Company profile (composite)
A Series C HR technology platform selling a workforce planning and performance suite into mid-market and enterprise HR buyers in North America and the UK. Roughly 320 employees at engagement, ARR in the mid $40M range, ACV between $65K and $180K depending on seat count and modules attached. New logo motion was field sales with an SDR layer feeding six pods of AEs, average sales cycle 118 days from first touch to closed-won. Two competing platforms were consistently showing up in evaluations, and Gartner had recently placed all three in the same category quadrant, compressing win rates.
The problem
The company had raised its Series C on a story of expanding beyond core HRIS-adjacent buyers into the Chief People Officer and Head of Talent persona at 1,000 to 5,000 employee companies. LinkedIn Ads had been the primary paid channel for eighteen months, running under a hybrid in-house and boutique-agency model. Spend had grown from $28K per month at Series B close to $142K per month by the time we were introduced, and every quarterly board deck showed the same pattern. Pipeline attributed to LinkedIn was flat to slightly down. CPL had climbed from $312 to $684. The prior agency’s response had been to add more audiences, more creative variants, and more form fills routed to a general MQL stage, which pushed cost per opportunity above $9,400 and cost per closed-won past $61,000. The CFO had already put LinkedIn on a 90-day watch. If Q1 numbers looked like Q4, the line item was going to get cut in half.
What our team diagnosed
The problem was not creative fatigue and it was not audience exhaustion. Our team pulled the LinkedIn Campaign Manager account, the HubSpot pipeline, and 14 months of Salesforce opportunity history into a single dataset and ran a full attribution reconstruction. Three findings surfaced that the client had not seen.
First, 71% of LinkedIn budget was flowing into single-image Sponsored Content targeting a matched audience list of 480,000 contacts that had been uploaded once and never refreshed. Roughly 38% of that list had since changed roles or companies, and LinkedIn was still charging premium CPMs to serve ads to people who no longer held the target title.
Second, the campaign structure had no separation between the Chief People Officer persona (the buyer the Series C thesis depended on) and the HR Ops Manager persona (a user, not an economic buyer). Both were being pushed the same generic “book a demo” offer, and 84% of form fills were coming from the ops layer. Those leads were being counted as MQLs, hitting sales quota targets on paper, and then dying in the pipeline because they had no budget authority.
Third, no dark-social attribution was in place. LinkedIn organic and paid were pushing traffic that converted through direct or organic search 9 to 34 days later, and last-touch attribution was crediting those conversions to the wrong channels. The board had been looking at a LinkedIn P&L that understated real contribution by roughly 40%.
Strategy MV3 shipped
The engagement scoped as a LinkedIn Ads rebuild with a supporting ABM overlay and an analytics rebuild underneath both. Growth AI tier retainer with a paid media lead, an ABM strategist, and an analytics engineer working in parallel for the first six weeks and then transitioning to steady-state monthly optimization.
Five moves anchored the strategy.
One, split the account into two persona-native campaign groups. Buyer campaigns targeted CHRO, CPO, VP People, Head of Talent, and SVP HR at 1,000 to 5,000 employee companies, with creative and offers built for a strategic buyer (annual planning frameworks, benchmark reports, peer roundtables). User campaigns targeted HR Ops, HRBP, People Analytics leads with a different offer set (product-led content, integration demos, community invites) and a separate downstream nurture that did not consume AE capacity until multiple engagement signals fired.
Two, rebuild the matched audiences from scratch off a fresh Apollo pull run through MillionVerifier, with a 45-day refresh cadence to keep list decay under 8%.
Three, add a treasury-style ABM overlay on the top 400 accounts, running LinkedIn CTV, sponsored InMail from named executive senders, and a coordinated outbound sequence from the SDR pod.
Four, rebuild attribution end to end. Server-side conversion API for LinkedIn, UTM discipline across all placements, self-reported attribution field on every form, and a HubSpot workflow that stitched dark-social touches into the opportunity timeline.
Five, tighten the MQL definition so that a form fill only became an MQL if the contact held a target title at a target account. Everything else went into a lower-priority nurture track.
Implementation
Weeks one and two ran discovery, data reconstruction, and stakeholder interviews with the CMO, VP Demand Gen, RevOps lead, and two field AEs. Weeks three and four rebuilt the campaign structure, produced 22 new creative variants across image, document, and video, and shipped a landing page cohort for each persona through the existing CMS. Weeks five through eight ran the new campaigns in parallel with a scaled-down version of the old structure to isolate the impact. From week nine forward the old structure was retired and the account ran on the rebuilt architecture with weekly optimization reviews.
Deliverables produced in the engagement: full LinkedIn account rebuild, ABM playbook covering 400 named accounts, HubSpot workflow overhaul, LinkedIn CAPI implementation, 22 net-new creative assets, four persona-specific landing pages, weekly analytics dashboard, monthly executive readout.
Outcomes (first six months)
- Cost per SQL down 58%, from $9,412 to $3,948.
- Pipeline sourced from LinkedIn up 214% quarter over quarter by month six.
- Buyer-persona MQL share up from 16% of total MQLs to 61%.
- Win rate on LinkedIn-sourced opportunities up from 11% to 23%.
- Board approved a paid media budget increase of 40% at month seven based on the new attribution model, reversing the previously planned cut.
Timeline
Kickoff to full campaign cutover: 8 weeks. First quarter reporting cycle showing the CPL and CPO improvement: month 4. Board reversal of the planned budget cut: month 7. Engagement continues on a rolling Growth AI retainer.
Composite testimonial
“We had convinced ourselves that LinkedIn just did not work at our stage anymore. What actually was not working was our own instrumentation and our own definition of a good lead. The rebuild MV3 shipped changed the conversation with our board inside a quarter.” — Priya, VP Demand Generation
How this profile is built
This profile is a composite, built from patterns and outcomes across multiple engagements rather than one client account, so there is no individual client identity behind it to protect and no further non-public data being withheld. If you want to see how a similar diagnostic maps to your own numbers, book a discovery call.
Talk to the team that ran this engagement
MV3 Marketing’s senior team oversees the MV3 client portfolio. This engagement was executed by our paid media, ABM, and analytics teams working as a single pod. If your LinkedIn Ads program has plateaued, or your board is asking harder questions about paid contribution than your attribution model can answer, we should talk.
Book a discovery call or read more about our LinkedIn Ads program and ABM offering.
