The $107M pipeline, proven to the dollar.
A national broker-dealer wanted pipeline it could prove, not just report. As the first dedicated lead-generation hire, I built the demand engine across two business lines and the attribution model that let Sales agree it was real: $107M in marketing-influenced pipeline, $22M in closed-won at 27.57 times return on ad spend, and the 2024 Marketing Disruptor of the Year award.
Independence with the platform to back it, for advisors who answer to clients, not a quota.
See the platformRecreation for portfolio use. Original brand mark, contact details, and disclosures removed.
Not the original asset. Rebuilt in a neutral treatment so the idea and craft show, with every identifying and regulated element stripped.
The problem
The mandate was simple to say and hard to survive: fill the pipeline, prove marketing sourced it, and do it for less every quarter. The proving was the hard part. Marketing and Sales counted the same funnel two different ways, so every quarterly review turned into an argument about whose number was real instead of a conversation about where to spend next. Underneath that, the plumbing leaked. One afternoon I opened the CRM and found twelve hundred qualified leads mis-staged and excluded from every nurture, revenue we had already paid to earn, sitting invisible. You cannot defend a pipeline you cannot see, and you cannot scale one nobody agrees on.
The move
I built the engine and the scoreboard at the same time. Over two years I shipped more than sixty integrated campaigns across paid, email, website, and webinars, roughly double what the function had ever produced, with no new headcount. For the niche, high-intent audience I ran account-based campaigns against named accounts and built lead magnets around the exact research those buyers were already hunting for, then scored and nurtured every lead through Salesforce so nothing stalled in the gap between channel and CRM.
The part that made it stick was the attribution. I co-authored a marketing-originated versus marketing-influenced model with Sales, in the quarterly business reviews, so both teams read the same number the same way. Once the scoreboard was agreed, the efficiency work had somewhere to land: I drove cost per opportunity down 56 percent, from $32.5K to $14.25K, and kept tightening the funnel every quarter instead of just feeding it.
The result
The engine drove $107M in marketing-influenced pipeline and $22M in closed-won revenue at 27.57 times return on ad spend. MQL-to-SQL conversion rose 511 percent, from 45 to 275. The account-based program generated 34 percent of total leads and 26 percent of opportunities, and the all-in budget returned 17.3 to 1. The work earned the 2024 Marketing Disruptor of the Year and Marketing Department of the Year Stevie Awards, the ANA B2 Award for Lead Generation, and finalist recognition from the Drum and Wealthmanagement.com. None of it moved until the pipeline was something both teams could prove.
Building a demand engine that turns spend into pipeline both teams can prove is the work I do now at applygro.