Overview
Our client’s business was growing 15–20% year over year — but decades-old manual processes, Excel-based data flows, and heavy reliance on direct mail were already capping its scale. Customer engagement liaisons spent their days on data entry rather than employer growth conversations. Gather was engaged to modernize the marketing operating model, data foundation, and go-to-market processes before the growth curve flattened.
The Approach
Gather began with a current-state assessment — interviewing stakeholders across marketing, Client Engagement, and vendor-facing teams; mapping the campaign lifecycle from census intake to attribution; and auditing the technology stack, channel mix, and performance reporting. The audit surfaced six structural weaknesses — fragile census data, manual operations,
limited segmentation, and poor funnel visibility among them — that together explained why growth was capped. From there, Gather designed a target operating model organized around four capabilities: centralized data, internal campaign execution, employer-aware journeys, and end-to-end measurement. Gather’s key recommendation was to move email execution off an external vendor and onto its internal marketing platform, paired with a pro-forma business case and a phased pilot-to-scale activation plan with team model, timeline, and migration path.
The Impact
Gather’s diagnosis and target operating model provided a defensible business case for change: continuing with the existing vendor-driven model would require substantial additional spend for only incremental revenue gains, while the target model projects multiples of new revenue on a materially smaller incremental investment. Beyond the economics, the model equips the business with capabilities it didn’t previously have — behavior-based digital marketing, employer-aware personalization, and end-to-end performance measurement from account to sale — shifting the marketing function from vendor-managed batch execution to a closed-loop growth engine. Campaign operations could be cut by more than half per batch, freeing customer engagement liaisons to focus on higher value employer growth conversations. The client has moved to pilot activation on Gather’s recommendation.