--- title: "AirOps ABM case study: $9.6M pipeline from a 90-day campaign" description: "How one 90-day ABM campaign took AirOps from $536K to $2.9M in monthly pipeline: $9.6M total pipeline and a 4x return on $136K of ad spend." url: https://frontal.so/case-studies/airops-abm updated: 2026-06-12 --- Case study · AirOps # AirOps case study: $9.6M total pipeline from one 90-day ABM campaign How one 90-day ABM campaign took AirOps from $536K to $2.9M in monthly pipeline: $9.6M total pipeline and a 4x return on $136K of ad spend. **Industry** SaaS, AI content platform **Company size** 11 to 50 employees **Built under** Paid Media **Tools** Clay, LinkedIn Ads, HubSpot **Time window** 90 days **Published** Jun 12, 2026 Built under ColdIQ Agency, which became Frontal in 2026. Same operators, new name. [The full story →](https://frontal.so/case-studies#coldiq) Want results like these? Book a call and we’ll walk you through how it would work for your team. [Book a call](https://book.frontal.so) ## 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. 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.” - Clay - LinkedIn Ads - HubSpot ## 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. - [Paid Media](https://frontal.so/services/paid-media) Want results like these? Book a call and we’ll walk you through how it would work for your team. [Book a call](https://book.frontal.so) ## More case studies [View all](https://frontal.so/case-studies) - [Aircall SaaS · RevOps + GTM Services 3,655 accounts into a self-refreshing TAM in 6 months How Aircall turned four data vendors and hand-built lists into 3,655 accounts in a self-refreshing TAM inside Salesforce, in 6 months.](https://frontal.so/case-studies/aircall) - [Playbook SaaS · GTM Services 20 opportunities in the first 20 days of outbound How Playbook went from zero outbound to 20 opportunities in the first 20 days, opening a new market with 300+ positive replies and a system their team now runs alone.](https://frontal.so/case-studies/playbook) - [Palico FinTech · GTM Services 6 to 15 positive replies a week, 3 clients closed in the first weeks How Palico’s under-20-person team turned manual prospecting into outbound that produced 6 to 15 positive replies a week, closing 3 clients in the first weeks.](https://frontal.so/case-studies/palico) ## Want to see what this could look like for you? [Book a call](https://book.frontal.so)