The One Where I Built the Business Case For Investing in Marketing

The problem: One product had grown to hundreds of installed units on pure word-of-mouth, with zero paid marketing spend, ever. Slow growth is great but not the way to achieve the 142% end-of-year growth the business was banking on.

The remedy: A phased H2 marketing plan built around a surround-sound strategy (repeated exposure, ecosystem depth, channel reinforcement) and a break-even model tight enough to defend in front of finance.

The result: We’ll never know! My role was eliminated shortly after. I don't have a conversion lift to report here, but what I do have is the plan itself, showcasing how I approach a GTM strategy that drives pipeline. 

The details: The product had dozens of case studies showcasing real value - she was ready for primetime but had never stepped into the paid spotlight. It grew entirely through existing sales relationships and referrals, but the business goal was to more than 10x the sales in the second half of the year. Ain’t no way we would get there through organic measures alone.

When I looked at the data, the lack of inbound made total sense: Google Keyword Planner showed the core pain point being searched just 10x a month. And the product landing page was pulling just a third of the traffic of the company's other product lines despite being the easiest-to-close and most organically promoted product. Houston: we have a visibility problem. 

When the target market isn’t even problem-aware, you need to think creatively about how to interrupt their thinking, educate them on an invisible issue they were overlooking, reiterate that with multiple touchpoints, and then convert to a customer.

I didn't pitch a generic awareness campaign. We had built plenty of that organically. This was a perfect opportunity to put some dollars behind a market-ready product to really put some bulk in the pipeline. 

My first step: I built the math. And then I built the story around it.

Make the ROI impossible to argue with. (Real deal numbers redacted to protect business intel) I modeled break-even three ways (small enterprise, mid-portfolio, large enterprise) and showed that a single conservative mid-portfolio deal paid back the entire budget in under nine months. One target enterprise deal alone returned 5.7x the budget, based on CLV.

Build a surround sound campaign, not a single channel bet. The plan sequenced lead matching, direct mail, LinkedIn awareness and retargeting, a sponsored podcast episode, a trade magazine placement, and a lead-gen webinar across six months. Each touchpoint was designed to hand off to the next, so a prospect who saw the direct mail piece in July was primed to convert on the LinkedIn retargeting ad in November. My wish-upon-a-star goal was a prospect thinking “geez these guys are everywhere.”

Ask for less than the full number. Rather than requesting the full budget upfront, I structured the ask as a Phase 1 release with a defined 30-day check-in and 60-day go/no-go gate before the rest of the budget unlocked. This included MQLs, SQLs, and pipeline value tracked monthly, with explicit benchmarks. It was designed to de-risk the ask for a company that had never spent a marketing dollar on this product, by putting my own accountability in writing before I asked for the money.

And I’m a frank gal, so I was upfront about what I couldn't guarantee. I couldn’t promise exact conversion rates, which channel would outperform, how fast the market would respond because this was the product’s first paid program. I didn’t have historical paid campaigns to build off of. (Yet another solid reason to test this investment: create baseline data that could inform future GTM decisions.)

The plan didn't get funded, and I didn't get the chance to run it. But real talk: the thinking behind it — reading the demand signal, building a defensible break-even model, structuring the ask to reduce risk instead of just requesting a number, and designing accountability checkpoints before anyone asked me to — is the same thinking I'd bring to the next budget I'm handed.