When a company asks what I'd do in the first 90 days, they're really asking: "Can you move the revenue number fast enough to matter to my board?" The answer isn't a transformation plan. It's fixing what's already broken but nobody's measuring correctly.

With this type of timeline, I don't build demand engines from scratch. I find the levers that exist today, the ones buried under bad attribution, weak qualification, or legacy assumptions and I pull them. Here's what actually moves pipeline when you have 90 days to prove ROI.

Early-Stage ($5M-$25M ARR)

At this stage, you don't have budget problems. You have focus problems. Every dollar matters, but most companies spread it across six channels generating activity instead of concentrating on the two generating revenue.

Commercial Intent SEO, Not Educational Rankings

Most early-stage companies rank well for educational content and poorly for commercial searches. I've seen this pattern repeatedly: you rank #3 for "what is cybersecurity for law firms" but don't appear for "law firm cybersecurity software" or "best cybersecurity for 50-lawyer firms." Educational traffic feels good. Commercial intent traffic closes deals.

Pull your closed-won customers. Ask what they searched before buying. Map that against your current rankings. When you shift content focus and you'll see qualified demo requests increase with no paid spend increase.

*Remember SEO is a marathon but you can make strides in 90 days with focus.

Channel Economics Before Channel Diversification

You're not big enough to be everywhere. Find the channel with the lowest CAC to closed revenue and go all-in. I don't care if LinkedIn generates more leads. If Google drives closed customers at $1,200 CAC and LinkedIn drives them at $3,100 after full-cycle conversion, reallocate the budget.

Concentrate spend on the two channels actually closing deals. Pipeline quality improves immediately because you stop optimizing for activity metrics.

Email as Infrastructure, Not Campaigns

Every company says they'll start a newsletter. Most start, send five editions asking for meetings, then wonder why open rates collapse. Email works when you're not selling. At Propeller, we run a weekly industry commentary newsletter, no product mentions, no CTAs beyond "this is who wrote this." It builds an owned audience that actually opens emails because they're useful.

When we do need to promote something a webinar, a report, an event that audience converts at 3-4x our cold list rates. Email isn't dead. Your approach to email is dead.

Growth-Stage ($25M-$100M ARR)

At this stage, you have budget and headcount. The problem isn't resources it's that nobody's accountable for what actually drives revenue. Marketing reports MQLs, sales complains about quality, and the real problem is your systems lie about what's working.

Attribution Exposes Where Budget Dies

Your marketing automation platform is lying to you. First-touch attribution gives credit to blog posts that someone read six months before a sales relationship started. Last-touch gives credit to whoever clicked a retargeting ad the day before they signed.

Manually trace 20-30 closed deals every quarter. Pull the CRM data, interview the AE, and map what actually influenced the deal. The gap between reported attribution and reality is always significant. If your sales team uses something like Gong, listen to those calls. At one company, we found that 35% of our paid budget was going to channels that couldn't show up in a single manually-traced closed deal. They got "credit" in the system but didn't influence revenue.

Cut what doesn't show up in real deal cycles. Double down on what does. You might find that your highest-ROI channels aren't the ones with the highest MQL volume.

Referral Revenue Nobody's Asking For

At $50M+ ARR, you have customers who would refer you and partners who could send deals. You're not making it easy. Most referral programs are passive a webpage nobody visits and a "refer a friend" email once a year.

I've built active referral infrastructure at multiple companies. Customer success asks for referrals in every QBR with customers above 90 NPS. Partners get a portal with deal registration, co-marketing assets, and transparent compensation structures. We track referral-source revenue like a paid channel and hold CS and partnerships to pipeline targets.

At one company, we saw huge gains in referral pipeline in six months just by asking consistently and making the process not suck. Your best customers know other people with the same problems. You're just not asking them.

Instant Booking Beats Forms Every Time

At early stage, you need forms to capture any interest. At growth stage, forms create friction that kills hot leads. I've tested this across multiple companies: embedding Calendly directly on high-intent pages, pricing, ROI calculator, competitor comparison converts better than "submit this form and we'll reach out."

When someone downloads your pricing guide, they should see available sales slots immediately, not a confirmation page promising contact in 24 hours. Quality over volume. Velocity over friction.

Expansion Pipeline That Marketing Ignores

Pull your expansion revenue from last year. Now look at how much marketing budget goes toward existing customers versus net new logos. I guarantee the ratio is backwards probably 90% new acquisition, 10% expansion, despite expansion representing 30-40% of new ARR.

You already have relationships with people who trust you and have budget. Marketing them is cheaper and faster than cold acquisition. But most CMOs ignore it because expansion doesn't count toward their MQL quota.

What ROI Looks Like in 90 Days

You can't rebuild a demand engine in 90 days. You can identify what's broken, fix the highest-impact problems, and prove you understand the difference between activity and outcomes.

The companies that see pipeline impact in 90 days aren't the ones that deployed perfect strategies. They're the ones that stopped doing things that didn't work and concentrated resources on what actually closed deals. They killed bad channels, fixed broken handoffs, and started measuring what mattered.

If you can't point to measurable pipeline improvement in 90 days, you weren't solving the right problems. You were optimizing the wrong metrics, celebrating the wrong wins, and hoping volume would eventually turn into revenue.

We don't build demand engines in 90 days. We fix the ones that are already there but measuring the wrong things. That's what 90 days buys you: clarity on what drives revenue and proof that you know how to move the number.

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