Inside a Series B Pipeline Engine
A big data observability company had the board mandate, the target account list, and the GTM tech stack ready to go. ELEVATE supplied the operating team, opened enterprise conversations across two regions inside the first month, and generated $1.41 million in opportunity pipeline in the first quarter.
ABOUT THE COMPANY
The client builds monitoring software for large data systems. When our engagement started, the category was young enough that buyers recognized the problem long before they recognized there was a product that actually solved it. This made building brand awareness – and pairing that brand awareness with problem awareness – critical.
With a compact internal sales team and a purpose-built GTM tech stack including Demandbase, Salesforce, ZoomInfo, and Drift, the company had assembled the infrastructure for account-based marketing at scale.
Additionally, their Series B raise arrived with an ambitious enterprise acquisition plan attached to it.
A GROWTH PLAN READY FOR AN OPERATING TEAM
Throughout their Series B, the company had clear board directives, a target account list, and the GTM tech infrastructure. What they needed next was an operating team to activate all of it, and they wanted that team running quickly, since each week of delay pushed the funded growth plan further out.
Our discovery process surfaced five specific gaps between the infrastructure they had built and the pipeline they wanted from it:
- An outbound function still to be built. The company intended to build, operate, and eventually bring a sales development function in-house. Standing it up internally meant creating the playbook, the management layer, and the operating experience at the same time as running the program.
- A data foundation that needed work. Their Salesforce instance carried inconsistent contact records, gaps in account coverage, and an enrichment process still to be defined. Outreach at volume depended on fixing data integrity first.
- An account list waiting for activation. The company had identified 5,000 marketing-qualified accounts (MQAs) in Demandbase, and reaching them called for a coordinated strategy across two regions.
- A market that required education before pitching. Big data observability was a category buyers were still learning to name. Outreach had to build awareness of the problem, along with the brand, and earn trust before it could drive pipeline.
- A complex buying committee. Targets included C-suite executives, analysts, and engineers. Every campaign had to speak across several stakeholder levels at once, which called for separate messaging tracks and a multi-threaded approach with real coordination behind it.
WHY THEY CHOSE ELEVATE
The company weighed its options: hire a sales development team directly, contract a pay-per-meeting agency, or bring in a managed execution partner. Each option carried a different trade-off between speed, control, and risk, and the board timeline made speed the deciding factor.
ELEVATE has executed B2B revenue programs since 1995, exclusively for companies running complex enterprise sales cycles, so the model already matched the long, multi-stakeholder buying process they were selling into.
Our teams arrive built, managed, and ready to execute on proven methodologies and frameworks, which meant activation in weeks instead of quarters. Also, coverage across North America and EMEA came as one team under one structure rather than two separate hiring efforts.
Most importantly for a company that intended to own this function eventually, we build their programs around ELEVATE’s Right-Housing strategy, where each initiative is designed to either be in-housed, automated, permanently outsourced, or temporarily outsourced with the intention to be transferred in-house on the client’s own timeline.
BUILDING THE PROGRAM AROUND WHAT THE DATA SHOWED
ELEVATE deployed a dedicated team using our CONNECT methodology, our new customer acquisition motion. Because speed of execution shaped the whole plan, we designed the program quickly and began generating results within the first month across North America and EMEA.
After launch, the program ran on measurement and four findings shaped how it operated:
- The practitioner opened the door before the executive did. For example, during one illustrative quarter, engineers accounted for 96 of the booked meetings and 15 of the 20 opportunities created, while executive and VITO targets produced 27 meetings and two opportunities. In a category buyers were still learning to name, the person living with the problem daily proved the most productive entry point. Executive conversations then followed once the technical case was established.
- Time to meeting drove attendance. Average time from first contact to meeting ran 11.4 days across the quarter. Meetings scheduled roughly a week out produced the highest attendance rate, while those set about a week and a half out produced the highest rate of missed meetings. Booking windows were compressed deliberately as a result.
- Regional coverage required regional calibration. Meetings booked split across the United States at 124 and EMEA at 53, and each region carried its own attendance and conversion profile. Accordingly, messaging and cadence were tuned per region rather than run as one global sequence.
- Structured testing kept the program improving. ELEVATE’s R&D group fed new outreach strategies into the team, which led to a 36% increase in the month over month.
Underneath the tactics, the delivery model itself removed exposure the company would otherwise have taken on, including solving for:
- Hiring risk. ELEVATE brought a proven, managed team with experience across the capability sets this kind of program requires, which removed a full cycle of vetting, onboarding, and early attrition.
- Ramp risk. The program booked its first meetings inside 30 days, so the Series B raise funded pipeline rather than a hiring cycle.
- Execution risk. When priorities shifted, ELEVATE adjusted inside the existing team structure, within weeks rather than quarters.
- Data risk. Salesforce records were cleaned, enriched, and maintained by the same team running outreach, so list quality and campaign execution stayed inside one accountability chain.
AN EMBEDDED, OPERATIONAL ENGINE
The client kept full control of strategy and priorities. ELEVATE supplied the operating layer and precision execution beneath it. When leadership wanted to change the go-to-market approach, the team adjusted within weeks.
Key elements of the program included:
- Direct pairing with the client’s account executives (AEs). One-to-one and one-to-two pairing ran across all regions, with ELEVATE team members embedded in the client’s Slack, joining their quarterly business reviews, and coordinating daily with counterpart AEs.
- Full ownership of data acquisition and enrichment. That work covered cleaning Salesforce records, sourcing new contacts, and building systematic coverage across 5,000 target accounts.
- Multi-stakeholder outreach calibrated across the full buying committee. Separate messaging tracks ran for engineers, operations leaders, and executives, each written to educate a market still learning to articulate its own problem.
- Tactical contribution to messaging, targeting, and go-to-market execution. In practice, the team operated as the client’s sales development infrastructure, sitting inside their systems and their cadence rather than reporting in from outside.
- A management layer that held performance accountable. Global coverage ran under one structure with weekly reporting into the account team, which kept supervisory load off the client’s leadership.
$1.41 MILLION IN OPPORTUNITY PIPELINE IN A SINGLE QUARTER
The figures below show the impact of the program on one quarter:
185
MEETINGS BOOKED
45%
MEETING OCCURRENCE RATE
84
SQLs CONVERTED
24%
OF ACCEPTED SQLs CONVERTED INTO SALES QUALIFIED ACCOUNTS
20
OPPORTUNITIES CREATED
$1.41M
IN OPPORTUNITY PIPELINE
11.4 DAYS
AVERAGE TIME FROM CONTACT TO MEETING
BUILT TO TRANSFER
Over the life of the engagement, the company established a robust and sustainable right-housing approaching, including scaling its outbound function, building the internal capability to sustain it, and eventually bringing the program in-house on its own timeline, with a team that already knew how to run it.
Within two years, they reached the point where they could operate the function themselves. ELEVATE shortened the path and carried the execution risk while that internal capability took shape.
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