Case study · Hostfully · 2024 → 2026
Lead preservation
Visitors who started a demo request and left used to vanish. Now they stay in the pipeline.
- sales-qualified leads we used to lose
- 1,010sales-qualified leads we used to lose
- leads kept since 2024
- 3,802leads kept since 2024
- of website SQLs in 2026
- 31%of website SQLs in 2026
- of preserved leads become SQLs
- 27%of preserved leads become SQLs
- Role
- My idea. Designed it and led it with RevOps
- Team
- The second engineer on my team, RevOps and Sales
- Timeline
- 2024 → today
- Stack
- In-house WordPress plugin, Account Engagement (Pardot), Salesforce, Turnstile
01·The problem
Before 2024.
Only a couple of pages had a form, and a visitor who started a demo request but didn't finish simply disappeared.
Half-finished requests vanished
Someone could fill in their details, get distracted before picking a time and leave. Nothing was kept, so Sales never knew they existed.
No attribution
Paid ads had no conversion tracking, so nobody could say which channel actually brought a demo.
No protection
No CAPTCHA, no structure, almost nothing inside the forms except a chat modal.
“Just forms from Pardot with really nothing inside except a Qualified modal.”
02·The idea
A visitor who starts a request is already a lead. Keep them.
Before
- Visitor starts a demo request
- Leaves before booking
- Lost
Now
- Visitor starts a demo request
- Leaves before booking
- Kept as a lead
- Salesforce, with source and UTMs
- Sales follows up
- 1
One widget, everywhere
The in-house Book a Demo engine sits on every page: booking, dynamic time zones and CAPTCHA.
- 2
Details first
Contact details are saved when the form is sent, before the calendar step.
- 3
No time picked? Still a lead
If the visitor leaves, the lead still reaches Salesforce, tagged so Sales knows the demo wasn't booked.
- 4
Routed with context
Source and UTMs travel with it, so Sales knows where the visitor came from.
03·Results
1,010 sales-qualified leads that used to vanish.
Measured in Salesforce, by the lead source that marks a demo that was started but not booked.
of the website's SQLs came from lead preservation in 2026.
Share of website sales-qualified leads that came through lead preservation. 2026 to mid-October.
of preserved leads became SQLs in 2026, up from 15%.
Preserved leads that became sales-qualified, by year. The share that turned into SQLs doubled as the engine matured.
04·How it evolved
From a couple of forms to a conversion engine.
- 2022Request-a-demo forms on a couple of pages.
- 2023A chat-style booking modal, with A/B tests.
- 2024Forms move to Account Engagement, and lead preservation starts: 5% of website SQLs that year.
- Jan 2025Our own form handler replaces third-party form logic.
- Jun 2025The in-house Book a Demo engine: booking, time zones, attribution and Salesforce hand-off.
- Oct 2025Widget v1.2 rolls out across the site.
- Nov 2025Cloudflare Turnstile CAPTCHA on every form.
- Jun 2026Booking analytics, a listings-size question, a sticky Book a Demo bar and a review badge.
05·Attribution
Then the next question: which channel really brought them?
With RevOps, I analyzed the journeys behind our demo leads and proposed recording first and last touch in Salesforce.
demo leads analyzed over 180 days
convert on a different channel than the one they arrived from
average journey before converting
06·What it unlocked
The point was never just the feature.
Paid ads became measurable
Ad landing pages, Google and Meta conversion events and ad leads routed into Salesforce. With paid landing on the site, the website's share of new pipeline reached 76% in 2026.
A first- and last-touch model
The attribution analysis led to a proposal for first- and last-touch fields in Salesforce, plus AI assistants as their own channel.
Reused on a second site
The same routing and conversion tracking now run on a second company website.
More case studies
Every figure on this page traces back to a system of record: Salesforce, Chrome UX Report, PageSpeed captures, WordPress databases, Jira and git. Business figures are shown as percentages or indexes.