it also requires process design, business ownership, training, and a willingness to change how the work gets done.
