BELLIN owned German-speaking corporate treasury for over a decade. Moving into the US meant carrying a value proposition across a language, and it didn’t survive the trip. This is what we did about it, how long it took, and which parts weren’t mine.
The ask was a website
The referral came through a videographer to the head of IT in BELLIN’s Vancouver office. What they wanted was a website for the North American market.
I told them the website was the last thing we should build. It wasn’t a hunch. I published The 4 Pillars of a B2B Marketing Campaign on MarketingProfs in 2010 — an approach my agency partner and I came up with two years prior. Insight, strategy, creative, metrics, in that order. BELLIN walked in at pillar three, like almost everyone does. What they needed first was market, customer, and competitor research, and my partner and I said so before taking the work.
Being German helped me hear the specific problem. “Treasury das glücklich macht” wasn’t going to carry into English, and I knew that in the first conversation. But hearing it is not the same as proving it. The research is what let us tell Martin Bellin, CEO, what treasurers actually wanted instead of what we suspected. What they wanted was to be taken seriously. A seat at the table where the decisions got made. Martin had been saying a version of that in German for years. Nobody had built the English-market story on it.
We started in October 2013. Treasury That Moves You launched in late 2014, and the website they’d originally asked for went live in early 2015, about fifteen months after they hired us. They got the website. They got it last.
What we did
After Treasury That Moves You launched, then everywhere the brand could reach was updated: website, sales tools, collateral, events, brochures, swag, apparel, video, and the BELLIN TV YouTube channel Martin hosted himself. The German marketing team was coached to hold the same personality and tone in both languages rather than translating literally in either direction.
The part that usually gets left out
Not everyone at the boardroom table bought in. A few were indifferent. One opposed it and said so at every opportunity. It ended in a meeting in Ettenheim where Martin shut the argument down, and that was the last of it.
That room is the whole engagement. A positioning decision that survives a determined internal opponent is a leadership decision, not a marketing one. Every version of this work I’ve watched fail since has failed at that meeting, with a CEO who let the argument stay open.
Signals moved first. Revenue took eighteen months.
Inbound conversations, demo requests, booth traffic at 1TC, US pipeline building. Sales felt it earliest. Reps stopped burning the first five minutes of every call explaining who BELLIN was. The hill was still there. It just got easier to climb.
I don't have 2015 pipeline figures and won't reconstruct them from memory. Directionally: leading indicators inside the first year, revenue about eighteen months out, full market engagement later than that.
Then 2016 to 2018. Revenue from roughly €9M to €35M, better than four times in four years, with customer acquisition in 2018 running 60% above 2017. Two new offices, Cambridge and London.
It didn’t stay in marketing
Customer Success moved from fielding trust objections and skeptical buyers to onboarding people properly. Product held its standards under less pressure from Sales to accommodate customers who’d bought on a bet.
None of that was in the brief, and none of it showed up on a dashboard. Four functions changed how they spent their day because of one positioning decision, and nobody was measuring the connection.
Who did what
Research and positioning were mine. Martin owned it, led it, and defended it — industry events, BELLIN TV, the trade show floor. BELLIN’s internal marketing team executed it for six years without letting it drift, which is the part almost nobody manages and the reason it compounded.
I won’t claim a positioning project quadrupled a software company’s revenue. There was a good product and a real market underneath it. What the positioning did was make a German company legible to American buyers, and then a CEO and a marketing team spent six years making that count.
Why a 2013 engagement is on a 2026 site
Because it’s the clearest evidence I have for the thing that’s hardest to defend in a quarterly meeting. Eighteen months between the signals and the money, then four years of compounding. Judge that on two quarters of closed business and you kill it while the pipeline is still filling. If Martin did that, Coupa buys someone else. That lesson has nothing to do with the date.
Lieber Herr Klor — einen Beitrag zur Erfolgsgeschichte haben Sie ja ebenfalls gehabt, denn “Treasury that Moves You” ist immer noch in aller Munde ;-)
Dear Mr Klor — you had a part in the success story too, since “Treasury that Moves You” is still on everyone’s lips ;-)
Martin Bellin, Former CEO, BELLIN Treasury
