The board of Lightbits Labs, a B2B on-prem-focused intelligent storage company, tasked the company with a pivot to a SaaS cloud sales structure within a 3-month timeline. Pivoting our brand identity from an on-premise storage provider to a cloud-focused solution was crucial for staying competitive. Still, it also carried significant risks, including the potential to alienate existing enterprise customers, create market confusion, and lose momentum against larger cloud competitors. In addition, budget reprioritizations led to a 50% decrease in our performance marketing budget for the year. Our entire database, messaging, and sales structure were based around on-prem targeting and messaging. This mismatch was felt in an immediate drop-off in marketing engagement and sales pipeline. We needed to build an entire go-to-market motion from the ground up with only half the growth budget we had access to the previous year.
In order to revise our marketing database, I partnered with the sales and business development teams to secure a budget to bring on HG Insights and integrate it with our systems. HG Insights allowed us to identify high-value leads within companies that met our criteria. I then partnered with the product team to create message-testing campaigns using low-cost channels (such as email, social, and SEM) targeting the new leads to identify the pain points motivating engagement. With that data in hand, I led a strikeforce consisting of executive, product, and sales management to rework our company's messaging criteria and sales enablement documentation. Finally, I used the newly revised lead database to disseminate that messaging to our newly identified target audience.
The initiatives resulted in a 50% increase in lead pipeline velocity and triple-digit growth in marketing-attributed revenue.
Leadership and Strategy:
• Managed growth, operations, and social team members/vendors and budgets and built cross-functional collaboration with sales, product, and executive leadership to develop agile go-to-market strategies and sales enablement programs.
• Spearheaded a holistic, cross-channel marketing strategy—encompassing brand positioning, paid media, SEO, direct marketing, account-based marketing (ABM), email automation, and advanced marketing technologies. This resulted in an 800% increase in marketing-attributed meetings and a 50% increase in lead pipeline velocity.
• Led company-wide rebranding/repositioning from a primarily on-prem provider to a cloud leader in intelligent storage. This initiative accelerated the marketing-attributed pipeline, leading to triple-digit growth in marketing-attributed revenue.
Growth Marketing & Community Building:
• Email Marketing: Leveraged data analytics and personalized content to boost email open rates from 8% to 30% and click-through rates from 0.8% to over 3%.
• Digital Advertising (PPC): Achieved click-through rates 150% above industry averages by implementing innovative targeting strategies.
• Social Media & Community Engagement: Drove a compound quarterly growth of 4% in followers by nurturing community participation and user-generated content.
• Revamped global events strategy, leading to a 200% surge in event attendance and a 100% increase in meetings booked at live events.
