There was new B2B payment feature designed to grow through existing customers by helping them adopt the product themselves and, over time, refer their upstream or downstream partners into the same ecosystem. (We called it FUSION project) From a marketing perspective, this immediately made it different from most acquisition projects I had worked on before. We were not trying to create demand from scratch. We were trying to activate and extend value from relationships that already existed.

I was responsible for the North America side of the launch, working closely with product teams in China, sales leadership in the U.S., and sales operations across multiple solutions, Salesforce, SalesLoft and Hubspot. From the beginning, I knew this could not be treated as a single campaign. It had to be a controlled growth system, because the surface area was large: a new product direction, multiple internal teams, and a funnel that did not behave like a standard “lead to customer” flow.

The first decision I made was to narrow the problem before trying to scale anything.

Because this Fusion project targeted existing customers, precision mattered more than reach. The real question was not how many people we could reach, but whether we were reaching the right customers,. Those whose business models, transaction volumes, and partner networks actually made referrals realistic. Before designing any messaging or experiments, I worked with our internal data and sales teams to identify and segment this audience as clearly as possible. Everything that followed, ads, creatives, landing pages, sales outreach messages (and cadences), sales deck, support documents. etc.

Sample creatives

Once we had a defined audience, I treated growth as a sequence of connected experiments rather than isolated optimizations. Each value proposition we wanted to test had to be expressed consistently across the entire journey: ad copy, landing page narrative, sales materials, and email messaging. I was deliberately strict about this. Mixing messages might create short-term engagement, but it makes learning almost impossible. If something worked or failed, I wanted to know why.

We started at the top of the funnel, focusing first on signals of relevance rather than conversion volume. On the advertising side, the primary question was simple: which value propositions actually earned attention from this specific audience? Click-through rate and engagement told us whether the message resonated at all. On the landing page, I looked less at form submissions initially and more at behavior such as bounce rate, time on page, scroll depth, and exit patterns. Tools like Google Analytics and Hotjar helped us see whether visitors understood the story we were telling or dropped off before it landed.

Sample landing page

Only after those signals stabilized did we move further down the funnel. This was intentional. In B2B, especially with a new product, pushing traffic into an unready sales flow creates noise for everyone involved. Once the messaging and landing experience showed consistency, I worked with sales leadership to design a dedicated SalesLoft cadence that felt conversational and personal, not like a continuation of marketing emails. The goal of these emails was not to close deals directly, but to warm conversations that would eventually happen over the phone.

At the same time, I built the operational backbone (lots of zapier automations) that allowed the system to run without constant manual intervention. Leads were pre-qualified and routed automatically, tagged correctly in Salesforce, and enrolled into the right cadences in SalesLoft. I also made sure sales teams were supported with clear materials—one-pagers, decks, and detailed PDFs explaining integrations and onboarding steps—so that conversations with customers were consistent and confident. 

One of the more complex aspects of Fusion was that referred users followed a different lifecycle than standard leads. Many entered the CRM pipeline as limited users, with restricted features, and only became full customers after completing KYC and other steps over time. This meant pipeline velocity looked very different from what sales teams were used to. To support this, I designed separate email cadences for different stages—nurturing for leads, activation for limited users, and onboarding for new customers—each with a distinct goal. Not every message was meant to drive immediate action. Some were simply there to maintain momentum.

Throughout the project, feedback loops were just as important as experiments. Sales conversations surfaced objections and confusion that we could not see in dashboards. Those insights were shared back with marketing and product, and we adjusted messaging, materials, and sometimes even positioning. Over time, this created a rhythm: test, observe, adjust, and run again. Not every experiment produced a clear win. Some validated assumptions; others told us what not to pursue further. Both outcomes were valuable.

Sample sales deck

Looking back, Fusion was not a project where everything worked perfectly. But it was a project where growth remained controlled. We resisted the urge to test too many ideas at once, protected sales teams from unnecessary noise, and treated marketing not as a channel owner but as a system designer.

For me, that is what growth work looks like in practice—especially in B2B. Not chasing volume for its own sake, but building something stable enough that it can actually scale.