At your scale, you’ve already figured out one thing: volume-based marketing is dead. Your competitors are flooding inboxes with emails. They’re posting endlessly on social. They’re running ads to anyone who breathes. And you know what? None of it’s moving the needle anymore.
The reality your team is facing is brutal: it now takes eight touchpoints to make a sale, and most of those touchpoints just frustrate people. Your customers are tuning out. Your engagement rates are dropping. Your open rates are plummeting. And the problem isn’t that you’re not trying hard enough—it’s that you’re trying the wrong things.
Here’s the hard truth: traditional marketing has become a blunt instrument. You can’t blast your way to growth anymore. But you can build your way there.
For the past 20+ years, we’ve worked with businesses exactly like yours—companies doing $10M, $50M, $100M+—and we’ve learned that sustainable, scalable growth doesn’t come from doing more. It comes from doing what actually matters to your most profitable customers.
That’s where our ProfitPaths® methodology comes in. And yes, there’s a direct connection to what Andrew Reid talks about in his framework. Let us show you how.
The Framework That Actually Works: ProfitPaths® for $10M+ Businesses
Before we dive into the five attention drivers, let’s be clear about something: your marketing strategy needs a foundation. That foundation is ProfitPaths®, our proven approach to identifying, targeting, and converting your highest-value customers with laser precision.
Here’s how it works at your scale:
Step 1: Identify Your IMPACT Offering — not every product or service you sell deserves marketing dollars. Some have higher margins. Some have better repeat business potential. Some face less competition. You need to identify which offering will generate the most profit and longevity. For a $10M+ business, this often means reallocating budget from lower-margin offerings to the ones that actually drive compound growth (i.e., more money in your bank account).
Step 2: Find Your IMPACT Customer — this is the person (or company) who will become your most profitable, most loyal customer. They’re not your most common customer. They’re your best customer. At your scale, the difference between marketing to everyone and marketing to your IMPACT customer is often $1-5M annually in revenue.
Step 3-5: Build the system — prospect magnets, conversion strategies, and channel selection all flow from these first two decisions.
Now, here’s where the five drivers come in. These aren’t just attention-grabbing tactics. When aligned with your ProfitPaths® strategy, they become the mechanisms that convert your IMPACT prospects into loyal, high-value customers.
The Five Drivers
1. Make Your Value Proposition Unforgettable
Let’s not pretend this is about viral marketing. At your scale, viral campaigns often waste money on the wrong audience. Entertainment, in the context of ProfitPaths®, means making your IMPACT customer’s decision easy and enjoyable.
Humor and wit work, but only when they’re targeting the right person. A $10M B2B company doesn’t need to feel like a golden era SNL skit, you just need to be relevant. You need a prospect magnet that makes your IMPACT customer feel like you actually understand their world.
How this looks in practice:
- Your educational content has personality. It’s not stiff whitepapers; it’s insights your customer actually wants to read.
- Your sales process is frictionless and even enjoyable, not another painful RFP cycle.
- Your brand stands out because it sounds human, not like every other corporate entity.
The data backs this: approximately 90% of consumers remember funny ads, and 72% prefer brands with humor. But more importantly for you? When entertainment is paired with the right targeting, it becomes a competitive advantage. Your IMPACT customer is paying attention because you’re speaking their language, not because you’re trying to be the next viral sensation.
Action for your team: Audit your top-performing prospect magnets. Where does personality shine through? Where are you being corporate and forgettable? Inject 15% more of the former into everything else.
2. Build Authority and Earn the Sale Before They Call
Your IMPACT customer is likely making a six-figure (or seven-figure) decision. They’re researching. They’re comparing. They’re trying to figure out if your solution actually works or if it’s just another empty promise from another vendor.
Education is how you earn that sale before the sales conversation even starts.
Educational content isn’t a blog post you hope people read. It’s a prospect magnet. A carefully designed asset that attracts your IMPACT customer by solving a specific problem they’re facing right now.
When done right, educational content does three things:
- Builds credibility. You’re not selling; you’re teaching.
- Identifies intent. The fact that someone consumed your content tells you they’re serious.
- Pre-frames the conversation. They’ve already bought into your approach before your team ever picks up the phone.
At your scale, this is non-negotiable. Your IMPACT customer expects your educational content to be phenomenal because, frankly, if you can’t teach them something valuable, why would they trust you to build something valuable for them?
The content mix that works:
- Checklists and frameworks (downloadable, actionable, specific to their industry)
- Case studies showing real results (not vanity metrics but actual ROI)
- Quick-reference guides and templates
- Short-form video content addressing specific pain points
- Webinars diving deep into strategic topics
Action for your team: Map out the customer journey for your IMPACT prospect. What questions do they have at each stage? Create one educational asset for each stage that answers that question better than your competitors can.
3. Make Your Advocates Your Sales Team
Here’s a fact that gets lost in the noise: people want to share things that make them look good.
For a business like yours, this means creating content, experiences, and results that your customers want to talk about.
In your world, social clout works differently. Your IMPACT customer shares with their peers when:
- You deliver measurable results they can brag about
- You make them look strategic and forward-thinking internally
- You position them as an innovator in their industry
- You create social proof so strong it influences their entire network
Think about it: A CFO who implements a solution that increases margin by 20% is going to tell other CFOs about it. A VP of Operations who streamlines their processes and becomes more efficient is going to showcase that at industry events. Your job is to make their success shareable.
How this manifests in ProfitPaths®: When you identify your IMPACT customer and create solutions tailored to them, you’re not just solving a problem. You’re creating a success story.
And success stories spread.
Action for your team: Identify your best case studies (the ones showing exceptional results). Design them for sharing:
- Create graphics
- Create infographics
- Create short videos
- Create social snippets
Create the things that make your customers look like geniuses. Give them permission and tools to brag.
4. Build Progress Into Your Customer Experience
Think about your own purchasing decision when you chose your current platform or partner. You didn’t just buy the product. You sold it internally. You made a case to your leadership team: “This will improve efficiency by X%, reduce costs by Y%, or increase revenue by Z%.” You put your reputation on the line.
Now consider what happens after the sale. How often does that vendor actually show you — and let you show your team — that those promised results are being delivered?
That’s where most vendors fail. They disappear.
For a business like yours, this driver is about creating undeniable proof that your IMPACT customer’s investment is paying off. It’s about giving them the data, the wins, and the momentum they need to justify their decision and expand their commitment.
In the context of ProfitPaths®, this means:
- Monthly business reviews that map progress against the specific KPIs they care about
- Quarterly outcome reports showing cumulative ROI and value delivered
- Regular milestone celebrations—not generic “thanks for being a customer” notes, but actual recognition of concrete wins they’ve achieved
- Annual ROI statements that make the business case bulletproof for renewal and expansion
Why this matters: Your IMPACT customer is under pressure. They made a commitment. They promised results. When you consistently show clear, documented progress toward those results, you transform from a vendor into a partner who helped them succeed.
More than that? You give them ammunition to defend the decision internally. They can walk into their next budget meeting with data. They can show their CFO that this decision was right. And they can make the case for expanding the relationship.
Your internal team needs to understand this too. The best vendors don’t disappear after the contract is signed. In fact, the best vendors aren’t vendors — they’re partners.
They show up every month with good news. They celebrate wins. They document progress. That’s what separates customers who stick around from customers who shop around at renewal.
Action for your team: Audit your post-sale customer experience. Are you proactively communicating progress, or only reaching out when problems arise? Design a cadence:
- Monthly KPI reviews
- Quarterly business outcome reports
- Annual ROI summaries
Make your customer’s success impossible to ignore and impossible to leave.
5. Make Loyalty Profitable for Both Sides
Here’s the difference between a customer and a partner: one buys once. The other keeps buying, keeps expanding, and keeps referring.
As an example, we don’t do long-term contracts at 5K. Why? Because every time our clients invest more in marketing with us, we didn’t just deliver results, we structured the relationship so they unlocked new capabilities.
More budget meant dedicated resources, strategic advisory, and industry benchmarking that informed their next moves. They didn’t feel like they were just spending more. They felt like they were gaining a strategic advantage.
That’s the difference. You’re not offering 20% off or a free month. You’re offering:
- Expanded strategic support as they increase investment
- First access to new capabilities and tools
- Dedicated account resources who become extensions of their team
- Industry benchmarking and competitive intelligence
- Business reviews at the C-level, not just operational check-ins
One of our long-term clients put it this way: “After 4 years working together, the results have been tremendous. So much better than our old agency.” They didn’t say that because of a discount. They said it because the partnership kept evolving to deliver what they actually needed.
Another client we’ve worked with for 5+ years said: “5K created explosive growth for us. They really strive to understand our growth goals.” Notice what’s missing from that quote? Any mention of cost. What’s there? Understanding and alignment.
Here’s the hard truth: your most valuable customers aren’t price-sensitive. They’re results-sensitive. They want to know that every dollar they invest is being strategic, intentional, and tracked. They want to feel like they’re unlocking something new each time they expand the relationship.
The data backs this up: most customers say the ability to earn rewards changes their spending behavior, often resulting in higher transaction values. But at your scale, the reward isn’t a discount. It’s strategic value.
Action for your team: Stop thinking about loyalty programs. Start thinking about partnership evolution. Map out what happens at 1x, 2x, 3x investment levels. What resources do they get? What capabilities unlock? What happens to their access and strategic involvement? Then talk to your top three customers and ask: “What would make you want to expand this relationship?” Use their answers to design your expansion strategy—and watch your net revenue retention climb.
Putting It Together: The ProfitPaths® + Five Drivers Formula
Here’s how this works at your scale:
- You identify your IMPACT Offering and IMPACT Customer using ProfitPaths®. This tells you who to market to and what to market.
- You design educational prospect magnets (Driver #2) that attract your IMPACT customer with content they can’t ignore.
- You inject personality and storytelling (Driver #1) into your brand so you stand out in a crowded market.
- You build case studies and social proof (Driver #3) that make your customers want to tell their peers about you.
- You create a customer success program (Driver #4) that shows progress and builds advocates.
- You design loyalty and expansion incentives (Driver #5) that turn customers into long-term revenue engines.
The result? A marketing system that doesn’t just rely on blasting more emails or posting more content. It relies on delivering so much value to your IMPACT customer that they can’t help but become your best sales team.
The Reality Check: Why This Matters More Than Ever
You’re at an inflection point. You’ve grown a company by being scrappy, responsive, and willing to try things. That got you here. But it won’t get you to $20M, $50M, or beyond.
Here’s what we see happening with companies at your scale:
The ones that keep blasting: They’re fighting harder and harder for the same results. Their CAC is climbing. Their churn is rising. Their margins are compressing.
The ones that build systematically: They’re being more selective with their marketing spend. They’re seeing better ROI. Their customer lifetime value is increasing. They’re hitting their targets with less chaos.
The difference? They stopped treating marketing like a volume game and started treating it like a precision game.
Your Next Move
Before you launch another campaign, before you hire another agency, before you invest another dollar, pause.
Step 1: Identify your true IMPACT Offering. Which of your products or services has the best margins, lowest competition, and highest repeat potential? Which one should you be betting on?
Step 2: Define your IMPACT Customer. Not your most common customer. Your best customer. The one who gives you the highest margin, stays longest, and refers most often.
Step 3: Build your strategy around those two decisions. Everything else—your content, your ads, your sales process, your customer success—flows from this.
You didn’t build a $10M+ business by accident. You did it by making strategic decisions and executing with precision. Your marketing system deserves the same rigor.
The companies winning right now aren’t the ones doing more. They’re the ones doing what matters most, to the right people, consistently.
That’s the difference between reacting and building. Between surviving and scaling.
Let’s talk about what your ProfitPaths® could look like. Schedule a strategy session with our team. We’ll walk through your business, identify your highest-potential opportunities, and show you exactly how to build a system that scales.
Because at your scale, growth shouldn’t be chaotic. It should be predictable, systematic, and profitable.
