Cedar Collaborative
Cedar Collaborative

Tag: acquisition strategy

  • Stability at scale in wholesale SaaS

    Stability at scale in wholesale SaaS

    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 2025 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.

  • Billboards in Minnesota

    Billboards in Minnesota

    Industry: SaaS search solutions

    Role: Global Marketing Director

    Duration: 2017–2021

    This was a full-time role, years before Cedar Collaborative existed, not a Cedar Collaborative engagement.

    The starting point

    When I joined Funnelback, marketing barely existed. A partner had once helped craft a core brand and some collateral, but the effort was brief and dated. Sales carried most of the weight: a talented salesperson moonlighted as a copywriter, but without design or marketing support, her work had no chance to scale.

    Leadership was skeptical that marketing could drive revenue. It was seen as a cost center, if it was seen at all. Still, the mandate was clear. Australia was increasingly saturated, the UK team was faltering, and North America was the real bet. Success meant proving marketing could create focus, credibility, and growth.

    Building it from scratch

    I stepped into a hybrid role: strategist, operator, team builder. I was the first US-based marketing hire, joining a tiny Seattle office full of good ideas shipped over from Australia that didn’t quite fit the American market. Positioning, sales collateral, and the partner approach all needed rethinking.

    Higher ed became the breakout vertical. We pitched the product team in Canberra on building a higher-ed template, cutting implementation time and giving sales a running start. Around that same push, targeted account-based campaigns made Funnelback look far bigger than it was: enough that one sales engineer came back from a prospect meeting convinced we had billboards in Minnesota. There were no billboards. The account had simply been hit with ads, email, and content everywhere it turned.

    Instead of spending heavily, Funnelback invested in trust with higher-ed associations like HighEdWeb, showing up every year even on a small budget, which earned the credibility to outlast better-funded competitors. Underneath it, we migrated off a patchwork of SugarCRM, Mailchimp, and spreadsheets and onto Salesforce and Marketo, so sales and marketing could both actually see what was happening instead of walking into prospect calls blind.

    The team itself was built the same way: generalists first, specialists added only when the work actually demanded it, with enough shared ownership that designers, copywriters, and martech staff covered for each other rather than working in separate lanes.

    When the pandemic hit, the technology got repositioned as a crisis-communication channel. Customers moved to all-digital fast, industry partners got support, and the company doubled down on community at exactly the moment competitors pulled back.

    What it produced

    The higher-ed template became a repeatable engine for new business. The ABM approach gave a small company outsized visibility and credibility it hadn’t earned through size alone. Customers and partners stayed loyal through a genuinely disruptive stretch. And the growth was real and attributable to the work, not just to a good market.

    The merger

    Funnelback was acquired by Squiz during this period, which was both validation and a real trial. It proved the marketing had built something worth acquiring. It also meant colliding with a different culture and a different system, at a moment when teammates were anxious, leaders were stretched thin, and pandemic uncertainty made everything harder than it needed to be.

    As the de facto senior marketing leader through the transition, the job became keeping communication open, steadying morale, and making sure what Funnelback had built actually carried into Squiz rather than getting lost in the integration.

    What carried forward

    Scrappy ABM works: smart targeting can make a small brand look much larger than it is. Tool sprawl is worth avoiding on principle, not just for cost, since a stack that scales with the team beats one that needs replacing every eighteen months. Credibility comes from steering strategy and still showing up on the conference floor, not one or the other. And in a crisis or a leadership inflection point, retention and credibility are what buy you the time to figure out what’s next.

    Funnelback was the training ground for what I bring to Cedar Collaborative clients now: building marketing where none exists, standing up systems under real pressure, running ABM that punches above its actual size, and getting leaders and teams through turbulence without losing what they built.