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Performance Roadmap

Orbit

Employee onboarding software for mid-market HR teams

Strategist: Apostolos Bolkas · Engagement: Performance Roadmap · Q1 2025

Context

Orbit helps mid-market HR teams reduce time-to-productivity for new hires. They had a working product, strong retention, and a sales team closing deals — but pipeline felt inconsistent. Some months 22 qualified demos, some months 9. No clear explanation.

The brief: build a measurement framework, run structured experiments across channels, and get pipeline to a predictable 35 Sales Accepted Leads per month within 90 days.

SALs at start

18/mo

Sales Accepted Leads

SAL target

35/mo

90-day goal

Total media spend

€7,000/mo

Across all paid channels

Blended CAC

€245

At end of engagement

01

Measurement Framework

What we track and why

Before any experiment starts, we defined exactly what counts as success at each stage of the funnel — and what doesn't. Vanity metrics were explicitly excluded.

Lead submitted

Form completions by source

Owner

Marketing

Note

Tracked in GA4 + HubSpot. Source must be verified — not 'direct'.

Demo booked

Calendly bookings within 48h of form submission

Owner

Marketing

Note

48h window filters out cold outreach contamination.

Sales accepted lead

SAL confirmed by sales rep in HubSpot

Owner

Sales

Note

Primary metric. Everything optimises toward this.

Opportunity created

Deal stage 2+ in HubSpot

Owner

Sales

Note

Tracked weekly. Used for channel efficiency calculation.

Deal won

Closed-won revenue by lead source

Owner

Sales

Note

Quarterly review only. Not used for weekly optimisation.

02

Experiment Results

What we tested, what we learned

01

LinkedIn Document Ads will generate lower CPL than Thought Leadership Ads for the same audience.

Scale

Result (CPL)

Document Ads: €38 CPL. Thought Leadership: €57 CPL.

Learning

Document Ads outperformed by 34%. The content format (downloadable checklist vs. carousel) drove dwell time and intent signals that LinkedIn's algorithm rewarded.

02

'See it in Action' CTA will outperform 'Book a Demo' on the homepage hero.

Keep

Result (CTR / Demo bookings)

CTR increased 22%. Demo bookings up 18%. SAL rate unchanged.

Learning

Lower-commitment language reduces friction at the awareness stage without attracting lower-quality leads. Worth testing across all paid landing pages.

03

An outcome-led homepage hero ('New hires productive in half the time') will outperform a feature-led hero ('Structured onboarding workflows').

Scale

Result (Demo requests)

Demo requests increased 41% over 3-week test period.

Learning

Buyers at the awareness stage do not care about features. They care about the cost of slow onboarding. Outcome-led messaging won decisively.

04

Retargeting visitors who viewed the pricing page but did not convert will produce SALs at lower CAC than cold prospecting.

Scale

Result (SALs / CAC)

12 retargeting SALs in 30 days. CAC: €140 vs €350 cold.

Learning

Pricing page visitors have already self-qualified on intent and budget. Retargeting them with a case study (not a demo offer) produced 2.5x better conversion.

03

Channel Performance

Where the pipeline comes from

LinkedIn Ads

Document Ads and retargeting now split 60/40.

Spend

€4,200

SALs

14

CAC

€300

Google Search

Reduced from €2,800. Brand + high-intent only.

Spend

€1,500

SALs

6

CAC

€250

Referral

Up from 5. Two customers became active referrers after case study launch.

Spend

€0

SALs

9

CAC

Organic / Content

Driven by one LinkedIn post that reached 38k impressions.

Spend

€0

SALs

6

CAC

Total SALs

35/mo

Target hit. Up from 18.

Paid spend

€5,700

Down from €7,000. Reallocated, not cut.

Blended CAC

€163

Down from €245 at start.

04

Next 30 Days

Where we focus next

1

Build a referral system around the two customers already referring.

Referral is producing 26% of SALs at zero media cost. Right now it's happening because two customers like the product — not because there's a system. Identify what prompted them to refer, make it easy to repeat, and approach 5 more customers with the same profile.

2

Extend the outcome-led homepage test to all paid landing pages.

The homepage rewrite drove a 41% lift in demo requests. The paid landing pages are still using feature-led copy. Run the same test there — one outcome-led variant per channel — over a 3-week window.

3

Add a LinkedIn organic content cadence: one post per week minimum.

One LinkedIn post drove 38k impressions and 6 SALs last month with no paid spend behind it. This is not a fluke — it's an underinvested channel. One post per week, focused on the buyer problem, not the product.

05

The Diagnosis

The one thing that changes everything

Organic and referral are generating 43% of SALs at zero media spend — and nobody was paying attention to them. The paid channels are working, but they're also masking the real opportunity. If Orbit systematises what's already happening organically, it can hit 50 SALs a month without increasing the media budget at all.

How this was built

This output came from real data.

Not assumptions. The Performance Roadmap engagement includes:

Measurement Plan

Define what counts before anything runs. No experiment starts without a primary metric and a decision rule.

Experiment Backlog

A prioritised list of testable hypotheses — each with an audience, an offer, a channel, and an expected outcome.

Campaign Briefs

One brief per experiment. Goal, audience, message, measurement, and approval — in writing, before spend is committed.

Creative Briefs

One clear idea per asset. Audience tension, proof point, mandatory elements, and a hard deadline.

Weekly Updates

Every Monday: what shipped, what we learned, what's next, and what decisions you need to make.

Quarterly Review

What worked, what we're scaling, what we're killing, and the next 90-day plan — with budget allocation.