A PROPOSAL · DIRECTOR, GROWTH MARKETING
Learn the number. Build the pipeline engine.
A ninety-day plan for owning enterprise demand at Markup AI, from lead gen to close.
GROUND RULES
What I am assuming, so you can correct me.
Everything below is built from your public site and the posting. If any of these is wrong, the plan changes, and I would rather be corrected in the interview than be confidently wrong in the job.
- The buyer titles I am targeting are the content operations manager, the regulatory content strategist, and the global brand compliance manager. All three own the consequences of bad content, not the production of it.
- The industries are the ones where language failure becomes legal exposure: medical device, pharmaceutical, biotechnology, financial services, and legal services. These are markets where a non-compliant sentence is a regulatory event, not an embarrassment.
- Two ICPs are live on your site: marketing teams and tech docs teams. They buy differently. Marketing buys on speed and brand risk; tech docs buys on compliance and terminology consistency.
- The motion is hybrid: a self-serve Professional trial and an enterprise Custom tier sold by a CRO-led team. Growth has to feed both, and they need separate scoreboards.
- The Acrolinx heritage means real enterprise logos already exist — Siemens, SAAB, Kohler, Meta, Microsoft appear on your site — but the Markup AI brand is new. That is a credibility asset most new categories do not have.
- You are creating a category (“AI content governance”), so most demand is latent. Very few people search for a product they do not know exists.
- The team is lean and AI-native by design. This plan assumes I execute, not that I hire.
PHASE ONE · DAYS 1–30
Gather. Ask the questions that make the budget decisions obvious.
No new campaigns in the first thirty days beyond keeping what is running alive. The deliverable at day 30 is a written point of view, not a launch.
The C-suite: what does winning actually mean this year?
Sessions with the VP of Marketing, the CRO, the CEO, and Product. The questions I need answered in writing:
- What is the pipeline target, split between self-serve and enterprise, and what is the marketing-sourced share of it?
- Which of the two ICPs is the growth priority this year, and is that a revenue call or a product-readiness call?
- What is the acceptable cost per opportunity, and what is the total budget I am spending?
- Where does the category story need to be by year end — are we selling “governance,” or are we still selling “a better writing checker”?
- What did we try last year that did not work, and what is the honest reason it did not?
Sales: collect the anecdotes before the averages
Ride-alongs and call recordings, not a survey. What I am mining for:
- The sentence a prospect says right before they lean in. Category-creation marketing lives or dies on that sentence, and sales already knows it.
- The three objections that kill deals, in order. Your own site already answers one of them (“we already use a writing tool”) — I want to know whether that is still the top one.
- Who actually signs: the VP of Marketing, the Head of Content, Legal, or IT? The buying committee shapes the channel mix more than the persona does.
- Which inbound leads sales genuinely wants more of, and which they quietly ignore. That gap is the lead-scoring model rewriting itself.
The pipeline and the funnel as they exist today
- A full HubSpot audit: lifecycle stage definitions, scoring logic, attribution setup, and where the marketing-to-sales handoff actually breaks.
- Cohort the last four quarters of closed-won and closed-lost by source. Not to assign credit, but to find which first touches correlate with deals that actually close.
- Trial funnel forensics: signup to first scan, first scan to repeat use, repeat use to sales conversation. Find the worst drop and treat it as a marketing problem, not only a product one.
- Confirm whether the Gartner Guardian Agents datapoint you cite is driving inbound. If a third-party analyst is validating the category for us, that is the most reusable asset we have.
Customers: what did it actually solve?
- Eight to twelve interviews, weighted toward customers who expanded and customers who churned. Both are more informative than the happy middle.
- The question that matters: what were you doing before, and what did you stop doing? Your site claims most teams cut time-to-publish by over 50%. I want that in the customer’s own words, with their own baseline, so it can be cited without a disclaimer.
- Harvest the language. Category creation means the customer’s vocabulary becomes the campaign’s vocabulary, not the other way around.
PHASE TWO · DAYS 30–60
Propose. Lean into addressing the fear, not how it’s done.
The central bet of this plan, stated plainly so it can be attacked: in regulated industries, nobody buys a content governance platform because they want better brand voice. They buy it because they are afraid of what happens when the language is wrong. So we lean hard into the first message below, and deliberately lean away from the second.
An extra set of eyes, as lawsuit protection
Buys because: a regulator, a plaintiff, or a legal team is downstream of every sentence they publish. The purchase is insurance. It is urgent, it is budgeted out of risk rather than marketing, and it survives a spending freeze.
Sold with: named customer near-misses, industry-specific failure modes, survey data showing their peers are already exposed, and a discovery call framed as an assessment.
This is the opening argument, in every channel, to every one of the three titles.
Massaging brand voice at scale
Buys because: volume is up and consistency is slipping. Real, and worth solving, but it is a productivity purchase. It competes with every other tool for the same discretionary budget and it is the first line cut when budgets tighten.
Sold with: efficiency claims, time-to-publish numbers, and workflow demos — all of which describe how the product works rather than what it protects them from.
This is not the opening argument. It belongs after the buyer has already agreed they have a risk problem, and it never leads a campaign.
What this means in practice
Customers care more about what problem you solve than how you solve it. So the message hierarchy inverts: non-compliance exposure first, volume and scale second, brand voice consistency third. The product story about scanning, scoring, and rewriting is proof of capability, not the opening argument. It belongs in the demo, not the first sentence.
The funnel that follows is deliberately conventional and deliberately measurable: cold outbound → discovery call → demo and pitch → close. Every channel below is judged on whether it feeds that sequence.
Repeatable cold outbound into the named account list
The opening line is not “publish faster.” It is a specific, recognisable failure in their own industry — a claim that shipped without review, a warning label that drifted in translation, a fund fact sheet that went out with last quarter’s language. The ask is a fifteen-minute discovery call to find out how exposed they are, not a demo.
Original survey research: how afraid is everyone else?
Commission a survey of content and compliance leaders in regulated industries and publish the number. “X% of regulated-industry content teams have shipped AI-generated copy no compliance reviewer read.” That statistic is the outbound opener, the webinar title, the paid creative, and the press hook, all from one asset. Fear is most persuasive when it is other people’s, measured.
Email carrying customer stories, not product updates
Every send leads with a named team describing what nearly went out the door. Your own testimonials already point here — regulatory security, trademark and branding terms tracked against legal rules. Nurture is sequenced by behaviour: someone who read the medical-device story gets the medical-device case next, and the ask escalates from read to discovery call.
Webinars, but only when a customer is describing their own near-miss
A webinar that explains how the product works is education. A webinar where a compliance lead walks through the review that caught something is a sales asset. Same format, different casting. The revenue version is customer-led, industry-specific, and gated, and every registrant enters an outbound sequence within 24 hours.
Paid social, constrained to retargeting and proof
LinkedIn against the buying committee at accounts already in an outbound sequence, carrying the survey statistic and the customer stories. In a latent-demand category, paid does not create the need — it makes the outbound feel like it came from a company the prospect has heard of. Kill threshold set in advance.
Partner co-marketing, scored on pipeline or dropped
The partners that matter are the ones already inside the regulated buyer’s compliance workflow. A joint piece framed as “what your review process misses” borrows their credibility for our fear. Each program is classified up front as pipeline-driving or awareness-only, and the awareness-only ones get much less of my time.
The awkward one: the YouTube webinar series
As it stands, the series is an education and brand motion. A few hundred views six months after publication is a respectable result for brand, and a poor one for pipeline. I would not kill it — it does real work for credibility and for AI search visibility — but I would stop counting it as demand generation, and I would change what gets made.
The version that produces pipeline is not us explaining the product. It is a customer in a regulated industry describing a specific thing that almost went wrong, with the compliance stakes named. Same production cost, same channel, entirely different asset. If that reframe does not lift registrant-to-discovery-call conversion within two quarters, the honest answer is that webinars are a brand line item here and should be budgeted as one.
The AI-native layer runs underneath all of it
Content production, campaign QA, reporting, and research get AI-assisted workflows built by me, using your own product where it fits. Every piece of marketing content we ship should pass a Markup AI check before publish, and the score should be visible internally. If we will not run our own quality gate on our own content, we should not be asking a prospect to.
PHASE THREE · DAYS 60–90
Execute, with the measurement built before the spend.
Attribution goes in first. A campaign that runs before the tracking exists is a campaign we will argue about for a quarter and learn nothing from.
- Rebuild the lifecycle in HubSpot — stage definitions everyone agrees on, scoring that reflects what sales actually wants, segmentation by ICP, and a handoff with an SLA on both sides.
- Ship the first integrated campaign against the priority ICP: the benchmark research, a webinar, the nurture, the paid retargeting, and a sales sequence, all telling one story.
- Set the kill thresholds up front. Each channel gets a spend cap and a date at which it must show a result or stop. Deciding in advance is what makes it a decision rather than a defence of last quarter.
- Instrument the trial funnel so activation, not signup, is the metric on the dashboard.
- Establish the weekly review: one page, same format every week, pipeline at the top. Leadership should never have to ask how growth is doing.
MEASURE
Accountable to the number, not the activity.
The scoreboard I would ask to be judged against. It is deliberately short. A dashboard with thirty metrics is a dashboard nobody reads.
| Metric | Definition | Cadence | Why it earns a place |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pipeline contribution | Marketing-sourced and marketing-influenced pipeline, in dollars | Weekly | The number the role is accountable to. Everything else is a leading indicator of it. |
| MQL → SQL conversion | Rate, and time-in-stage | Weekly | Named explicitly in the posting. A rising MQL count with a falling conversion rate is a failure, not a win. |
| Discovery calls booked | From cold outbound, by industry and by title | Weekly | The engine’s output. If this number is flat, nothing downstream matters, and no other channel can compensate for it. |
| Discovery → demo → close | Conversion at each step, and time between them | Weekly | Tells me whether the fear message is qualifying or just interesting. High discovery volume with low demo conversion means the opener is landing on the wrong people. |
| Campaign ROI | Pipeline dollars per dollar spent, by channel and campaign | Monthly | Decides what gets more budget next month. Requires attribution to exist first. |
| Trial starts → activated | Free-trial signups, and the share that scan real content | Weekly | A signup that never scans a document is not a lead. Activation is the honest top of funnel. |
| Newsletter growth and engagement | Net subscriber growth, click-through, and pipeline attributed | Monthly | Email is called out as a growth channel, not a broadcast channel. It gets measured like one. |
| Content-attributed pipeline | Pipeline touched by an editorial or organic entry point | Monthly | Separates authority-building that works from authority-building that only feels good. |
| Partner co-marketing yield | Pipeline per partner program, versus reach only | Quarterly | The posting asks for a call on which partnerships drive pipeline versus awareness. This is how that call gets made. |
| Cost per opportunity | Blended, and by channel | Monthly | The efficiency constraint. Rising CPO is the early warning that a channel is saturating. |
Targets are intentionally absent. Setting a pipeline number from outside the company would be theatre. The first thing I would ask for in week one is the real one, and the first thing I would commit to at day 30 is what I think marketing can carry of it.
THE ARGUMENT I WANT TO HAVE
What I would want you to push back on.
Four places this plan could be wrong, so we can spend the interview on those rather than on the parts we already agree about.
The fear thesis may be too narrow
I am betting the whole message hierarchy on regulatory exposure being the dominant buying trigger. If your closed-won data says deals are actually won on volume and speed, the hierarchy inverts and the outbound opener changes. That is the first thing I would check in the phase-one pipeline audit, and it is the assumption I would most want killed early if it is wrong.
Cutting webinars back may be a mistake
A few hundred views six months on is weak for pipeline but genuinely useful for brand and AI search visibility, which you sell against. If the series is influencing deals in ways attribution is not catching, reweighting away from it costs more than it saves.
Thirty days of listening may be too slow
If there is a board-level pipeline commitment this quarter, the listening compresses to two weeks and runs in parallel with keeping current campaigns alive. I would rather know that constraint now.
I may be underweighting paid
My instinct that paid is for retargeting rather than cold discovery comes from latent-demand categories generally, not from your data. If your paid social is already producing efficient pipeline, that instinct is wrong and the mix shifts.
Two ICPs may be one too many
Marketing teams and tech docs teams need genuinely different content, proof, and channels. A lean function serving both may serve neither well. I would push to pick one for two quarters, and I expect that to be a real argument.
The HubSpot gap is real
I have built lifecycle, scoring, and attribution logic from scratch, but not inside HubSpot as an admin. If this quarter is mostly deep HubSpot surgery on day one, that is a legitimate reason to prefer another candidate, and I would rather have said so.
Happy to be argued with.
If any of the above is wrong, the fastest way to find out is a conversation.