Building B2B Marketing from Scratch at Rosetta Stone
The Challenge
Rosetta Stone was a household name in consumer language learning, but its institutional business, selling EdTech to schools and B2B solutions to companies and government, was just getting started. Schools, companies, government agencies, nonprofits, libraries, and homeschool families were all buying, mostly consumer product at a volume discount. Growth came from adding salespeople to knock on doors. Seven vertical sales leaders shared one part-time events coordinator, and that was the extent of B2B marketing.
The consumer brand was a double-edged sword. It brought a flood of inbound interest, with no system to qualify it, nurture it, or measure what worked. It also made serious buyers skeptical. Educators had seen the airline magazine ads and the infomercials, and many rolled their eyes at the idea of Rosetta Stone as a real education product. The company was also preparing to go public, which meant the institutional business needed to scale fast and prove it with data.
The Solution
As the first B2B marketing hire, I started by sitting down with each vertical sales leader to understand what they needed, then built a marketing plan for each market.
Fix the product first. Education buyers needed more than discounted consumer software. Working with the product team, I helped create a true education offering, with a scope and sequence, lesson plans and a teacher's guide, and tiered licensing. Early data showed schools were mostly buying English, so we went after the ESL and ELL market in earnest. Over time, the business moved from boxed discs to SaaS subscription licenses for education and corporate customers.
Cut what was not working. Analysis showed the automatic sample CD mailer sent to every new lead actually slowed the buying cycle. We killed it and connected interested buyers directly with sales. We trimmed an events calendar that looked busy but did not convert, and closed a library channel that was cannibalizing consumer sales.
Reinvest in what works. The money we freed up funded multi-touch campaigns: targeted direct mail, trade publication ads, social media, pre-event prospecting, customer events, case studies, long-form content, influencer reviews, and partnerships with associations like NABE, CABE, and ALAS.
Build the engine. I built the business case for marketing automation, and we implemented Eloqua alongside Salesforce. For the first time, we could see the full funnel, from engaged to marketing qualified to sales qualified, find where leads were falling through, and recycle them back to marketing. I hired a demand generation team and a data analyst to run that engine, while vertical marketing managers supplied the fuel.
Scale the team. The team grew from one to 32 people across marketing, sales operations, and customer success, including a matrixed group of international marketing leads. When the institutional VP left, I took on the division's full P&L, including sales spend.
The Results
Institutional revenue grew from $3.45 million to $78 million, with 750% ACV growth from new customers and expansion. Rosetta Stone went public on the NYSE in 2009 with a B2B business that had real marketing infrastructure, full-funnel visibility, and a team built to keep scaling.
The approach was simple: try new things, scale what works, and revisit what did not, because what fails today might work in 18 months.