Client identity protected under NDA. Details available under mutual sign-off in a discovery call.
Composite company profile
A Series D cybersecurity platform in the cloud workload protection space. Roughly $80M ARR at engagement start, 320 employees, average contract value between $145K and $310K depending on module mix, and a 14-month median sales cycle. Buyer committee typically includes a CISO, a Head of Cloud Security, a Director of Compliance, and a Procurement lead. Board had approved the Series D on a growth-and-margin thesis with a 24-month runway to a $200M ARR gate before an IPO window.
The problem
Twelve months after the Series D close, the company was missing plan by 22 percent. New logo pipeline had flattened despite headcount in sales doubling. Marketing was spending $1.9M per quarter across paid channels, six SDRs, and three agencies. Their previous playbook — a broad “cloud security” content library plus mid-funnel Gartner and G2 spend — had worked well through Series B and C when the category was still forming, but at Series D scale the CAC payback had drifted from 14 months to 31 months.
Three specific symptoms were showing up on the CRO dashboard. Organic traffic to the top ten commercial pages had dropped 34 percent year over year as AI Overviews absorbed informational queries. Cost per opportunity in paid search had climbed from $2,400 to $6,900 as CrowdStrike, Wiz, and Palo Alto raised bids on the same shortlist terms. And enterprise deals that had reached late stage were stalling in procurement without a clear reason.
What our team diagnosed
MV3 was engaged for a six-week GEO plus revenue diagnostic before any retainer work began. Our SEO and analytics team pulled the last 18 months of GA4, Ahrefs, Search Console, HubSpot pipeline, and Gong call transcripts.
Four root causes surfaced that were not obvious to the internal team.
First, category-level cannibalization. The company had 47 pages targeting variants of “cloud security” and “CSPM,” and Google was rotating the ranking URL every few weeks. No single page was accumulating link equity or engagement signals long enough to hold a top-three position.
Second, an AI citation gap. When our team ran the 40 highest-intent buyer prompts through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AIO, the client appeared in cited sources for only 11 percent of them. Two competitors appeared in 60 percent plus. The client’s product pages read like feature dumps and were not being pulled as source material by any of the LLM crawlers.
Third, the ABM program was targeting the wrong 400 accounts. The scoring model had been built in 2023 on firmographics that no longer predicted close rates. When we rebuilt the fit score using won-deal data from the last four quarters, only 38 percent of the current target account list intersected with the new high-fit set.
Fourth, procurement stalls were traceable to a missing security and compliance content layer. Prospects who reached late stage were going to Google looking for SOC 2 posture, FedRAMP status, and comparison content, and finding either nothing or a competitor’s landing page.
Strategy MV3 shipped
Engagement moved to the Scale AI retainer at $9,997 per month with a 12-month commitment plus a one-time $34K category-consolidation project.
Five workstreams ran in parallel.
The SEO team executed a category consolidation. The 47 legacy pages were merged into 11 canonical pillar pages with a clear internal linking hierarchy. Redirects were mapped one-to-one and monitored for equity retention.
The GEO team rebuilt the top 22 commercial pages for AI citability. Each page received a 40 to 60 word Quick Answer block, FAQPage schema with 8 to 12 buyer-intent questions, statistics with year and source, and third-party validation quotes formatted for citation extraction. An llms.txt file was published and an AI-facing knowledge base was structured for crawl.
The ABM team, working under Jordan Reeves, rebuilt the target account list from won-deal firmographics and shipped a 12-touch cross-channel sequence across LinkedIn, cold email, direct mail, and calling. 500 accounts per month were engaged on a rolling cohort.
The paid media team, under Morgan Ellis, cut branded and generic-category spend by 43 percent and reallocated to competitor conquest, review-site retargeting, and LinkedIn ABM.
The content team shipped a security and compliance content layer: a live trust center, three FedRAMP progress explainers, five head-to-head competitor comparisons written to answer procurement-stage objections, and a set of buyer’s guides gated behind low-friction forms feeding the ABM sequence.
Implementation
Deliverables shipped over months one through nine included 11 pillar pages rebuilt, 22 commercial pages optimized for GEO, 34 net-new blog posts, 5 comparison pages, 3 buyer’s guides, an llms.txt file, structured data across the site, a rebuilt HubSpot lead scoring model, a 12-touch ABM sequence powered by an n8n workflow into Apollo and MillionVerifier, and 4 quarterly executive readouts to the CRO and CMO.
Cadence was weekly for the analytics team, biweekly for SEO and ABM syncs, and monthly for a full executive report combining GA4, GSC, HubSpot, and AI citation tracking.
Outcomes
Measured 12 months from kickoff against the trailing 12 months.
- New logo pipeline up 187 percent, from $14.2M trailing to $40.8M forward.
- Cost per opportunity down 61 percent, from $6,900 to $2,680.
- Non-brand organic traffic on the 11 consolidated pillar pages up 214 percent.
- AI citation coverage across the 40 buyer prompts went from 11 percent to 58 percent, passing one of the two named competitors.
- Sales cycle on ABM-sourced deals shortened from 14 months to 9 months on average.
- CAC payback moved from 31 months back to 16 months, inside the board’s IPO gate model.
Timeline
Diagnostic ran weeks one through six. Category consolidation and GEO rebuild shipped weeks seven through twenty. ABM sequence launched week twelve and hit full 500-account cadence by week eighteen. First material pipeline lift showed up in month five. Full outcomes above were measured at month twelve and held through month eighteen.
Under NDA
Client identity, exact ARR figures, product module mix, and named competitor comparisons are protected under NDA. Full engagement details, quarterly board-report excerpts, and a live reference call with the CMO are available under mutual sign-off during a discovery call.
“MV3 was the first agency that treated our category consolidation and our AI citation problem as one problem, not two. The 12-month pipeline number is the one the board cares about. It moved.” — Ana, CMO
Ready to run this play?
If you are a Series C or Series D cybersecurity, infrastructure, or data platform company with a CAC payback problem, a category cannibalization problem, or an AI citation gap, our team can run the same diagnostic on your business. Book a discovery call or see the ABM Agency program that powered the pipeline lift.
