From Invisible to Inevitable - Full-Funnel Growth for a B2B SaaS Fintech

The Challenge: Where We Started

The business was underperforming across every critical growth metric before engagement began.

Blended CAC was sitting at $8,400 - more than 2.5x the SaaS benchmark of $3,200 - with no channel-level visibility, meaning there was no way to identify where budget was being wasted.

MQL-to-SQL Rate was just 9% against a benchmark of 20-30%, driven by an ICP so broad that leads were qualified by volume rather than actual fit.

Demo-to-Closed-Won Rate was 11%, well below the 20-25% benchmark, because the wrong stakeholders were consistently in the room and champions were never pre-sold before calls.

LTV:CAC Ratio stood at 1.8:1 - the business was growing at a structural loss. A healthy SaaS business requires 4:1 or higher to be considered scalable.

Organic Share of Pipeline was just 4%, against a benchmark of 30–50%, with zero SEO infrastructure and no category presence in search.

Time-to-First-Value was 47 days - more than three times the sub-14-day benchmark - creating onboarding drag that directly suppressed activation and expansion revenue.

Attribution was last-touch only, leaving 67% of pipeline touchpoints invisible and making every budget decision unreliable.

Root Cause Analysis

The brand's stagnation was not a budget problem. It was four interlocking structural failures that more spend could not fix.

1. The ICP Illusion

The company's stated ICP was "finance teams at mid-market companies." In practice, campaigns targeted everyone from startup office managers to enterprise VPs of Finance. The result was algorithmically destructive. Ad platforms were trained on demo requests that sales could not close, creating a feedback loop where marketing celebrated volume while sales rejected quality. MQL had become a metric that actively misled leadership.

2. The Demand Capture Trap

96% of the marketing budget was allocated to capturing existing demand: branded search, intent-based retargeting, and review platforms. The company was fishing only in the pool of buyers already in-market. In a category where fewer than 3% of the total addressable market is actively evaluating solutions at any given moment, this left 97% of potential customers outside the brand's reach. There was no engine for demand creation.

3. The Demo Graveyard

A disproportionate share of demos landed with the wrong stakeholder. Typically an analyst or controller who lacked the authority to champion the product internally. The sales team ran repeated education cycles instead of closing. Without a pre-demo sequence to educate and qualify the champion before the call, every demo started from zero, and a significant portion died in the internal evaluation stage.

4. Zero Organic Infrastructure

The brand had no SEO presence, no content authority, and no thought leadership. Competitors owned the SERP for every high-intent query the ICP ran during the research phase. This brand was invisible at the exact moment buyers formed their shortlists. In B2B SaaS, absence from the research phase means absence from the shortlist.

The Solution: The Vicious Full-Funnel SaaS Architecture

Vicious Marketing deployed a structured, phased buildout across the full revenue funnel. We started with precision before touching a single campaign.

Phase 1: Foundation - ICP Sharpening and Measurement Infrastructure

ICP Redefinition. Analysis of the top 20% of customers by LTV revealed a tight profile: finance operations teams at B2B companies with 150 to 800 employees processing high transaction volumes. This segment represented 40% of historical pipeline by volume but drove 78% of retained ARR. All future campaigns were calibrated exclusively to this profile.

CRM-to-Platform Signal Bridge. We implemented a server-side data integration connecting Salesforce closed-won and expansion events to Meta, Google, and LinkedIn campaign APIs. Ad platforms were trained on actual revenue signals instead of demo requests. Platform algorithms were retrained within six weeks, and bid strategies shifted to optimize against closed-won ARR.

Multi-Touch Attribution Model. We deployed a framework that tracked prospect touchpoints from first organic interaction through to closed-won. The finding: 41% of closed-won deals consumed at least two organic content assets before requesting a demo.

Phase 2: Funnel Reconstruction

Demand Creation Engine. We launched a B2B content authority program targeting three non-branded keyword clusters mapped to ICP research behavior. These assets were built to rank for queries the ICP runs during the 60-day pre-shortlist research window, engineered to answer specific objections appearing at each stage of the buying journey.

Paid Demand Capture, Rebuilt. LinkedIn campaigns moved from broad job-title targeting to a company-signal model. We targeted finance decision-makers at companies exhibiting growth triggers like recent funding, headcount expansion, and new CFO hires. Cost-per-qualified-demo dropped 44% within the first cycle.

The Pre-Demo Nurture System. We built a 14-day pre-demo email sequence triggered at the point of booking. The sequence delivered an ROI calculator, a product video addressing the prospect's specific pain point, and a reply-prompt to identify internal decision-making authority. Nurtured demos converted at 2.4x the rate of cold demos.

Champion Enablement Layer. For deals stalling in evaluation, we built assets for the champion to share upward: business case templates, CFO-facing ROI summaries, and integration checklists. Average sales cycle length dropped by 19 days.

Phase 3: Expansion and Compounding

Activation Intervention. The 47-day time-to-first-value suppressed expansion potential. We identified that 61% of new accounts failed to complete core integrations by day 14. Redesigning the onboarding flow with an integration-first prompt reduced time-to-first-value to 11 days.

Expansion Trigger Campaigns. Using usage data, we identified signals that predicted expansion readiness. Accounts hitting a specific usage threshold were 3.4x more likely to upgrade within 60 days. We built an automated sequence triggered by this threshold. Net Revenue Retention improved by 18 percentage points.

Detailed Results and Metrics

Primary Metrics

Every metric that was broken at the start of the engagement moved significantly in the right direction.

Blended CAC dropped from $8,400 to $3,276 - a 61% reduction - bringing the business within benchmark range for the first time and fundamentally changing the unit economics of growth.

MQL-to-SQL Rate improved from 9% to 13.8%, a 53% increase, as a direct result of tightening the ICP and training platforms on revenue signals rather than demo volume.

Demo-to-Closed-Won Rate rose from 11% to 17.4%, a 58% improvement, driven by the pre-demo nurture system and champion enablement assets that ensured the right people were prepared before every call.

LTV:CAC Ratio grew from 1.8:1 to 4.3:1 - a 139% improvement - crossing the critical 4:1 threshold for the first time and unlocking a board-level conversation about the next funding round.

Organic Share of Pipeline jumped from 4% to 44%, a 40-point increase, as the content authority program began ranking for high-intent ICP search queries and delivering qualified pipeline at zero marginal cost.

Time-to-First-Value was cut from 47 days to just 11 days - a 77% reduction - after redesigning the onboarding flow with an integration-first approach.

Net Revenue Retention improved from 104% to 122%, an 18-point gain, driven by expansion trigger campaigns activated by usage-based signals.

Key Success Factors

1. ICP Precision Before Channel Activation

Broad targeting in B2B SaaS does not just waste budget. It actively poisons platform algorithms and erodes sales team confidence. Precision is not a constraint on scale. It is the precondition for it.

2. Training Platforms on Revenue, Not Proxies

Connecting closed-won ARR events back to ad platforms fundamentally changed who the algorithms found. When you optimize for the wrong signal, you scale the wrong outcome.

3. The Pre-Demo Sequence as a Force Multiplier

What happens between booking and the call determines whether the demo closes or dies. A structured system that educates and pre-sells the champion is one of the highest-ROI interventions available.

4. Organic as Structural CAC Reduction

When 44% of qualified pipeline arrives at zero marginal cost, the blended economics of the entire program improve permanently. An organic moat in B2B SaaS is a financial infrastructure decision, not a content play.

Conclusion: Systems Win. Campaigns Don't.

The SaaS fintechs that will own their categories are not the ones running the most campaigns. They are the ones that have built acquisition and expansion systems with the same rigor their engineering teams bring to product.

This client did not need a new agency running the same campaigns. They needed a different operating model for growth. That is what we built. The brands that get the infrastructure right, and then scale on top of it, do not just grow faster. They make their growth structurally cheaper and harder for competitors to match.

"Before working with Vicious Marketing, we had campaigns. After, we had a system. The difference showed up in pipeline quality, in CAC, and in our board conversations. We crossed 4:1 LTV:CAC for the first time, and organic now drives nearly half our demos."