Directive wants fewer
dead-end leads.

The restaurant had disappeared. Garrett Mehrguth had spent a month helping a shawarma shop with its marketing: a Yelp presence, a Facebook page, flyers. When he went to collect his payment, the owner told him to return tomorrow. Tomorrow, the place was boarded up. In Mehrguth’s account, the first Directive client left him with work completed and no check.

The episode makes a fitting introduction to an agency preoccupied with the distance between activity and money. A business can have a Facebook page and still close. A campaign can generate contacts who never become customers. Directive has made that uncomfortable gap its commercial territory.

A better question than “how many?”

Mehrguth and co-founder Tanner Shaffer built their early expertise around local businesses and search marketing. Their company story places the beginnings in 2013; company profiles commonly list 2014 as the founding year. The early work included a hookah business and a plumber. Today, the customer roster includes names such as Calendly, Gong, and ZoomInfo.

The change in clientele matters. Selling business software often means reaching a small population of plausible buyers, then waiting through a lengthy decision. A person searching for a category may have immediate interest but work at the wrong company. Someone at the right company may have no immediate interest at all.

Mehrguth described that tension in a 2021 Nathan Latka interview: Google offers intent, while LinkedIn offers company and professional attributes. Neither automatically supplies a buyer. His answer, called Customer Generation, asks marketers to follow the prospect far enough to learn whether sales can use the introduction.

“Transparency is our default”A published Directive value

That has consequences for the scorecard. Downloads and marketing-qualified leads can tell a team that an offer attracted attention. They cannot, by themselves, show that the right company is considering a purchase. Directive argues for connecting those early signals to sales-qualified outcomes, pipeline, and ultimately revenue.

For a marketing leader, that changes the agency meeting. The practical question becomes which audiences produced conversations worth having, and which offers merely produced names. The team can then argue about the same commercial result. This is the appeal of the approach: fewer opportunities for advertising and sales to congratulate themselves separately.

When the CRM joined the campaign

Consider ServiceChannel, a facilities-management software company. During the pandemic, retail disruption weakened engagement and spending. Its audience was a specific set of enterprise brands. According to Directive’s published case, ServiceChannel also doubted whether paid search could deliver.

Directive connected offline conversion tracking to CRM feedback and built a verified-sign-up goal. It then combined nonbranded search with social advertising, directory listings, programmatic media, and connected television. StackAdapt supported display and native campaigns. The point was to keep reaching likely buyers across their research journey.

The reported results included 56% quarter-over-quarter pipeline growth and a 24% fall in acquisition cost. Search generated more than $1 million in pipeline in the first quarter of 2021, exceeding the previous two years combined. Those are agency-reported outcomes. They illustrate the method; they do not establish what every future client should expect.

The expensive part of learning

Directive also buys its own medicine. In an Agorapulse interview, Mehrguth said the agency spent roughly $3 million on LinkedIn advertising during 2022 and part of 2023, alongside about $18 million in annual bookings. The periods and measures differ. That is no tidy profit calculation: bookings, cash collected, media expense, and delivery costs belong in separate columns.

The targeting discipline is more portable than the budget. Mehrguth described advertising against a manually verified list of roughly 14,000 SaaS companies. In another public account, he said smaller companies were consuming too much spend. He tightened the startup segment and shifted money toward larger businesses. Over eleven days, he reported form fills down 10% and strategy calls held up 127%.

That short account is a founder’s observation, with several changes happening together. Still, it makes an excellent reporting question. Would your team recognize an improvement if the familiar top-line number went down?

A wider net, a tighter scorecard

The current offer is broader than the SEO-and-PPC agency of the early years. Performance covers media, content, creative, and revenue operations. Commerce adds marketplace advertising, shopping, and product feeds. Communications brings PR, social, and influencer work into the mix. Technology, industrial, and services businesses now appear in its positioning.

Its DiscoverabilityOS methodology reflects a buyer who researches through reviews, communities, search results, and AI answers. Stratos, its proprietary AI platform, brings together marketing and CRM data and assists strategists with research, drafting, and reporting. The product supports the agency’s work; the business still sells expertise and execution.

The distinction from a narrow channel specialist is the breadth of the assignment. A company can buy help with an advertisement, a landing page, or the systems that reveal what happened next. Keeping those jobs connected is the proposition. For a buyer, the test is whether that coordination solves a real bottleneck worth paying an outside team to manage.

The commercial arrangement is scoped service work. Clutch lists a $5,000-plus minimum project size, which should not be mistaken for a complete monthly marketing budget. The revealing historical pricing moment came in a Mixergy interview: Mehrguth recalled learning that another operator charged $2,000 a month and realizing Directive could raise its rates.

In September 2026, Directive announced an expanded Communications division and reported $30 million in annual revenue. Paid social moved over from sister brand Abe. The expansion carries a strategic wager: credibility built before someone searches can affect the sale that follows.

Buyers comparing Directive with other B2B agencies or an internal team should examine the handoffs. This approach needs reliable customer data, sales feedback, and enough margin to fund sustained acquisition. It becomes harder when the product cannot retain customers or the sales team cannot convert interest. Better tracking can expose those problems. Fixing them requires decisions beyond an advertising account.

The part a reader can copy tomorrow is modest: take the last batch of leads, ask sales which ones deserved a conversation, and trace those companies back to the campaigns. Then change the budget. It is less entertaining than a dashboard full of rising arrows. It is considerably closer to getting paid.