Client Context
- Industry: B2B SaaS (Series B)
- Location: Bangalore, India
- Core Challenge: Stagnant enterprise pipeline, unsustainably high Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), and a massive disconnect between marketing spend and sales-qualified leads (SQLs).
Adherio Solution
End-to-end Account-Based Marketing (ABM) execution, CRM restructuring, and SDR cadence retraining.
We embedded fractional RevOps and Sales leaders directly into the client's go-to-market team for 16 weeks to build the revenue machine from the ground up.
The Bleed: Traffic Is Vanity, Pipeline Is Sanity
A prominent Series B SaaS firm based out of HSR Layout, Bangalore, had hit a painful revenue ceiling. At $4.5M in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), their growth had flatlined.
Their marketing team was burning roughly ₹25 Lakhs a month on broad performance marketing across LinkedIn and Google. On paper, the metrics looked fine: website traffic was up, and Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) were pouring in. But the reality in the sales war room was bleak.
The leads were low-intent. The Account Executives (AEs) were wasting hours on demo calls with mid-level managers who lacked purchasing power. Because the sales cycle was stretching past 9 months and win rates were plummeting, their Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) payback period had bloated to a fatal 22 months.
They didn't have a traffic problem. They had an enterprise pipeline problem.
The "Advice" Trap: Why a Strategy Deck Wasn't Enough
Before engaging Adherio, the founders had hired a traditional tier-one advisory firm to diagnose the issue.
Six weeks and a hefty retainer later, the firm delivered a beautifully designed 80-page slide deck. The diagnosis was correct: “You need to pivot from broad inbound marketing to targeted Account-Based Marketing (ABM) to capture enterprise clients.”
But that is where the traditional consulting model stops. They left the deck on the founder’s desk and exited.
The startup’s internal team didn't know how to translate a high-level ABM strategy into daily execution. The CRM was a mess of duplicate data, the Sales Development Reps (SDRs) were still blasting generic cold emails, and marketing refused to change their lead-scoring criteria. Six months post-advisory, revenue had not moved an inch.
They needed a partner who wouldn't just tell them what to do—they needed someone to get into the trenches and build the machine with them. That is when they brought in Adherio.
The Adherio Execution: Building the ABM Engine
We didn't present another deck. We embedded our fractional RevOps and Sales leaders directly into their go-to-market team for 16 weeks. Here is exactly how we executed the turnaround:
CRM Hygiene & RevOps Alignment
You cannot run enterprise sales on bad data. We audited their HubSpot instance and found that 40% of their existing database consisted of dead contacts or companies completely outside their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
The Fix: We scrubbed the CRM, instituted rigid data-entry protocols for the sales team, and rebuilt the lead-scoring model. Marketing was no longer allowed to pass an MQL to sales unless the prospect matched three strict criteria regarding company size, tech stack, and job title.
Defining the "Whale Hunting" ABM Tiers
We stopped the "spray-and-pray" ad spend. We sat down with the founders and the VP of Sales to handpick a finite list of 150 enterprise target accounts.
- Tier 1 (Top 30 Accounts): Highly personalized outreach. We worked with marketing to create bespoke landing pages and custom ROI calculators specifically tailored to these 30 companies.
- Tier 2 (Next 120 Accounts): Industry-specific sequencing with targeted LinkedIn thought-leadership campaigns.
SDR Retraining & Script Teardowns
An ABM strategy dies if the SDRs sound like robots. We spent three weeks running daily role-play scrums with the 8-person SDR team.
The Fix: We threw out their generic cold email templates. We wrote highly personalized, pain-point-driven cadences. More importantly, we sat in on their cold calls, providing live coaching on how to bypass gatekeepers and book discovery calls with C-suite executives rather than middle managers.
The Marketing-Sales SLA
To bridge the gap between departments, we instituted a strict Service Level Agreement (SLA). Marketing committed to generating a specific number of engaged target accounts per quarter.
In return, Sales committed to contacting those accounts within 2 hours of a trigger event (e.g., downloading a whitepaper) and executing a minimum of 12 touchpoints over 21 days.
The Quantifiable Impact: ROI in 6 Months
By shifting the focus from top-of-funnel vanity metrics to bottom-of-funnel execution, the unit economics of the business fundamentally transformed within two quarters.
Enterprise SQLs YoY
Pipeline cleared of bad-fit leads. AEs now spend 80% of time with decision-makers.
Reduction in CAC
Cut wasted broad ad spend, focusing exclusively on the 150 target enterprise accounts.
CAC Payback Period
Halved from a dangerous 22 months down to a highly sustainable 11 months.
Landmark Contract Win
Closed the largest multi-year enterprise contract in the company's history in month 5.
Stop Paying for Advice. Start Paying for Execution.
If your startup is burning cash on marketing but your enterprise pipeline is starving, another strategy deck will not save you. You need operational alignment, rigorous sales management, and flawless execution.
Adherio Consulting doesn't just diagnose the bottleneck; we embed with your team to clear it.