Case Study · Digital Transformation · 2022–2024
Digital Transformation Across Four Regions with Zero Infrastructure.
A major global AgTech enterprise with 80 years of history, operations across four continents, and no digital marketing function. No CRM. No online sales. No content programme. No way to measure what was working. This is the story of building everything from scratch — and letting the results do the talking.
700%
Lead engagement increase
30%
YoY revenue growth
40%
Reduction in production cycles
4
Regions transformed from zero
The Starting Point
The client was a major global AgTech enterprise — a market leader with operations spanning the US, Canada, the UK, Brazil, France, Italy, Australia, Germany, and India. They had been in business for over 80 years. They had deep institutional knowledge, strong customer relationships built through field sales teams, and a reputation that was genuinely respected across the industry.
What they did not have was any digital marketing infrastructure. No CRM. No marketing automation. No online sales capability. No content programme. No webinars. No structured email marketing. No way to track which customers were engaging, what content was resonating, or where leads were coming from. Marketing materials were produced in print. Customer relationships were managed through personal knowledge and phone calls. The entire go-to-market model was built on the assumption that customers would always buy the way they had always bought — through a field sales representative they already knew.
The business had tried digital initiatives before. They hadn’t worked. Eighty percent of the marketing and sales teams didn’t believe digital transformation would work for their industry. Their customers were farmers and livestock producers — people who worked outdoors, made decisions based on decades of experience, and weren’t sitting in front of screens all day. The scepticism was understandable. It was also wrong.
Industry Context
Research from McKinsey consistently shows that 70% of digital transformation initiatives fail to meet their objectives. The primary cause is not technology — it is resistance to change from employees at all levels, compounded by a lack of clear ownership and cultural readiness.
01
Getting the Green Light
The breakthrough wasn’t persuasion. It was proof.
The company’s leadership — working alongside a consulting partner — secured C-suite support and budget for a proof of concept. The brief was straightforward: build the digital infrastructure, run it for a defined period, be completely transparent about what worked and what didn’t, and let the data determine whether to continue.
I was brought in as the client-facing Director through a specialist consultancy embedded within the transformation programme, with responsibility for strategy, implementation, and day-to-day delivery of the digital marketing function. The arrangement required me to operate as a trusted extension of the client’s own team — attending their leadership meetings, reporting into their commercial structure, and building relationships across their regional offices — while the consultancy’s founder led the AI and data science workstreams alongside a major global consulting partner.
The approach was simple: don’t argue with 80 years of institutional knowledge. Build something, measure it, and share the results — including the failures — openly.
Research
Paul Strebel, writing in Harvard Business Review, identifies the core disconnect: “For senior managers, change means opportunity. But for many employees, change is seen as disruptive and intrusive.” The gap between leadership enthusiasm and employee resistance is the single most common reason transformation initiatives stall.
Customer Journey Blueprint
The customer journey blueprint mapping the full customer experience from awareness through advocacy, with six opportunity areas identified across the journey.
02
What Was Built
CRM and Marketing Automation
HubSpot was implemented as the central marketing platform — configured from scratch with UTM tracking, lead scoring, automated email workflows, and full integration with the client’s sales processes. This was the foundational layer that made everything else measurable. Before HubSpot, there was no way to know which marketing activity was generating engagement, leads, or revenue. After implementation, every touchpoint was tracked, attributed, and reportable.
HubSpot Performance Dashboard
The HubSpot dashboard tracking digital touchpoints across the marketing operation — page views, new contacts, customer conversion, email performance, and campaign attribution, all built from a zero base.
Online Ecommerce
An online store was launched, giving customers for the first time the ability to browse and purchase products digitally. Within ten months, the store generated over 76,000 users, 120,000 sessions, and 485,000 page views — with 80% of sales coming from customers who had never previously been in the system. The store didn’t replace the field sales team. It opened an entirely new channel that reached customers the field team couldn’t.
Ecommerce Performance — First 10 Months
Online store traffic and engagement metrics from February to November 2022 — the first ten months of operation. 80% of purchasing customers were new to the business.
Digital Product Discovery
The development and enhancement of a digital product discovery tool enabled customers to search, compare, and evaluate products online—activities that had previously required direct engagement with a sales representative. This capability provided the first opportunity to build meaningful customer segmentation based on behavioural data. Within its first year, the platform served more than 450,000 users and generated 5.4 million page views, becoming one of the client's highest-traffic digital properties. It also delivered valuable insights into customer purchase intent and product preferences, helping the business better understand what customers were actively considering and likely to buy.
Product Discovery Platform — User Analytics
The digital product discovery tool — serving 450,000+ users with 5.09 pages per session and an average session duration of over five minutes, indicating deep, purposeful engagement rather than casual browsing.
Content and Authority Programme
A structured blog and content programme was built from zero — but the most important decision wasn't what to publish. It was whose instincts to follow.
The client's marketing team wanted to create the kind of content they had always created: product-focused articles explaining why their genetics were superior, why their technology led the market, and why customers should choose them. It was educational content designed to tell customers what the business wanted them to know.
We took a different approach. Using data gathered through customer research, search behaviour analysis, and engagement patterns from the digital tools we had already built, we identified the questions customers were actually asking — and created content that answered them. Not content about the product. Content about the customer's problem.
The results made the argument for us. The two highest-performing articles on the blog were both built around solving real customer problems — driven by empirical data about what people were searching for and engaging with. The third-best-performing article was the kind of traditional product-education content the client would normally produce. It performed — but at a fraction of the reach and engagement of the customer-problem content.
The lesson was the same one that had surfaced at LAIKA years earlier: audiences engage with content that helps them, not content that promotes you. The blog became an authority-building tool because it earned trust by being genuinely useful — and Google's algorithms rewarded that trust with organic visibility that no amount of product-focused content would have achieved.
Content Authority — Blog Performance
Blog performance data showing the gap between customer-problem content and product-education content. The two top-performing articles were built from empirical data about what customers were searching for. The third was traditional product-focused content. The data made the case — audiences engage with content that helps them, not content that promotes you.
Webinar Programme
Eight webinars were produced across a 90-day period, and the programme reinforced the same lesson the blog had already surfaced.
Seven of the eight webinars were built around customer problems — practical questions that farmers and livestock producers were actively trying to solve. Topics were selected using data from customer interactions, search behaviour, and engagement patterns across the digital tools we had already built. Each session featured a genuine industry expert speaking on something their audience cared about, not a company representative talking about the product.
The eighth webinar was product-education content — the kind of presentation the client's team would normally produce, focused on explaining the features and benefits of a specific offering.
The data told the story clearly. Across all eight sessions, the programme generated over 438,000 impressions and 2,872 clicks. But the product-education webinar was the consistent outlier — the lowest impressions, the lowest engagement, and the lowest relevance score of any session in the programme. The seven customer-problem webinars outperformed it on every metric, with engagement and relevance scores ranging from 40% to 75% higher.
The webinar programme wasn't just a content channel. It was a proof point for the entire strategic approach: audiences engage when you solve their problems, not when you explain your product. And the data made the case more convincingly than any argument ever could. Webinar content was repurposed across email, social, and video channels, with engagement data feeding directly back into the CRM to close the loop between content, engagement, and lead scoring.
Webinar Programme — 90-Day Performance
Eight webinars across 90 days. Seven built around customer problems. One built around product education. The product-education session was the lowest-performing on every metric — impressions, clicks, and engagement relevance. The data reinforced the strategic approach: solve the customer's problem, and the engagement follows.
Email and Lifecycle Marketing
An email marketing programme was built from the ground up — but the real value wasn't in the emails themselves. It was in what happened around them.
Before the transformation, the client's email approach was a shotgun: the same message to everyone on the list, sent manually, with no way to know who opened it, who acted on it, or who it was wasted on. The marketing team spent significant time preparing and sending communications that had no targeting, no sequencing, and no feedback loop.
HubSpot allowed us to replace that with a system that worked while the team slept. Marketing automation workflows were built to trigger follow-up sequences based on customer behaviour — if someone attended a webinar, they received relevant follow-up content automatically. If they visited the product discovery tool and spent time comparing specific products, the system scored that lead and flagged it for the sales team. If a prospect engaged with content but didn't convert, retargeting sequences kept the conversation going without anyone manually sending an email.
Lead scoring transformed how the sales team prioritised their time. Instead of working through a flat list of contacts, they received ranked leads based on actual engagement data — who had attended events, who had visited the store, who had downloaded content, and who was actively researching. The marketing team's workload dropped because the system handled the repetitive follow-up that had previously been done by hand.
Over 61,000 emails were sent, with a 71.2% read rate — significantly above industry benchmarks. But the more important number was the time the marketing team got back. The automation didn't just improve performance. It reduced the manual effort required to achieve it.
AI-Driven Analysis and Insight
AI was embedded into the programme not as a content production tool but as an analytical one — used to surface patterns and priorities that would have taken weeks to identify manually.
The first application was supply chain analysis: reviewing operational data across the client's global supply chain to identify inefficiencies, cost-saving opportunities, and areas requiring strategic focus. This wasn't about automating processes — it was about giving leadership the visibility to make better decisions about where to invest time and resources.
The second application was customer feedback and complaint analysis. By running AI-driven analysis across customer feedback reports, complaints, and survey responses, we were able to identify the themes that mattered most to the client's customers — and critically, the gap between what the business thought customers cared about and what they actually cared about. The word map analysis revealed that customers were overwhelmingly focused on practical concerns like cost, feed prices, and information access — not on the product features and genetic performance metrics the business had been leading with in its marketing.
This insight directly informed the content strategy. The reason the customer-problem blog articles and webinars outperformed the product-education content wasn't a guess — it was a conclusion drawn from AI-driven analysis of what customers were actually telling the business when the business was willing to listen.
03
Building the People, Not Just the Systems
The transformation was never going to stick if it depended on the consultancy being present forever. The systems needed to be owned and operated by the client’s own teams.
I delivered two three-day training programmes — one for the UK marketing team and one in Brazil for the Latin America marketing group. The training covered data-driven decision-making, customer-centric marketing principles, and practical application of the digital tools and workflows that had been built. These weren’t introductory overviews. They were working sessions designed to transfer operational capability so that the regional teams could run, adapt, and improve the systems independently.
This training was additional business won for the consultancy — a direct result of the client seeing enough value in the transformation to invest in embedding the capability permanently across their organisation.
Research
McKinsey research finds that organisations investing in cultural change alongside technology see 5.3× higher success rates than those focused on technology alone. The difference between transformation that sticks and transformation that fades is almost always capability transfer.
04
The Results
The data did the talking.
700% increase in lead engagement — from a base of zero digital engagement to a fully instrumented, multi-channel marketing operation
438,000+ webinar impressions across eight events
71.2% email read rate — significantly above industry benchmarks
76,000+ users on the online store within ten months of launch
450,000+ users on the digital product discovery platform in its first year
40% reduction in creative production cycles — through AI-driven localisation workflows across international markets
3% market share expansion — for a legacy enterprise in a mature, competitive market where share gains are measured in fractions
30% year-on-year revenue growth — directly attributable to new digital channels and improved customer targeting
The 80% of the marketing and sales teams who didn’t believe digital would work? They didn’t need to be persuaded. They saw the dashboards. They saw the leads. They saw the revenue. The resistance dissolved because the evidence was undeniable — and because it had been shared openly from the start, including the things that didn’t work.
The consultancy was subsequently acquired by a major global group — a transaction in which the proven client results and established pipeline were part of what made the business attractive to the acquirer.
Commerce Analytics — Revenue and Growth
Commerce analytics showing sales outperforming previous years from launch, revenue attribution by source, and user activity growth demonstrating that trust and traffic were building steadily over time.
This Case Study Demonstrates
What This Work Required
Digital infrastructure built entirely from zero — CRM, marketing automation, ecommerce, content strategy, webinars, email marketing, and AI-driven localisation across four regions
Business development — Won additional client engagements, built billable hours tracking and resource utilisation across 3–20 people
Capability transfer — Training programmes delivered in the UK and Brazil/LATAM to embed permanent operational capability
Stakeholder management in a resistant organisation — Building credibility through transparency and evidence with 80% initial opposition
Product ownership — part of the team leading digital product discovery platform serving 450,000+ users as Product Owner
The Numbers
700%
Lead engagement increase
30%
YoY revenue growth
40%
Reduction in production cycles
450K+
Product discovery platform users
76K+
Online store users (10 months)
71.2%
Email read rate