Full-service B2B marketing, with AI transformation built in.
One partner, one team, one methodology, responding to both tracks. Track B builds the AI operating model, the agents, and the infrastructure. Track A runs that model every day and keeps improving it. What we build in the transformation is used in the ongoing engagement, which lowers cost and raises output over time.
Two tracks that reinforce each other.
We respond to both tracks as one partner. We can, because the firm was founded after ChatGPT and built for exactly this: senior operators with strategic insight, taste, and technical capability, working with AI from day one. Marketing and AI transformation are one discipline for us, not two departments.
- Part A · Overview and fit
- Part B(a) · AI in the ongoing engagement
- Part B(b) · The AI transformation
- Part C · The ongoing engagement
- Part D · Commercials
Three things about your situation shape every recommendation in here. The repositioning to a supply chain risk, resilience and intelligence platform changes who you sell to and how you compete. The regulatory clock (UFLPA, EUDR from December 2026, CSDDD) is opening budget in Legal, Compliance, and Sourcing now, on a 12 to 18 month window. And those buyers increasingly start their research in answer engines rather than Google. Underneath it all sits your moat: connected data and a 40,000-supplier network that competitors like Inspectorio and EcoVadis are extending toward but cannot yet replicate. The marketing job is to establish category leadership while that window is open.
Agency overview and fit.
Funded scaleups where the sales cycle is complex, the buying committee is challenging, and the product is technical. Worldly fits the profile, and so do our references.
Built by operators, for complex B2B.
The Growth Syndicate is a B2B marketing agency founded after the release of ChatGPT, by operators who ran marketing through the exits at 3D Hubs, Recruitee, Impraise, and Reveall. Built for the AI opportunity from day one, not retrofitted for it. We work with funded B2B companies in complex categories, with deep experience in SaaS and software platforms across manufacturing, logistics, and supply chain. The kind of buyer who knows more than the average marketer and tunes out fluff. We operate in the US and Europe.
We are built for one profile: funded scaleups with complex sales cycles, challenging buying committees, and technical products. Worldly fits it. So do our references: Cradle and Frends are companies at your stage selling to your kind of buyer, not small-startup examples.
Funds we have supported
Three promises.
Here are our three promises: no juniors, no surprises, and no lock-in.
No juniors
Every engagement is led by a seasoned CMO and Head of Growth. Our specialists are senior people who have done the work before.
No surprises
One fixed monthly fee, agreed up front, and complete transparency about our operating model: what we are doing, who is on it, and where your money goes.
No lock-in
Cancel any time on 30 days' notice. We build inside your infrastructure, so you are never dependent on us. The same thing you are asking for in the transformation: build it, prove it, hand it over.
- Senior person sells it, juniors run it
- Opaque retainers, unclear scope
- AI sprinkled on top for the sake of it
- Built in systems only the agency can see
- Senior experts are cheaper per outcome, not per hour
- Thought leadership and ABM as a core motion, on a clear ICP
- Practical AI, run on ourselves before we sell it
- Built inside your stack, documented and handed over
Three founders, seven exits.
Ferdinand Goetzen, Joliene van Grieken, and Clément Dumont have been working together on various collaborations for years. Our clients span Series A to exit, from around $5 million to well over $100 million in revenue, and we have contributed to seven exits in the past five years. Having carried commercial responsibility through growth, pivots, and exits ourselves, we run client work like operators rather than vendors.
Early lead trainer at Growth Tribe, then Recruitee (Head of Growth to CMO, ~5x ARR in under two years). Director of Marketing & Growth at 3D Hubs through its $330M exit to Protolabs. Founded Reveall (acquired by NEXT).
12+ years in B2B tech marketing. Led marketing at Deskbookers (acquired by Spacebase). Right hand to the CEO at Impraise through its BetterUp acquisition. Built marketing from the ground up at Bud Financial.
Go-to-market and market-expansion specialist. Led market expansion at 3D Hubs: France to 200%+ and DACH to 250%+ growth in a year, with a Station F launch in Paris. Head of Growth at HelloMaaS, French expansion for Insify. Works across four languages.
Roughly three decades across Disney, Microsoft, Intel, Qualcomm, and MLB. Led growth at Slate Digital (user growth +104%, CAC −85%) and Simpler Media (revenue +75% YoY, an Inc. 5000 company).
Channel-agnostic, so we prioritize honestly.
Covering the whole spectrum makes us channel-agnostic: an SEO agency will never tell you SEO is not the answer, and a paid-ads agency will never tell you paid is not working. We can prioritize honestly, steer budget to what works, and adjust as we learn.
Strategy
- Go-to-market and market analysis
- Positioning and messaging, with your product marketing team (which owns positioning)
- Pricing and packaging
- ICP and segmentation across personas
Tactics
- Demand generation and paid, with proactive budget reallocation
- Account-based marketing
- Organic search, AEO, and GEO
- Content and creative, from thought leadership to sales enablement
Operations
- Website and CRO
- Technical SEO and AEO
- RevOps and CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce)
- Measurement and attribution
- AI and automation throughout
We are honest about the edges. For heavier motion, video, large events, or highly specialized creative we bring in trusted specialists rather than pretend it all sits in-house, and we keep Worldly as the source of truth for public relations, core positioning, and content strategy, which stays with your team.
A taskforce of senior specialists.
A dedicated taskforce for Worldly, led day to day by a Fractional CMO and a Head of Growth who make decisions and take ownership. Because the team is senior, the repetitive execution that usually needs juniors is accelerated by AI and automations instead.
The GTM & AI engineer (Track B build)
The bottleneck is almost never ideas. It is build capacity. David maintains a dedicated bench of GTM & AI engineers and picks for the specific collaboration, which is why this is the only seat we do not name up front. Full-stack and AI-native, trained on our playbooks, embedded in your Slack, your repos, and your standup, and running in days. Each engineer runs two to three POCs in parallel; if the fit is not right, you swap the engineer.
Bridging markets.
One company spanning North America and Europe, with a headquarters in New York and a headquarters in Amsterdam. Brad leads for Worldly from Los Angeles (Disney, Microsoft, Intel, Qualcomm, MLB), and Berk runs US paid programs daily for Softeon, DKSH, Credibly, and inDinero. Cradle sells into top US pharma; Software Improvement Group runs ABM across US and European markets; Frends opened the US this year, with three of its five most recent deals marketing-sourced.
European expansion is the founders' own record: 3D Hubs into France and DACH, Recruitee into DACH, the UK, and France, and Frends now scaling from the Nordics into the UK and DACH. Prove the motion in one market, then widen. The AI transformation has the same footprint: Backbase ran mostly with its North America region, and a second program is live at Mews.
Most B2B marketing treats the whole market as buyable today. It is not.
In most industries only about 5% of buyers are in-market at any moment. The other 95% are not. You cannot force demand into existence. You can do four things, and each is a distinct job for marketing.
Awareness, thought leadership, social ads, event support. The out-of-market 95% think of you first.
Search ads plus signal-based and intent-based outbound, aimed at the 5% in-market now.
Sales enablement and tight follow-up on the accounts already talking to vendors.
ABM runs over the top of all three, pushing awareness, value propositions and point of view into the named accounts you most want. None of it works without sales, product and customer success in the same room: shared account lists, shared targets, shared results. Cradle, below, shows the overlay doing exactly this in practice: upgrading existing proofs-of-concept into enterprise deals.
Frends, in brief
A European iPaaS selling into regulated industries. Marketing was busy, unfocused, and out of step with sales. We rebuilt the motion around sales: one ICP, a shared named-account list, and pipeline as the number that mattered. We proved the ABM motion in two industries in one market (municipalities and energy, Sweden) before scaling anything. The playbook is now scaling into the UK, DACH, and the US, where three of the five most recent US deals were marketing-sourced. Full case →
Cradle: brand to demand to expand
Deep tech backed by IVP and Index Ventures, $100M+ raised. Series B, tripled sales team, no marketing system, selling into pharma where fluffy marketing dies on contact. One motion, three connected layers: the CEO's point of view built preference, the same content powered paid and community into top EU and US pharma, and engagement signals routed to sales inside named accounts, moving a top-20 pharma account from proof-of-concept toward an enterprise deal. Full case →
From one buyer to four or five. Focus before breadth.
You are moving to sourcing, procurement, legal and compliance, finance, and product, often in the same account, each with its own budget and motivation, and each mapping to a different product (Axion, SCM, BHive, PIC). The risk is fragmentation. Our answer is focus before breadth: identify the ICPs, buyers and solution areas, then prioritize where the impact is highest and sequence the rest.
Successful past B2B engagements, confirmed references.
Confirmed references from successful B2B engagements. Introductions available on request.
Community, SEO and AEO, and ABM programs for a global B2B SaaS with a strong US user base.
Fractional marketing leadership, ABM, and sales-marketing alignment across multiple European markets.
Integrated brand, demand, and expand for a deep-tech Series B that has raised over $100M.
A €2.5B digital banking platform; the AI-native GTM rebuild, handed over and now run by the Backbase team. Full details in Part B(b).
AI maturity for the ongoing engagement.
How AI is embedded in how we work today, and how we would bring it into Worldly's day-to-day execution.
Six engines, each with a human in control.
We founded the agency to combine senior B2B expertise with practical AI. We hire senior only because the repetitive execution that used to need juniors is now done by agents and automations. An internal AI guild continuously tests and scales new workflows, and answer-engine visibility has become one of our own main acquisition channels, so we run the discipline on ourselves before selling it.
Large batches of interviews, calls, and win-loss analyses distilled into recurring pains, language, and triggers.
Fast competitor and market research with Perplexity and deep-research modes, plus custom agents on anonymized client context.
Agents that pressure-test ICPs, positioning, and messaging angles.
First drafts and variations across copy, design, and video, always finished by a human.
Wiring data, tools, and logic with Clay, Claygents, and n8n to run growth motions with far less manual work.
Turning content into long-form assets, infographics, and interactive lead magnets in Lovable.
Three relevant applications for Worldly
The Oracle
Our proprietary system for answer-engine visibility: citation-ready content around real buyer questions, measured across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Google AI, roughly 12× our output of quality content. Running for Expandi, Cutr, and Geomiq; Expandi alone sees 300+ AI-engine citations a month.
Clay and Lemlist
Clay as an enrichment and orchestration layer (list building, firmographic data, stack detection), a personalization pass on the Claude API, then Lemlist for warmed email and LinkedIn outreach. Each message is grounded in real account signals, so outreach reads researched, not automated. In one build, response rates doubled.
Lovable and Claude Code
Ideation, brainstorming, wireframing, and prototyping. Design, landing pages, and interactive assets in hours rather than days. That pace matters for ABM: persona-specific landing pages and interactive lead magnets shipped inside a sprint, not queued behind a dev backlog. What works gets hardened; what does not gets discarded cheaply.
Note: the actual tools vary depending on what is best suited to your use case and processes.
How we would bring AI and agents into your day-to-day.
Closing your infrastructure gaps first
The Google Tag Manager work stuck at 98% blocks behavioral triggers, so it goes first. With no MarOps or RevOps hire, our engineer absorbs that load and hands it over. SEO and AEO tooling is covered by The Oracle and Ahrefs. Built inside your stack (HubSpot, Clay, Claude Enterprise, GA4), documented and handed over.
A knowledge layer
Codifying knowledge scattered across Drive, Confluence, HubSpot, and your supplier network so agents perform better and nothing depends on one person's memory. This also starts to answer your missing single source of truth for assets.
A persona-message engine
An agent that selects message, product, and proof by buying-committee role and account, built for your shift into sourcing, procurement, legal and compliance personas. It supports repricing and higher-ACV Social Compliance Management deals without adding headcount.
Answer-engine presence, via The Oracle
Your sourcing, legal, and supply-chain buyers now start in AI tools, so AEO and GEO are first-order, not an SEO sub-task. The shift is from topical coverage to positioning: recognized authority across the high-authority sources engines cite. It leans on original insight, proprietary data (you have 40,000+ suppliers of it), and co-marketing.
Governance is based on cost of error: the higher the commercial, legal, privacy, or trust risk, the more human control. Before production, every agent passes labeled evaluations for accuracy, hallucination, brand voice, citation quality, and regulatory-claim correctness, under four controls: approved-source grounding, human approval gates, data and IP safeguards, and workflow monitoring. For regulatory-adjacent claims to Legal and Compliance buyers, that is not optional.
Take a short breather?
Play a round of Snake, then we get into the operating model itself.
The marketing operating model, rebuilt around AI.
Led by our AI lead, David Arnoux. One operating model with a shared foundation, built with your team, handed over to run on its own.
Not a drawer of tools. One operating model.
A discovery agent here, a content tool there, each bolted onto a workflow built for a smaller team. That version fades, because the old process stays in charge and the tools never talk to each other. The version that holds is one operating model with a shared foundation, where every agent reads from the same source and each new build makes the next one cheaper. That is what we built at Backbase, and it is the shape we would build for Worldly's marketing function.
A shared brain, distributed interfaces.
Underneath sits one intelligence layer holding the accounts, signals, business definitions, and institutional knowledge that today live scattered across HubSpot, Clay, Drive, and Confluence. On top sit the interfaces each team works in. Because they read from the same foundation, the function sees one version of the truth, and every new capability reuses most of what is already there. At Backbase that reuse ran around 80%, so the first capability was expensive and the tenth was nearly free.
Visibility, then governance, then personalisation, then throughput.
We keep the order Worldly set, because each layer is the dependency for the next.
Stand up the signal and knowledge layer so the function sees accounts, intent, and its own definitions in one place. AEO and GEO visibility sits here too.
Set the control model before any agent touches a regulated output. Graded by cost of error: higher risk means more human sign-off.
A persona-message engine picks message, product, and proof by committee role across the new buyers, without a marketer rewriting by hand.
Scale the proven patterns on the same foundation. Content, SEO, outbound, and reporting volume, from a team that stays lean.
The backlog, matched to your growth levers.
01Signal + account layer
Joins HubSpot, Clay, ZoomInfo, Chorus, and web behavior into one queryable view of every account.
02Persona-message engine
Message, product, and proof for the new buying committee (sourcing, procurement, legal, compliance, product).
03AEO + GEO citation engine
Pointed at the regulatory questions buyers ask answer engines first.
04Pricing + packaging assistant
For the existing base, Worldly's highest-probability revenue lever.
05Knowledge layer
Over the scattered Drive, Confluence, HubSpot, and the half-built DAM, so every agent reads from one source.
06Capacity model
Shows, in real operational math, what each build changes for output and headcount.
Hands-on across your stack, with governance underneath.
Hands-on technical capability
We work in HubSpot as an automation and data platform, not only a CRM: workflow architecture, enrichment routing, behaviour-based enrolment. Clay for enrichment at scale with a Claude API personalization layer on top. The Claude API at the core of the agent builds, from signal scoring to drafted plays. AEO and GEO programs that are measured, with clients now cited across ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews. And platform events, CRM, call intelligence, and web behaviour joined into one queryable layer.
Governance and quality
Every agent that touches a customer-facing or regulated output passes a labeled evaluation set before it ships: accuracy, hallucination, brand voice, claim correctness. Four controls run underneath: approved-source grounding, human approval gates, data and IP safeguards, monitoring for drift. AI speeds the work. A human stays accountable for any output that carries legal, trust, privacy, spend or brand risk.
Three seats. One backlog. We fill the empty one.
The build needs an operator who knows the business, an ops owner who holds the data definitions, and the AI engineer who builds. Worldly has no RevOps or MarOps FTE today, which is usually the seat that holds the wiring. We fill it: the engineer builds, and David runs the interim product-owner seat that holds the backlog and the definitions, until an internal owner takes it over.
Prove each layer before the next, in a sandbox first.
We build in a separate sandbox first, no production access and no customer data, so discovery carries no risk to the live systems. Proven capabilities then harden into Worldly's own environment, owned by Worldly's team.
Backbase. The same model, already handed over.
Backbase is a €2.5B digital banking platform that more than 120 banks run on. Over the past year David architected and led the rebuild of its GTM function into a GTM OS the company now owns and runs. The work was handed over and the team runs it now. The figures below are the result the operating model delivers, not the activity.
The situation. Pipeline coverage was thin, hundreds of accounts were managed by hand while thousands were never touched, and AI showed up only in pockets that never compounded. The CMO had already decided incremental would not cut it.
What was built. One GTM OS: a shared intelligence layer holding the accounts, signals, and definitions, with the interfaces each team works in on top (a signal engine, an ABM engine, and a mission-control view). Every new capability reused around 80% of the last, so cost fell as coverage grew. Built in Backbase's own environment, on its own data, and handed over; the team runs it now and is rolling it out across the organization.
The coverage, pipeline, deal-size, licensing, and reuse figures are Backbase's. The blended-CAC figure comes from a comparable anonymized B2C engagement. Reference: Joana Luiz, GTM Lead (contact details with the references in Part A).
The ongoing engagement.
An embedded extension of your team that runs the model every day and keeps improving it. We co-develop strategy with your marketing leadership and own execution from there, with final campaign authority staying with you.
Foundations first. Then execution, by the same people.
Every collaboration starts with strategic foundations, and at Worldly's stage that means alignment, prioritization, and refinement rather than rebuilding. One rule holds throughout: the people who set the plan run the plan, one line of accountability for quality, speed, and reliability.
Strategic foundations & audits
We start by making sure the strategic foundations are solid and the commercial and GTM teams are fully aligned. For Worldly, the focus is the repositioning and the new buying committee.
- Markets & buyers deep dive: what is working, what is not, and a clear picture of the new personas and solution areas.
- GTM, ICP, positioning & messaging: made campaign-ready with your product marketing team (which owns positioning), anchored in the repositioning.
- Market(ing) analyses: a comprehensive read of target markets and an audit of all current marketing activity to surface growth opportunities.
The output: the C-suite aligned around one GTM plan with a short, mid, and long term roadmap.
Quick wins
In parallel, we audit your current marketing and the competitive field for improvements that drive short-term pipeline.
- Website fixes: messaging, social proof, and content gaps that unlock conversions.
- Campaign optimizations: auditing existing campaigns to cut cost per lead and lift click-through.
- Automation wins: easy automations and AI workflows for faster, more consistent follow-up.
Continuous execution workstreams, mapped to your five growth priorities
01Website & positioning
Prioritized improvements that reflect the repositioning, build trust, and convert better.
02Thought-leadership content
Executive points of view and your 40,000-supplier data, from LinkedIn posts to thought pieces, white papers, and reports.
03High-intent paid
Optimizing, and where needed creating, campaigns that capture existing demand: high-intent Google and Bing.
04SEO & GEO engine
More relevant organic traffic through SEO, and AI visibility by optimizing for mentions across the most-used LLMs.
05Account-based marketing
Targeted campaigns on a dedicated list of ideal accounts: apparel, footwear, and textiles, plus the Social Compliance Management buyer, timed to the UFLPA, EUDR, and CSDDD window.
06Lifecycle & expansion
Reactivation, expansion plays, and value-framing into the installed base: your highest-probability revenue lever.
The workstreams feed each other: the thought leadership that builds preference powers the ABM motion, gets cited by answer engines, and gives existing customers reasons to expand. Pipeline, new and expansion, is the primary marketing KPI.
Your metrics, not vanity numbers.
Our senior team owns this without you having to manage it closely, but involvement is your call. We usually run weekly or bi-weekly alignment with your hands-on stakeholders and monthly strategic check-ins with your CMO, Jay Gaines, and leadership for sign-off. Reporting combines automated weekly diagnostics with a detailed monthly view of week-on-week, month-on-month, and quarter-on-quarter movement.
We report marketing-influenced and sourced pipeline, marketing-influenced expansion revenue and upsell pipeline, SQLs and opportunities, pipeline velocity and CAC; MQL volume and quality, paid performance, landing-page conversion, and account engagement by buying-committee role; organic, answer-engine and generative-engine visibility. B2B buying is mostly dark, so on attribution we combine multi-touch views in your stack (GA4, GTM, and HubSpot) with self-reported attribution and pipeline-sourced analysis rather than trusting last click. Fixing the Tag Manager gap and standing this up is early work, since without it the optimization loop and the expansion-revenue reporting you want are not trustworthy. Because the tracks connect, we can also report the model's own operating metrics (time-to-output, cost-per-asset, agent accuracy, human-review burden), which is the bridge into Track B.
AI-native, human-led, built in your tools.
Creative process
Creative is AI-native but human-led: taste, judgment, and originality (exactly what a repositioning needs) start with people, and AI accelerates execution. Thought leadership runs through the Listen, Extract, Articulate, Promote process; every claim, especially a regulatory-adjacent one for your Legal and Compliance messaging, gets human review before it ships. Output spans campaign and paid creative, infographics and guides, landing pages, sales enablement, and executive presentations.
Project management and tooling
We operate as an embedded extension of your ~11-person team. The Fractional CMO (Brad) is accountable and your point of contact; the Head of Growth (Aurora) owns day-to-day project management; our AI lead (David) owns the AI track. We work in weekly agile sprints over Slack and are operational within one to two weeks. We work in your tools, not ours: HubSpot, Clay, GA4, Google Tag Manager, WordPress, Claude Enterprise, ZoomInfo, Chorus, Asana, Confluence, Slack, Canva, and Adobe. Nothing important is built in a system only we can see.
Indicative timeline
An indicative shape for the first months, starting on your August or September 2026 date. It flexes to your priorities.
Commercials.
Two principles: transparency and no lock-in. A fixed monthly fee, and cancellation any time on 30 days' notice.
Full-service retainer, $39,000 per month.
A dedicated senior team across four capability areas. Ad spend excluded and billed at cost. Billed monthly. Cancel any time on 30 days' notice.
| Capability area | What's included | Senior roles |
|---|---|---|
| Fractional leadership + strategy | POC and sparring, strategic coordination, growth, campaign and project management. | Fractional CMO, Head of Growth |
| Performance + paid media | Paid across channels with proactive reallocation, plus SEO, AEO and GEO. | Performance Lead, Senior Paid Media, SEO/AEO/GEO Lead |
| AI-native creative + content | Thought leadership, campaign and ad creative, content and design. | Content Lead, Content Writer, Designer, Creative Director |
| Technical implementation + RevOps | Web and front-end, data, automations, and the bridge into the AI track. | Web Developer, Data & RevOps Engineer |
One-off architecture, then a monthly program.
A fixed-scope build with a defined start and a handover.
Discovery + architecture
Stakeholder interviews, an AI-maturity read, the workflow map, the agent roadmap across the four themes, the capacity model, and a board-ready plan.
The program
David as architect and interim product owner (the seat that fills your missing RevOps role), plus one embedded GTM & AI engineer building on the shared foundation. Governance, hardening, and handover included. First month money-back.
The plan matters. The people running it matter more.
Everyone in these pages was picked for this engagement specifically. Operators who carried revenue through seven exits. A US lead with three decades of selling to North American buyers. An AI lead who has already built, run, and handed over the exact model Worldly is weighing. Specialists who have done this work in your category, at your stage. No juniors appear after the signature; the people in this proposal are the people who show up. You have just met your team.