The Blueprint: How One Marketing Hire Generated $100M in Pipeline for a 6-Person Firm
Executive Summary
When Lauren joined Kolme Group, the company had six people, one major partner driving 80%+ of its revenue, and no marketing function whatsoever. Five years later, it had grown to 40+ people, six active partnerships, and a pipeline that was 60% organic. This is the story of how that happened — and the playbook I'd hand to any first marketing hire walking into a similar situation.
The Starting Line: What We Had and What We Didn't
Kolme Group had remarkable raw material. Twenty-plus years of project management experience. Relationships with major enterprise organizations. A technical integration team that could execute ideas most firms could only talk about. And a rare gift: the ability to translate deeply complex system administration concepts into language that everyday users and stakeholders could actually understand.
What they didn't have was a way to capture any of it.
Those brilliant trainings? Recorded Zoom calls collecting dust on a SharePoint shelf. The client relationships? Warm, but untapped. The technical expertise? Known internally, invisible externally.
As the first marketing hire, I was sitting on a library no one had ever opened. My job was to open it — and build something lasting from what was inside.
The strategic goal was clear: reduce dangerous dependence on a single partner and build an organic pipeline powered by brand trust. To get there, I focused on two major initiatives — Education and Diversification.
Arm One: Education as a Growth Engine
Office Hours — Building Trust Before the Sale
The first move was creating "Office Hours" — a free, weekly, one-hour session facilitated by Kolme's most senior project managers. Open to both current customers and prospects, it gave people real access to expert guidance without asking them to commit to anything.
This wasn't a disguised sales call. It was genuine help. And that was exactly the point.
As one of the only trusted partners for a leading cloud-based PPM (Project and Portfolio Management) system, Kolme was uniquely positioned to offer something no one else in the ecosystem was providing. I built the internal scheduling and tracking infrastructure inside our task management system, then launched a full go-to-market around it: a tour for the PPM sales team, a new "Events" tab on the redesigned website for easy sign-ups, a co-branded social push with the PPM partner, placement in their customer newsletters, and a targeted email campaign that reached not just our current customers, but dead prospects who had gone with other partners — people who might now be struggling with adoption and quietly looking for help.
The results in year one were consistent: 20+ active users per session, with a steady +2% flow of net-new prospects joining each week. More importantly, the sessions generated content — real customer questions, real expert answers — that I repurposed into short video clips, social posts, polls, and a YouTube technical support series.
Kolme University — Turning Expertise into Revenue
After six months of successful Office Hours, we had proof of concept. The next step was to monetize the knowledge.
Kolme University launched as a paid masterclass program — professional, high-production video courses covering technical content that didn't exist anywhere else at this price point. I owned the full product lifecycle: content roadmap, video production quality standards, sales training, and ongoing updates whenever the underlying system changed.
Getting buy-in from the project managers wasn't easy. They were already stretched thin with client work, and asking them to write scripts, record courses, and review updates required real organizational support. I worked with our C-suite and resource manager to carve protected time into schedules and built a full project board in our task system to track every asset from ideation through launch.
We soft-launched at $600 (discounted from $749) and saw a 40% purchase conversion rate straight out of the gate — which validated the demand immediately.
The real inflection point came when the PPM partner's global training leader took notice. After conversations about mutual benefit, we moved the Kolme-branded masterclasses inside the PPM's own University platform, where Enterprise customers could purchase access using their included "training tokens" — valued at $1,000 each. We priced the masterclasses at $899, with the partner retaining $100 in exchange for hosting and marketing support.
The outcome exceeded every benchmark: 70% of all Enterprise system admins used a training token to access the courses, with a 53% completion rate. Office Hours — promoted via a short commercial aired before each course — reinforced the full ecosystem. Together, these two programs contributed to an 18% reduction in Enterprise churn across the partner's entire customer base.
Arm Two: Diversification — From One Partner to Six
The success of Kolme University earned me a promotion to Marketing Director and a team to help scale what we'd built. With the University now living on the partner's platform, I had the bandwidth to focus on what came next: expanding beyond a single partnership.
Over the following years, we signed five new PPM and task management partnerships — ClickUp, Smartsheet, TimeJam, GuideCX, and monday.com. With each new partnership came press releases, targeted blog content, and a replication of the education framework that had already proven itself:
ClickUp Office Hours — the same trusted format, applied to a new audience
Mini-Masterclasses — webinars that previewed full course content and drove purchases
Function in a Flash — a YouTube series delivering quick, vertical-specific wins inside each tool
EmPOWer Your PMO — a webinar series anchored in our top-performing whitepapers
PMO: You Ask. We Answer. — a live Q&A series drawing on 25+ years of hands-on experience
The diversification paid off.
Our customer mix shifted from 80%+ partner-driven to 60% organic — and the 40% still coming through partners was now on Kolme paper, giving us the ability to upsell and retain the full revenue from additional services.
Building Core Products to Own the Category
Expanding partnerships revealed gaps in the broader PPM ecosystem — gaps Kolme was uniquely positioned to fill. With leadership's support, we moved from services into proprietary products:
KolmeConnect is an all-in-one integration platform that connects existing software tools into a unified solution, improving efficiency and project visibility across organizations.
RAIDLOG.com is the only cloud-based SaaS RAID Log tool in existence, empowering teams to proactively manage risks, actions, issues, and decisions.
Technical content sample: Lauren Caughlan's Complete Guide to RAID Logs
Monday.com PSA is an all-in-one solution that helps revenue-generating teams manage project finances, improve forecasting, and boost revenue visibility — built on the monday.com platform and brought to market through a 6-month co-launch strategy.
Technical content sample: Lauren Caughlan's Complete Guide to monday.com PSA
Each product came with a full GTM framework: co-branded campaigns, partner enablement, dedicated landing pages, blog content, and whitepapers.
Closing the Loop: Case Studies as the Final Piece
With a full content library, multiple active partnerships, and a growing product suite, there was still one missing piece in the funnel: proof.
I worked with our project managers and resource leader to identify clients who had strong relationships with Kolme, were likely to participate, and stood to benefit from continued engagement. I built a tracking board to manage outreach and follow-ups, then conducted in-depth interviews with enterprise customers — some of them multi-billion-dollar global organizations — at the close of their onboarding.
Those case studies became some of the most powerful tools in our sales arsenal. Real outcomes. Real voices. Real proof that what we built worked. They helped close some of Kolme Group's largest deals.
The Results
In five years, Kolme Group grew from a 6-person firm with one major partner to a recognized brand with 40+ team members and a diversified, scalable revenue model. Here's what the marketing function delivered:
$100M+ in qualified pipeline through GTM campaigns, events, and ABM strategies
400+ enterprise demos, driving adoption among Fortune 500 and mid-market organizations
20:1 ROI sustained through aligned sales enablement, partner marketing, and content strategy
120% organic traffic growth and an 85% lift in inbound leads post-website overhaul
18% reduction in Enterprise partner churn attributed to Office Hours and Kolme University
6 active partnerships scaled from a starting point of 1
What This Means for Any First Marketing Hire
If you're stepping into a professional services company as the first marketing hire, here's the honest takeaway: your most valuable asset is probably already there — buried in recorded calls, internal wikis, and the heads of people who've been doing this for decades.
Your job isn't to invent. It's to extract, structure, and broadcast.
Start with education. Build trust before you ask for anything. Be patient with internal stakeholders who don't yet see the value of marketing investment. And when you find something that works — replicate it relentlessly across every new channel, partner, and audience you can reach.
The pipeline will follow.
