How Lightship Works Transformed Their Marketing From Scattered to Scalable With Eighty Twenty CMO

Lightship Works provides a comprehensive operations platform which enables businesses to see the big picture. With the ability to automate, communicate, track, and manage all in one place, companies can get more work done.

This leading SaaS company works primarily with B2B Enterprise customers, providing the forward-looking technologies—such as automation and AI—to create more efficiency and success.

ENGAGEMENT HIGHLIGHTS

CHALLENGES

• Executing scattered marketing strategies without a clear direction.

• Lacking CMO-level expertise in-house. 

• Having no measurement framework in place.

• Needing more structured thinking and established priorities.

• Looking for support in laying the right foundations for marketing success and growth.

SOLUTION

Eighty Twenty CMO provided a bespoke 12-week performance marketing sprint:

• Deep Discovery: Founder and Principal Michael had conversations with key team members to understand the business and prioritize actions.
  

• Analytics and Insight: Michael created a measurement framework and designed systems to capture critical metrics.
  

• Lead and Client Nurture: Michael redesigned the company’s lead and deal stages to make the pipeline scalable.
  

• Platform Optimization: Michael reduced friction and implemented a variety of best practices to boost demo requests from the website.
  

• Growth-Focused Mentoring: Michael coached and advised the sales and marketing teams so they could add long-term value to the business.

RESULTS

• Strategy-driven marketing enhanced revenue and results.

• Marketing investment prioritized on the activities that matter most.

• Website optimization boosted conversion rates.

• High-calibre CMO support delivered without the time or hassle of hiring.

• Upskilled staff ready to deliver greater value across the funnel moving forward.

• Deep structural change provided foundation for scale.

CHALLENGES

Scattershot marketing and lack of measurement limiting pipeline revenue and readiness to scale

Lightship Works was at a crossroads with its marketing. While they had an in-house resource who had some knowledge of the tools and strategies they should be executing, their activities were disorganized, lacked leadership, and weren’t laddering up to their business goals.

“We’d done a few of the things that, classically, you’d consider marketing, like a little bit of Google Ads, we had a CRM to track our progress, and had done some social media activity,” says Dan Erikson, President and COO at Lightship. 

“But we didn’t fully understand how we should execute, what we should be doing first to create the biggest impact, or how to bring everything together to actually make real progress as a business.”

With a lack of marketing strategy and leadership, coupled with an absence of established priorities, they risked creating organizational challenges, limiting their readiness for future growth and, ultimately, limiting their potential company valuation.

“In order to grow, we needed to make sure we were visible and people could find us. And secondly that when they did, they would understand our value proposition,” says Dan. “But we hadn’t done the structured thinking or developed the right processes or collateral to achieve that effectively. While it wasn’t limiting us just yet, we knew it was about to as we started to seriously scale.”

Among the company’s critical pain points was its lack of a measurement framework. So even with the scattered marketing they were doing, they had no proof of what was working and what wasn’t, leading to inefficient decision making on where to invest their marketing dollars.

As a result, the sales team was feeling the impact. 

“Rather than using technology and automation to assist in moving leads through the funnel, we were relying on the strength of our sales executives’ personalities alone to close deals,” says Dan. “This wasn’t efficient or scalable—and was no way to maximize revenue in our ambitious business.”

What Lightship Works needed was an experienced CMO to provide leadership, bridge knowledge gaps, and identify where they should be spending time and money for maximum benefit at their stage of development. 

The only problem? They’d already interviewed multiple people for the role, but couldn’t shake the feeling that hiring a full-time marketing leader—at that stage—was just too high a risk. Instead, they needed help getting started and laying the right foundations, before they hired someone to lead the team forward in the long term. 

That’s when Dan heard about Eighty Twenty CMO’s flexible and fast-to-results ‘fractional’ solution.

“We didn’t really understand how we should execute, what we should be doing first to create the biggest impact, or how to bring everything together to actually make real progress.”

Solution

Providing the marketing leadership they needed, but in a faster and more flexible way

Dan heard about Eighty Twenty CMO through a contact in his network of COOs and CEOs who’d worked with them previously.

After further research online, Dan liked what he saw. The company helped businesses on a ‘fractional’—or part-time—basis, saving them significant hiring time and the usual employment costs, such as vacation time and stock options. Even better, Eighty Twenty CMO had a proven track-record of achieving growth for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies through performance marketing. For Dan, it was a case of ‘what’s not to like?’ 

After a kick-off call with Eighty Twenty CMO’s Principal Michael Gaudet, Dan signed up for the 12-week sprint. The model is designed to get companies quickly on-track to achieve their business goals.

“The fractional option was ideal for where we were at as an organization,” says Dan. “While it will make sense for us to hire a full-time position in the future, Mike’s solution enabled us to go from fits and starts and a disorganized approach to marketing, to properly structuring it and having a go-forward plan we could really run with.”

The first steps of the sprint focused on discovery. Michael held conversations with key members of Dan’s team, including his sales director and executives, and marketing teammates to gather the business’s collective wisdom, evaluate their performance marketing needs, and prioritize the actions that would benefit the business most, right now.

“The discovery process was valuable, because Mike uncovered exactly where we were as a business. He took a detailed look at all our collateral, including the website, and the systems underneath that. He explored our CRM, whether or not we had analytics, what our sales process was, and left no stone unturned,” says Dan. 

Next, using all the data he’d dug out, Michael created a laser-focused plan, incorporating what to eliminate, what to consolidate, what their areas of priority should be, and what early actions could bring the best results. From there, Michael worked with Dan’s team to execute in the following areas:

Analytics and Insights

Lightship Works, with Michael’s leadership, established benchmark metrics and KPIs in order to measure the effectiveness of their entire sales and marketing pipeline, giving Lightship Works a measurement framework for the first time. 

Michael then designed the systems to capture these metrics and KPIs on an ongoing basis. Importantly, he introduced new software augmentations to make reporting fast, simple and clear, so Lightship could figure out what was working across the pipeline, and make the most efficient use of their marketing spend.

“Mike determined the right KPIs for us, selecting and setting up the technology to track and measure them, and upskilled team members to manage reporting,” says Dan. “This enables us to draw ongoing insights and keeps our main numerical KPI of revenue growth in sharp focus.”

Lead and Client Nurture

Michael worked with Dan’s team to make Lightship Works’ pipeline more scalable. He redesigned their lead and deal stages, including entry and exit criteria, triggers for moving leads to the next stage, and ownership of each part of the sales and marketing lifecycle. 

“Mike helped us hone the journey our leads and clients go through, and adjusted the processes our people follow so they qualify leads better and don’t flood account executives with a bunch of low-quality leads,” says Dan.

Platform Optimization

Michael carried out research and testing to find and resolve friction points on Lightship’s website. 

Using that data, he integrated numerous best practices into the platform. These included adding goal tracking code for demo requests, to give more clarity on what led to conversions. A floating navigation bar was added to the website to ensure the Call-to-Action (CTA) was visible at all times, while client logos were brought to the fore to increase credibility and boost conversion rate of demo requests. 

“Mike was great at identifying technical changes we could make that would have an impact on our business now,” says Dan. “From reworking parts of our website to leveraging customer success stories in our outbound campaigns, Mike’s work has already helped us drive growth within several verticals.” 

With so much knowledge and experience to share, Michael provided regular coaching and advice to team members, enabling them to grow and become more efficient and high-performing for the long term.  

“There are team members who’ve developed their skills significantly thanks to Mike’s mentoring,” says Dan. 

“He also provided his expertise when we made key decisions around lead stages and qualification. He was able to short circuit some of those conversations, which allowed us to avoid a bunch of churn in terms of determining the direction to take.”

The 360-degree bubble of strategic support that Michael created surprised even a veteran COO like Dan. So when they crossed the finish line on the first 12-week sprint, Dan signed up for a second engagement. 

“We loved Mike’s results-driven approach and his collaborative, candid and professional way of working, so we wanted to keep using him to continue to help our people grow, improve our processes, and meet our KPIs and business goals,” says Dan. 

“Mike’s solution enabled us to go from fits and starts and a disorganized approach to marketing, to properly structuring it and having a go-forward plan we could really run with.”

Results

Data-driven marketing actions, more conversions and revenue, and a business that’s ready for scale

Thanks to the leadership and expertise provided by Eighty Twenty CMO, Lightship Works’ marketing has transformed from disorganized guesswork to strategy-driven actions that drive revenue and results. 

“With clear KPIs and a measurement framework now in place, all our activities directly ladder up to clear business goals,” says Dan. “It enables us to constantly refine our activities and ensure we’re prioritizing our investment in the right areas to drive more revenue through the pipeline.”

Michael’s support is bringing more wins for the business. Since optimizing the website, including creating linkages between analytics and CRM to ensure the team is notified when leads return to the website, they’ve seen a significant uplift in conversion rates. 

Meanwhile, having clearer parameters around entry and exit criteria has created more consistency around sales stages and enabled the team to work more efficiently. 

Even better, with hugely improved data analytics and dashboards, Lightship Works can now track every part of the funnel and make smarter, data-driven decisions. 

“With our new dashboards, we can see everything from conversion deals that aren't moving properly to how team members are performing and what they’re contributing,” says Dan. “We can see every contribution, whether that be lead generation or later stages like seeing how the funnel is progressing, what's not happening, and how it's growing. So the dashboarding has been a significant step forward for us.”

Of all the successes from their engagement with Eighty Twenty CMO, what Dan appreciates most is Michael’s ability to bring structure to the people, processes and technology across his department.

“Aside from a variety of quick wins, Mike has brought us something that’s undervalued in many organizations—the structural change that enables us to be ready for scale,” he says. “We have structured systems in place, which new hires can seamlessly and efficiently drop into, which is incredibly valuable as we continue to grow.”

Dan says choosing Eighty Twenty CMO’s fractional offer was the right choice. “It was a cash-efficient way for us to take our sales and marketing to the next level,” says Dan. “We avoided the time and cost involved in hiring a full-time CMO, and were able to get results sooner, because we could just get on with getting the job done.”

Dan would recommend Michael and Eighty Twenty CMO to any technology company looking to scale. 

“What’s great about Mike is he’s not about fluff, fancy talking or fancy presentations. He’s practical, results driven, and execution-oriented,” says Dan. “When he looks at your business, he quickly gets to what the recommendations are and the reasons why, always prioritizing the impact actions will have in accelerating your business.”