How Zylo Maintains 10× Pipeline Efficiency While Moving Upmarket

"We’re building a market that doesn’t fully exist yet. We needed to reach niche enterprise buying groups who don’t even know they need us yet.” — Chris Cruz, Senior Director of Demand Generation & Digital Marketing, Zylo

Zylo is creating the SaaS Management category — helping enterprises bring order to SaaS sprawl and optimize software spend. Its buyers sit across IT, procurement, finance, and executive teams, each with different motivations and different levels of awareness.

As Zylo pushed further upmarket, efficiency could no longer be protected by scale alone. Buyer segments were small. Match rates mattered. Channel roles needed to be clearly defined, and every impression had to stay inside the ICP.

Zylo needed a demand system that could introduce an unfamiliar category at scale while still activating only the right enterprise personas at the right moment.

Company & GTM Profile

The Overarching Challenge

Zylo’s ICPs are highly specific — often under 50,000 people per segment. If match rates fall, performance deteriorates quickly.

"Our audiences are small and specific — often under 50,000 people. If only 30–40% of those match in ad platforms, the whole program falls apart.”

At the same time, Zylo must operate across very different buyer states. Some prospects are completely unaware the category exists. Others are actively researching solutions. Still others are already in open opportunities.

The challenge was educating the market without drifting outside the ICP — and converting intent into persona-level engagement without sacrificing efficiency.

How Zylo Structures Demand Generation for an Emerging Category

Zylo runs demand as a coordinated system where each channel plays a defined role inside the funnel.

Pillar 1 · Constrain the top of funnel (Performance Max + LinkedIn)

Zylo uses Performance Max and LinkedIn together for top-of-funnel education, but with different responsibilities.

Performance Max provides scale and cost efficiency. It introduces the SaaS Management category broadly while Primer audiences constrain reach to high-fit enterprise segments. This allows Zylo to expand awareness without inflating spend across irrelevant software buyers.

LinkedIn reinforces precision and professional context. It supports role-specific messaging and ensures that awareness lands in front of the right enterprise personas, not just the right companies.

By anchoring both channels in Primer audiences, Zylo maintains ICP discipline while building the category in a market that does not yet self-identify.

Pillar 2 · Filter and activate mid-funnel intent (6sense + Primer)

For mid-funnel activation, Zylo uses 6sense as the first layer of intent detection. It identifies which accounts are actively researching SaaS Management and showing buying signals, but that intelligence stops at the account level.

Account awareness alone isn’t enough. Zylo sells to buying committees made up of IT, procurement, finance, and executive stakeholders — and each persona requires different messaging.

"6sense can help identify in-market accounts, but you can only target the account — not the individual, not the personas. With Primer, we're able to take that initial 6sense intent data, which then goes into Salesforce, and build audiences based on those individual roles.”

Once intent-qualified accounts flow into Salesforce, Primer transforms that data into persona-specific audiences. This allows Zylo to move from broad account targeting to engaging the actual decision-makers and influencers inside those organizations.

The result is a controlled transition from awareness to influence: intent signals define who is in market, and Primer defines who inside those accounts should be reached — preserving both relevance and precision as accounts move deeper into evaluation.

Pillar 3 · Sustain and align in real time

Primer keeps Zylo’s audiences continuously synced with Salesforce. When opportunities move into an active stage, associated personas begin receiving ads automatically.

"When a deal becomes an active opportunity in Salesforce, the audience updates instantly in Primer and starts getting ads. I can look my CMO in the eye and say, ‘Yes, we’re already marketing to them."

This same flexibility allows Zylo to pivot quickly across verticals. Audiences can be cloned, refined, and redeployed in minutes without disrupting the underlying demand system.

Rather than rebuilding campaigns, Zylo adjusts the audience architecture beneath them.

Key Principles from Zylo’s Playbook

Zylo’s approach reflects a few consistent ideas.

• Precision protects efficiency in small enterprise segments.
• Scale and specificity must coexist rather than compete.
• Performance Max introduces the category, while LinkedIn reinforces persona clarity.
• 6sense identifies intent, and Primer ensures the right individuals see the message.
• Real-time Salesforce syncing keeps demand aligned with live revenue activity.

The Outcome

Zylo measures success through pipeline generated per dollar spent, with a consistent benchmark of 10× ROI.

"Our KPI is pipeline generated per dollar spent, and we aim for 10×. We consistently hit that with Primer — and we’re doing it while pushing further upmarket every quarter.”

By clearly separating education, activation, and real-time alignment — and anchoring all three in Primer’s audience precision — Zylo sustained efficiency while expanding into increasingly complex enterprise buying groups.