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Building go to market from nothing

Client
Kitman Labs
Industry
Sports science SaaS
Engagement
In house, director
Duration
2016 to 2019
Stack
Salesforce, Marketing Cloud, HubSpot
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What Kitman Labs was facing

Kitman Labs sold performance intelligence software to elite sports organizations: NFL and NBA franchises, Premier League clubs, Australian Football League teams. I was the first full time marketing hire. There was no demand generation function, no marketing automation, and no CRM the sales team trusted.

The unusual part was the market itself. There are only so many professional sports organizations on earth, and every buyer is a head of performance or a sporting director you could name. That makes conventional demand generation the wrong instrument. Volume tactics are pointless when the total addressable market is countable and every prospect knows the others.

The problem

Selling into a small, relationship driven market without systems means the whole motion lives in individual heads. Nobody could say which organizations had been approached, what had been said, or which markets were worth prioritizing next quarter against which were a year early. The company was growing on the strength of the product and the founders' networks, which works until you need a second sales hire to be as effective as the first.

What I did

  1. Defined the addressable market before generating demand into it

    I worked with the founders and sales leadership to map every organization worth selling to across North America, EMEA and APAC, then sequenced them into an 18 month roadmap. In a countable market, prioritization matters more than volume.

  2. Wrote top of funnel messaging for the actual buyer

    Heads of performance and sports scientists working with elite athletes, not a generic B2B software buyer. I worked alongside the in house sports scientists so the content stood up to an audience that would spot a marketer guessing.

  3. Implemented the company's first marketing automation and CRM

    Salesforce and Pardot stood up from nothing, then the global sales team onboarded onto it, so pipeline lived in a system rather than in inboxes.

  4. Built lead qualification and conversion reporting

    Defined what qualified meant, instrumented inbound lead flow, and built reporting on response rates, conversion and pipeline so programs could be judged rather than assumed.

  5. Migrated the tech stack to HubSpot

    As the requirements clarified, I led a full migration from Salesforce to HubSpot CRM and Marketing Hub, and re-onboarded the team.

Results

  • 96%

    Growth in the qualified, marketable database in year one.

  • $400k

    Annual recurring revenue over a 12 month period.

  • $20k

    Average deal size

From day one, Elliot was eager to hit the ground running. He quickly implemented our first marketing automation system, introduced new ideas and products to increase our inbound lead flow, assisted with our outbound campaign list builds and execution of those campaigns, and took over management of our social media channels. The structure he installed within our marketing and sales process allowed for folks to focus on other important things as we knew he had it handled.
Jeff Eckenhoff, Sales Manager at Kitman Labs