Revenue Problems Solved

C-suite marketing intelligence for growth-stage companies that are done playing small.

TLDR: Impressions are not revenue. If your marketing dashboard does not connect to your ARR, you are measuring the wrong things.

A sale or exit will be difficult without a clear competitive moat and marketing leadership that has responsibility for the P&L.

If the goal is to grow quickly so you can sell your company someday, you need both: a clear competitive advantage (positioning and counter-positioning) and C-suite level marketing leadership to capitalize on that advantage.

How to know. If your analytics dashboard reports on impressions and reach, your marketing team cares more about looking busy than about your ARR. This is not an indictment of your team. It is an unfortunate result of the system they operate in. Marketing technicians care about job security so they optimize for the metrics they are measured on. If the metrics are impressions, they will get you impressions. A CMO with P&L responsibility cares about revenue. If the metrics are Marketing-Attributed Revenue by Channel, CAC Payback Period, ROAS, and LTV:CAC Ratio by Segment, they will build toward revenue.

The question worth asking this month: If someone were to acquire your company tomorrow, could your marketing team show them a clear line from spend to revenue, by channel, by segment? If not, that is where to start.

Brandon Smith has done something most can't: While at Plainsight (a SaaS company) he scaled ARR 6x in 12 months without burning the budget to get there. He reduced cost per lead by 30% while tripling revenue. He generated $2M in influenced pipeline from a CFO-targeted content campaign that got 200+ downloads, 60% from his exact target accounts. The secret is not a bigger budget. It is a more surgical one.

Brandon on the growth-speed-efficiency myth:

"Most CMOs really think you have to choose between growth speed and efficiency. First, don't waste it. The most important thing is to make sure we're targeting the right triggers. It's not just about brand awareness. This is real money. So we need to get that ROI immediately. Find the people with the problem. Talk about the actual risk. Make sure you're touching the right people who are really in the weeds at the moment."

That precision is what produced the 6x result at Plainsight. Once the targeting was right, Brandon scaled spend with confidence:

"Once you hit the right people, then you start to amp up the spend. Now that we're hitting the right people, we're getting the right feedback. Now we can apply scale. Let's throw more money at it. And then the money just continued to scale. One X, two X, three X. We hit the sweet spot. All the way to 6X."

ABM is not a campaign. It is surgery.

Brandon ran a persona-based Account Based Marketing campaign at BlastPoint that improved SQL quality by 45% and achieved over 3X ROAS on paid media. His view on why most ABM underperforms:

"That's a surgical approach. I think what's missing in the understanding of ABM is that it's surgical. This is not something that's for everybody. ABM should not be your largest growth engine. A lot of marketing organizations think the execution for ABM is: we have a targeted list. That's just the beginning. You really have to get surgical in your account-based marketing initiatives. Otherwise ABM will always be messy. That's not what ABM is."

"Account-based marketing is super targeted. You know the messaging. You know when they need it. You know how bad they're ailing, and you target them specifically. That's where you can attribute conversions and cost of acquisition is super low. And then you can apply the scale."

Content that moves pipeline: target the buyer and the person holding the pain.

At BlastPoint, Brandon's CFO AI playbook generated $2M in influenced pipeline and 200+ downloads, with 60% from target accounts. What made it convert when most content just generates downloads?

"The key is to make sure you target two people. You target the buyer and you target the person who's really holding the pain. It's not always the person who is the purchaser who is going to drive the impetus to purchase. You need to make sure that in your content you're attacking both people so that they can symbiotically work together."

Want to read more from Brandon, but only have 5 minutes?

FinTech and B2B How Brandon Smith Builds Revenue Systems Read Now

NEW EPISODE Lightning Speed Podcast Marketing leaders who engineered revenue growth at Fortune 500 companies share blueprints to help SMBs grow quickly. In each episode, a CMO shares their learning and systems for acquiring customers, reducing churn, and scaling revenue. Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify Watch on YouTube

ABM is evolving from a tactic into a growth discipline

ABM now targets buying groups of 5 to 16 people around ONE ideal customer. Successful ABM in 2026 requires mapping roles: champion, economic buyer, technical buyer, end user, and orchestrating signals across the entire committee, not just the primary contact. Volume (reaching out again and again) is not the hero. Engagement with the entire stakeholder group is.

What this means for you. Your sales and marketing team need to identify all the decision makers up the chain, and work the whole line. Stop banging down the door of one person.

Systems are more important than ever (less so campaigns)

The three biggest shifts in B2B marketing for 2026, digital self-serve, RevOps automation, and AI copilots. These are not competing trends, they are pieces of the same puzzle. Systems that are continuously running and evolving.

What this means for you. Shift from building and launching campaigns to continuous learning cycles on your systems (e.g. we lead 90 day sprints to continuously review and implement leanings).

Cheering for you,

Corinne Cavanaugh

CAC Media & Publishing, Founder & Growth Advisor

Revenue Systems for ambitious CEOs and founders.

If you're ready to improve new customer acquisition and retention, we can help.