Fractional Assignments
Fractional · B2B SaaS · Series A
From founder-led marketing to a measured growth engine
Embedded as Fractional CMO across product marketing, demand gen and lifecycle for a 22-person team that had stalled at $2.1M ARR.
Client
Northwind Labs
Engagement
9 months
Headline
+184% pipeline in 6 months
+184%
Qualified pipeline
−42%
Cost per qualified meeting
11% → 19%
Trial-to-paid conversion
9 days
Time to first value
Challenge
Northwind was selling on founder energy alone. Pipeline was lumpy, attribution was a spreadsheet nobody trusted, and the demand gen team was running tactics nobody had connected to revenue.
Approach
- 01Rewrote positioning around the single ICP that was actually closing in under 30 days.
- 02Stood up a weekly pipeline council with sales, marketing and the founder so every channel had an owner and a number.
- 03Replaced the agency retainer with one in-house marketing engineer and a paid-media playbook tied to qualified-meeting cost.
- 04Built a lifecycle program in HubSpot that turned trials into expansion conversations within 14 days.
Outcome
Inside two quarters Northwind had a marketing function the board could read in five minutes — and a pipeline that compounded instead of bouncing.
"We finally stopped guessing. Every Monday I knew what was working, what wasn't, and what we'd change by Friday."
— Priya Shah, Co-founder & CEO, Northwind Labs