Clients / Penfold
Case study · Penfold
Tripling revenue by redesigning Penfold’s acquisition model
A Series A pensions fintech was carrying expensive B2C acquisition into a post-raise growth target it could not fund. The fix was a different acquisition model, not a bigger budget.
Julian Moore · Chief Marketing Officer · September 2022 to September 2023 · ExCo
The situation
Penfold had built a strong consumer pensions product and around 100,000 customers, mostly acquired through paid channels. After Series A, the goal was to triple revenue. The economics said no: consumer CAC was high, payback was slow, and every extra pound of growth needed more spend on the same expensive channels.
The business problem was not “we need more leads”. It was “we need to triple revenue without tripling acquisition cost”. Those are different problems with different answers, and the second one cannot be solved inside a B2C paid-acquisition model.
The diagnosis
I went through the funnel data, sales cycles and downstream customer value by segment before touching the channel mix. Workplace pensions, where one employer decision brings in a whole company of savers, had far better acquisition economics than winning consumers one at a time. Advisers and accountants were better again: one partner relationship could introduce many employers.
The team, spend and reporting were all built for the old model. Attribution could not show what each pound of acquisition spend produced downstream, which made every budget conversation a matter of opinion. So the diagnosis was an acquisition-model problem, an economics problem and an operating-model problem, in that order.
This was never “do more B2B marketing”. It was redesigning acquisition around unit economics and sales velocity, then rebuilding the team and measurement to match.
The work
What changed
Four workstreams, sequenced so the economics improved before spend scaled.
Acquisition-model reset
Shifted the centre of gravity from B2C-led growth to workplace, adviser and B2B2C channels. Employers were never treated as one audience: the motion was segmented by company size and by who actually buys, because a 20-person firm and a 400-person firm do not buy pensions the same way.
Paid rationalisation and organic build
Rebuilt paid acquisition from the ground up rather than simply cutting it. Activity that produced volume without acceptable economics was killed, and spend concentrated on higher-intent demand. Alongside it, long-form content and semi-programmatic SEO were built to compound high-intent organic demand.
RevOps and attribution rebuild
Built the attribution layer needed to track ROI across the funnel: lead source, conversion, sales cycle length, company size, buyer type and downstream customer value. That analysis stopped the business treating a lead as a lead, and showed which segment, buyer and route combinations produced good customers fast enough.
Team restructure and handover
Restructured the team away from general brand capability and towards B2B demand, performance, SEO, content, partnerships and measurement. Once the new model was established, I mentored an existing team member into the Head of Marketing role rather than leaving a dependency.
Operator detail
How it worked in practice
The workplace motion had a ceiling
Testing found a practical upper limit of around 500 employees for the motion we were building. Above that, procurement and sales complexity changed the deal entirely. Knowing the ceiling meant spend and sales effort stayed where the model actually worked.
HR was not always the buyer
In smaller companies, pensions competed with every other HR priority and deals moved slowly. Founders and business owners had the pain, the authority and a direct decision process, so velocity was materially better when campaigns targeted them instead.
Partners beat one-at-a-time acquisition
A separate channel programme was built for accountants, advisers and IFAs, with its own proposition, acquisition activity and team. The rationale was simple arithmetic: one successful partner introduces multiple companies, while an employer campaign wins one at a time.
Paid was rebuilt, not abandoned
The paid programme went through account by account. What stayed had to clear an economic bar, not a volume bar. CAC fell 60% because the mix changed and the remaining spend worked harder, not because marketing stopped spending.
Outcomes
Results
| Metric | Start | Outcome | Timeframe |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue run-rate | c.£1m | £3m | 12 months |
| Revenue growth | baseline | 3x | 12 months |
| Customer acquisition cost | baseline | -60% | over the engagement |
Revenue run-rate
c.£1m → £3m
12 monthsRevenue growth
baseline → 3x
12 monthsCustomer acquisition cost
baseline → -60%
over the engagementRevenue tripling is a company outcome my B2B growth strategy contributed to. The CAC reduction came directly from the restructure, the paid cuts and the pivot to organic and adviser channels. The attribution rebuild is what made both measurable.
He has very strong commercial judgement and business acumen, and a wealth of marketing knowledge to draw from. He is growth focused and ties everything back to impact.
What I took from it
Channel-mix questions are usually economics questions in disguise. The buying centre, the sales cycle and the downstream value of each segment decide whether a channel can scale, and no amount of optimisation fixes a channel pointed at the wrong buyer.
I also learnt to put a number on the ceiling early. Finding the 500-employee limit stopped us wasting a year selling into companies our motion could not win.
About Julian Moore
Julian Moore is a growth CMO specialising in fintech and B2B SaaS. Across 20 years he has led growth in six fintech and SaaS leadership roles, from pre-seed startups through PE-backed scale-ups to listed businesses including Xero, with three company sales during his tenures (Contis to Solaris, Bullhorn’s Vista to Insight transaction, and Jillion pre-launch). He runs Marketing Momentum, a fractional CMO practice for fintech and SaaS founders.
More about Julian →Acquisition economics breaking as you scale?
If revenue targets have outgrown your acquisition model, that is a diagnosis problem before it is a channel problem. I work with fintech and SaaS founders on exactly this.