Paid On Pipeline
Ben Smith is Marketing Director at Reachdesk, the integrated gifting, direct mail and swag platform for B2B marketing and sales teams. Six promotions in six years at the same company, from BDR to Marketing Director. Before marketing, five years touring as a professional ice skater with Disney on Ice.
“Ice skating teaches you one thing. Fall down. Get up. Keep going.”
Ben Smith is Marketing Director at Reachdesk, leading a global team of fifteen across content, demand generation, performance marketing, partnerships and business development. An unusual route in: five years as a professional ice skater with Disney on Ice, a spell in PR working on corporate gifting, then six consecutive promotions at Reachdesk from BDR to the head of the marketing function.
Smith joined Reachdesk in July 2019 as a Business Development Representative. At the time the company had no platform and no customers. He rose through Team Lead BD, Manager BD, Senior Manager BD, and Director of Global Business Development before taking over the marketing function as Director in early 2024. By his own telling, the discipline that transferred most cleanly from ice skating into early-stage startup life was the comfort of failing in public and continuing anyway.
Reachdesk is an integrated gifting, direct mail and swag platform for B2B marketing and sales teams, with warehouses across Australia, Europe, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States, serving 180 countries. Roughly 80 percent of its customers are in the US and the headquarters has migrated from London to New York. Smith’s team operates across that geography from a London base.
Outside Reachdesk, Smith co-founded Sales Development Leaders in 2024, spent five years as community host for SDRs of London, and has been an associate of Revenue Collective since 2021. His case on LinkedIn that marketing leaders should be compensated like sales leaders, seventy percent on pipeline and thirty percent on revenue, continues to divide the comment section and to work operationally inside Reachdesk.
“Pipeline at 70 percent. Revenue at 30 percent. Compensated like sales.”
“70 percent of my commission is pipeline. 30 percent is revenue. When both functions are paid on the same things, everyone is in it for the same reasons.”
Smith treats marketing as a revenue function and has structured his own compensation to prove it. Most of his commission package is measured in pipeline generated; the remainder in closed revenue. Shared numbers with sales produce shared calendars, shared targets and shared accountability when a quarter closes short. He makes the case publicly on LinkedIn and watches the comment sections split, but the operating model at Reachdesk has survived both growth-at-all-costs and efficiency phases.
“A hundred-pound spa day for booking a meeting before the event. Twenty meetings in the diary before we arrived.”
Smith’s event playbook runs in three acts. Pre-event, gift vouchers go to attendees who book a meeting in advance. During the event, attendees pick swag from an e-commerce store that ships to their home rather than sitting in a tote bag for three days. Post-event, personalised follow-up lands alongside the swag on the doormat. The underlying thesis is that every competing B2B brand looks the same from a distance, and the differentiator is unreasonable hospitality, something the industry hasn’t yet thought to do.
“Six to eight people in the buying committee. Each with different pain points, different ways into the product.”
Reachdesk’s typical deal involves a champion, end users from sales, BDR and customer success, a budget holder at VP or C-level in marketing, plus finance and procurement. Smith’s content team ungates everything because trust compounds faster through giving than through gating. Each of the six to eight buyers gets content engineered for their specific pain point, which produces a lower-volume, higher-quality pipeline that closes at a meaningfully better rate.
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