Machina
Clean modern manufacturing floor with shafts of morning light: precise machinery lines, polished concrete, one distant worker silhouette

B2B

B2B Marketing Agency That Keeps Your Pipeline at 4x Coverage

Machina is a growth marketing agency in Hollister that builds B2B pipeline across California's Central Coast and beyond: demand capture, LinkedIn ABM, lifecycle nurture, and revenue operations, measured in qualified pipeline instead of MQL counts. We took a shoppable-video commerce platform from $12K to $208K monthly recurring revenue in six months.

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Proof

Results, in the numbers a CFO checks

Pipeline, ARR, and retention, in the clients' own numbers. Read the full case studies.

Revenue Operations

B2B Services Company

48h → 5min
Lead response time

A native B2B revenue-operations build: eight automated workflows around one CRM cut lead response from 48 hours to 5 minutes, hit 92% scoring accuracy, and returned about $180K a year in recovered time.

Read the case study

B2B SaaS

Shoppable Video Platform

$2.5M
ARR in 6 months

SaaS is B2B at its fastest clock speed, same committee and same cycle. ROI-first GTM positioning, 15 webinars, and multi-touch attribution took MRR from $12K to $208K on a $150K budget, with LinkedIn sourcing 42% of pipeline.

Read the case study

Customer Experience

SaaS Platform

8.2% → 4.5%
Monthly churn

Retention is the other half of B2B growth: when median SaaS spends about $2 to acquire $1 of new ARR, keeping accounts beats rebuying them. Onboarding rebuilt to 92% completion cut churn 45%.

Read the case study

What makes B2B different

The conditions B2B sells under

Marketing budgets have flatlined at 7.7% of company revenue for two straight years, and 59% of CMOs say the budget cannot fund the strategy (Gartner, 2025). Non-branded Google CPCs rose 29% in a year while average sales cycles stretched to 6.5 months, and any deal past $100K now clears security review, legal redlines, and procurement before signature. Median B2B SaaS spends about $2 in sales and marketing per $1 of new ARR. We build plans that survive that math.

What we hear

What B2B operators tell us on the first call

Four complaints we hear from founders, CMOs, and heads of sales, and what we do about each.

“We convinced our champion, and the deal still died in procurement”

The average buying committee now runs 8 to 13 people, up from 5.4 in 2015, and your champion has to re-sell you to finance, IT, and legal with whatever you handed them. We build role-segmented nurture and champion kits: ROI math for the CFO, spec depth for engineers, references and security documentation for procurement.

Email Marketing

“Leads sit in the CRM for two days before anyone calls”

We rebuilt this exact pipeline for a B2B services company: eight automated workflows cut lead response from 48 hours to 5 minutes and raised lead quality 40%. Enrichment, scoring, and routing run before a human ever touches the record.

AI Automation

“ChatGPT recommends our competitors and we don't even appear”

Forrester found generative AI named a meaningful buying source by twice as many B2B buyers as any other source in 2025. We earn the citations the engines retrieve: review-platform presence, comparison pages, structured data, and original numbers worth quoting.

SEO

“Our website is a brochure that engineers bounce off”

Buyers finish 70 to 83% of the journey before they talk to sales, and a site without pricing, comparison pages, or spec depth fails that evaluation in silence. We build the pages buying committees pull up in their own evaluation meetings.

Web Development

What we do

Five services, priced in your economics

CAC payback, cycle length, CPCs, and committee size. Every service below is built around the numbers a B2B operator runs on.

Web Development

A B2B site has to close the 70–83% of the journey that happens before sales contact. We build the pages committees pull up in evaluation meetings: transparent pricing, comparison pages against named competitors, self-serve product tours, and a resource library your champion can forward to a CFO. Organic B2B traffic converts around 2.1% visitor-to-lead; sites that hide pricing and proof convert under 1% on the same traffic.

SEO

B2B SEO is bottom-up: 'best for', 'alternatives', and 'vs' pages catch buyers while they write requirements. Organic converts at 2.1% visitor-to-lead against 0.7% for PPC, and SEO-sourced MQLs become SQLs at 51% versus 26% (First Page Sage, June 2025). We treat answer-engine optimization as the same job, since generative AI became the top shortlist source in 2025: structured data, citable original stats, and the third-party mentions ChatGPT retrieves.

Paid Ads

We split paid into capture and creation. Google Search takes purchase-intent keywords only, because non-branded B2B CPCs jumped 29% to $5.34 while CTR fell 26% (Dreamdata, 2025). LinkedIn carries creation with firmographic targeting to your ICP list: CPLs run $60–150 for mid-market, Lead Gen Forms cut CPL 30–50% versus landing pages, and Thought Leader Ads run about 6x more efficient than standard sponsored content. We report pipeline, not clicks.

Email Marketing

With median SaaS cycles at 84 days and B2B averages near 6.5 months, most leads will not buy this quarter, and email is the channel that stays present the whole way at near-zero marginal cost. B2B email converts MQL to SQL at 46%, second only to SEO. We segment nurture by committee role: ROI content for the economic buyer, technical depth for evaluators. Average B2B CTR runs 2–3.2%; well-segmented programs hit 6–10%.

AI Automation

Long-cycle B2B drowns in pipeline hygiene: routing, enrichment, follow-up, CRM notes. We automate the connective tissue. For a B2B services company, eight workflows cut lead response from 48 hours to 5 minutes, lifted lead quality 40%, tripled per-rep capacity, and returned about $180K a year in recovered time. Automation handles the hygiene so your sellers spend their sliver of buyer face time selling instead of doing data entry.

Who we work with

Who we work with

Sector by sector, the cycle changes, and so does the plan.

B2B SaaS

Median sales cycles run 84 days and trial-to-paid decides the P&L. Our deepest B2B result lives here: a shoppable-video commerce platform taken from $12K to $208K MRR in six months, at 85% trial-to-paid.

Manufacturers

Engineers and procurement finish most of their research before the first RFQ, then bounce off brochure sites with no spec depth. Hollister's own Teknova ships reagents to biotech buyers worldwide; the Central Coast builds more than it markets.

Professional services firms

The founder is the sales team and referrals are the pipeline. We build the Clutch profile, named case studies, and nurture that keep the calendar full when the referral well runs dry.

Distributors & wholesale

Territory reps and line cards cover the accounts you know. Comparison pages, reorder email flows, and account-based campaigns to named buyers put a distributor into evaluations it never used to hear about.

Agtech & ag suppliers

Salinas incubates a real cluster: the Western Growers Center for Innovation & Technology downtown, and Reservoir Farms, the world's first on-farm robotics incubator, opened in 2025 targeting 50+ startups. Selling to growers takes Silicon Valley and packing-shed fluency at once.

AI visibility

AI Search Visibility for B2B

B2B buyers moved their first meeting into a chat window. Forrester's 2025 Buyers' Journey Survey found generative AI named a meaningful information source by twice as many B2B buyers as any other source, ahead of vendor websites and sales reps, with software review sites second at about 15%. The engines assemble shortlists from what they can retrieve: G2, Capterra, and Clutch profiles, comparison articles, structured data, and plain crawlable HTML. AI crawlers don't execute JavaScript, so proof buried in scripts never gets quoted. We structure your pages, entity data, and review presence so the machines can read and cite you. When someone asks ChatGPT for the best managed IT provider in Salinas, we make sure it's you. Our free SEO report scores your AI visibility today, before we touch anything.

Explore AI visibilityRun a free SEO & AI report
$2.5M

ARR in six months, on a $150K budget. Shoppable video platform.

48h → 5min

lead response time we build for B2B pipelines

17%

of the buying journey B2B buyers spend with sales reps (Gartner)

The deal is decided in meetings you never attend, by people you never met. Marketing's job is arming the one person in that room who wants you to win.

Case study

Eight workflows, eight weeks: 48-hour lead response cut to 5 minutes

The client was a B2B services company whose pipeline had outgrown its process: leads sat 48 hours before follow-up, and the ops team spent six-plus hours a day on manual routing, enrichment, and CRM entry. In eight weeks we built eight automated workflows around their CRM: instant capture and enrichment, lead scoring at 92% accuracy, routing by territory and fit, and follow-up sequences for every buying-committee contact. Response time fell from 48 hours to 5 minutes. Manual work dropped 70%. Lead quality rose 40% as scoring separated real buyers from noise, and each rep now handles 3x the leads, worth about $180K a year in recovered time. In a market where buyers grant suppliers 17% of their attention, 5 minutes versus 48 hours is the difference between a live evaluation and a shortlist that closed without you.

Read the case study
48h → 5min
Lead response time
“The automation workflows have transformed our lead management process. We're now handling 3x more leads with the same team size.”
Lisa Park, Marketing Operations Manager · B2B Services Company

The Pipeline Coverage System

How we work

The Pipeline Coverage System: three phases, one metric. Qualified pipeline per channel.

01

Audit the dark funnel

A free audit of the funnel you can see and the one you can't: attribution model, AI visibility, site conversion against the 2.1% organic benchmark, and how long a lead waits for a response. Most B2B teams lose more pipeline to 48-hour follow-up than to weak creative, so we measure that first.

02

Run capture and creation in parallel

Google Search goes live on purchase-intent keywords for pipeline within weeks. LinkedIn campaigns cover the buying committee inside your ICP list. Underneath, comparison pages, review velocity, and answer-engine work compound toward organic traffic that converts at 2.1% and gets cheaper every quarter.

03

Score accounts and report pipeline

Buying-group scoring replaces single-lead MQLs, self-reported attribution catches the dark funnel, and speed-to-lead automation answers in minutes. Every channel reports qualified pipeline by cohort, so when budget season comes you defend the spend with the CFO's own math.

Playbook

The B2B Marketing Playbook

Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey (n=402) puts marketing budgets at 7.7% of company revenue, flat for a second straight year, and 59% of CMOs say that budget cannot fund the strategy. Flat money against rising CPCs forces sharper allocation. Nine tactics we run for B2B companies, each with the math attached.

01

Market to all 13 people on the buying committee

The average B2B purchase now involves 8 to 13 stakeholders, up from 5.4 in 2015, and enterprise deals can pull in 14 to 23 (Attainment Labs, 2025). One whitepaper download tells you one of them exists. The champion who found you still has to re-sell you to a CFO who wants payback math, engineers who want documentation, procurement chasing references, and a security reviewer holding a SOC 2 checklist. Build for that room: a one-page ROI model the champion can present, comparison pages that survive a skeptic, spec sheets that download without a form. Then score accounts instead of leads; a buying group forming on your pricing page deserves a faster response than any single form fill.
02

Win the evaluation you never see

Buyers spend about 17% of the journey with any potential supplier (Gartner), and 61% would now prefer skipping the rep entirely, though Gartner also finds rep-free buyers report more purchase regret. That regret is your opening. Publish what the committee needs to advance you without a meeting: transparent pricing, since vague pricing is a disqualifier for risk-averse buyers, named case studies with numbers, security documentation, and a demo they can drive unaccompanied. Then add the guardrails a rep would have provided: an ROI calculator, an honest 'who we're not for' section, comparison pages that concede a competitor's strengths. The vendors who win rep-free evaluations are the ones that answer the awkward questions in public.
03

Treat ChatGPT like the first sales call

Forrester's 2025 Buyers' Journey Survey found generative AI named a meaningful information source by twice as many B2B buyers as any other source, ahead of vendor sites, product experts, and salespeople, with software review sites second at about 15%. The engines assemble shortlists from what they can retrieve: G2, Capterra, and Clutch profiles, comparison articles, structured data, and original statistics with clear sourcing. The work is unglamorous. Accumulate reviews on the platforms your buyers check, publish data only you have, keep every citable claim in server-rendered HTML, and earn mentions in the third-party roundups LLMs pull from. Our free SEO report includes an AI Visibility Score that shows where you stand before we change anything.
04

Build the comparison pages your competitors won't

Bottom-funnel B2B SEO converts triple: organic traffic turns visitor-to-lead at 2.1% against 0.7% for PPC, and SEO-sourced MQLs become SQLs at 51% versus 26% (First Page Sage, 50+ B2B SaaS clients, June 2025). The queries that convert are the uncomfortable ones: '[competitor] alternatives', '[you] vs [rival]', 'best [category] for [use case]', '[category] pricing'. Most vendors refuse to name a competitor in public, and that refusal is why the pages work; the buyer is making the comparison anyway, in a tab you cannot see. Write the honest version, concede the cases where the rival wins, and you become the source both Google and the answer engines quote when the shortlist forms.
05

Police the line between demand capture and demand creation

Non-branded B2B Google CPCs rose 29% in a year to a $5.34 average while CTR fell 26% to 4.04% (Dreamdata, 2025). At those prices, Google Search earns its keep only on purchase intent: category-plus-software queries, comparisons, pricing searches, guarded by a negative-keyword list that blocks students and job seekers. Demand creation belongs on LinkedIn, the one ad platform with reliable firmographic targeting by company size, title, and industry. CPLs run $60–150 for mid-market and $150–250 for the C-suite, but leads convert to opportunity at 2 to 3 times the rate of other social. Lead Gen Forms cut CPL 30–50% versus landing pages, and Thought Leader Ads post about 2.68% CTR at $2.29 CPC, roughly 6x more efficient than standard sponsored content (HockeyStack and theB2Bhouse benchmarks, 2025).
06

Nurture like the cycle is 6.5 months, because it is

Average B2B sales cycles stretched to about 6.5 months in 2025, up from 4.9 in 2019, with $50K–$100K deals averaging 120 days (Ebsta and Gradient Works benchmark data). A lead that says no this quarter is often a customer two quarters later, and email is the only channel that stays present the whole way at near-zero marginal cost: B2B email converts MQL to SQL at 46%, second only to SEO. Segment by committee role, because the CFO and the technical evaluator should never receive the same message. Then add webinars, which B2B marketers ranked the most effective distribution channel at 52% in Content Marketing Institute's 15th annual study. A webinar registrant is a buying-committee member telling you the evaluation has started.
07

Answer in 5 minutes anyway

A 6-month cycle tempts teams into slow follow-up, and the market punishes it: the evaluation window opens when the buyer reaches out, not when your SDR clears the queue. We rebuilt this for a B2B services company. Eight automated workflows around their CRM cut lead response from 48 hours to 5 minutes, raised lead quality 40% while scoring ran at 92% accuracy, and tripled the leads each rep handles, worth about $180K a year in recovered time. Automation does the enrichment, routing, and first touch; humans do the selling. The vendor who responds while the interest is live takes a disproportionate share of it.
08

Add one form field before you trust your attribution

70 to 83% of the B2B journey happens where no UTM survives: Slack communities, podcasts, AI chatbots, a colleague's recommendation. Last-touch models then over-credit branded search and 'direct' and starve the channels that created the demand. The cheapest fix is a mandatory 'How did you hear about us?' field; self-reported attribution routinely surfaces the podcast or community your CRM has never heard of. Measure channels on pipeline contribution by cohort, and accept the physics of a 6.5-month cycle: this quarter's spend shows up two quarters out. With median B2B SaaS spending about $2 in sales and marketing per $1 of new ARR, reallocating budget on bad attribution is the most expensive mistake on the P&L.
09

Sell into the Central Coast's quiet B2B economy

The region reads as agricultural, and its B2B layer hides in plain sight. Salinas incubates agtech at the Western Growers Center for Innovation & Technology, and Reservoir Farms opened in 2025 as the world's first on-farm robotics incubator, targeting 50+ startups and $100M in investment. San Luis Obispo runs a quiet SaaS cluster of roughly a dozen firms with $108M in combined revenue, Postal near $40M among them, fed by Cal Poly's engineering pipeline. Santa Cruz produced Looker, which Google bought for $2.6B. Hollister, our home base, hosts Teknova, shipping reagents to biotech customers worldwide. Almost none of these companies can hire a full demand-gen team locally; they overpay Bay Area agencies or run founder-led marketing. We built Machina to close that gap from inside the region.

Sources

  1. 61% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free buying experience, yet rep-free buyers are significantly more likely to report purchase regret (Gartner sales survey, June 2025).
  2. Marketing budgets flatlined at 7.7% of company revenue for a second consecutive year, with paid media at 30.6% of budget and 59% of CMOs reporting insufficient budget to execute strategy (Gartner CMO Spend Survey, 2025, n=402).
  3. Generative AI was named a meaningful buying-information source by twice as many B2B buyers as any other source, ahead of vendor websites, product experts, and salespeople (Forrester Buyers' Journey Survey, 2025).
  4. Non-branded B2B Google Search CPCs rose about 29% year over year to a $5.34 average while CTR fell about 26% to 4.04% (Dreamdata benchmark across B2B accounts, 2025).
  5. B2B SaaS funnel benchmarks: organic search converts visitor-to-lead at 2.1% versus 0.7% for PPC, and SEO-sourced MQLs convert to SQLs at 51% versus 26% for PPC (First Page Sage, 50+ B2B SaaS clients, June 2025).
  6. B2B buying committees grew from an average of 5.4 stakeholders in 2015 to 8–13 in 2025, with enterprise deals involving 14–23 people (Attainment Labs, 2025).

Related industries

Explore adjacent verticals

Tech

The same committee-and-cycle selling at startup speed: product-led funnels, launch GTM, and developer-skeptic audiences.

View industry

Fintech

B2B selling with a compliance officer in every meeting: regulated claims, security reviews, and trust built in public.

View industry

Financial Services

Long-cycle trust selling where the buyer is a household or business owner instead of a 13-person committee.

View industry

B2B marketing by city

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B2B

Let's put next quarter's pipeline at 4x coverage

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Last updated July 4, 2026