From cost centre to revenue driver and the role of workflow integration

Daniel Evans

Blogs

When Jennifer Paterson joined Danos Group seven years ago, marketing was a two-days-a-week support function. Today she’s running it full-time as a strategic, revenue-contributing part of the business.

But the most interesting part of the journey isn’t how marketing earned that seat. It’s what comes next for Jennifer. And that isn’t about achieving growth through more marketing activity. It’s about sales and marketing workflow integration.

From support function to revenue contributor

When Jennifer joined Danos Group, marketing was tactical implementation. The keeping the lights on stuff, to put it in her words.

That’s where most recruitment businesses start when they make their first marketing hire. It makes sense to start there. But if marketing stays in the tactical-and-reactive lane, it won’t move the commercial needle, and it won’t change the way consultants or leadership perceive marketing’s role.

What changed at Danos Group wasn’t a big strategic pitch. Two things did it.

The first was COVID. Danos Group is a headhunting-led business where relationships are normally built face-to-face. When that route closed off overnight, marketing had to fill the gap with webinars, virtual events, and thought leadership content. For the first time, consultants started seeing marketing as a way to get in front of audiences they couldn’t easily reach themselves. That was the start of the perception shift.

The second was Jennifer’s deliberate, building-block approach to proving impact. One campaign at a time. One result at a time. Building trust with leadership and consultants by showing, not telling. In many businesses, leadership don’t know what to ask for and consultants don’t know what marketing can do for them. That’s why you need to build the case from the ground up.

Key for Jennifer was how marketing reported its impact. Out went “we delivered 124 campaigns this year.” In came “marketing contributed to X amount of revenue through Y channels.”

Marketing was now talking sales’ language.

The real opportunity for marketers is workflow integration

Danos Group now has a proven marketing methodology. The consistent campaigns generates hiring signals, candidate signals, engagement scores, and lead scores, all built on a weighted scoring model running in Force24.

What’s important to recognise here is that what Jennifer has built over the last 7 years is what success looks like for many recruitment businesses. Consistent outputs. Reliable signal generation. Qualified leads passed across to sales consistently. If your business isn’t there yet, getting there is the goal.

The marketing challenge is different in every business. Sometimes it’s awareness. For others it’s lead generation. For Jennifer, there isn’t an opportunity-generation problem anymore. The challenge (and the opportunity) is workflow integration.

Consultants live in their CRM and ATS, and marketing often operates outside of that. The signals and leads get passed across in spreadsheets. But when that happens outside the consultant’s workflow, the likelihood of a successful follow up drops sharply.

You can have the cleanest lead scoring model in the world, but if the consultant has to log into a different system to see it, it won’t happen. That’s why Jennifer’s vision for the next stage of marketing growth at Danos Group is to have marketing-generated signals appearing inside the consultant’s workflow as tasks.

Generating leads is success, yes. But if marketing can’t see what happens to the leads, it can’t refine the model or focus on filling the bucket with less but higher quality.

The tech requirements

Plenty of recruitment businesses stay at the manual lead-passing stage indefinitely, and that’s okay. Changing processes is disruptive. And what Jennifer has at Danos Group today with consistent signals, qualified leads, a manual handoff that works is valuable on its own. It doesn’t have to be a stepping stone to something else.

What’s changed in the last few years is that integration is more accessible. The platforms have matured, the integrations between marketing and recruitment tech have got better, and the budget required to get something working has dropped. If you do want to take this on, it’s easier than it’s been at any point in the last decade.

And if you do take it on, here’s what you need to consider:

Your CRM and ATS. What you can integrate into is the first determining factor. Some recruitment CRMs are built to receive marketing signals natively. Most aren’t.
Your marketing stack and how it talks to your CRM. If your marketing automation is sitting in isolation today, integration will mean middleware, custom builds, or platform changes.
How your sales team operates. Some consultants live in the CRM. Others live in their inbox. Others live in LinkedIn. The integration must fit how they work in reality.
Who owns the integration. Marketing? Sales ops? RevOps? An external partner? Without clear ownership, integration projects stall.
Your budget and appetite for change. New platforms, custom builds, and process redesigns all cost time and money. So does leaving a broken handoff in place.

Two principles from Jennifer worth borrowing:

Keep the workflows familiar for sales. Don’t ask consultants to learn a new way of working and bring the enriched marketing data to wherever they already are.
When new tools at Danos Group have diverged from the sales process, adoption has been slow. When tools have sat inside what consultants were already doing, adoption has been fast. That pattern probably holds in your business too.

How to approach this in your business

If your business is earlier in the journey, focus on getting marketing producing reliable leads and signals, and on building leadership trust through evidence.

If marketing is already generating leads but they’re not being consistently followed up, your next bottleneck isn’t more activity. It’s the bridge between marketing and the consultant’s day-to-day. Sort that out before you scale activity further, or you’re pouring more into a leaky bucket.

If workflow integration is the right next move for your function, here’s where I’d start.

Audit your current handoff. Where are leads dying? Sit with two or three consultants and walk through the last 10 leads they were sent. What happened to each one? Where did the process break down? That’s your map.
Pick one signal first (the highest-value one). “Actively hiring” is usually the obvious candidate. Don’t try to integrate everything at once. Pick the one signal that has the clearest commercial value, design the workflow around that one thing, and prove it before scaling.
Decide who owns the integration internally. Marketing alone can’t make this work because it depends on sales adoption. Sales alone can’t make it work because they don’t see the marketing data. The integration project needs a clear owner (ideally a small cross-functional team) or it stalls.
Build accountability into the existing workflow first. Before you invest in tooling, see if you can get visibility on what’s happening to the signals you’re already passing across. Even a basic tracking system that shows “passed across, actioned, outcome” is more than most recruitment businesses have today.
Then look at tooling. Now you know what you really need, you can evaluate platforms against your specific workflow rather than chasing whatever’s being marketed as the latest all-in-one solution.

The goal isn’t to get to Jennifer’s vision in a month. It’s to start moving in the right direction without burning budget on tech that doesn’t fit your business.