Case Study: Build Foundations of Demand-To-Pipeline Engine

“I needed a team that could not only set up the technical side of things but also help me think strategically, OneMetric (formerly Growtomation) delivered on all fronts.” 

Julie Taylor

VP Marketing Confidencial

Breaking Into a Crowded Market With Precision

Confidencial is a data-centric security company that protects sensitive information at the data level with advanced encryption and AI. The product gives organizations control over documents even after they leave internal systems, which is especially important in industries like finance, healthcare, and the public sector.

Launching a new product in cybersecurity is never easy. The market is crowded, and buyers are cautious. Decisions take time and require trust. That is why education became the natural starting point, not just to create awareness, but to build authority in an emerging category like AI data governance.

What was missing was a way to bring all of these motions together and make them work as one. This is where OneMetric stepped in, helping Confidencial find clarity and building the execution layer inside HubSpot so that education, nurture, and pipeline capture could run as a connected system.

Challenges: Driving GTM Success in High-Complexity Environments

Turning Education Into Pipeline

For Confidencial, education was essential. In a crowded security market with long buying cycles, prospects needed time to understand the value of a new product before considering adoption. But education on its own does not create opportunities. The challenge was how to move from awareness to a real pipeline without losing credibility.

Also, even if someone attended a webinar or downloaded content, the buying journey was far from over. Enterprise sales cycles often stretched across months, involving discovery, validation, and InfoSec reviews. 

The question was how to keep prospects engaged during this time, build trust step by step, and prevent early interest from fading before a deal could move forward.

Building a 0→1 GTM Motion

Confidencial was bringing a new product to market, which meant there was no existing playbook to follow. Every step, from defining the demand channels to shaping the buyer journey, had to be built from the ground up.

The challenge was not only to design a first GTM motion but also to figure out what would work for Confidencial and to document what would not. This created clarity around both wins and misses, giving the team the ability to revisit decisions and refine the motion over time.

Aligning Multiple Demand Sources Into One System

The Confidencial team was planning to generate demand through inbound, outbound, events, and paid campaigns. Each channel had potential, but the role of each and how they would fit into the customer journey was not yet clear. 

The challenge was to design a system where all channels worked together, with a defined place in the journey, and where sales and marketing could see how they connected to create a pipeline.

What We Built to Make the GTM Work

Miro Blueprint for Clarity

We started by creating a Miro blueprint to bring structure to Confidencial’s go-to-market motion. With no existing playbook to lean on, the blueprint became the shared map of how demand would be generated, nurtured, and converted.

The process of building it involved discovery calls with the team, market research, and multiple rounds of iteration until every motion was aligned. This exercise clarified not just what needed to be built, but why.

To make the blueprint actionable, we divided it into layers:

• HubSpot Layer: how lifecycle stages, lead statuses, properties, and workflows would be structured so every touchpoint could be tracked in one system.
  
  
• Channel Layer: how inbound, outbound, webinars, paid media, and ABM would each play their part in the journey, and how leads would move from one channel to the next.

As campaigns expanded, we later created a dedicated Miro to map how ads would work. This helped the team visualize budgets, targeting, and creative flows before execution, bringing the same level of clarity to paid campaigns as we had for the overall GTM system.

This gave the team clarity on what needed to be built inside HubSpot and created alignment before execution began.

Webinars as the First Demand Engine

In a market where trust had to be earned before a sales conversation could even begin, webinars became the first major demand channel. They allowed Confidencial to educate deeply on topics that mattered most to buyers, such as selective encryption, zero trust, and AI in data security, while keeping the focus on value rather than a hard sell.

Attendees who showed interest were nurtured further, while those who were not ready still received valuable content without pressure. Alongside webinars, a regular newsletter program kept the audience engaged between events, sharing product updates, insights, and thought leadership that reinforced Confidencial’s position in the market.

“From creating a sleek newsletter design to building out insightful reporting, they’re always thinking ahead. They helped me execute my first webinar flawlessly, even integrating all the necessary tools for smooth operation.”  

- Julie Taylor, VP Marketing, Confidencial

Every webinar also created assets that lived on beyond the event. Recordings, snippets, and slides were repurposed into gated content, nurture campaigns, and sales material. With everything managed inside HubSpot, attendees, no-shows, new leads, and newsletter subscribers all entered into structured journeys.

Education stayed credible, but now it also contributed to a repeatable pipeline.

Disqualification Playbooks

Not every lead was ready to move forward, but dropping them entirely would have meant losing future opportunities. To address this, we built disqualification playbooks directly into HubSpot.

Thirteen standardized reasons were created, and each was tied to its own nurture path so that leads were recycled instead of lost. For example, a prospect marked as “not the right time” would move into a softer nurture stream, while someone disqualified for “no budget” could be re-engaged later when conditions changed.

This gave sales clarity on why leads were disqualified and gave marketing a structured way to bring them back into the funnel when the timing was right.

Expanding Into New Channels

Since education alone could not create all the demand Confidencial needed, we began testing additional channels to reach accounts beyond webinars and newsletters. This included LinkedIn, Google Ads, and ABM.

While there were many moving parts, two initiatives stood out for their impact.

News-Driven Campaigns

Confidencial was competing in a fast-changing market where headlines could shift buyer attention overnight. To stay relevant, we built campaigns that tapped into industry news and used it as a demand driver.

When a competitor announced changes in their operations, Confidencial was in front of the same audience on LinkedIn within days. The campaign highlighted the uncertainty in the market and positioned Confidencial as the reliable choice.

This approach turned external events into timely campaigns that sparked conversations with accounts already in the funnel.

ABM with Foundry

Account-based marketing was also introduced to complement inbound and paid search. Using Foundry, we structured campaigns at three levels: one-to-many to warm broad ICP accounts, one-to-few targeting industry-specific clusters, and one-to-one for high-intent Tier 1 accounts.

This provided a scalable way to balance reach and precision. Broad campaigns created awareness, while targeted clusters and account-specific messaging drove relevance and supported sales conversations.

“OneMetric team helped me optimize and refine our paid programs and workflows, ensuring that everything runs smoothly even when I’m not actively managing it. Their guidance in shifting towards an ABM strategy has been invaluable, allowing us to tailor our marketing more effectively.” 

- Julie Taylor, VP Marketing, Confidencial

Data Validation for Better Deliverability

As outbound and nurture programs scaled, email quality became critical. High bounce rates or invalid addresses could hurt domain reputation and reduce deliverability, putting the entire system at risk.

To address this, we integrated ZeroBounce directly into HubSpot. Every new contact was validated in real time before entering a workflow. This kept lists clean, reduced wasted effort on unreachable leads, and protected the domain so campaigns continued landing in inboxes.

For a company building its first GTM motion, this step was tactical but essential. It ensured that the foundation being built could scale without being undermined by basic deliverability issues.

Reporting for Leadership

With education, outbound, and paid campaigns running together, leadership needed a way to see the whole picture. Traditional reports only showed activity in silos, making it hard to connect marketing efforts with pipeline impact.

We built reporting inside HubSpot that tracked how accounts moved across long enterprise cycles. Marketing dashboards showed which channels were creating engagement. Sales dashboards highlighted pipeline velocity and where deals slowed down in stages like validation or InfoSec review. Alignment dashboards brought it all together so leadership could see the full demand-to-pipeline motion in one place.

This gave the team confidence that the system was working and clarity on where to focus next. Instead of chasing isolated metrics, they had visibility into how the entire GTM engine was performing.

The Impact

By turning scattered activities into a connected GTM system, Confidencial built a foundation that could scale. The work created measurable outcomes across marketing, sales, and leadership visibility:

• 34%+ growth in direct traffic in a single quarter
• 18%+ growth in organic search in the same period
• 10%+ growth in marketing-qualified leads quarter over quarter

What was once fragmented became a repeatable motion. Education created trust, campaigns created demand, and HubSpot turned it all into a trackable pipeline.

We are still working with Confidencial to roll out the next phase. This includes adding a chatbot, improving visibility on search, and launching retargeting to build a stronger pipeline.

If building a system like this on HubSpot sounds right for your organization, we’d be glad to help you get there. 

Book a call with us for a free audit!