How This Startup Turned Paid Media Into Their Top Lead Generation Channe

TLDR: From wasted spend to top pipeline channel in under a year

Agnayee Datta, Director of Marketing at Vicarious, was the only demand gen person at a lean cybersecurity startup. Campaigns were set and forgotten, default settings were draining budget, and there wasn't enough bandwidth to do it right. In less than a year working with us, paid media became one of Vicarious's top qualified lead channels and contributed to a closed enterprise deal.

Listen to this episode to learn how closed-won CRM data outperforms LinkedIn's native targeting, why the "prove ROI before investing in experts" mindset almost always backfires, and how a layered brand awareness plus lead gen approach is the only way to win over skeptical cybersecurity buyers.

Meet the guest: Agnayee Datta, Director of Marketing at Vicarious

Agnayee Datta leads demand generation and marketing at Vicarious, a cybersecurity company targeting technical security buyers across the US, UK, and Germany. She joined Understory as a client in March 2025 with one clear need: expert paid media execution her lean team couldn't provide in-house.

Chapters

[00:25] The paid media situation before Understory: one marketer, too many priorities

[01:46] Why social proof and flat-fee pricing sealed the deal

[03:17] First wins: how killing default settings stopped the budget bleed

[03:50] How closed-won account data replaced LinkedIn's native targeting

[05:00] What Vicarious learned running campaigns across the US, UK, and Germany

[06:13] Results: qualified leads, POC progression, and a closed enterprise deal

[07:13] Why long-cycle deals require consistent paid media, not sprints

[07:49] Brand awareness before lead gen: the only approach that works for cybersecurity buyers

[08:02] Which startups should hire a paid media partner instead of going in-house

[09:12] The $100K/month account where not a single ICP prospect saw an ad

Key insights

A single marketer running paid media alongside everything else is a setup for wasted spend.

Before working with us, Agnayee was the only demand gen person at Vicarious while simultaneously managing the broader marketing team. Paid campaigns weren't getting the monitoring or optimization they needed. "I couldn't give the paid media campaigns the kind of time and effort that it needs for it to really work," she explains. "We needed someone with the expertise to execute perfectly and then monitor the execution, not just set and forget." For Series A and B startups operating with lean teams, the issue rarely comes down to budget. It comes down to bandwidth.

Default platform settings are quietly bleeding most startup ad budgets.

One of the first things we identified at Vicarious was that audience expansion was turned on by default across several campaigns, routing spend toward irrelevant audiences and generating spam leads. "We suddenly saw a full stop to that," Agnayee shares. "There was no spam, no overspending on this random LinkedIn default audience network." LinkedIn's defaults are designed to maximize LinkedIn's revenue, not your pipeline quality. As we discuss in the episode, the biggest efficiency gains early on often come from turning things off, not adding new ones. Auditing settings before rethinking creative or messaging is almost always the faster ROI.

Social proof from companies at the same stage drives agency selection more than any pitch.

When Agnayee chose Understory, it wasn't a capabilities deck or a sales call that moved her. It was her LinkedIn feed. "It was the social proof. You all were all over my LinkedIn feed and it's always good to see other customers at our stage, other startups that are growing, talk highly of you guys," she explains. Having been burned by agencies before, peer validation from companies at a similar growth stage carried more weight than anything we could have said about ourselves. For SaaS teams evaluating partners, what other clients say openly is the most reliable signal available.

Flat-fee pricing removes the misalignment that percentage-of-spend models create.

A key factor in Vicarious's decision was pricing structure. As we discuss in the episode, we were very intentional about moving away from percentage-of-spend. "You guys don't do the percentage of spend, which I think can be exploitative as you start growing," Agnayee notes. The budgeting predictability mattered too: with a flat retainer, she could plan her annual media budget without worrying about agency costs scaling alongside spend. The alternative creates a perverse incentive: the more you spend, the more the agency earns, regardless of whether that spend is working. For growth teams managing fixed budgets, pricing model is worth scrutinizing early.

Closed-won account data outperforms LinkedIn's native targeting as an audience foundation.

Rather than relying on LinkedIn's built-in job title and industry filters, we asked for Vicarious's closed-won account lists and used them to build lookalike audiences and segmented campaigns. "Send me the list of closed-won accounts in your region and then we'll build out a lookalike audience. We'll try and maximize our chances by really segmenting the audience, not just going based off of LinkedIn's targeting," Agnayee explains. Starting with accounts that already converted is the most direct way to reverse-engineer your ideal buyer profile. The lead quality difference compared to platform-default targeting is significant, especially for high-ACV SaaS with a specific ICP.

Multi-region campaigns require localized strategy, not copy-paste execution.

Vicarious runs paid campaigns in the US, UK, and Germany. Rather than duplicating US campaigns across regions, we provided market-specific recommendations for each geography. "Ifarz from your team was able to give us very nuanced recommendations on these markets and insights into these markets, which were different from the US," Agnayee shares. Cybersecurity buying behavior, messaging resonance, and competitive dynamics differ across markets. A campaign that works in the US will often underperform in Germany, not because of budget or creative quality, but because the buyer's context is different. For SaaS companies expanding internationally, each market needs its own campaign ecosystem.

Paid media can become a top qualified lead channel for cybersecurity companies, but it takes consistent investment.

Since starting with us in March 2025, paid media has become one of Vicarious's top channels for qualified lead generation and deal progression. "It's become one of our top channels for creating qualified leads," Agnayee shares. "It's also one of the stronger channels in terms of deal progression where we see leads go into POCs." Vicarious recently closed a significant enterprise deal directly attributed to paid ads. As we discuss in the episode, clients with large ACVs and long deal cycles benefit most from consistency: every deal that closes at the enterprise level compounds the value of campaigns that stayed on over months, not weeks.

Brand awareness before lead gen is the only way to reach skeptical, research-heavy buyers.

Agnayee called out the layered campaign structure we built: brand awareness running alongside lead generation. "Kudos to Ifarz who helped us build the brand first. So we have campaigns where you're doing brand awareness and then building lead gen on top of it," she notes. "Cybersecurity buyers are not just going to come in right away." In a market where buyers distrust vendor claims and evaluate multiple solutions carefully, familiarity and credibility have to come before any form fill or demo request. The same logic applies broadly to any SaaS selling to technical or risk-averse buyers: build recognition first, then capture the demand you've created.

Trying to prove paid media ROI without expert execution guarantees the wrong conclusion.

Agnayee's advice to other startups was direct: don't run paid media in-house to test whether it works before bringing in help. "Companies at our stage will sometimes say, we're going to experiment with paid media with a smaller budget and prove ROI. And then they try to do it themselves and they don't do it the right way. And so the results are not going to be what you want it to be," she explains. As we discuss in the episode, we recently audited an account spending $100,000 per month where not a single person in their ICP was seeing any ads. Six months of spend, one incorrect toggle. A bad test doesn't tell you whether paid media works for your business. It tells you whether your setup was correct.

Want more on paid media strategy for high-ACV SaaS? Listen to the full episode on YouTube and subscribe to Understory's podcast for more on building pipelines with lean teams.

Ready to turn paid media into a real qualified lead channel?Book a call with Understory to see how coordinated paid media execution eliminates the wasted spend and guesswork.