Erin Toughill
Book a Diagnostic
Six years, 180+ engagements, four exits north of $100M. Below: a working dossier of the repositionings that produced measurable lifts in pipeline, press pickup, and investor confidence — written like the magazine features they were studied in.
The company arrived in Q2 of 2023 with a clear problem and no clear category. ARR had plateaued at $14M, two competitors were raising on similar messaging, and the board had asked the CEO a question he couldn't answer in one sentence: what category do you intend to own?
The prior positioning — "AI-powered operational intelligence" — was true, broad, and useless. It indexed against no buyer in particular. Win rates had slipped from 34% to 21% across two quarters, sales-cycle length had stretched from 41 to 67 days, and inbound had flattened despite a record marketing budget. The company's actual wedge — a proprietary signal layer that no public competitor had replicated — was buried beneath generic AI language.
"Erin did not sell us a new tagline. She dismantled the story we had been telling ourselves for four years and rebuilt it from the buyer backward. We closed our Series C inside eight months of launch." — Founder & CEO, revenue intelligence platform
The repositioning centered on a category of one: revenue intelligence for mid-market SaaS. It took 21 calendar days. The thesis was that mid-market RevOps teams were drowning in dashboards and starving for answers — and that the company's signal layer was the only architecture built for that exact gap. Messaging, sales enablement, the homepage, the deck, and the investor narrative were rebuilt in lockstep.
By day 90: qualified inbound pipeline had lifted 3.2×, win rate recovered to 38%, average sales cycle compressed to 44 days, and coverage in The Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, and Axios followed within the next two quarters. The Series C closed at a 4.1× markup on the prior round.
The thesis: stop selling "modern treasury" to controllers, and start selling the only payments rail built for B2B software platforms to integrate in under a week.
The thesis: lead with the specific clinical workflow eliminated (prior authorization in oncology), not the underlying model — buyers hire outcomes, not architecture.
The thesis: growth-stage consumer companies stop winning on TikTok and start winning on a named category and a defensible reason to exist beyond the algorithm.
A deliberately small roster — 12 active engagements per quarter — preserves the senior-level attention each account receives.
We were six weeks from a board meeting I was going to walk into with no category, no story, and a deck that contradicted itself on page four. Erin rebuilt the narrative in three weeks. We didn't just survive the board — we used the same narrative to close our Series C two quarters later.
A strategy diagnostic is not a sales call. It is a working session — the same diagnostic run on every engagement that produced the numbers above. You leave with a written point of view on your category, your wedge, and the three moves that move pipeline, press, and investor confidence. If we are not the right fit, you get the read anyway.
Direct correspondence preferred: [email protected] · San Francisco · By appointment only.