Industry: Wholesale ordering SaaS
Project Duration: Ongoing partnership
Engagement Type: Fractional CMO
The context
When the client was acquired, the new ownership faced a daunting reality: no website, customer data living in Word docs, and marketing that had been left largely untouched for years. At the same time, aggressive, well-funded competitors were entering the wholesale ordering space. The new CEO needed to stabilize the business fast: protect existing customers, stop churn, and build a credible brand presence, with no room for a bloated team or slow experimentation.
The approach
I stepped into the engagement as both strategist and operator, standing alongside the CEO as a trusted advisor while putting systems in place the team could use immediately. The work balanced quick wins, a customer newsletter, sales collateral, a HubSpot cleanup, with foundational systems: CRM setup, retention workflows, competitor positioning.
Underneath it sat a simple set of principles: react to real market moves instead of manufacturing content for its own sake, build materials that serve customers and prospects at the same time, design every deliverable to lay groundwork for what comes next, and favor building trust over generating noise.
The breakthrough
The real turning point was realizing retention and acquisition didn’t need to live in separate silos. Newsletters that retained existing customers could double as technical material for prospects, which meant every effort had multiple payoffs instead of one. From there, stability started to compound: HubSpot cleanup and contract renegotiation reduced costs while giving sales better visibility, competitor landing pages helped fend off new entrants, and a blog and SEO program put the client on the map for the first time. All of it fed the same engine: protect the base, then grow with confidence.
Results
By focusing on clarity and credibility first, the client bought the breathing room it needed for its next chapter: zero churn during the engagement despite heavy competitor activity, stronger brand credibility in prospect conversations and at trade shows, weekly new prospect conversations driven by collateral and web presence, HubSpot costs cut by roughly $350 a month through contract optimization, 3,200-plus new website users since April largely from new email campaigns, and early SEO traction of 100-plus organic search hits and 30-plus organic social hits within months of launch.
What’s next
With tariffs shaking customer budgets across the industry, the client made the deliberate call to pause a full-scale growth push and invest in product improvements that help their own customers save money. Marketing never stopped through that shift, it moved to holding ground and building credibility while the foundation strengthened. The partnership continues, with acquisition work resuming as conditions allow.
What it taught
Stability comes before scale, especially after an acquisition. Dual-use content multiplies return when resources are thin. And a CEO under pressure needs a partner who can move between strategy and execution without needing a handoff every time the ground shifts.