Pallavi Sehgal leads growth marketing and corporate development at CRM Messaging, where she shapes customer acquisition strategies and guides capital raising initiatives. Her career spans luxury goods, pharmaceuticals, and technology startups, delivering revenue growth at companies including Just Wines, Smartbox, and Gilead Sciences.
Pallavi holds degrees in computer engineering, business analytics, luxury business, and an MBA with a finance specialization. This technical and business foundation informs her approach to marketing strategy, product launches, and investment analysis.
She also runs pallavisehgal.com, a platform focused on capital allocation in consumer, luxury, and technology sectors. Her YouTube channel has grown to over 31,000 subscribers, and she publishes two newsletters on LinkedIn covering luxury business strategy and venture capital. The platform bridges conversations between founders seeking capital and investors evaluating opportunities.
In this interview, Pallavi discusses the evolution of growth marketing, how marketing analytics inform investment decisions, and what trends will define customer acquisition and retention over the next decade.
1. For readers unfamiliar with growth marketing, can you explain what it means and how it differs from traditional marketing approaches? Why do you think startups gravitate toward this model?
Growth marketing goes beyond brand awareness or one-time campaigns; it’s about creating sustainable, measurable growth loops that compound over time. Traditional marketing often focuses on top-of-funnel activities like advertising, branding, and promotions. Growth marketing, by contrast, is full-funnel. It integrates product, data, content, and technology to drive not just acquisition, but also activation, retention, and monetization.
The mindset is experimental and agile. Instead of launching a big campaign and hoping for results, growth marketers run continuous, data-driven experiments, testing channels, messages, and user journeys to find scalable levers. It’s closer to building a growth engine than just telling a story.
Startups gravitate toward this model because they need speed, efficiency, and proof of traction. They often don’t have the budget for traditional mass-media plays, so growth marketing allows them to test fast, learn fast, and scale what works. It also aligns marketing tightly with product and revenue goals, which is essential in early-stage environments.
In my own work, whether it was scaling an e-commerce platform or shaping a strategic GTM plan, growth marketing has always been about balancing creativity with data, turning insights into action that moves the business forward.
2. You’ve worked across very different sectors: luxury goods, pharmaceuticals, and tech startups. How does marketing strategy differ across these industries, and have you noticed any patterns that translate across sectors?
Each industry has its own rhythm and language, which shapes its marketing strategy. In luxury, the focus is on brand storytelling, scarcity, and cultural relevance; it’s about creating desire through heritage, craftsmanship, and emotion. In pharmaceuticals, the strategy leans heavily on trust, compliance, and education. Messaging must be precise, regulated, and grounded in credibility. In tech startups, the priority is speed, experimentation, and growth loops, where marketing is deeply intertwined with product and user behavior.
Despite these differences, there are patterns that translate across sectors. The most important is that clarity of value and audience insight always win. Whether you’re selling a $5,000 handbag, a life-saving therapy, or a SaaS product, you need to understand your consumer’s motivations deeply and deliver the right message at the right moment.
Another common thread is the fusion of data and narrative. The strongest strategies are those that balance measurable outcomes with an emotional hook. This ability to blend analytical thinking with creative storytelling has been the connective tissue throughout my career.
3. At CRM Messaging, you handle both growth marketing and corporate development. How do these two functions work together? Can you share an example of how marketing insights have shaped business strategy?
Growth marketing and corporate development may seem like separate functions, but in practice, they’re deeply intertwined. Growth marketing generates real-time market intelligence, consumer behavior patterns, channel performance, cost efficiencies, and engagement trends, that informs how we position the business strategically. Corporate development uses those insights to make bigger moves, from capital raising and partnership strategy to market entry decisions.
For example, at CRM Messaging, we noticed a consistent uptick in conversion and retention rates from a specific vertical we hadn’t initially prioritized. Instead of just optimizing campaigns, we used that data to shape our broader business strategy, deepening product integrations in that segment, building strategic partnerships, and highlighting the traction in investor conversations.
This closed feedback loop, where marketing insights guide strategic decisions, makes the organization more agile. It ensures that we’re not just acquiring users, but also building the right business around them.
4. You’ve been involved in capital raising and investor relations. What role does marketing analytics play when pitching to investors? What metrics do investors care most about, and how do you present them?
Marketing analytics plays a strategic storytelling role when pitching to investors. It’s not just about showing growth numbers but about demonstrating a repeatable, scalable engine behind those numbers. Investors want to see traction, but more importantly, they want to understand why it’s happening and how it can accelerate.
Key metrics vary slightly by business model, but there are some that consistently matter: Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Lifetime Value (LTV), CAC:LTV ratio, payback period, retention and churn rates, and channel efficiency. These are leading indicators of whether a company can grow profitably.
When presenting, I focus on tying metrics to narrative. For example, showing how a drop in CAC wasn’t just a fluke, but the result of a targeted channel strategy, or how high retention points to strong product-market fit. Framing analytics within a strategic story gives investors confidence in the company’s ability to execute, scale, and deliver returns.
5. Your work at Just Wines and Smartbox delivered substantial revenue growth for both companies. What was your approach in each case, and how did you use data to drive those results?
At Just Wines, my approach was to identify and unlock underutilized revenue channels. We saw an opportunity in the auction space, which wasn’t part of the original business model. By analyzing customer purchase behavior, we realized there was a strong segment interested in premium, limited-edition wines. We built an auction platform tailored to that demand, optimized pricing strategies, and ran targeted retention campaigns. The result was AU$500,000 in new annual revenue and a sharp increase in average order value, from AU$70 to AU$120.
At Smartbox, the challenge was different . It was about scale and partnerships. I focused on go-to-market optimization: analyzing lifecycle data to understand drop-off points and channel efficiency. That data guided how we onboarded major retailers and international locker manufacturers, creating $5 million in annual revenue. It also informed how we structured long-term partnership deals to align with usage and adoption patterns.
In both cases, data wasn’t just a reporting tool. It was the steering wheel. It shaped strategy, informed where to double down, and helped convert insights into measurable growth.
6. You’ve built a substantial following through pallavisehgal.com, with over 31,000 YouTube subscribers and multiple newsletters. What inspired you to start creating content about luxury business and capital raising, and how has it shaped your professional perspective?
The inspiration behind building pallavisehgal.com came from my deep interest in capital allocation, particularly at the intersection of consumer, luxury, tech, and finance. I’ve always been fascinated by how capital flows shape industries, not just through investment rounds or exits, but through how money moves, how strategy gets set, and how companies scale. I noticed that most conversations were happening in silos: investors talking about returns, founders about building brands, and technologists about innovation. Few connected the dots between these worlds.
My goal was to create a platform that bridges these conversations, unpacking how capital allocation decisions drive innovation, market positioning, and long-term value creation in industries like luxury, beauty, consumer tech, and retail. I write and produce videos for both sides of the table: helping founders understand how to tap capital intelligently and helping investors identify where enduring value is being built.
This work has profoundly shaped my professional perspective: it’s made me more disciplined in analyzing capital flows, more attuned to how strategic decisions at the investor, founder, and technology layers interact, and sharper in articulating where opportunity truly lies. It’s not just a content platform; it’s become a strategic vantage point on how capital, technology, and creativity intersect to shape the future of industries.
7. Many companies collect large amounts of customer data but struggle to turn it into actionable insights. What mistakes do you see businesses make with marketing analytics, and how can they avoid them?
The biggest mistake I see isn’t the lack of data but the lack of clarity about what the data is supposed to answer. Many companies collect everything but connect very little. They end up with impressive dashboards but no clear decision-making framework. Data without a strategic lens becomes noise.
The second common mistake is treating analytics as a back-end reporting tool rather than a frontline growth driver. When teams only use analytics to look backward instead of guiding future strategy, they miss opportunities to move fast and course-correct early.
Finally, many organizations overcomplicate their stack. Tools pile up, metrics multiply, and teams lose sight of the few critical levers that actually drive growth, such as CAC, LTV, retention, and engagement quality.
The solution is to start with the right questions, not the right tools. Define what success looks like, identify the key metrics that map to business outcomes, and build lightweight feedback loops that turn insights into action. Good analytics should clarify strategy, not clutter it.
8. You combine technical training in computer engineering and business analytics with business expertise from your MBA and luxury business master’s. How has this technical foundation influenced the way you approach marketing and business strategy?
My technical foundation has fundamentally shaped the way I approach marketing and business strategy. Engineering teaches you to break down complex problems into structured, solvable components, and business analytics sharpens that with a data-driven, evidence-based lens. So when I look at a marketing or growth challenge, I don’t just think about messaging or channels; I think in systems, loops, and levers.
This approach allows me to connect technical execution with strategic intent. For example, in growth marketing, I can look under the hood of product funnels, analyze how data flows, and translate those insights into strategies that drive acquisition, retention, and capital efficiency. On the investment and corporate development side, that same lens helps me evaluate scalability, whether a business model can actually sustain the growth story behind the numbers.
What my business education, particularly in finance and luxury, added was the context and narrative layer: how to align technical insights with brand positioning, consumer behavior, and capital flows. That combination has made my work more strategically rigorous, whether I’m building growth strategies, assessing investment opportunities, or shaping brand narratives in industries where precision and storytelling both matter.
9. Moving from large organizations like Gilead Sciences to early-stage startups requires a different mindset. What advice would you give to professionals considering a similar transition, particularly around building credibility in a startup environment?
Moving from a large organization to a startup is less about changing industries and more about changing your operating rhythm. In large companies like Gilead, systems are established, processes are structured, and your role is well-defined. In startups, you’re often building the plane as you fly it. That can be both exhilarating and uncomfortable for people used to clear guardrails.
The first piece of advice I give is to lead with contribution, not credentials. Big-company experience can be an asset, but only if it’s translated into tangible value. Startups care less about titles and more about how quickly you can help them build, ship, or grow. Second, credibility comes from velocity and adaptability. You need to make an impact fast — whether that’s finding product-market fit, shaping GTM strategy, or improving unit economics. You can’t rely on process alone; you have to earn trust through execution.
Finally, bring your structure, but lightly. One mistake many professionals make is trying to replicate big-company processes wholesale. The real value is knowing which principles to keep (discipline, clarity, accountability) and which to unlearn (layers of bureaucracy, slow decision-making).
10. Where do you see the biggest opportunities at the intersection of AI and marketing for growth professionals? How should marketing professionals prepare?
AI is transforming marketing from manual execution to intelligence-driven orchestration. The real edge will belong to marketers who combine AI fluency with strategic judgment, using data to drive smarter, faster decisions. Learn the tools, understand the economics, and build systems that scale.
Today, most marketing strategies still rely on fragmented tools and human intuition to connect the dots. AI is changing that by enabling real-time personalization, predictive modeling, and autonomous campaign optimization at scale.
For growth professionals, this means AI isn’t just another tool but an infrastructure shift.
It allows us to see patterns earlier, respond to consumers faster, and allocate capital more intelligently across channels. For example, we can now dynamically adjust acquisition strategies based on lifetime value predictions, or use agentic AI to design multi-channel campaigns that self-optimize.
But the biggest unlock will come from marketers who can pair AI capabilities with strategic judgment. Those who know which signals matter, how to train models around business objectives, and how to use AI to amplify, not replace, human creativity and insight.
To prepare, marketers should invest in data literacy, prompt and workflow engineering, and a clear understanding of business model economics. The best growth professionals of the next decade won’t just run campaigns but architect intelligent growth systems.
11. You’ve worked in both B2B and B2C contexts, from luxury fashion to pharmaceutical products to SaaS platforms. What trends do you think will define how companies acquire and retain customers over the next decade?
Customer acquisition and retention are going to be defined less by channels and more by precision, trust, and ecosystem thinking. Over the next decade, I see three major shifts shaping this landscape:
1. Brands will build integrated ecosystems, not just acquire customers through ads or one-off touchpoints., combining product, service, community, and content. Whether it’s a luxury house or a SaaS company, growth will increasingly come from being embedded in a customer’s daily life, not just visible to them.
2. Personalization today is largely reactive. With AI and real-time data, we’ll move toward predictive engagement, anticipating intent and shaping experiences before a customer asks. This shift will collapse the gap between acquisition and retention.
3. In an age of data abundance, trust will be the strongest differentiator. Companies that demonstrate transparency, protect user data, and build credibility, whether through brand storytelling or secure infrastructure, will have a structural advantage.
B2B and B2C will continue to blur. Luxury brands will adopt SaaS-style retention strategies; tech platforms will lean on storytelling and community. The companies that win will be those that master long-term relationship building, not just short-term conversion.
