Upside replaced guesswork with self-serve, data-driven confidence.

• AI Adoption and Custom Mini-Apps via MCP: Analytics dashboards built in minutes instead of weeks.
• Content Strategy Transformed: 11,500+ campaigns sortable by downstream engagement in seconds.
• Event Investment Validated: Doubling down on events, backed by pipeline-influenced data.
• Digital Spend Optimized: Paid channels evaluated on actual pipeline, not intuition.
• Self-Serve Reporting: 18 people across GTM look up any campaign in seconds, no custom reports.
• Salesforce Migration De-risked: New instance stood up in days, caught gaps the migration missed.

Why “Pinball Marketing” Demands Better Data

Comply CMO Wendy Werve wants to kill the funnel. Her philosophy is “pinball marketing” — a signal-driven, AI-first model where marketers are in charge of the flippers, not the ball.

“A sales rep will say, ‘the deal came in this way.’ We go in and say, ‘actually, they pinballed their way through.’ No two journeys are exactly the same. It’s like a snowflake.”Wendy Werve · CMO, Comply

Pinball marketing demands real-time visibility into every touchpoint. That mandate landed on Senior Marketing Operations Manager Carl Gunlefinger.

No Standardized Way to Measure What Was Working

When Carl joined in October 2024, he walked into two overlapping problems. Marketing had no standardized way to measure campaign performance. And Comply was mid-Salesforce re-implementation — a migration that left 60%+ of 30,000+ historical opportunities without contact roles.

“There wasn’t any standardization to say, ‘I had a piece of content and here’s how it performed downstream.’”Carl Gunlefinger

Carl needed a system that could work with imperfect data and still tell the CMO which campaigns to fund. Comply had evaluated other vendors. Upside was the one that didn’t flinch.

Trusted Data Model That Powers Insights and AI Workflows

Within days, Upside stood up Comply’s new Salesforce instance, mapped the migrated historical data, and caught attribution gaps the migration had missed.

“You guys were the easiest vendor to work with and the quickest to debug problems. Upside ended up being a critical tool in figuring out where things had gone not quite as intended during the migration.”Carl Gunlefinger

Aha Moment #1: Instantly Seeing What Content Matters

Once Upside was live, the first thing that clicked was speed. Across 11,500+ campaigns, what used to require custom Salesforce reports became a 30-second task.

“All I had to do was go into a view, select a filter, sort by engagements, and I can see at the top: this is what people care about right now.”Carl Gunlefinger

For a team creating content across six sales segments, that instant read rewrote how the content calendar gets built.

Aha Moment #2: Seeing the Full Multi-Touch Picture

Speed was just the entry point. Once the team started digging into accounts and opportunities, the real story showed up: Comply’s deals don’t close from one touchpoint. In Upside’s account explorer, the scale became obvious — and the whole team got hooked.

“We are like kids in a candy shop digging into accounts and opportunities.”Wendy Werve · CMO, Comply

For Carl, the implication was bigger than curiosity:

“There are some opportunities that just have hundreds and hundreds of touchpoints. Being able to quickly see the map of that has been huge.”Carl Gunlefinger

Aha Moment #3: Data You Can Actually Trust

Scale is only useful if you can trust what you’re seeing. Carl used to verify everything, cross-checking IDs and timestamps. Not anymore.

“I’m not doing that following-the-trail thing anymore. I just know you guys have this all built right.”Carl Gunlefinger

That trust freed the team to chase surprising patterns — like content downloads, which the org had long undervalued but, in Upside, showed a remarkably high conversion rate to pipeline.

“The organization hadn’t really considered content downloads as solid for moving things into an opportunity stage. In Upside, they actually have a very high conversion rate.”Wendy Werve · CMO, Comply

Aha Moment #4: Complex AI-Powered Analysis via the MCP

If trusted data was the foundation, the MCP was the unlock.

“Honestly, the first time I found a huge use case for AI for me. A tool that has the data organized, and I can query it thinking the way I think.”Carl Gunlefinger

In a recent GTM Engineers webinar, Carl showcased three mini-apps built in minutes via the MCP:

• Paid Search Impact Dashboard — 6 tabs, keyword-level pipeline attribution, built in 30 minutes.
• Webinar Performance — 126 webinars, 25,623 registrations, 1,723 opps influenced, 813 won, with Salesforce attendance statuses auto-mapped.
• Single-Deal Replication Playbook — 390+ touchpoints on one deal stitched into a repeatable playbook.

“Literally from idea to preview publication, probably 30 minutes.”Carl Gunlefinger

Next up: a 36-dimension pipeline roll-forward report for Comply’s CFO. The appetite across the company is outpacing one person.

From One User to 18: The Self-Serve Moment

What started as Carl’s tool now serves 18 people across Sales Ops, Product Marketing, Digital Marketing, and Leadership — all self-serve, zero custom reports. Adoption was accelerated by a team-wide commitment to pipeline as the only scoreboard that mattered.

“Our team is 100% KPI’d on pipeline. MQLs are a participation trophy. It didn’t make it into pipeline? It didn’t matter.”Wendy Werve · CMO, Comply

That focus pairs with Wendy’s AI-first operating philosophy — one she was pushing long before most peers:

“AI today can do the ‘ING’ of marketing. Get in and be the chief market officer — understand the signals, be first to respond.”Wendy Werve · CMO, Comply

Decisions Driven by Data

The real impact isn’t dashboards — it’s decisions. Events, content, and paid channels are now funded (or cut) based on actual pipeline.

“The biggest thing we’ve decided is where to invest in content and which events to attend. Upside is how we justify it.”Carl Gunlefinger

A Partnership That Keeps Expanding

Carl is already extending Upside’s MCP into tools for sales and finance — AI-generated sales toolkits, win-back kits, and the CFO pipeline report. Wendy sees that expansion as vindication of an early bet:

“The smartest decisions I have ever made is partnering with folks early on. Where you’ve gone is leaps and bounds beyond what I could have even articulated.”Wendy Werve · CMO, Comply

Carl puts the recommendation more plainly:

“Would I recommend Upside? Yes. Simple gives you a lot, and simple is not easy. Plus, you guys are great partners to work with.”Carl Gunlefinger · Senior Marketing Operations Manager, Comply

• Blog: “How Three Marketing Leaders Are Becoming GTM Engineers With AI” (aigtm.engineer) — Carl’s mini-apps featured alongside ServiceTitan and Dscout.