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. The proposal follows the RFP structure: Part A (overview and fit), Part B(a) (AI maturity for the ongoing engagement), Part B(b) (AI transformation), Part C (the ongoing engagement) and Part D (commercials).
This answers the concern that runs through the RFP: the handover. Worldly does not want another dependency. We build everything inside your infrastructure, documented and handed to your team. You stay with us because the work is good, not because you are locked in.
We have read Appendix A. 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 in answer engines rather than Google. Your moat is the connected data and 40,000-supplier network that competitors like Inspectorio and EcoVadis are extending toward but cannot yet replicate, so the marketing job is to establish category leadership while the window is open. These facts shape our recommendations throughout.
Agency overview and fit.
Funded scaleups in complex, often traditional industries: long sales, large committees, technical products. Worldly fits the profile, and so do our references.
Built by operators, for complex B2B.
The Growth Syndicate is a B2B marketing agency founded in 2024 by operators who ran marketing through the exits at 3D Hubs, Recruitee, Impraise and Reveall. We work with funded B2B companies in complex categories: regulated software, supply-chain platforms, deep tech, industrial. The kind of category where the buyer knows more than the average marketer and punishes fluff. We operate in the US and Europe, with teams in Amsterdam and New York.
We are built for one profile: funded scaleups where the sale is long, the committee is large and the product is technical. 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
The anti-agency. Three promises.
Most firms win the business with a senior person and run it with juniors, sell opaque retainers, and sprinkle AI on old processes. We do the opposite.
No juniors
Every engagement is led by a seasoned Head of Growth. Our specialists are senior people who have done the work before.
No surprises
Transparent, hour-based pricing with a clear monthly commitment. Your Head of Growth keeps you updated on hours used.
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 theater sprinkled on old processes
- Built in systems only the agency can see
- Senior experts are cheaper per outcome, not per hour
- Transparent, hour-based pricing you can scale
- Practical AI, run on ourselves before we sell it
- Built inside your stack, documented and handed over
A few opinions we hold and market on: senior experts are cheaper per outcome, not per hour; you cannot do serious B2B marketing today without practical AI, as opposed to AI theater; and any B2B company with a sales team should run thought leadership and account-based marketing as a core motion, built on a clear ICP and a genuinely different proposition.
Operators who carried the number.
Founded in 2024 by Ferdinand Goetzen, Joliene van Grieken and Clément Dumont, who had worked together across B2B tech for years first. 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 CGO, ~5x ARR in under two years). Director of Marketing & Growth at 3D Hubs through its $330M exit to Protolabs; grew the team from 3 to 15+, led the rebrand to Hubs, and helped double net revenue through 2020. 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).
The whole spectrum, so we prioritize honestly.
We cover the whole spectrum, which lets us prioritize honestly rather than sell the one channel we happen to run.
Strategy
Go-to-market and market analysis, positioning and messaging (with your product marketing team, which owns positioning), pricing and packaging, and ICP and segmentation across multiple personas.
Tactics
Demand generation and paid performance with proactive budget reallocation, account-based marketing, organic search plus AEO and GEO, and content and creative from thought leadership to landing pages and sales enablement.
Operations
Website and CRO, technical SEO and AEO, RevOps and CRM (HubSpot and Salesforce), measurement and attribution, and AI and automation woven through it all.
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 the RFP places with your team.
A taskforce of senior specialists.
A taskforce forms around the account, led day to day by a Fractional CMO and a Head of Growth who decide without escalation. Because the team is senior, the repetitive execution that usually needs juniors is accelerated by AI and automations instead.
The GTM engineer (Track B build)
The bottleneck is almost never ideas. It is build capacity. So the build is run by GTM engineers from our embedded bench: full-stack (React, Next.js, Node, Python, AWS, Azure, GCP) and AI-native (Claude Code, agentic workflows, MCP servers, no vibe coding), trained on our playbooks and running in days, not months. They live in your team, your Slack, your repos, your daily standup. David architects and oversees weekly, and each engineer runs two to three POCs in parallel; if the fit is not right, you swap the engineer. The lead profile for Worldly: a solutions and full-stack engineer with five years of production delivery who owns API integrations across messy enterprise stacks and ships AI products end to end. As the pace picks up, the bench adds an AI and RAG engineer who hardens agentic and retrieval systems inside regulated environments, and a backend engineer who took a live system from five thousand to roughly a hundred thousand daily users.
Both markets, grounded by people who live there.
A lot of our work runs in or into the US. Cradle sells into top US pharma and is backed by IVP. Software Improvement Group runs ABM across US and European markets. Expandi has a large US user base. Frends opened the US this year, and three of its five most recent US deals came through marketing-sourced channels. Brad leads this account from Los Angeles after three decades at Disney, Microsoft, Intel, Qualcomm and MLB. He knows how North American buyers evaluate software because he has spent a career selling it to them. Berk runs US paid programs every day: Softeon, DKSH, Credibly, inDinero.
EMEA is home ground. We are based in Amsterdam, and market expansion is the founders' track record rather than a service line: 3D Hubs into France and DACH, Recruitee localized into DACH, the UK and France, Insify into France, and Frends now scaling from the Nordics into the UK and DACH. The method is the same every time. Prove the motion in one or two industries in one market, then widen.
The AI transformation has the same footprint. Backbase is Sequoia-backed, and the GTM OS build ran mostly with its North America region. A second program is live at Mews, a global hospitality platform with a large US base. The model was built for companies selling into the US and EMEA at the same time. That is Worldly's map.
Most B2B marketing treats the whole market as buyable today. It is not.
In most industries only 5 to 10% of buyers are in-market at any moment. The other 90 to 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 90–95% think of you first.
Search ads, and signal- and intent-based outbound aimed at the 5–10% 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 what the RFP asks about: upgrading 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 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.
At Rapid Circle, facing the same multi-product, multi-persona sprawl, we prioritized solution areas one at a time, then built one overarching value proposition with tailored messaging for each solution-area-by-persona segment, so sellers, solution owners, CIOs and CFOs heard one coherent story. What makes this workable at your scope is AI, which lets us personalize and optimize messaging far more granularly, across many more persona and segment combinations, than a team could by hand.
Relevant B2B engagements, each agreed to speak.
Three references from relevant B2B engagements, each agreed to speak with Worldly. 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.
Track B reference: Backbase — Joana Luiz (GTM Lead) and Tim Rutten (CMO), who published a public account of the work. A €2.5B digital banking platform; the AI-native GTM rebuild.
AI maturity for the ongoing engagement.
The RFP is explicit that this is the primary filter, and that "we use AI" is not an answer. So: 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 matter most for Worldly
The Oracle
Our proprietary system for answer-engine and generative-engine visibility. It builds citation-ready content around real buyer questions and measures presence across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google AI, roughly 12× our output of quality content. Real results: Expandi (207 Grok, 91 Perplexity, 41 AI Overviews / month), Cutr (543 AI Overviews, 1.3k Grok), Geomiq (104 AI Overviews, 769 top-3 rankings).
Clay and Lemlist
Clay as an enrichment and orchestration layer (list building, firmographic and behavioral data, stack detection), a personalization pass on the Claude API, then Lemlist for warmed email and LinkedIn outreach. In one build we lifted response rates from 19.7% to 40%.
Lovable and Claude Code
Ideation, brainstorming, wireframing and prototyping. Design, landing pages and interactive assets in hours rather than days.
How we would bring AI and agents into your day-to-day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The marketing operating model, rebuilt around AI.
This is the track Worldly weighs most heavily. It is led by our AI lead, David Arnoux, working as part of the same team and to the same methodology as the rest of this proposal. 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, the foundation Worldly's RFP asks for by name.
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, which is the outcome Worldly is asking for.
Public, shared by CMO Tim Rutten. Read his account → Reference contacts: Joana Luiz (GTM Lead) and Tim Rutten (CMO).
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. Three commitments shape how we run the engagement.
01GTM and strategic foundation
ICP and segmentation across the new personas, positioning and messaging made campaign-ready with your product marketing team (which owns positioning), audit and competitor analysis, anchored in the repositioning to a supply chain risk, resilience and intelligence platform. The output is not a deck: it is the C-suite aligned around one GTM plan with a short, mid and long term roadmap. Repositioning is familiar ground: a brand-new category at Cradle, 3D Hubs repositioned twice.
02Tactics and execution
Six workstreams: website and positioning, thought-leadership content, high-intent paid, an SEO, AEO and GEO engine, ABM on named accounts, and lifecycle and expansion marketing into the installed base. Quick wins run from week one: ad optimizations, untapped channels, unused assets, missing automations, aligned with the AI track.
03Strategy and execution, same people
The people who set the plan run the plan. No handoff from a strategy team to a delivery team, no translation loss, no waiting. One line of accountability holds quality, speed and reliability.
Three motions stand out, mapped to your five growth priorities
Expand the installed base
Your highest-probability lever. Repricing and packaging, adjacent categories and intelligence monetization are all growth from existing customers. We support these with lifecycle and account marketing, customer stories and value-framing aimed at current accounts.
Win new logos with focused ABM
New logo in apparel, footwear and textiles, plus the new $40–50k Social Compliance Management product for legal and compliance buyers. High-ACV, multi-persona sales, timed to the UFLPA, EUDR and CSDDD window while budget and urgency are live.
Capture the demand that exists
Your sourcing, legal and supply-chain buyers research in search and answer engines before they reach you. We capture that through Google, Bing, SEO and AI search (AEO and GEO) plus continuous website work. Unlike paid, organic and AI visibility keep returning after the spend stops.
The three feed each other: the same thought leadership and content that build preference also power the ABM motion, get cited by answer engines, and give existing customers reasons to expand. Pipeline, new and expansion, is the primary marketing KPI.
The RFP's 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 the RFP's August or September 2026 date. It flexes to your priorities.
Commercials.
Two principles: transparency and no lock-in. An hour-based model with a clear monthly commitment, and cancellation any time on 30 days' notice.
Full-service retainer, €39,000 per month.
A dedicated senior team delivering an average of 200 hours per month. 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 |
The transparency behind the number
Our standard hourly rates by role. The retainer is a senior mix of them.
Priced by workstream. The roadmap is fixed, engineers set the pace.
A fixed-scope build with a defined start and a handover. Figures in USD.
| Workstream | What it is | Fee |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery + architecture weeks 1 to 4 | Stakeholder interviews, an AI-maturity read, the workflow map, the agent roadmap across the four themes, the capacity model, a board-ready plan. | $50,000 once |
| The build months 1 to 6 | Embedded GTM engineers building the agents on the shared foundation. Start with one, add a second and a third to move faster. First month free or money-back. | $7,000 / mo each |
| Architecture + interim PO | David on the design, sprint direction and the interim product-owner seat that fills the missing RevOps role. | $15,000 / mo |
| Governance + handover | Hardening into Worldly's stack, a named internal owner takes over in the final stage. | included |
Build the model, run it every day, and hand it over.
The bottleneck at a lean team is build capacity. We bring the engineers who ship it on a foundation that compounds, run the channels every day, and leave your team owning the system. One partner, both tracks, no lock-in. That is what Worldly asked for.