The context: Building a scalable growth engine from scratch
ATS Marketing is a retail growth company that helps consumer product brands get placed into major retailers (Target, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Macy’s, Nordstrom, and others), then manages the sales, operations, and marketing needed to grow those retail accounts. Founded in 2008 by CEO Pamela Galvan, the company built its entire client base one way: referrals and industry relationships.
Challenges they faced
- A wave of the client’s small- to mid-size manufacturing and import partners were acquired or retired. Acquiring companies typically brought their own internal sales and marketing teams, and even when they kept working with ATS Marketing, they renegotiated terms downward, which shrank both revenue and referral pipeline.
- Since the client didn’t market itself through inbound or outbound channels, its existing website hadn’t been meaningfully updated in years (and had been built internally with no professional design or strategy).
- ATS Marketing’s business model itself was shifting from commission-only (no revenue until a partner’s product sold) to a monthly retainer, which required a steadier, more qualified pipeline of larger clients.
- Leadership set quite an ambitious goal: grow to 10x their best-ever revenue year within three to five years, meaning a deliberate move upmarket toward more established, better-funded consumer brands.
To get there, they needed a partner who could help build the commercial infrastructure they had never developed before.
Why Belkins
ATS Marketing evaluated several providers before choosing Belkins. While strong reviews and industry reputation initially stood out, the deciding factors were:
- Belkins’ consultative approach and strong outbound expertise, combined with branding and website development.
- The people who gained the client’s trust and created a positive impression from the very first call with our Account Executive, Bukky Sosnaya. ATS Marketing’s Founder and CEO, Pamela Galvan, mentioned: “She (Bukky, — editor’s) was very professional, always on top of it; she followed up and was just like on her A game all the time.”
- A single partner for the whole problem. ATS Marketing needed more than outbound lead gen — they wanted to rebuild brand and website to go with it. As Ashley Blaschka, Director of Growth and Innovation, put it, Belkins was the only partner whose package addressed both needs at once, rather than making them stitch together two vendors.
Belkins’ solution: Building a growth system
Belkins ran two parallel workstreams for ATS: a full brand and website rebuild, and omnichannel outbound campaigns via email, LinkedIn, and calling.
1. Defining the right growth strategy
The engagement started with extensive discovery sessions to understand ATS Marketing’s business, vision, customers, and long-term objectives.
Belkins ran the standard ICP mapping process, but the client’s targeting criteria evolved substantially as the engagement progressed, which became a core part of the story:
- ATS Marketing initially wanted to prioritize women- and minority-owned brands (tied to their emerging minority-owned certification) across a broad set of product categories.
- During the first ICP review, ATS narrowed the category list, excluding categories like high-end skincare (not their retail channel) and a few categories with existing client exclusivity conflicts.
- Weeks later, ATS Marketing asked Belkins to broaden back out, dropping the women/minority-owned restriction to test open targeting and let response data drive focus, rather than pre-filtering on assumptions.
As a result of that process, the teams:
- redefined the ICP
- mapped buying committees and decision-makers
- identified high-potential industries
- created customer psychology profiles
- built messaging tailored to each stakeholder
The ICP that came out of this work centered on North American consumer product manufacturers with 20+ employees: established brands already selling through retail or direct-to-consumer (D2C) channels and ready to scale into national retail. Priority categories included furniture and home décor, pet products, and wellness hardgoods. On the buyer side, outreach targeted founders and CEOs, VPs of Sales or Business Development, heads of retail channel partnerships, and directors of e-commerce or operations.
Rather than treating ICP development as a one-time exercise, Belkins designed it as a living framework that evolved alongside campaign data. As new insights emerged, targeting and messaging were continuously refined.
First iteration of defining high-potential industries
Buying committees mapping
2. Creating the commercial foundation for outreach
Because ATS Marketing’s existing site actively undercut their credibility, brand and web work became gating priorities before general outbound could launch. We took the following steps to make the whole process smooth:
- Scheduled discovery calls to define positioning, voice, and visual direction, including references.
- Delivered 3 logo concepts for the client to choose from, which were followed by a few minor revisions.
- Built a full brand book (colors, typography, visual system) after approving the logo concept.
- Mapped site structure in a shared working doc before any visual design began.
- Interviewed stakeholders to source content and positioning language.
- Prepared full site copy, based on all the inputs gathered.
- Designed and built the website on Webflow and prepared training for the client on how to use it and update/add information on their own.
- Set up analytics and lead-capture forms, as well as integrated Calendly-based booking links with the client’s calendar.
Brand identity was complete about a month after the first discovery call, and the new website went live within three months. The timeline looked as follows:
These initiatives helped ATS clearly communicate who they serve, how they create value, and what differentiates them in the market.
3. Launching an omnichannel outbound strategy
Once the groundwork was complete, our team created and launched a coordinated cold outreach strategy that combined personalized email and LinkedIn campaigns with cold calling.
To test the audience and get quick results, we decided to start with event-based campaigns tied to trade shows. We were deliberately avoiding the common trap of exhibiting-industry mismatch, where a vendor ends up marketing to an audience of exhibitors rather than the buyers they actually want. Together with ATS Marketing’s team, we picked 9 events that their potential clients were attending:
- Las Vegas Furniture Market
- National Restaurant Show
- High Point Market
- NHS Concept to Commerce
- CES 2026
- Kitchen and Bath Industry Show
- Inspired Home Show
- Global Pet Expo
The selected trade shows lined up well with the categories ATS Marketing sells into, which is a meaningful reason the campaigns performed from month one.
We developed highly personalized email and LinkedIn messages for each event, covering all the stages:
- Pre-event outreach with a brief intro to our client’s services and offerings and a suggestion to meet at the trade show
- During-the-event reminders about the meeting
- Post-event follow-ups, aligned with what was discussed at the event or a suggestion to book a quick call if the in-person meeting hasn’t happened
The outreach flow looked as follows:
Belkins also tested two secondary angles outside the event motion: outreach to international brands entering the US market, and geo-targeted local outreach paired with in-person meeting offers (a modest but not primary contributor).
4. Acting as a true growth partner
ATS Marketing initially looked for a partner willing to challenge their thinking and bring real strategic input to the table. That distinction shows up directly in the client’s own words:
“What impressed us most was how much strategic support Belkins provided, especially because we were starting without an established outbound process. They did not simply launch a campaign based on assumptions. They pushed us to think carefully about who our ideal clients were, helped us define the target audience on multiple levels, and continued refining the strategy throughout the engagement. They’ve also taken the time to understand our language, our process, and what we wanted to achieve. That made the work feel like a true collaboration rather than an outsourced service.”
Where this showed up in practice:
- Belkins’ Account Director suggested and pushed testing categories and audiences that ATS Marketing hadn’t considered. She didn’t accept the initial brief at face value and suggested ongoing improvements.
- The ICP was constantly reviewed, narrowed, broadened, and re-tested as new information came in, with Belkins driving that iteration rather than waiting to be asked.
- The brand and website served as a deep dive into ATS Marketing’s language and positioning, so the outbound messaging and the client’s own voice stayed aligned. Overall, it helped ensure all communications didn’t sound outsourced.
Ashley Blaschka, Director of Growth and Innovation at ATS Marketing, echoed the same theme when reflecting on the partnership, saying that the team’s willingness to challenge ATS’s assumptions “led to really great conversations that we would have never had before” — the kind of strategic pushback the company didn’t have the internal bandwidth to generate on their own.
Lessons learned
#1: Growth starts long before the first campaign launches
For ATS, the biggest outcome was gaining the strategic clarity and operational maturity needed to scale.
By the end of the engagement, the company had:
- a clearly defined ICP
- stronger positioning and messaging
- a professional digital presence
- repeatable outbound processes
- proven go-to-market playbooks
- a much deeper understanding of its ideal customers
As Ashley Blaschka summarized:
“You guys helped us be better in so many ways... We learned so much throughout the partnership. It really opened our eyes.”
#2: Running several activities in parallel pays off
Creating and launching event-based campaigns first, while the site was still being rebuilt, allowed the team to generate real pipeline without waiting months for the rebrand to finish and to avoid sending cold traffic to a site the client wasn’t yet proud of.
The same applies to rebranding and website redesign — we run several processes simultaneously to minimize the overall project timeline.
This sequencing matters most when the current website would undercut outreach, as it did for ATS. A company whose positioning and site already hold up can skip the brand workstream and go straight to outbound.
#3: Event selection is a targeting decision, not a logistics one
The campaigns that performed best were built around shows where ATS Marketing’s actual buyers (not just adjacent industry players) would be in the room. This is a distinction worth calling out explicitly, since it’s a common mistake in trade-show-based outbound.
#4: A long, retail-specific sales cycle means meetings and revenue arrive on very different timelines
ATS Marketing’s own clients typically need months of onboarding before they’re placement-ready with a retailer, so the first signed deal from this campaign isn’t expected to generate revenue until later in the year — a useful expectation-setting note for prospects in long-cycle B2B categories.
