I built the revenue engine behind a new B2B payments line, paid and lifecycle, end to end
I built the acquisition engine and the lifecycle engine, with automation underneath both.
A brand-new business line, no inbound engine, and the CRM admin resigning in my first week
PingPong had just opened its cross-border payments line when I joined in late 2021. There was no inbound channel, no marketing automation, and no real technical infrastructure underneath any of it. In my first week the CRM administrator left the company.
The managing director asked whether I could run ops and build the technical infrastructure on top of what I was hired for. I took it, and I took it quickly, because the two jobs were the same job. I was brought in to run inbound, and inbound on a funnel with no automation and no revenue operations underneath it cannot work. Whatever I spent would have leaked out through the joints.
The harder part was that this was a new line. Internal demand for it was loud, external demand was unproven, and there was almost no history to reason from: no benchmark for what a supplier lead should cost, no record of which segments converted, nothing to copy. Meanwhile leads that did arrive sat in a shared inbox for around 12 hours before a human noticed them, qualified them by hand, and forwarded them on. So I built the machine first, and bought traffic second.
Instrument the spend you already have before buying more
Consolidate what is already running before spending another dollar
My first move was to spend nothing new. The ads already live were scattered across platforms with no single view, so I consolidated them, made the data legible, and optimized the spend already committed. That gave me a denominator to reason from on a line with no history.
Then I relaunched the top of the funnel properly. On Google and LinkedIn that meant a real campaign hierarchy, awareness through consideration to conversion, with PMax, Search and retargeting each doing the job it is good at, campaign structures cut by supplier segment instead of geography, and conversion tracking finance could audit line by line.
LinkedIn CPL $300+ → ~$160 · Google registration $90+ → ~$35, volume heldTwo months to onboard HubSpot, then wire three systems into one
This is the part I was not hired for. With the CRM administrator gone, the stack itself was mine. I spent two months onboarding HubSpot as the marketing system of record, brought in Salesloft for outbound and sales cadences, and went back into Salesforce to revamp it and rebuild the flows underneath it.
No connector existed for the hand-offs we needed, so the three-way integration was custom built: HubSpot to Salesforce to Salesloft, with the record staying correct in all three. On top of that I built more than 70 automations, and the count kept growing. That stack is what every later build ran on.
HubSpot onboarded in two months · Salesloft added · Salesforce revamped and re-flowed · 70+ automations · integration custom builtFrom a shared inbox to the right rep in minutes
The old path was a person: a lead arrived, someone processed it by hand, and eventually it reached an SDR, a BDR or an AE, about 12 hours later. Nothing enriched or routed them, so whoever picked one up started from a name and an email. I replaced the whole path: enrich on arrival, round-robin the routing, and put the lead in front of the right rep with its context already attached, in one to two minutes. The same automation enrolls that lead into the marketing cadence that matches its state, so nothing waits on a human to remember.
Then I made the information come to people. Status changes push into Slack, to the right individual and the right channel: a KYC completion or a LinkedIn lead. Slack and email both carry it. A rep should not spend their day hunting for the information they need to act on, and after this they did not have to. That is why the rest of it worked.
Lead handoff ~12 hours → 1–2 minutes, enriched and routed, then auto-enrolled into the right cadenceThree cadences, sequenced on where the account sits in KYC
Once HubSpot was in and I could finally see the data, the second leak was obvious. Suppliers registered, went into KYC, and received nothing. No marketing email, and no consistent process on the sales side either. For a payments product that is the worst possible place to go quiet, because KYC is where a supplier decides whether this is worth the paperwork.
So I built automated cadences that each carry one objective and fire on the account's KYC state. Before KYC, an email arc exists to get the application finished. It carries what a new supplier needs to get there:
- A welcome.
- The channels to reach us.
- An introduction to their dedicated account manager.
- What the next step is.
- Which documents to prepare.
- What becomes available once they are through.
After they submit, one cadence keeps them supported while the review runs. After approval, a product tour and product-support track turns an approved account into one that transacts.
Three cadences on one trigger set: registered → KYC submitted → KYC approved → using the product · registration to KYC submission started at 5-6%Make marketing's numbers the company's numbers
The last build was trust. Campaign messaging and SDR follow-up ran as one motion with Sales and Product, on a shared dashboard where the targets and the definitions were the same. When a launch shipped, its campaign and its lifecycle journey shipped with it.
That's what let the engine compound. Year two ran on the same instrumented system, just for longer, on numbers everyone already believed. Those are annual revenue numbers for the payments line, with Sales closing the deals and the inbound channels I ran producing more than 85% of the lead volume behind them. Across 2023 to 2025 I moved from building the engine to running the website, where I was program manager on three major rebuilds. The same period added AI enablement: OpenAI API work, a content pipeline for the glossary and blog, and an integration into customer support.
$2M → $76M year one · $250M+ year two · one line, one engineWhat the engine produced
I ran this on one payments line for two years, and every part of it reported a number. The operating numbers below each trace back to a build on this page.
Revenue
Annual revenue grew from $2M at launch to $76M by the end of year one, then past $250M+ in year two, on the same engine.
Efficiency
LinkedIn CPL nearly halved, from $300+ to ~$160, and Google registration cost fell more than 60%, from $90+ to ~$35. Lead handoff compressed from ~12 hours to 1–2 minutes.
What I owned, and what I didn't
I owned the demand side, paid and lifecycle, end to end, plus the ops and the stack after the CRM administrator resigned in my first week. Once the system routed a lead, the conversation and the close belonged to the SDR, BDR or AE who picked it up. Launches ran on targets and a dashboard shared with Sales and Product, and every asset for a regulated product cleared compliance review before it went live.
Related work
“He is an extremely diligent worker whose attention to detail is matched by his understanding of how the details affect the bigger picture.”
“For every project, he's also a strong partner to help shepherd and support the development of net new deliverables, troubleshooting everything from design resources to securing buy-in from cross-functional global stakeholders, including executives.”
“He took over all of Marketing for PingPong for over 6 months and has ensured there was no interruption to the business with minimal support. … His work is thorough and impactful.”
Nothing shipped until finance could trace it and compliance had cleared it
Instrumented, or it didn't happen.
Every channel, journey and handoff reports a number finance can trace. That's what made “$2M → $76M” a statement instead of a slide.
Compliance-checked by design.
Regulated product, global audience. Every asset cleared before it shipped. Speed without losing the audit trail.
System over campaign.
Campaigns expire; systems compound. Year two ran on the same engine as year one, at the same budget, for longer.
He took over all of Marketing for PingPong for over 6 months and has ensured there was no interruption to the business with minimal support.
Tijana SijanicDirector of Human Resources
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