Many founders feel their marketing is busy and expensive, yet their pipeline stays flat. They see plenty of activity, although very little of it turns into steady growth. This gap is where I focus.

I build growth systems for companies in tech, SaaS, proptech and services. My work brings clarity to the story, consistency to the funnel and confident decisions to the leadership table. I look at how sales, product and marketing operate, then shape them into one engine that produces qualified demand and measurable results.

The approach is straightforward. I help teams simplify their message so customers understand the value quickly. I set up processes that help them think clearly, test ideas and learn from the data they already have. I help founders replace guesswork with a structure that gives them predictable progress.

Some outcomes from my recent work include the following.
-I helped a tech company build their ANZ presence and reach two point five million dollars in new business during their first year in the region.
-I supported a proptech firm in growing their user base from zero to over fifteen times their starting point within six months.
-I shaped the digital marketing setup for a UCaaS company that once relied on printed brochures and helped them shift to a modern inbound engine.

These results come from a simple belief. Growth improves when the story is clear, the process is steady, and the decisions come from real signals rather than hope. This is the type of work I enjoy, and I work closely with founders who want a more stable way to grow.

If you lead a company where the marketing motion looks full yet the revenue is uneven, I am open to a conversation. The right structure can reduce pressure on the team and give the business a cleaner path forward.

Rahul Bakaya

I sat in a pipeline review last month where the marketing team was celebrating 312 inbound leads.
 
Sales closed 4 of them.
 
Nobody in the room thought that was weird.
 
The VP of Marketing showed cost-per-lead charts. The Head of Sales talked about “lead quality.” Everyone agreed they needed to “better align.”
 
Meanwhile, I’m looking at their CRM and seeing:
 
38-minute average response time on demo requests. A rep who hadn’t logged a follow-up in 9 days. 74 leads sitting in a stage called “New” with zero activity.
 
This company was spending $40K a month to fill a bucket with a hole in it.
 
And here is the worst part? They were about to increase ad spend.
 
I see this constantly. 

The conversation is always about getting more in the door. Rarely about what happens after someone walks through it.
 
The gap between “hand raised” and “deal created” is where most revenue quietly disappears. 

But it doesn’t show up in any marketing dashboard, so nobody’s accountable for it.
 
Next time your pipeline review starts with lead volume, ask one question:
 
What happened to the last 100 leads that didn’t close?
 
The answer will tell you more than any acquisition metric ever will.

Chief Growth Officer | Marketing, Growth, Positioning | Builds scalable systems for brand, demand and revenue | Known for transforming scattered activity into outcomes

I keep seeing the same job listing.

“Hiring: Head of Demand Gen. Must have experience with ABM, paid social, SEO, content marketing, email automation, event strategy, and analytics.”

Salary: $130K.

So you want one person to own strategy and execution across 7 channels, report to the CMO, manage a budget, and somehow also build the systems underneath all of it.

Good luck.

This is the mistake I see over and over with Series A and B companies. They think hiring a demand gen person solves demand gen. It doesn’t. Not if there’s no system underneath them.

What actually happens: the new hire spends 3 months trying to understand the existing mess. They duct-tape some tools together. They launch a few campaigns. Pipeline looks okay for a quarter. Then they burn out or get blamed when the CEO expected 3x growth from one headcount.

Before you hire for demand gen, you need to answer one question honestly:

If a great demand gen lead walked in the door today, would your system convert them? Or would they get lost in the same mess everyone else does?

Hire the person after you’ve built the machine they’ll operate.

Not the other way around.

15 years in marketing.
Millions in pipeline generated.
Still can't get my dad to understand what I do for a living.

But apparently someone thinks I know enough to put me on a stage, so here we are.

Speaking at Intrigue MAdverse Sydney on March 4th about "Building Trust in a Distracted Digital World", which is essentially what every marketer tries to do every day while the entire internet works against them.

Come through if you're in Sydney. I'll be the one on the panel nervously hoping no one asks a question I can't answer.

#IntMadverse #INTSYD #B2BMarketing #Growth #Sydney

Real talk from today’s panel at Intrigue  Madverse.

I’ve been in marketing for over a decade now, I’ve run campaigns with six-figure budgets. I’ve obsessed over funnels, conversion rates, and attribution models.

But today my world is changing. 

And 

My amazing panel taught me one thing today about the new world.

The world with AI looks like this: infinite content, infinite noise, and a shrinking premium on anything that feels genuinely human.

Here’s where I think this goes: in 5 years, AI-generated content will be so abundant it becomes invisible, like elevator music. 

Nobody listens to it. Nobody trusts it. And the brands that invested in being genuinely worth trusting? They’ll be the only signal in a room full of noise.

Don’t be the noise. 

Thank you Maricel Custodio Tom Willis Bayu Eka Putra and Matt for an amazing session.

No alternative text description for this image

Let me walk you through what should happen in the first 5 minutes after someone requests a demo on your website.


Not what happens at most companies. What should happen.

👉 0:00 — Form submitted. Lead hits your CRM. Immediately.
Not in a batch sync every 15 minutes. Not via a Zapier chain with three steps. Direct integration. Real-time.

👉0:01 — Lead gets scored. Company size, title, intent signals from page visits, and whatever enrichment data you can pull in automatically. This decides what happens next.

👉0:02 — Routing fires. High-intent enterprise lead? Goes to an AE directly. Mid-market? SDR team. Small company, low intent? Nurture sequence. The lead never sits in a queue waiting to be triaged by a human.

👉0:03 — The assigned rep gets a notification they can’t ignore. Not an email buried in their inbox. A Slack ping, a mobile push, something that interrupts. With the lead’s name, company, what they requested, and their last 3 page visits.

👉0:04 — If the rep hasn’t acknowledged within 90 seconds, it escalates to the next available rep. No leads sitting in limbo because someone’s in a meeting.

👉0:05 — The prospect gets a response. A real one. Not a “thanks, someone will be in touch” email. A personalised message that references what they asked for and gives them something useful immediately — a calendar link, a relevant case study, a short video from the rep.

That’s five minutes. Most companies take 45.

And here’s the part that frustrates me: none of this is technically hard. Every CRM on the market can do some version of this. The gap isn’t capability. It’s that nobody sat down and actually mapped the first five minutes as if it mattered.

Because it’s the only five minutes that do.

A founder messaged me 11 weeks ago. Exact words: “We’re generating leads, but nothing’s converting. I think our sales team might be the problem.”

It wasn’t the sales team.

I asked him to walk me through what happens when someone fills out a demo request on their site. He paused. Then: “It goes into HubSpot. And then... I think someone picks it up.”

That pause told me everything.

Here’s what was actually happening behind the scenes:

A lead comes in. It lands in a general inbox. No assignment rules. Whoever checks the CRM first claims it, if they check at all. There’s one pipeline with six stages, used for everything from a $500 self-serve signup to a $60K enterprise deal. Same stages. Same follow-up cadence. Same expectations.

An enterprise prospect requesting a custom demo was getting the same automated email as someone who downloaded a free PDF.

So they had to rebuild it from scratch.

Three separate pipelines. One for self-serve, one for mid-market, one for enterprise. Each with its own stages, its own assignment logic, its own follow-up sequences. Lead comes in, gets scored based on company size and intent signals, routes to the right rep in under 2 minutes. First touch is relevant to what they actually asked for.

They didn’t add a single new lead source. Same traffic. Same budget.

Conversion from lead to qualified meeting went from 3.1% to 8.7% in seven weeks.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Every time someone tells me they need “better salespeople,” I ask the same thing: show me what happens in the first 10 minutes after a lead comes in.

That’s usually where the answer lives.

Weird thing happened last Tuesday.

A company reached out saying they wanted to “automate their follow-up.”

Small company, but decent revenue.

Thirty minutes into the call, I told them automation was the last thing they needed right now.

Here’s why.

Their problem wasn’t speed. They had fast response times. Their SDRs were dialing within minutes. The issue was that every single lead got the same treatment. 

A CMO at a $50M company requesting a strategy call was handled identically to a marketing coordinator downloading a checklist.

Same sequence. Same messaging. Same timeline.

Automating that would just mean doing the wrong thing faster.

What they actually needed was segmentation. Different entry points triggering different journeys. The CMO gets a personalised Loom video from an AE within an hour. The coordinator gets a nurture sequence with case studies over two weeks.

We mapped four buyer journeys in 90 minutes on that call. 

They’re three weeks into implementing it. Early signs: qualified meeting rate is up 23%.

Sometimes the best thing you can do for a prospect is tell them "the thing they think they need isn’t the thing they need."

Even when it’s the thing they wanted to pay you for.

The best-performing B2B companies I work with have stopped measuring MQLs.

Completely.

They’ve replaced them with one metric: revenue-qualified pipeline. 

Meaning: opportunities that have been validated by sales as real, with a timeline, a budget conversation, and an identified decision-maker.

Why does this matter?

Because MQLs created a perverse incentive. Marketing optimised for volume. More form fills. More downloads. More “leads.” And the dashboard looked fantastic every month.

But pipeline didn’t grow. Close rates didn’t improve. Sales kept complaining about quality. Marketing kept pointing at quantity. And the executive team kept wondering why revenue was flat despite record lead numbers.

When you measure revenue-qualified pipeline, something shifts. Marketing starts caring about what happens after the handoff. They want to know which campaigns produce opportunities that actually close, not just opportunities that exist.

It’s a harder metric to hit. It takes longer to report on. And it’s the only one that correlates with the number your board actually cares about.

If your marketing and sales teams are still arguing about lead quality vs. lead quantity, you’re having the wrong conversation.

Measure the thing that matters. Everything else follows.

Quick math that nobody does at board meetings.
 
Your average deal is $30K ARR. You close 2.5% of inbound leads. You generate 150 leads a month.
 
That’s roughly 3.75 new customers per month. $112K in new ARR monthly.
 
Now. What if you didn’t touch the top of funnel at all, but improved conversion to 3.25%?
 
That’s 4.8 customers. $146K monthly. An extra $400K+ in ARR annually.
 
From zero additional ad spend. Zero new channels. Zero new headcount.
 
Just from getting slightly better at converting what’s already coming in.
 
I ran these numbers with a SaaS founder two weeks ago and watched his face change. 

He’d been arguing with his board about a $200K increase in marketing budget. The conversion improvement I was describing would have cost less than $50K to implement.
 
You may obsess over the top of the funnel because it’s visible. You can point to impressions. Clicks. Leads generated. There’s a dashboard for it.
 
The middle of the funnel has no dashboard. So the $400K sitting there stays invisible.
 
Until someone runs the math.

A Sales Director from Sydney asked me last week why I insist on separate pipelines for different deal types.

“Isn’t that overcomplicating things? We just need one pipeline with clear stages.”

Let me explain why one pipeline is quietly killing your conversion rate.

You sell a $5K self-serve product and a $60K enterprise solution. Both go into the same pipeline. Same stages: New, Qualified, Demo, Proposal, Closed.

Seems clean on paper. In reality, here’s what happens:

Your $5K buyer goes from New to Closed in 8 days. Your enterprise buyer takes 90. In the same pipeline, the enterprise deal looks stalled. Your weekly review flags it. Reps start getting pressure to “move it along.” But the deal isn’t stalled. It’s just... enterprise. It has procurement. Legal. A buying committee. It moves differently.

Meanwhile, your $5K deals are flying through stages so fast that your pipeline always looks healthy from a volume standpoint. So nobody notices that the close rate on enterprise, where the real revenue is, has been dropping for two quarters.

One pipeline averages everything into a single number. That number lies to you.

When you separate them, something clicks. You start seeing that enterprise deals have a 60% drop-off between Demo and Proposal. That’s specific. That’s fixable. You discover that self-serve deals with more than one stakeholder close at half the rate, so you adjust the nurture.

Different buyers move differently. Your system should reflect that.

I’ve seen this structure for a dozen companies now. The average impact on overall conversion is 20–40% improvement within two months. 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If your VP of Sales can’t tell you the close rate for each distinct buyer type you serve, that's on the system. 

And system problems become revenue problems faster than anything else I’ve seen.

If you are head of events or field markting and you want to show ROI, do this 👇👇




First rule.
Stop paying for bigger booths.
INSTEAD
Negotiate for at least 10 free passes instead.

Next.
Open your CRM.
Look at deals already in negotiation.
Those are your real targets.

Now do the part most teams skip.
Identify the real decision-makers tied to those deals.

Send them a handwritten invite.
Make it feel personal. Make it feel limited.
Make it feel like it wasn’t sent to everyone.

Prepare a small, thoughtful giveaway.
Spend your money here, not on banners.

At the event, don’t “network.”
Use the time to move the deal forward.

Afterwards, tag the event as deal-influenced in your CRM.

Then take the data back to leadership.

And finally. 
Ask for more budget.

Because this time, you’re not asking on faith

Had a call with one of my industry mates who said, “I’m thinking about firing my marketing agency.”

I asked why.

“They’ve been running campaigns for 6 months. We’re getting leads, but revenue hasn’t moved.”

I asked to see the data. Not the agency’s report. The actual CRM data.

Turns out the agency was doing a solid job. Lead volume was up 70% over six months. Cost per lead had come down. The leads were in-market, right titles, right companies. By any marketing metric, the campaigns were working.

The problem was on the other side of the handoff.

Leads were coming in and sitting in a queue for an average of 4 hours. Follow-up sequences hadn’t been updated since they were built 18 months ago. Half the leads were going to a rep who’d been underperforming for two quarters. And nobody could tell me the conversion rate from lead to qualified meeting, because that metric didn’t exist in their reporting.

The agency was filling the top of the funnel. The company was letting it drain out the middle.

So I asked him to fix the response time, rebuilt the assignment rules, create stage-specific follow-up sequences, and set up the three numbers he actually needed to see every Monday morning.

Let's see if the revenue goes up from here. I will update in the post.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

P.S. Before you blame your lead source, check what happens after the lead arrives. That’s usually where the story changes.

A question I get at least once a month: “What should our revenue dashboard actually show?”
 
 
Here’s what I’d build if I was starting from zero.

 
🤜For the founder or CEO, you need three numbers, updated daily. Total revenue-qualified pipeline (what’s real right now). Pipeline created this month vs. target (are we on pace). And average days from lead to qualified opportunity (is the machine getting faster or slower).
 
That’s it. Three numbers. If any of them are off, you dig in. If they’re on track, you move on with your day.
 
🤜For the VP of Sales, you need pipeline by stage with conversion rates between stages. Not overall conversion. Stage-to-stage. Because that’s where you spot the specific bottleneck. If Demo-to-Proposal is dropping, that’s a different problem than Proposal-to-Close. Each one has a different fix.
 
🤜For the marketing lead, you need one view that most marketing dashboards don’t have: what happened to the leads we generated? Not how many. What happened to them. Which ones became qualified opportunities. Which ones died and at what stage. Which campaigns are producing leads that actually convert downstream, not just leads that fill a form.
 
The pattern across all three: nobody needs more data. Everyone needs the right data for the decision they’re making this week.
 
Every time I strip a dashboard down from 40 widgets to 8, the same thing happens. People start actually looking at it. And when people look at their data, they make better decisions.

If I had 30 days to fix a broken growth engine, I'd do it in this order.

Week 1 → ICP + qualification + one metric
Week 2 → Fix tracking + build one pipeline report
Week 3 → Align sales follow-up + run two tests
Week 4 → Review + double down on what moved conversion

That's it.

Minimum viable everything.

I've diagnosed systems where founders thought their sales team was the problem.

But this is the real issue, they have:

General inbox.
No assignment rules.
One pipeline for everything.
Same follow-up for enterprise demos and PDF downloads.

You can't scale what you can't see.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗼𝗿𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗺𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘃𝗼𝗹𝘂𝗺𝗲.

If you ask me....
"Should we try account-based marketing? Everyone's talking about it."

My answer: I don't know yet.

𝗕𝗲𝗰𝗮𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝗜 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲𝗻'𝘁 𝘀𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮.

This is the pattern I see constantly.

A tactic works for someone else.
It gets written about.
It becomes the new "best practice."

Then founders adopt it based on hope, instead of signals.

Hope that it'll work for them too.
Hope that this is the missing piece.
Hope that following the trend will fix the pipeline.

Meanwhile, their own data is screaming different answers.

Before you chase the next shiny tactic, ask yourself:

→ What is your current customer feedback telling you?
→ Where are your best leads actually coming from?
→ What conversion data do you already have?

The right strategy is hiding in your existing signals.

Not in someone else's LinkedIn post.

What's one marketing trend you adopted that your data never actually supported?

If Narcos was made with ChatGPT

Helmer: Pablo, a lot of business owners ask me — our merchandise is being seized. Is that a security problem?

Pablo: It's not a security problem. It's a clarity problem.

Helmer: I agree, that's a great starting point. Let's dwell more into it.

Pablo: Here are 3 mistakes our crew is making that no one is talking about…

Mistake #1: We're not documenting our processes. The DEA isn't outperforming us. We're just not systemising our workflows.

Mistake #2: We're optimising for short-term shipments instead of long-term brand equity. Escobar & Co. needs to be a legacy, Helmer. Not just a Q3 revenue play.

Mistake #3: We're not leveraging our network effects. We have 400 armed men. But are we nurturing those relationships with consistent value delivery?

Helmer: This is gold, Pablo. Can you summarise this in a LinkedIn carousel?

Pablo: Absolutely. Slide 1: "Stop running from the DEA. Start running toward your vision."

Helmer: Should I add — "Save this post. Your competitors won't."

Pablo: Always.

(The colonel arrests them both while they're debating the hook for slide 7.)

Marketo Champion 2023-24 | Solving marketing automation problems

I am working as a Marketing Manager at HERE Technologies since 2023. Most of my projects are about solving marketing automation problems. Some of them are about campaign designs, and messaging. 

For example:

▪ Investigating sales queries about why certain records were assigned (or not) by Marketo
▪ Researching feasibility of technical dreams of team
▪ Providing technical assistance - e.g. integration projects which involve Marketo
▪ Maintaining the quality (and limits) of Marketo database
▪ Impact assessment/QA in various projects
▪ Marketing ideas for nurture designs & messaging

I have been solving marketing automation problems using Adobe Marketo Engage since 2013. My commitment to stick with Marketo gave me a diverse experience of working with 100+ Marketo customers at Grazitti Interactive (2013-2023) 

I learnt about customer problems, service delivery processes, team management, sales support and more aspects of work - aimed to deliver high quality work and sustain customer satisfaction. I am now transitioning into a role of marketing while maintaining my forte in automation. My strength is awareness of technical feasibilities. This combination brings unique value to organization - I don't always need to check feasibility for marketing ideas. My experience helps us make decisions faster.

During my early years, I learnt a lot from Marketo Community. And I am grateful to be a part of Adobe Championship Program. I was recognized as an Adobe Marketo Engage Champion for 2023-2024, and 2024-2025. I am a 6x certified Adobe Marketo Engage Business Practitioner Expert. 

I share my learnings from Marketo at:

▪ LinkedIn (Carousels and Posts)
▪ YouTube (Solo talks about concepts)
▪ Marketo Nation Community (Champion Blogs)
▪ Marketo User Groups (Deep Dives)

Besides, I also co-lead the Chandigarh Tricity Chapter for the Marketo User Groups where we host virtual discussions about various Marketo topics. Past recordings of the topics can be found on the Adobe's official YouTube channel for Marketo user groups.

PS - I am also an early adopter of ChatGPT - a new subject to study and it's a lot of work.

Balkar Singh Rao 🤔

Analytics is not as much about data as it is about interpretation. 

When I cleared Marketo certification the first time (2014), reporting was my weakest area. I did not knew much about reports. 

Later, there was a moment during a marketing campaign project in 2020. It changed my understanding of analytics in a profound manner, forever I guess. 

At many levels, it’s not just about fancy dashboards. Sometimes, a simple so-called vanity-metric can help you win customers.

We once bounced off some ideas in a user group about analytics in Adobe Marketo Engage.

Here’s the recording: https://lnkd.in/gXPV-_aT

Balkar Singh Rao

Decoding AI | 13 years in Marketing Automation | 3x Adobe Marketo Engage Champion | Adobe Community Advisor | Chandigarh Tricity Marketo User Group Leader

Documentation travels through time and talks to the future.

Back in 2023, when we started our Chandigarh Tricity user group, our first topic was about how to simplify complexity. This has also been my attempt in most of my content. E.g. the flow charts are pretty obvious when I try to explain workflows. 

Although I am changing my mind about some of it now (writing language is way more easy and effective with AI) - visuals still remains my favourite way to explain stuff. 

Besides, LLMs can transform a diagram to language and vice versa to increase the chances of good communication.

Here’s our recording: https://lnkd.in/gZx9z6mk

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