Turning a $2M marketing budget into $10M of pipeline for DAVO by Avalara

Situation

DAVO by Avalara automates sales tax for restaurants and small businesses, sold largely through point-of-sale partners such as Toast and Clover. The team was charged with driving new-customer growth behind an aggressive revenue goal.

Insight

Bidding works best when it can see the full funnel. Sending downstream quality signal to the agency, and reporting spend against pipeline, would let every dollar follow return.

Action

• Owned the full DAVO budget across paid search, paid social, display, video, email and events, and reallocated it by ROI after two holistic media reviews.
• Gave the agency deeper funnel insight so bidding optimized to quality: Performance Max lead quality improved 80–160%.
• Launched Reddit, a channel new to all of Avalara: legal approval for the pixel, partner-community targeting, and a lunch-and-learn so other teams could use it. It beat benchmark metrics while scaling.
• Stood up influencer marketing with legal and finance, and testimonial video that outperformed prior creative.
• Built Power BI dashboards with SQL access to paid media data, linking spend to new-customer creates and churn.
• Introduced AI-assisted creative testing that cut creative-cycle time 30%.
• Ran the ATC for Managers launch campaign on schedule: site, demos and sales training ready on day one.

Result

• $10M in pipeline and about $5M in sales from a $2M budget, roughly 2.5x ROAS.
• MQL volume +66% year over year and creates +11.8% (per my manager’s review).
• Cost per lead 35% lower in H2 than H1, and the $300 CPA target hit and held for four straight months.
• Avalara Passion Award: "Your actions have directly changed the business outcome over the last quarter."