Our Resources
Our upcoming events and recordings
Behind the successfull partnership
Insights from marketing leaders
Data for smarter decision
Long-form you can learn from
Latest Media
.png)
Gridware's digital presence and marketing engine were not converting technical reputation into consistent, qualified pipeline. Cybersecurity is a long sales-cycle business, and prospects needed to stay warm across 6 to 9 month buying cycles. Without a system for that, paid spend produced activity that was hard to trust, and organic search was not capturing buyers at the moment they were looking for a provider.
Paid acquisition was generating leads at over $670 CPL, with no visibility into which leads were actually converting to MQL. The algorithm was being asked to chase volume. Sales then had to sort the results by hand. That is an expensive way to run a B2B motion in a category where a qualified conversation is worth far more than a cheap form fill.
Landing pages, nurture and analytics were not set up to support a long-cycle B2B motion. A visitor who arrived from search for penetration testing Sydney did not land in an experience that matched that intent. Follow-up was inconsistent. Reporting could not show marketing and sales the same journey from first click to closed won, so the two teams were arguing about different versions of the truth.
Operationally, the gaps showed up as friction. Sales lacked context on where a contact sat in the buying journey. Marketing lacked a lifecycle model that distinguished a raw lead from an MQL. There was no shared pipeline language, no scoring that sales trusted, and no dashboard that could answer a simple question: which activity is actually producing closed-won work? Until those pieces existed, more budget would have produced more of the same.
The brief to Segments was therefore structural. Rebuild go-to-market so the right buyers were targeted. Rebuild search so Gridware showed up for commercially valuable terms. Rebuild paid so spend optimised against MQL rather than raw lead volume. Rebuild the site so conversion pathways matched intent. Rebuild HubSpot so nurture, scoring, and reporting could carry a 6 to 9 month cycle.
Gridware is one of Australia's leading cybersecurity firms, specialising in incident response, managed detection, and cyber risk advisory for mid-market and enterprise clients. The practice is known for technical excellence and frontline expertise. That reputation was never the problem. The problem was turning it into a consistent, qualified pipeline that sales could work with week after week.
Led by CEO Ahmed Khanji, Gridware partnered with Segments to convert credibility into closed-won outcomes. The engagement was not a campaign brief. It was a request to rebuild how marketing and sales worked together across a long cybersecurity buying cycle, from first search through to a signed engagement.
Gridware's buyers sit inside mid-market and enterprise organisations across Australia. The people who raise a hand are often CISOs, IT directors, and risk and compliance leads. They do not buy on impulse. They research providers when an audit, an incident, a board request, or a renewal forces the issue. They compare technical capability, commercial fit, and whether a firm can actually show up when something goes wrong.
That buyer journey is long. A prospect might first search for a service such as penetration testing, read a few pages, speak to a peer, disappear into an internal process, and only re-emerge months later. If marketing treated every form fill as a hot lead, sales burned time. If marketing went quiet after the first click, the opportunity went cold. Gridware needed a partner who understood that rhythm from day one.
Over 12 months, Gridware recorded a 125% increase in MQLs and closed-won outcomes year on year. That is the commercial headline, and it was measured in HubSpot against the lifecycle and pipeline model built during the engagement, not against a spreadsheet of raw form fills.
Improved MQL performance year on year allowed the sales team to close deals faster. Gridware ranked for top-performing keywords including penetration testing, and scaled closed-won, marketing-generated opportunities. Paid was no longer judged on cost per lead alone. Organic search was no longer a traffic report. Both were judged on whether they contributed to qualified pipeline and closed-won work.
Measurement sat on the HubSpot foundation: lifecycle stages, MQL definition, closed-won opportunities, and a dashboard from first click to close. Year-on-year comparison over 12 months was the window. Search performance was reviewed against commercially valuable terms, including penetration testing and penetration testing Sydney. Paid was reviewed against MQL, not against the old CPL-only view that had sat above $670 with no quality signal.
Commercially, the result meant Gridware could put more of the right conversations in front of sales, keep those conversations warm across a long cycle, and see which marketing activity was actually generating closed-won work. That is the difference between a cybersecurity firm that is well known and one that can grow pipeline on purpose.
Cybersecurity is a long sales cycle business and Segments understood that from day one. They built nurture sequences in HubSpot that kept prospects warm across 6 to 9 month cycles, redesigned our landing pages for conversion, and gave us analytics visibility we never had before.
Ahmed Khanji, CEO, Gridware Cybersecurity
Segments came in across five workstreams: GTM and growth strategy, SEO, PPC, UI/UX, and HubSpot with reporting and tracking. The work was sequenced so the operating system came first. Positioning and ICP had to be clear before channels scaled. Tracking and HubSpot had to be in place before paid could be judged on MQL. Nurture had to exist before a 6 to 9 month cycle could be supported without burning the sales team.
The engagement opened with discovery: how Gridware sold, who actually signed, which services carried commercial weight, and where marketing and sales currently handed work to each other. From there the work moved in phases. First, the go-to-market foundation and the HubSpot model. Second, search architecture and conversion pathways. Third, paid search and LinkedIn with MQL-based bidding. Fourth, nurture and sales enablement so no lead went cold. Optimisation then ran across the full 12 month window used to measure results.
We rebuilt Gridware's go-to-market foundation, redefining their ICP, tightening positioning for both technical buyers and C-suite decision-makers, and aligning sales and marketing around a shared pipeline model. Technical buyers care about method, tooling, and whether the team has been in the room during an incident. C-suite buyers care about risk, commercial clarity, and whether the firm can be trusted with the organisation. Both had to recognise Gridware on the page and in the follow-up.
The shared pipeline model gave both teams the same stages, the same definition of MQL, and the same view of what good looked like. That sounds simple. In a long-cycle cybersecurity sale it is the difference between a marketing engine and a lead factory.
We overhauled keyword architecture to target high-intent, buyer-stage search terms across incident response, MDR and cyber risk. Content was restructured around authority and conversion, not just traffic. A core part of the strategy was ranking for commercially valuable terms including penetration testing and penetration testing Sydney, putting Gridware in front of buyers at the moment they were searching for a provider.
The SEO work was not a blog volume play. It was a map of how a buyer researches a cybersecurity firm in Australia, then a set of pages and internal pathways that could carry that buyer from a service query into a conversation. Rankings were treated as a commercial asset, measured against whether they produced the right kind of enquiry, not as a vanity chart.
We launched and managed paid search and LinkedIn campaigns targeting CISOs, IT directors, and risk and compliance leads at mid-market and enterprise organisations across Australia. We integrated Google Ads directly with HubSpot and shifted bidding to optimise against MQL rather than raw lead volume. That changed what the algorithm was chasing. Volume at over $670 CPL with no MQL visibility was replaced by a model where paid could see which leads marketing and sales actually agreed were qualified.
We rebuilt landing pages to improve user experience and conversion quality, and set up automated email nurture sequences to move leads through the funnel. Paid was no longer a tap that filled a spreadsheet. It was a channel with a destination, a follow-up path, and a quality signal HubSpot could send back to the ad platforms.
We redesigned key conversion pathways across the site, simplifying the buyer journey, sharpening messaging hierarchy, and building landing pages that matched intent at every stage of the funnel. A visitor who arrived on a penetration testing query needed a different path from a visitor researching managed detection. The site had to make that obvious without turning into a maze of disconnected campaigns.
Messaging hierarchy was tightened so technical proof and commercial clarity sat in the right order. The goal was not a redesign for its own sake. It was to stop qualified buyers bouncing because the page did not answer the question that brought them there.
We implemented HubSpot end to end, including pipeline configuration, lead scoring, lifecycle stage mapping and automated workflows connecting marketing activity to sales outcomes. Google Ads was integrated with HubSpot to enable MQL-based bidding. Server-side tracking captured conversion data beyond browser-based tracking. Sales enablement inside HubSpot gave the team the context, sequencing and automation to follow up faster. Email automations were tailored to where each contact sat in the buying journey, and a unified reporting dashboard gave Gridware visibility from first click to closed won.
Operationally this was the workstream that changed how the business ran. Marketing stopped guessing which leads mattered. Sales stopped starting every conversation from zero. Nurture covered the 6 to 9 month cycles that cybersecurity deals actually take. Reporting sat in one place, so the 12 month year-on-year read on MQLs and closed-won could be trusted.
Enjoy the best growth marketing newsletter on the internet — right in your inbox.
