Seven completed phone calls is a ridiculous number if you believe a lead is a person. It is a perfectly sensible number if you believe a sale is a small political system. In one Root3 Marketing campaign, the buyer was not one hospital executive but three constituencies: operating-room leadership, procurement and finance. Each needed a reason to care. Each had a different objection. The average marketing-qualified lead took seven completed calls across those three departments.
That number explains more about Root3 than the usual agency vocabulary does. The Chicago firm can make a website, run paid search, write copy, build a booth and configure a CRM. Plenty of agencies can. Root3's more specific proposition is that those things should behave like connected parts of a revenue operation. A form fill should trigger qualification. A white-paper download should tell the next caller what interested the buyer. A trade-show video should point toward a demo. Attention is not the finish line. It is the beginning of an administrative process.
A department, available by the fraction
Scott Christiansen founded Root3 in 2014 after working in healthcare marketing. The company now describes itself as a fractional marketing partner for middle-market organizations. The menu spans strategy, creative, web, digital and SEO, CRM and lead generation, communications and trade shows. Its three declared markets are mid-market B2B, healthcare companies selling to businesses and healthcare organizations speaking to patients.
“Fractional” can sound like consultancy arithmetic: a portion of an executive on Tuesdays, perhaps. Root3 uses the term more broadly. A client buys flexible access to specialists without assembling every discipline in-house. The agency can set the positioning and then make the landing page; plan a product launch and then staff the digital machinery around it. It earns revenue through custom-scoped projects and ongoing services, not a standardized product. The practical comparison is less with another ad shop than with the time, cost and coordination required to recruit an internal department.
This is where Root3 fits in a crowded market. A specialist search agency may go deeper on one channel. A large network agency can bring more global scale. A pure fractional CMO may offer senior advice with little production underneath. Root3 occupies the seam between them: a relatively small, embedded team with enough range to carry a plan from boardroom language into ads, emails, code, calls and event floors.
“Our work is corporate. We're not.”Root3's careers page
The first thing to fail was breadth
One of the company's clearest case studies begins with an ordinary failure. A B2B client's paid-search campaigns were too broad. They promoted the brand as a whole, attracted the wrong traffic and spread money across services that did not carry equal value. A newly onboarded sales team needed the marketing to favor a particular service line. More reach would have enlarged the mistake.
Root3 split the campaign by service, researched keywords around intent, shifted budget toward high-margin priorities and built dedicated landing pages. Ad copy named the expertise and the next action. The team A/B tested variations, coordinated the paid work with organic content, social and email, and tracked conversions. In the first month, leads for the preferred service rose more than 30 percent. Relevant site traffic rose 150 percent. Individual campaign costs fell 10 percent.
The useful lesson is not “do PPC.” It is to organize the account around the economics of the business. Separate services. Name the desired buyer. Give each campaign a landing page that continues the argument. Let the client decide which revenue deserves the spend. Then measure a business action, not the comforting abstraction of traffic.
Ten days before the door closed
Speed matters differently when a market window has an expiration date. When U.S. hospital price-transparency requirements were approaching, Stroudwater Associates had a timely advisory service and an audience of critical-access hospitals already consumed by the pandemic. Root3 had fewer than ten days to identify decision-makers, make a lead-focused landing page and send the campaign.
The agency worked backward from urgency: what changed, what it meant for hospital leaders and what they should do now. CRM data guided qualification calls and appointment setting. In the first 30 days, the campaign produced 12 proposals and three closed deals. A 25 percent proposal-to-deal conversion is tidy. The more important fact is that the whole mechanism existed before the opportunity became old news.
A launch is choreography
Root3's 2025 launch for Visionary Optics shows the same preference for linked actions in a more theatrical setting. The client was bringing the iContour device to the Global Specialty Lens Symposium after supply-chain problems had made its previous model unavailable. Root3 created the product identity, messaging, web pages, videos, print pieces, segmented email, digital ads and booth experience. All of it pointed toward demo requests.
More than 100 people attended the breakout session and the team delivered more than 10 demonstrations on the trade-show floor. These are modest, concrete numbers, which is their charm. For a specialized medical device, ten hands-on conversations with relevant practitioners may matter more than a large, blurry impression count.
The part worth copying
Root3's public work suggests a repeatable order of operations. Begin with the obstacle, not the channel. Map every participant in the decision. Give each piece of content a job in the progression. Connect behavioral signals to a CRM. Decide who follows up, with what context and how quickly. Review the chain at the level where money changes hands.
A five-part field note
- Choose the commercial priority before choosing the campaign.
- Replace the fictional single buyer with the real buying group.
- Build separate messages and paths for separate intentions.
- Connect marketing signals to named human follow-up.
- Count the next meaningful action: demo, proposal, booking or deal.
There are conditions attached. This model depends on access to sales priorities, clean enough data to recognize a signal and a team willing to follow through. If the CRM is decorative, if sales and marketing keep separate scoreboards, or if nobody can agree which service should grow, integration becomes a handsome diagram. Root3's own private-equity advice is blunt on this point: disconnected data can work against a company, especially when several acquired businesses compete online or call the same account.
The eccentricity has a physical artifact. Every new employee visits Reckless Records and chooses an album for the office collection. It is hard to draw a causal line from vinyl to revenue, and one should not try. But the ritual has the same structural intelligence as the client work. A new person makes a choice, contributes something visible and leaves a signal for the next conversation.
Root3's mission is to generate “positive and powerful momentum” for business and personal growth. Momentum is an overused word in marketing because it sounds like progress without requiring a destination. Here, the case studies rescue it. Seven calls. Three departments. Twelve proposals. Three deals. A hundred people in a room. Ten product demos. The numbers are not enormous, and they do not need to be. They describe movement from one consequential state to another.
That is the company's most persuasive distinction. Root3 does not merely sell attention. It sells the connective work that prevents attention from dying alone in a dashboard.