CASE STUDY·2019–2020·18-MONTH ENGAGEMENT·$100M ARR DELIVERED
How we engineered Motive's $0 → $100M ARR in 18 months. One outbound engine.
Motive had just acquired a division with a $100M ARR target on a 24-month clock, and no GTM stack to speak of. We stood up Salesforce, Marketo, and HubSpot from scratch around a 2M-contact database, coded the lead-scoring, routing, and velocity layer ourselves, and ran an outbound engine that peaked at 2.5M emails per month. The 100-rep sales team got warm, scored leads. The division hit $100M ARR in 18 months, six months ahead of plan.
M01 · KPI
$100M
ARR delivered
in 18 months · 6mo ahead
M02 · KPI
2.5M
Outbound emails / month
at peak cadence
M03 · KPI
2M
CRM contacts
stack stood up from zero
M04 · KPI
100
Reps fed warm leads
by one operator
EXHIBIT 01
Acquired division, no GTM stack, $100M ARR target, and a 24-month clock.
When the engagement opened, the acquired division had a 100-person sales team and almost nothing for them to sell off of. No CRM of record, no marketing automation, no shared funnel definition, no scoring, no routing. Reps were prospecting from spreadsheets. Leadership had committed to $100M ARR in 24 months, and there was a single growth operator hired to make it real.
⊘ Status quo
A 100-rep team prospecting from spreadsheets. No stack, no scoring, no shared funnel.
×01No system of record. Leads scattered across spreadsheets, inboxes, and reps' heads
×02No marketing automation. Every send was hand-built, every list one-off
×03No lead scoring or routing. Best accounts went to whoever asked first
×04No attribution. No defensible answer to 'where did this pipeline come from?'
→ Mandate
Stand up the full GTM stack from scratch and hit $100M ARR within 24 months.
→01Build the CRM, MAP, and contact graph end-to-end
→02Code the scoring, routing, and velocity reporting in-house
→03Feed a 100-rep team enough warm volume to sustain the ramp
→04Defend the funnel to leadership with attribution that actually ties out
EXHIBIT 02
An outbound engine that compounds, not a stack of unowned tools.
Most acquired divisions stack tools (sequencer, MAP, CRM, enrichment, dialer) and find out a year later that nobody owns the seams between them. Lists go stale, scoring is a vibe, ownership rules drift, attribution is a story. Pipeline shows up on the dashboard and disappears before close. The thesis here was the inverse: one operator, one engine, one source of truth. Salesforce as the system of record, Marketo for nurture, HubSpot for inbound capture, scoring + routing + velocity reports coded against the same contact graph. Reps trust the system because it tells the truth, and the truth scales.
DIAGRAM · ONE OPERATOR · ONE ENGINE · ONE GRAPH
∑
Three vendors. One graph. Three operations owning the seams that most acquired divisions leave open.
EXHIBIT 03
$100M ARR. Six months ahead of board commit.
HEADLINE METRIC
The 24-month plan committed to leadership had $100M ARR by Q2 2021. The division hit it at Q2 2020. Each quarter after Q2 2019 outpaced forecast, driven by an outbound engine that, at peak, sent 2.5M emails per month and fed the sales team hundreds of qualified, scored, routed leads per week.
Quarterly ARR · forecast vs. actual
n=6 quarters · Q1'19 → Q2'20
Q1'19
Q2'19
Q3'19
Q4'19
Q1'20
Q2'20
Forecast (board commit)ActualΔ +6 months ahead of plan at $100M
"
The infrastructure ramped through Q1, then the engine compounded. Q3 was the inflection. Once scoring and routing went live, the rep team's connect rate roughly doubled and the curve never came back down to plan.
Engagement retrospective · Boost
Motive RevOps Case · #2
EXHIBIT 04
Operating model. Four phases, one operator, one engine.
Phases overlapped; nothing was strictly sequential. The stack stood up while the first scoring rules were being prototyped, while outbound infrastructure was already being lit. Velocity reporting started shipping daily by the end of phase 02.
Wk 1–8
PHASE 01
Stand Up the Stack
Salesforce, Marketo, and HubSpot installed and configured around a 2M-contact database. Object model defined, sync rules wired, dedupe pass executed. Lifecycle stages and lead-status taxonomy agreed with sales leadership.
Outputs
→ Salesforce org (object model + flows)
→ Marketo instance + nurture skeleton
→ HubSpot inbound capture
→ 2M-contact graph deduped
Wk 4–12
PHASE 02
Wire the Score
Custom lead scoring coded against historical close patterns: firmographic + behavioral + source-of-record signals. Assignment routing rules built per territory and tier. Daily velocity reporting (lead-to-MQL-to-SQL) shipping by week 12.
Outputs
→ Lead-scoring model (in-CRM)
→ Routing logic + SLA timers
→ Daily velocity dashboard
→ Top-ICP definition v1
Wk 8 onward
PHASE 03
Light the Engine
Automated outbound sequenced against scored, routed lists. Scaled from a few thousand sends per week to a peak of 2.5M emails per month, feeding the 100-rep sales team a steady flow of warm conversations.
Outputs
→ Persona-forked sequences
→ Deliverability infrastructure
→ Weekly outbound ops cadence
→ Hundreds of warm leads / week
Mo 6+
PHASE 04
Operate & Defend
Daily velocity standups, monthly score refreshes, quarterly attribution reviews to leadership. The engine kept compounding. By month 18 the division was at $100M ARR and the system was documented end-to-end for handoff.
Outputs
→ Daily velocity report
→ Monthly score recalibration
→ Quarterly attribution to board
→ Runbook for handoff
"
He stood up the entire GTM stack from scratch and we hit $100M ARR six months ahead of plan. That doesn't happen without one operator who owns every seam.