Strategic Team Restructuring: Validated true inbound vs. outbound performance, leading to a data-backed restructuring of the ADR function to optimize efficiency.

Holistic Event ROI: Moved beyond "one-touch" attribution to identify events that accelerated in-cycle opportunities, revealing hidden revenue influence and guiding budget allocation for FY26.

Operational Self-Sufficiency: Eliminated data bottlenecks by empowering program managers to access their own campaign insights, fostering a culture of self-sufficient, data-driven decision-making.

About Syndio: Syndio is the industry pioneer in decision intelligence for pay. Syndio serves total rewards leaders, CHROs, and talent management professionals at large enterprise organizations.

GTM Background: Syndio targets enterprise accounts involving complex, multi-touch sales cycles. The team needed to understand not just what sourced pipeline, but what messaging and channels were resonating with our new ICP. The team had the usual tools: Marketo, Salesforce, and a pile of reports. What they didn’t have was a trustworthy way to connect all their touchpoints into a coherent picture of how enterprise deals were really created and won.

The "One-Touch" Trap and Data Distrust

Before Upside, Syndio relied on traditional attribution models (like first-touch or last-touch) within Salesforce and Marketo. While these tools provided data, they failed to capture the complexity of an enterprise sales cycle. "We didn't have just one thing that was bringing in an enterprise account," Amy explains. "They take many different touchpoints."

The reliance on a single-touch model created significant blind spots. The team struggled to see the full impact of their efforts—specifically, what was driving account activation, converting them to demos, and nurturing them through the funnel. This lack of visibility led to internal skepticism. When reports were pulled from Salesforce, stakeholders often questioned the data, noting that certain impactful events weren't showing up, while others appeared inflated.

Furthermore, there was a disconnect in understanding the ADR (Account Development Representative) function's actual performance. There was a perception that outbound efforts were driving results, but without a unified view of the customer journey, it was difficult to distinguish actual outbound hunting from inbound demand capture.

Uncovering the Truth About Outbound

One of the most significant impacts of adopting Upside was the clarity it brought to the "Inbound vs. Outbound" debate. Syndio used Upside to analyze the touchpoints of their ADR team. The data revealed a critical insight: much of what was perceived as outbound success was actually the result of ADRs engaging with leads that had already demonstrated intent via marketing channels or events.

"It helped us validate that what we thought was true was actually true," Amy notes. "We were just not seeing the impact of the ADR function like we needed to." This insight empowered leadership to make a difficult but necessary strategic decision: restructuring the ADR function to optimize for efficiency and actual performance. This move, driven by credible data, allowed Syndio to level-set strategically for its next phase of growth.

AI-Driven Segmentation & Self-Sufficiency

As Syndio pivots to a new solution, they are leveraging Upside’s AI agent to perform complex qualitative analysis on their funnel. The team is now using Upside to view what drives the pipeline on a weekly basis using the milestone analysis. This granularity—previously impossible to track manually—is helping them refine our outreach strategy in real time.

Culturally, Upside has transformed the marketing team’s relationship with data. Previously, Amy was the bottleneck for all data requests. Now, program managers utilize Upside’s dashboards independently to monitor program success.

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What changed for Syndio

Across these projects, the real shift wasn’t just prettier charts. It was how Syndio’s teams made decisions.

1. Budget conversations became grounded instead of political.

When Q4 and FY27 planning rolled around, Amy’s team wasn’t arguing over whose spreadsheet was “more right.” They were walking through Upside dashboards and analyses that tied budget lines directly to inbound vs. outbound performance, CAC by segment, and funnel outcomes.

That made it far easier to justify big bets—like where to keep investing in events and webinars—and to cut experiments that weren’t paying off, even if they were beloved internally.

2. Marketing, Sales, and SDRs had a shared view of inbound/outbound.

The inbound vs. outbound analysis reframed the conversation from “who sourced what” to “how do we work together to activate high-quality opportunities?” For example, the data showed that AEs were leaning on marketing-assisted outbound far more effectively than SDRs, especially in EMEA—fuel for a concrete discussion about training and process, not finger-pointing. 

3. Optimizing Event Spend with Multi-Touch Insight

Moving into budget planning for the next fiscal year, Syndio needed to decide where to place its "big bets." Using Upside’s campaign report cards, the team moved beyond simple "sourced" metrics to look at "in-cycle" influence.

They discovered that certain events, which Salesforce attribution ignored because they didn't source the deal, were critical in accelerating existing opportunities. "That brought us a different list of events," Amy says. By seeing how events influenced revenue and pipeline velocity, Syndio was able to confidently cut underperforming programs (such as specific roundtables in the EU) and double down on the events that actually moved the needle.

4. The team became more self-sufficient with data.

Once the core dashboards were live, Amy noticed a behavioral shift: marketers and RevOps leaders were logging into Upside on their own, using the campaign and channel views to evaluate performance and plan their programs—without waiting for a special analysis deck. That freed Amy from being the bottleneck and nudged the whole org toward more data-driven decisions.

"The biggest shift I saw is that once we launched that... they were way more self-sufficient with data," Amy concludes. "It saved time on my end, and they became more data-driven in their decision-making."

5. Upside became a strategic partner, not just a tool.

When asked to summarize the value of Upside, Amy didn’t talk about a specific metric. She talked about partnership:

“The value we find is that we have a strong partner to help us make data-driven decisions. We trust what you’re doing, and you’re doing it in innovative ways we just haven’t seen other startups do yet.” 

That trust matters, especially as Syndio continues to evolve its AI-native product and go-to-market motion. With a shared data foundation, the team can ask harder questions—like how “compliance-mindset” leads behave versus those responding to the new Syndi-led messaging—and expect to get meaningful, timely answers.