$1.7M in Pipeline Generated From a Game! [Breakdown]

Intro 

Hello and welcome to the Mark Sourced newsletter, where we break down successful B2B marketing programs that you can leverage to hit your growth goals.

Today, we’re looking at how Mutiny generated $1,700,000 in pipeline through gamification, a program that’s detailed on Navattic’s Revenue on the Rocks podcast.

Let’s unpack this campaign!

Summary

Mutiny is a no-code AI platform that enables companies to personalize their marketing assets to target accounts. 

To educate marketers about AI, as well as drive awareness of their product features, the team created the “Surv-ai-vor” campaign.

At a high level, the campaign was a contest based upon the Survivor TV show that enabled customers to earn points by attending various educational workshops as a part of the campaign. Each of the workshops was hosted by a customer or partner that delivered real value and marketing expertise in their sessions.

Each session highlighted a use case around Mutiny, and eventually culminated in an in person competition in San Francisco or New York.

Ultimately, the campaign generated over 4,000+ participants, $1,700,000 in pipeline generated, and 40x ROI.

Speaking personally, I absolutely love this campaign. It’s the type of thing that marketers are supposed to do – develop fun and creative ways to engage our audience that serves them and generates revenue for our company.

The Results

4,000+ participants
$1,700,000 in pipeline generated
40x ROI

Why This Worked

There are a variety of reasons why this fun and creative campaign was successful, but I’ll highlight a couple of the major ones below:

1. The Structure of the Game

Mutiny structured their Surv-ai-vor game in a way that drove the type of behavior they wanted to see. Contestants received points that went towards a financial prize for each session they attended. Those points incentivized engagement with multiple educational sessions.

Additionally, the financial pot increased with each additional registrant in the game. With that being the case, participants were incentivized to help promote the game to drive more registrants and increase their potential winnings.

2. Quality Content From Credible Speakers

While you can put as many incentives in place as you want for a game like this, people are unlikely to dedicate their time to content that isn’t worthwhile.

So, outside of just the potential financial rewards, Mutiny also recruited credible speakers from their customer and partner network to present at their sessions. As a result, the sessions themselves were valuable for attendees, their product was highlighted in an impactful way, and the speakers helped to promote the campaign to their networks, driving additional registration.

Who Should Consider Running This Type of Program

I’ll start this section by saying that we as marketers can all take inspiration from this campaign. We all should be thinking about fun and creative ways to educate our audience about our products and generate buzz in the market. To that end, we all should consider how we can apply the concepts from this campaign to our own company.

That said, to this program specifically, which was an extended multi-part campaign that ran over multiple weeks, I would say there need to be a couple of factors in place for a company to consider running it:

1. Companies That Can Recruit A Variety Of Quality Speakers

One of the things that made this campaign successful was that Mutiny had a variety of respected speakers present on their sessions. Those speakers were pulled from their customer or partner network, and all could provide valuable education while highlighting the value of Mutiny’s solution. 

To pull off this type of a program, you need to have relationships with folks that your audience wants to hear from to get them to attend a session.

2. Marketing Teams That Have Trust From Leadership

Mutiny ran a risky campaign. They committed to a multi-session, multi-week campaign that featured in-person events. If the campaign flopped, they still would have had to deliver the content and the failure would have drained their resources for weeks.

With that being the case, they needed trust from their leadership team to take this type of a risk and the ability to fail and not have it cost them their jobs.

The folks at Mutiny mentioned that they did have that trust…a trust that only increased when the campaign started to take off and sales leadership got more and more engaged in wanting to help promote the campaign.

How to Run This At Your Company

To effectively run a campaign like this, there are a few things from an execution perspective that you need to do to pull this off:

 1. Get Your Speakers In Place

A good speaker list creates immediate credibility for a campaign like this. Furthermore, your speakers can serve as resources to help promote your campaign to their network. Line up some big name speakers to have ready at launch.

2. Build Out Your Campaign Branding

If you’re going to take a swing on a campaign like this, you need to make it feel special. It should have custom branding, it’s own section of the website, and you should have resources made for your speakers, sales team, and success team to enable them to promote the event to their networks.

3. Bolster Your Email List

While the potential social media virality of a campaign like this is nice, email is still king for driving registration to virtual events. Make sure you have a strong email list in place and, even if you do, bolster that with as many relevant contacts as you can find from places like ZoomInfo, Apollo, or Clay.

Conclusion

The Surv-ai-vor campaign is a great example of finding a fun and creative way to educate your audience and build awareness about your product features. It’s the type of campaign that we as marketers love to create, but are often stifled due to risk aversion and internal politics. 

Major credit to the folks at Mutiny for taking a risk and pulling this off and may we all as marketers find ways to serve our audiences with similar fun and engaging campaigns.

-Founder @ Mark Sourced

P.S.

If you’re looking to find inspiration for programs that you can run in 2025, be sure to check out our database of 25+ B2B marketing programs that drove real results (like Mutiny’s).

It's sortable based upon factors like what marketing channels were used, the size of the company, and the results that were achieved so you can find the programs that would be most relevant to your business.

Don’t reinvent the wheel in 2025, leverage established templates playbooks that companies like you are using to hit their growth goals.