From website to demand engine.
A grant management platform didn't need a full-time marketing hire. It needed senior direction to join good execution to a strategy.
Client: SurePact | Sector: B2B SaaS, government and not-for-profit | Engagement: Fractional marketing lead | Duration: June 2025 to September 2026
The problem.
SurePact had a strong product and a great team. What it didn't have was a strategic marketing layer above the work already being delivered.
The business was not big enough to justify a full-time marketing leader, and not small enough for marketing to run itself. So marketing ran executionally. The tactics got done, and got done well. What was missing sat above them: what the brand stands for, who it is talking to sector by sector, how the product family is named and structured, and how to tell whether any of the spend is working.
That is not an execution problem. Without direction, good execution still produces a scattered program, because every piece is decided on its own merits rather than against one agreed line.
The approach.
The brief was to lead the whole marketing function fractionally, at roughly a day and a half a week. That constraint shaped everything.
Work was split into three tiers, with the top one protected: foundations for the always on day to day, initiatives for medium projects, and strategic projects for the transformative work. Without that split, business as usual consumes every available hour and nothing structural ever gets built.
Sequencing mattered more than speed. The website was the visible problem, so fixing it first was the obvious move and the wrong one. The work started instead with brand positioning and messaging, built through a sales team workshop and a technical sense check. Everything downstream was then derived from it: the site architecture, the campaign structure, the content calendar and the product naming system. One decision, applied consistently, rather than six disconnected ones.
What was built.
Brand positioning and messaging framework. Vision, brand truths, an insight matrix, personas and audience specific messaging. The source everything else was built from.
Product naming architecture. An endorsed brand model with three naming families, plus a four question tree that routes any new product to the right layer on commercial intent rather than how it currently ships, and a matrix setting how much marketing each layer warrants.
Website rebuild. Sector entry points for local government, not-for-profits and grantmakers, rebuilt product pages, restructured navigation and new lead magnet landing pages. The homepage went from carrying 54% of all traffic to 36%, as visitors landed instead on pages built for their sector.
CRM rebuild. A two funnel architecture separating inbound from outbound on identical stage definitions, with cleaned user flows and proper opt out paths.
Paid media restructure. Seven message pillars from the positioning framework, each run as a live market test, then priced and retired on the evidence.
Content and earned media. Double the contracted article volume, a quarterly white paper repurposed across six verticals, and editorial placements in the sector press.
Marketing P&L. The annual budget managed, and the forward plan built to scale it through a capital raise.
+120%
42%
84%
<3 mths
The results.
+222% growth in conversion actions year on year
Against 142% traffic growth. Conversion outgrew traffic, which means the quality of what the business attracted improved, not just the volume.
+120% growth in booked sales meetings
Comparing the most recent eight months against the first eight. Qualified conversations with buyers more than doubled.
42% of live deals acquired through marketing leads
Marketing leads accounted for only 6% of contacts. Inbound converts prospects to leads at 38.3% against outbound's 2.6% on identical stage definitions, and moves roughly six times faster to first qualification.
84% return on marketing investment
Measured on new annual recurring revenue in pipeline against the same year's marketing spend.
Under 3 months customer acquisition cost payback
Against a B2B SaaS benchmark of twelve to eighteen months, at a lifetime value to acquisition cost ratio of 10:1 where the benchmark is 3:1.
+222%
What made it work.
Sequence beat urgency. The website was the visible problem. Positioning was the actual one. Fixing the site first would have produced a better looking version of the same confusion.
Build once, use six times. A single piece of lifecycle research became a white paper, a generic cut, a maturity assessment, sector collateral and a content calendar across six verticals. That is how a day and a half a week covers a whole function.
Measure to the revenue end. Every channel looked defensible on its own platform metric. Only cost per customer told the truth.
Structure protects strategy. Without the three tier split, business as usual would have absorbed every hour and none of the transformative work would exist.
How these numbers were measured
Audience and conversion figures are from Google Analytics 4, comparing twelve months to 14 September 2026 against the same period prior. Funnel and channel figures are from HubSpot on a trailing 365 day basis. Return and acquisition cost are measured against the reconciled marketing budget for the same financial year. Where platform analytics and the CRM disagreed on session volume, the analytics figure was used, because the CRM was counting crawler traffic. Lifetime value is modelled on a three year contract at the conservative end of the client's own recorded deal values.
"We didn't need a full-time marketing hire. We needed direction, and someone senior enough to join up what we were already doing. Nicole did that. She works like an owner rather than a contractor, and she is honest with you about what the numbers say even when it isn't what you want to hear."
DAN PRITCHARD, CEO, SUREPACT