The constraint
AirOps weren't struggling. They were plateauing. Their AI content platform was trusted by brands like Webflow, Ramp, Carta, and LegalZoom, but for almost a year monthly pipeline hovered around $536K, no matter what the team layered on top.
The audience explains it. AirOps sells to marketing executives, growth leaders, and CMOs at top SaaS brands. People at that level do not click "Book a Demo" in a cold email. Cold outreach got ghosted, generic demo ads got ignored, and webinars without trust behind them ran half empty. The fight was not for attention. It was for trust.
The brief: move from under $600K pipeline a month to over $2M, on a $136,000 ad budget, in 90 days, without cold outreach.
What we built
A four-part account-based marketing campaign.
First, the audience. Clay, best known as an outbound tool, became the targeting engine for paid media: account lists filtered by website traffic trends, tech stack, ARR and growth rate, and recent funding, pushed straight into LinkedIn Ads with no CSVs in between. Every ad dollar landed on accounts already worth winning.
- Clay
- LinkedIn Ads
- HubSpot
Second, the creative. 80% of the budget went to thought leadership ads: the founder explaining how AI search is changing marketing, team members showing how they use the product, customers telling their own stories. Ads that read like content, positioning AirOps as the teacher in the room rather than the seller. Engagement spiked within weeks, especially from executives.
Third, the ask. "Book a demo" was replaced with mini-demos (15 and 30-second clips of small, satisfying product moments) and expert webinars about problems rather than products. Sessions like "The New SEO Playbook for AI Search" pulled in hundreds of attendees matching the ideal customer profile.
Fourth, the follow-through. Every interaction triggered retargeting across LinkedIn, YouTube, Display, and Native ads, and every engagement synced into HubSpot so sales knew exactly when and why to reach out. The line heard repeatedly in sales calls: "Your ads were following me everywhere."
Results
| Month | Monthly pipeline |
|---|---|
| Before ABM (Nov '24) | $536K |
| Dec '24 | $659K |
| Jan '25 | $1.2M |
| Feb '25 | $2.2M |
| Mar '25 | $2.9M |
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| Total pipeline generated | $9.6M |
| Closed revenue | $543K |
| Qualified deals added to CRM | 182 |
| Ad spend | $136K |
| Return on ad spend | 4x |
One definition note, because AirOps appears twice on this site: this page counts total pipeline from a single 90-day ad campaign. The flagship AirOps story counts SQL-qualified pipeline ($7.83M) across the full 10-month system. Different windows, different definitions, both real.
What this means for you
When your buyers sit too senior for cold email, the answer is not louder outreach. It is engineering the journey around them: ads that teach instead of pitch, aimed only at accounts worth winning, with the CRM telling sales the moment interest turns real. Trust scales the same way outbound does, when it runs as a system.
