In short
- About USD 450K in sales opportunities from about USD 50K of US media spend between April and July, an 8x return by the client's own math.
- The campaigns were working before the engagement. The tracking between website and CRM was orphaning every deal from the ad that created it.
- The order of operations won the result: prove the tracking, protect the lead after the click, then spend.
The email that could not have been written in April
In July, a note from Talogy's US marketing team landed in our inbox. We've reread it more times than we'll admit.
We had a lead come through the enterprise campaign that has now turned into a USD 125K opportunity. We are now at about USD 450K in opportunity created from Platty activity and I know there is more out there.
Four hundred and fifty thousand dollars in pipeline, from about fifty thousand in media spend, between April and July. An 8x return by the client's math. Run the division yourself and it lands closer to 9x; we publish their number.
Rewind to April, though, and that email could not have been written. The results might have happened anyway. The proof would have died somewhere between the ad click and the CRM.
April: a pipeline full of ghosts
Talogy is a global talent management company. They help organizations hire and develop people through science backed assessments. That puts their buyers among the most careful shoppers in B2B: HR and talent leaders at midsize and enterprise companies, people who research for weeks, loop in a committee, and treat contact forms like a last resort.
When we took over their US paid media, the campaigns had potential. The plumbing under them did not. Lead source data was arriving at the CRM incomplete or not at all. A six figure deal born from a LinkedIn ad would enter the system looking like it walked in off the street, filed under direct traffic, while four ad platforms each claimed full credit for it in their own dashboards.
Anyone who has sat through a budget review knows how that movie ends. Finance asks what the spend produced. The CRM shrugs. The budget shrinks, and it shrinks precisely on the channel that was quietly feeding the pipeline.
What this meansLaunching more spend into that system would have been setting money on fire in the dark. It might burn bright. Nobody would see it.
The suspect everyone got wrong
Talogy's own team had a theory: the UTMs were a mess. They were half right.
The tags were messy, and we standardized them across every channel, one convention, documented, non negotiable. But messy tags were the misdemeanor. The felony was hiding a layer deeper.
The handshake between the website and the CRM, the little piece of tracking that ties an anonymous visitor to the contact they eventually become, was failing. Every deal was being orphaned from the ad that created it at the exact moment the visitor turned into a lead. The campaigns were doing their job and getting robbed of the credit one record at a time.
We fixed the association working side by side with Talogy's marketing team, then ran a test lead through the whole circuit, ad click to CRM record, until it arrived with its history intact. Only then did we touch the media.
What this meansFix the record before you fix the campaign. A result nobody can trace is a result nobody will fund.
Then, and only then, the actual marketing
With the measurement honest, the US program was rebuilt around intent. Awareness campaigns put Talogy in front of the right HR and talent audiences. Sales campaigns went after the demand that already existed, with dedicated coverage for enterprise accounts. Google, LinkedIn, Meta and Bing each carried the stretch of the journey where they earn their keep, instead of one blended effort spread thin across all of it.
What this meansFour platforms, four jobs. A channel asked to do the whole journey does none of it well.
After the click: routing, scheduling and an AI SDR
Most of the money in B2B paid media is lost after the click, in the part of the funnel nobody screenshots for the case study. So before scaling the spend, we went there, and treated the post click journey as three separate jobs.
The routing matrix: 45 paths, tested one by one
Talogy's lead routing lived in a 45 row spreadsheet: forty five combinations of segment, region, product interest and campaign of origin, each pointing a lead at a different human. On paper, the matrix was complete. In practice, nobody had ever taken a test lead and walked all 45 paths to see where it actually landed. We did, path by path.
- Document what was supposed to happen on that path
- Fire a test lead through it
- Record what actually happened
- Fix the mismatch before real money depended on it
Routing looks like admin work exactly until the day a USD 125K opportunity depends on which inbox a form fill reaches.
Calendly: from interested to scheduled in one motion
The default pattern in B2B funnels is a thank you page promising that someone will be in touch. We wired Calendly into the flow instead. A qualified lead goes from form to booked meeting in one motion, and the routing logic decides whose calendar they see. A talent director clicking an ad at 9pm has a meeting on the right rep's agenda by 9:03, confirmed, synced to the CRM with its campaign source intact.
Avexa: the AI SDR that works beside the routing
What this meansReply to a campaign lead in minutes and you're continuing a conversation they started. Reply in days and you're a stranger interrupting their week.
The operating rhythm that kept it honest
The last piece wasn't a tactic. It was a cadence.
- A live dashboard kept Talogy's team looking at the same consolidated numbers we were, across all four platforms
- Monthly reports read the funnel top to bottom, diagnosed the drop offs, and named the next moves
- Once a month, the pipeline data made the budget decisions: spend flowed toward campaigns creating opportunities and drained away from campaigns creating activity
Nobody had to win an argument in a meeting. The report had already won it.
Ninety days of that produced the email at the top of this article: about USD 450K in opportunities attributed to Platty activity in the CRM, campaign by campaign, including one lead from the enterprise campaign that grew into a USD 125K opportunity with its full paper trail attached. The ad, the click, the contact, the deal.
What this meansTalogy's marketing now defends its budget with a CRM report instead of a story, and the system belongs to the client. The visibility survives with or without us.
The order of operations
If we could tattoo one thing on every B2B media plan, it would be the order of operations, because that's where this result was won. We've watched brilliant campaigns get canceled because nobody could show what they produced, and mediocre ones survive for years because someone could.
- Prove the tracking: run a test lead from ad click to CRM record and check that its source survives
- Standardize UTMs across every channel, one convention, documented
- Walk every routing path with a test lead before real money depends on it
- Book the meeting in the same motion as the form, and let an SDR layer qualify what arrives
- Make the monthly budget decision from pipeline data, campaign by campaign
