Fast forward to today. Buyers are highly informed. Categories are crowded. CFOs fiercely guard budgets. Multiple stakeholders are involved in almost every meaningful enterprise deal.

A decade ago, a good enterprise seller could create conviction where there was only interest. Today, in mature B2B categories, the more critical skill is often determining whether enough internal conviction already exists to build upon.

The fundamental question is increasingly not: How do I convince this prospect to buy?

It is: Is there enough here to justify trying to convince them at all?

Welcome to the era of qualification.

Why the “Challenger Sale” Became Good Wine

This does not mean persuasion is dead. Methodologies like the Challenger Sale still hold immense value. Teaching, tailoring, and taking control absolutely work. But you shouldn’t act like a professor with a buyer who already knows the category, the competitors, the pricing and the alternatives inside out.

I increasingly think of Challenger as good wine. It is still valuable. Yet, it is not water. The approach is powerful when the situation calls for it. Consequently, it becomes counterproductive when you pour it into every conversation.

Persuasion has become selective. Qualification has become foundational.

And modern qualification is not discovery. Furthermore, it is not BANT. Nor is it a MEDDPICC checklist properly updated in the CRM.

The new era of qualification seeks evidence, not just answers. Here is what in my experience it looks like in practice.

Evidence #1: Language Is Not Commitment

A CEO I’m working with recently came to me frustrated. “They said we were the preferred vendor. They said they wanted to sign before the quarter ended. Then they didn’t sign.”

There is a massive gap between: “We want to sign.” and: “We will sign.”

But even “we will sign” is not enough. Who exactly is signing? Is Legal fully aligned? Has Procurement approved the vendor? Are all the necessary stakeholders on board? What still needs to happen internally between today’s conversation and the signature? And who owns each of those steps?

This is where “happy ears” become expensive. We hear a positive statement and unconsciously convert it into evidence supporting what we already want to believe. Modern qualification requires almost the opposite reflex.

Every positive statement should trigger the next qualification question, not the next forecast increase.

The buyer probably isn’t lying. The person telling you they want to sign may genuinely want to sign. But wanting something to happen and having an organization capable of making it happen are two completely different things.

Your job is to understand the difference.

Evidence #2: Make the Buyer Work

In another case, we were discussing how to present ROI to a key Prospect Account. He proudly noted: “We already have a business case simulator that we build for them.”

My question was: How central is it to the conversation?

If you are the one asking for the data, running the numbers, and building the business case alone, you have lost a massive qualification opportunity.

A business case simulator can do much more than calculate ROI. It can qualify the customer. Make it a collaborative process. Ask the prospect to bring their own numbers. Agree on the assumptions together. Understand what happens if a particular metric improves by 5%, 10% or 20%. Bring whoever owns the underlying data into the conversation.

Suddenly, you are learning things that no discovery checklist will tell you. Will they give you the data? Will they invest the time? Can your champion bring other stakeholders into the room? Do people internally agree on the problem? Does anyone actually own the metric you’re proposing to improve?

Most importantly: Will the customer do some work?

Because commitment is easier to observe than intent. Good qualification doesn’t only ask better questions. It creates small commitments that generate evidence.

The prospect doesn’t just tell you the project matters. They behave as though it matters. That is a very different signal.

Evidence #3: Qualify the Future They Want

I recently reviewed a stalled deal with a large retailer. On the surface, the scale-up’s product had proven value, clear ROI, and a strong historical relationship with the customer.

Yet something had changed. The customer organization had increasingly become attracted to what we started calling the Holy Grail: one integrated platform capable of solving most of the problems currently addressed by several specialized solutions.

At that point, you don’t simply need to convince them that your specific best-of-breed product is superior. You need to ask a different question: Are they psychologically and organizationally available to buy the kind of specialized solution we actually sell?

Around the same time, I spoke with an experienced seller from a competing specialized vendor. He had learned to recognize the pattern. Whenever he realized that the customer was pursuing the Holy Grail of an all-in-one platform, he knew his probability of winning had dropped dramatically.

Not necessarily because the competing product was better. The customer was buying a philosophy: integration, consolidation, fewer vendors, one platform.

That is sophisticated qualification. Not: Do they have budget? Not: Do they like our product? Not even: Can we demonstrate ROI?

But: What kind of solution has this organization already decided it wants to buy?

Sometimes you are not losing a feature comparison. You are on the wrong side of a strategic conviction. And when the answers don’t align, sometimes the right thing to do is to bless the loss.

Walking away early can create more value than dragging a fundamentally misaligned deal through your pipeline for another six months.

Evidence #4: Your Champion Isn’t Your Decision System

A friendly contact who loves your product is great. But that doesn’t necessarily make them a champion. Modern qualification demands knowing whether that person can actually move the decision system.

Do they share internal information a vendor normally wouldn’t have? Will they consistently keep their commitments? Can they introduce you to the stakeholders you need? Furthermore, do they have influence inside the organization? Are they willing to spend some of their internal political capital moving the project forward? Ultimately, do they personally have something to gain if the change succeeds?

A friendly contact gives you access. A real champion creates movement.

And in complex enterprise sales, even that may not be enough. You are rarely selling to one person. You are selling into a decision system.

So the question isn’t simply: Is my champion convinced? It is: Can this person mobilize the organization required to make the decision?

Tailoring for group consensus becomes more important than tailoring only for individual buy-in.

A champion saying “yes” is information. A champion mobilizing others is evidence.

Qualification Is Not a Stage in the Funnel

This is perhaps the biggest shift. Qualification is often treated as something you do at the beginning of a deal. You qualify the opportunity, enter the information into the CRM, move it to the next stage and start selling.

But in complex B2B, qualification should become progressively deeper as the deal moves forward.

At the beginning, you may be qualifying pain. Is there actually a meaningful problem? Then priority. Is solving it important enough compared with everything else competing for attention? Then commitment. Will the customer invest time, data and internal resources? Then mobilization. Can your champion bring the decision system with them? Then buying philosophy. Does the organization actually want the kind of solution you sell? And ultimately, organizational readiness. Can this company absorb the change required to produce the outcome you’re promising?

Pain → Priority → Commitment → Mobilization → Buying Philosophy → Organizational Readiness.

The deeper you move into a complex deal, the less useful stated intent becomes. You need behavioral evidence.

The Hidden Cost of Bad Qualification

This is why a badly qualified opportunity does more damage than simply wasting a salesperson’s time.

Every additional meeting consumes resources. Likewise, every unnecessary pilot burns time. Each Solution Engineer pulled into the wrong opportunity carries an opportunity cost. Furthermore, every founder spending three months chasing the wrong enterprise logo is not doing something else. And ultimately, any badly qualified opportunity sitting in the pipeline corrupts your understanding of the business.

This illusion makes pipeline coverage look healthier than it is. It contaminates your forecast. Consequently, it can make you think you have a conversion problem when you actually have a qualification problem. And eventually, such noise can influence hiring and investment decisions based on demand that was never really there.

Knowing When Not To Sell

For years, enterprise sales culture celebrated persuasion. Overcoming objections. Creating urgency. Handling resistance. Never taking no for an answer.

There is still a place for all of that. But persuasion is expensive.

The modern enterprise seller needs to be skilled enough to create conviction when a real opportunity exists, and disciplined enough to recognize quickly when it doesn’t.

That means stopping the instinct to ask: How can I keep this deal alive?

And asking instead: What evidence would make this deal deserve to stay alive?

That distinction matters. Because the objective of qualification isn’t to kill opportunities. It is to concentrate your organization’s persuasion, expertise and energy where they have the highest probability of creating value.

The best enterprise sellers are still persuasive. They just know that persuasion is expensive. Qualification tells them where it is worth spending it.

Featured image: Jahra Tasfia Reza

The post The Era of Persuasion Is Over. Welcome to the Era of Qualification appeared first on Luigi Mallardo.

The more I work with AI companies, the more I realise they are not just competing with software. They are competing with human work.

For more than twenty years, enterprise software has helped people do their jobs better. Faster, more precise, more scalable. SaaS was built on a simple premise: give specialists better tools and they will produce better outcomes.

Today, AI is increasingly starting to do the job itself.

That changes something far more fundamental than the product. It changes the business case. And I think many AI founders are still selling as if they were selling SaaS. Same qualification, same pricing, same demo, same buyer.

Clearly, the product has changed. Yet, the GTM conversation often hasn’t.

That is the mistake.

The hidden mismatch

A typical enterprise AI deal looks healthy from the outside.

The champion is engaged. All goes well during the demo. The budget exists. Also the use case is clear. And the timeline is reasonable.

Inevitably, six months later the relationship becomes difficult. Because the vendor was selling one business case while the customer was preparing for another.

Two business cases. One product.

Most AI founders think the complexity of their enterprise deals comes from the product, the integration, or the change management. In my experience, the deeper complexity comes from something less visible.

Not two products. Not two buyers. Two business cases.

Business Case A — Augmentation

AI helps existing specialists do their work better.

For example, consultants use it. Engineers use it. Compliance teams uses it. Auditors use it. Ergonomic analysts use it. The process remains human. AI accelerates, improves, automates parts of it.

In this case the ROI is productivity, quality, speed. The internal champion is the operational lead or the functional manager. The budget is operational and can often be approved without direct C-suite involvement.

Business Case B — Transformation

Exactly the same product. Completely different economic logic.

The question is no longer “how much faster can my specialists work?”. The question becomes “how much specialist work will eventually disappear?”

In this case the ROI is labour substitution, reduced headcount growth, lower outsourced spend, or the elimination of entire categories of manual work. The internal sponsor is no longer the operational lead. It is the CFO. The COO. Sometimes the CEO. The budget is strategic, significantly larger, and requires a completely different approval process.

Nothing changed in the software. Everything changed in the business case.

Here is where the vendor was selling productivity. The customer was planning transformation. And in the gap between those two realities, deals quietly fall apart, contracts fail to expand, and relationships that started well become difficult.

I saw this recently with a deep tech company selling AI into a large industrial group. The prospect described Business Case A in every conversation. As a result, the champion was enthusiastic. Their use case was concrete. Consequently, the vendor qualified accordingly, priced accordingly, and structured the contract accordingly.

Six months after signing, the internal conversation shifted. The executive sponsor changed. Success metrics changed. The renewal conversation looked nothing like the original deal. What had started as an augmentation purchase was now being evaluated as a transformation programme.

The product had not changed. The business case had.

Four conversations inside every enterprise AI deal

Inside a large enterprise, the same AI product creates four parallel conversations.

The champion talks about usability, adoption and features.

Operations talks about productivity.

The CFO talks about labour costs.

Then the board talks about organisational redesign.

The vendor often hears mainly the first conversation. The other three happen behind closed doors, in rooms the vendor never enters, with stakeholders the vendor has never met, using a business case the vendor never built.

That is not a communication problem. It is a GTM problem.

And it is a problem that traditional qualification frameworks were not designed to surface.

Why Traditional Enterprise AI GTM Qualification Breaks

Traditional enterprise qualification was built around pain, budget, authority and timeline. It assumed that buyer and seller were, more or less, qualifying the same opportunity.

In AI, increasingly, they are not.

The customer is buying tomorrow. The vendor is qualifying today.

While the pain described in that first conversation is real, it is often not the pain driving the strategic decision. The budget that exists for Business Case A is not the budget available for Business Case B. The champion who is enthusiastic about augmentation may have personal incentives to resist transformation, because transformation changes their role, their team, their relevance.

Traditional qualification captures what the customer is ready to discuss. It may completely miss what the board is already considering.

There is a question that surfaces the gap. One question. And it is almost never asked.

“If this works exactly as expected over the next three years, are your specialists still doing the same work, only faster? Or are they doing something fundamentally different?”

That answer changes everything: the stakeholders you need to involve, the business case you need to build, the ROI you need to demonstrate, the pricing logic you can defend, the contract structure that will hold, and the expansion path that actually exists.

If you do not ask it, you are not qualifying an enterprise opportunity. You are qualifying the version of the opportunity your customer is comfortable describing in the initial meetings.

Why AI Companies Risk Pricing The Wrong Business Case

Many AI vendors still price as if they were selling conventional software.

Per seat, per user, or per volume of data processed. The logic comes directly from SaaS — and in Business Case A, it often makes sense.

But many enterprise buyers are valuing something different: not access to software, but the amount of human work it can replace.

Fundamentally, those are completely different economic models.

If the customer is buying productivity, seat pricing captures the value reasonably well. If the customer is buying organisational transformation — if the perceived value is the elimination of consulting spend, the reduction of specialist headcount, the removal of an outsourced function — seat pricing captures only a fraction of the value being created.

An ergonomic consultant costs X per year. If your AI eliminates the need for that consultant in 70% of cases across a manufacturing group with operations in twelve countries, the value is not the cost of the software. It is a fraction of the consultant’s annual cost multiplied across every site where the workload, external spend or required headcount is materially reduced.

This does not mean every AI company should jump to outcome-based pricing. It means the pricing model should follow the business case.

You cannot choose the right pricing model if you do not understand which business case your customer is actually buying. When the buyer is doing labour economics and the vendor is still using SaaS logic, the product is likely to be materially underpriced.

Qualifying The Business Case, Not Just The Opportunity

One of the biggest risks in enterprise AI is qualifying one business case while the customer is already preparing for another.

The software has not changed. Neither has the demo. Even the buyer may be the same person.

But the business case has.

And if your qualification framework does not uncover that shift, you are not qualifying an enterprise opportunity.

You are qualifying yesterday’s buying logic.

The question every AI founder selling into enterprise should be asking is no longer:

Is my product good enough?

It is this:

Do I understand the business case my customer is actually buying?

Because in AI, the product may stay exactly the same.

The economics rarely do.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:

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Featured image: Evgeniya Koniukhova

The post AI Doesn’t Just Change The Product. It Changes The Business Case. appeared first on Luigi Mallardo.

The uncomfortable answer is: You are the CRO.

Most founders believe their core problem is: “We just haven’t found the GTM leader yet.” The actual problem is: “Nobody has built the Go-To-Market system yet.”

You cannot delegate a system that does not exist.

Until that system is built, codified, and generating predictable outcomes, the CRO is you, the founder CEO. Even at €2M ARR. Even at €5M ARR. And especially after your Series A. Even when the board is impatient and you are mentally exhausted.

But here is the point. Most technical and product-native founders think acting as the CRO means doing more product demos, closing more deals and running forecast calls. Updating the CRM. Hiring and firing.

What the job actually is

That is not being a CRO. That is being a Sales Manager. Your job in this phase is not just to sell and manage people. Your job is to build.

What does building a GTM system actually look like for a CEO? It looks like managing friction.

The real job is creating the conditions under which revenue becomes predictable. And in early stage, those conditions don’t exist yet. Someone has to build them. You.

In many B2B complex tech companies, the CEO must act as the CRO long before the company is ready to hire one.

Here are four real scenes from the trenches of startups navigating this exact phase.

Scene 1. The board wants a superhero CRO. Your job is to reframe the question.

The board sees pipeline starting to move. Their pattern-matching kicks in immediately: now is the time to hire a serious GTM leader, someone who has done this before, someone who can convert this demand.

It’s not wrong instinct. It’s just the wrong question for this moment.

A founder I work with was heading into exactly this board conversation. His investors were pushing for a VP of Sales — experienced, expensive, traditional profile.

He had a different view, built on something more nuanced: a framework of four hiring profiles, mapped against fit, cost, and probability of success for his specific stage and motion.

The insight wasn’t just analytical. It was strategic.

If you walk into a board meeting with an open question — who should we hire? — the board will answer it for you. And their answer will be shaped by pattern recognition from companies that looked nothing like yours.

If you walk in with a structured view — here are the four options, here is why three of them fail at our stage, here is the profile that fits our next twelve months — you’re not asking for permission. You’re guiding a decision.

Be ready to push back if they insist: “how often have you seen hiring a senior CRO in a situation like ours to work well? None of our Account Executives are consistently hitting quota. Our sales choreography is not yet fully codified. If we hire an experienced VP right now, we will burn six months of their salary just to watch them fail in a structural vacuum. I will hold the wheel until the fundamentals are green.”

They know the answer. 99% of the time, it fails.

That’s GTM leadership. It looks nothing like closing a deal. You don’t just report to the board. You coach the board.

Scene 2. Sales and marketing don’t align by themselves. You are the alignment.

In another company, there was a tension that had been simmering for months. The sales rep in a key market didn’t trust marketing. Not personally, professionally. Every time marketing proposed a campaign, the response was some version of this is not going to work.

The temptation in this situation is to call a meeting. Get everyone in a room. Talk about alignment.

That meeting will not work. An open brief, let’s build a plan together, in a low-trust environment doesn’t create alignment. It creates more surface area for conflict.

A traditional CRO expects alignment to already exist. The CEO-CRO has to create it in the mud.

They don’t host motivational team-building meetings. They use closed briefs. Instead of giving Marketing an open mandate to “do lead gen,” the CEO intervenes surgically: “Marketing will organize two highly targeted events in the UK for these 10 specific accounts, and Sales will attend.”

You align warring departments by forcing execution and building trust through delivery.

One deliverable. One owner. Clear enough that success and failure are both visible.

The CEO as CRO doesn’t manage pipeline. They manage the conditions that make pipeline possible. In early stage, that often means getting into the room, sometimes separately, before putting people in the same room together.

Scene 3. The market sends signals, if you listen. 

News breaks out. A well-funded, direct competitor just got acquired by a massive legacy conglomerate, or they are rapidly burning cash and losing key talent. Even better, they are having serious product gaps and issues.

A standard sales manager might wait for the quarter to end to analyze the impact. A CEO who is doing the GTM job sees it differently and immediately turns this into a weapon.

This is a demand generation window. Customers who chose that competitor are now uncertain. They launch a surgical campaign the very next morning, reaching out directly to the competitor’s enterprise clients. They leverage the market uncertainty, offering creative pricing models to rip and replace the competitor’s product. That is pure Go-To-Market agility, driven by someone who understands the product, the cash flow, and the market intimately.

This kind of opportunistic strike requires someone who is close enough to the market to see the window, and has enough authority to move immediately. In most early-stage companies, that person is the CEO.

Scene 4. Don’t let the board rush you past the foundations.

Pipeline is starting to appear. Inbound is working. A few outbound sequences are converting. The board is energized.

And now the pressure shifts: let’s accelerate. Let’s add headcount. Let’s scale what’s working.

The CEO as CRO has to protect something in this moment that is genuinely difficult to protect: the discipline of building correctly before building fast.

Because what looks like a working pipeline is often a founder-dependent pipeline. The CEO is in the deals. The qualification is happening in their head, not in a process. The conversion is driven by relationships that don’t transfer.

Scale that, and you don’t accelerate. You expose it.

The job in this moment is not to resist growth. It’s to make sure that what you’re about to replicate is actually replicable, that the qualification criteria exist, that the stages in the CRM reflect reality, that the behaviours you want from your team are trained and documented before you add more people to carry them forward.

This is unglamorous work. It is also the difference between a GTM system and a GTM dependency.

The Wrong Question

Eventually, the fatigue sets in, and every founder asks the same question: “When should I finally hire a CRO?”

It is the wrong question.

The better question is: “Have I already done the CRO job myself?”

Because the best revenue leaders on the market do not create GTM systems from scratch. Unless they are one of the founders. They inherit ones that already kind of work, they optimize and scale them.

If the system doesn’t exist yet, no hire will create it. The board won’t create it. The advisor with the impressive network won’t create it.

You will. Reluctantly, imperfectly, while doing twelve other things.

That’s the job nobody announces and everybody eventually does. The CEO-CRO nobody wants to be, until they look back and realize it was the most important role they ever played.

And until that system exists, the title is yours.

The post The CEO-CRO Nobody Wants To Be appeared first on Luigi Mallardo.

They had funding. Customers were signing. A sales team was in place. Some were hunting for an experienced CRO.

From the outside, everything looked promising. Revenue was growing. The board was supportive. The pipeline looked healthy.

But when you looked underneath the surface, the foundations were still missing. Not the product or the vision. Not the ambition. The GTM foundations: the unglamorous, unsexy infrastructure that determines whether growth compounds or collapses.

What looked like an operating system was merely a series of uncoordinated heroic acts performed daily by the founding team to keep the illusion of traction alive.

Today, the problem is getting worse. Most founders I meet are benchmarking against Cursor, Lovable or the latest AI-native rocketship growing faster than anyone thought possible. And they are asking themselves what to do to expand at that exact same velocity. The comparison feels natural. The pressure is real. The board is asking questions.

The problem is not a lack of ambition or talent. The problem is a fundamentally broken benchmark.

Cursor built a product-led growth motion in a market of tens of millions of developers. Adoption is viral, frictionless, individual. They are selling convenience to a user base that can adopt a tool with a single click.

Your company is selling to a VP of HSE (Health, Safety, and Environment) at a German manufacturing group with a nine-month sales cycle, three approval committees, a procurement process, and a legal team that has never heard of you. That is not the same game. It is not even the same sport.

Benchmarking your GTM readiness against PLG rocketships when you are selling complex B2B software into mid-market and enterprise is not just misleading. It is dangerous. Because it makes you believe you are behind when you are actually just playing a different game, one that requires a completely different kind of machine.

Scaling is not a reward. It is an amplifier.

When legendary basketball coach Phil Jackson took leadership of the Chicago Bulls, and later the Los Angeles Lakers, he did not begin his tenure by designing complex, spectacular offensive plays to highlight the individual genius of Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant.

Instead, he systematically forced his teams back to the absolute basics of basketball mechanics. He installed the Triangle Offense, a highly structured, repetitive framework that completely relied on non-negotiable fundamentals: spacing, passing precision, acute situational awareness, and split-second defensive reading.

The system itself was intentionally boring to practice. It replaced the reliance on chaotic individual brilliance with a predictable, repeatable rhythm.

Coach Jackson understood an absolute truth that applies directly to GTM organisational engineering: if your players cannot maintain precise four-foot spacing or execute a textbook chest pass under pressure, any advanced playbook you design is entirely useless. You cannot scale individual heroism; you can only scale structural discipline.

The Bulls didn’t win six championships because Jordan invented a new way to score every night. They won because the underlying system was executed with such mechanical perfection that the opposing defense was completely starved of options.

The same logic applies to complex enterprise Go-To-Market strategy.

Founders constantly mistake the injection of venture capital as a validation of their readiness to accelerate.

They treat scaling as a reward for past survival. It is not. Scaling is an amplifier.

It takes whatever organisational architecture you currently have and multiplies its volume by a factor of ten. If your sales process is structurally sound, scaling amplifies your revenue efficiency. But if your GTM fundamentals are broken, scaling simply amplifies your structural flaws at an unsustainable velocity.

Hiring ten more Account Executives or bringing in an expensive corporate CRO before your fundamentals are codified does not accelerate growth.

It merely accelerates your burn rate and scales your internal chaos.

PMF is not GTM readiness. Most founders confuse the two.

Here is the mistake I see most often, and it is an honest one, because the signal is genuinely confusing.

The company closes a massive logo. Can be BP. Santander. A global retailer with hundreds of stores. 6-digit ARR. The product delivers real, measurable value. Excitement spreads to the CEO. The case study is written, the logo is proudly displayed on the sales deck. Investors are satisfied and read this signal as definitive. The machine is ready to be scaled. Build out an outbound sales apparatus, scale up the headcount, build partnerships.

Then you look at what actually happened and start to see the truth.

The deal took fourteen months. Every critical alignment call had one of the founders in the room. The pricing model was rebuilt from scratch three times to navigate the client’s internal budget constraints.

Onboarding required three weeks of on-site work that was never scoped. The champion was incredible, but without that specific champion, the deal would not have survived month four.

That is not a scalable motion. That is heroic intervention dressed up as commercial momentum.

Product-market fit means your product solves a real problem for a real segment. It is necessary. It is not sufficient.

Being ready to scale means your go-to-market machine can operate without heroic intervention. That it can replicate, that it can survive personnel changes, that it produces predictable output.

Product-Market Fit merely gives your startup the right to exist. It is Go-To-Market readiness that gives you the right to scale.

As a matter of fact, the pattern I have seen more times than I can count goes like this. The company has PMF. The founder, energized by the signal, starts building the team. First SDRs. Then AEs. Then a Sales Manager or VP. Eventually, under board pressure, under the weight of investor expectations, they start interviewing CROs.

Each hire is made before the previous layer is working. SDRs generate meetings that AEs cannot qualify properly. AEs generates proposals that die in procurement because no one de-risked the decision system. The VP of Sales inherits a pipeline full of wishful thinking and a sales team that learned everything from watching the founder close.

Nine to twelve months later, growth has slowed. The pipeline looks worse than before. The VP of Sales is under review. And the founder is back in every deal.

The problem was never the hire. The problem was that they tried to scale a system that did not yet exist.

Are you really ready to scale? Run this test before your next hire.

What follows is not a checklist. This is a diagnostic of 6 areas that in my experience are the key ones to surface the specific gaps in your GTM foundation before you pour more concrete on top of them.

The six criteria are not independent. They have a hierarchy. The first two are prerequisites. If you fail either of them, the remaining four do not matter yet. Not because they are unimportant. Because building on a broken foundation accelerates the collapse.

Test 1 — ICP Discipline

What is the last deal you actively walked away from because the prospect was outside your ICP?

If you cannot answer that question immediately, you do not have an ICP. You have a wish list.

This matters more than almost anything else at this stage because your ICP is not just a targeting filter. It is a compounding force.

Selling complex technology to a mismatched customer forces your engineering team into a cycle of bespoke product customisation and traps your Customer Success team in an endless cycle of reactive fire-fighting.

Scaling without a rigorous ICP does not accelerate growth. It scales your future churn.

Stop here until you have an honest answer and the courage to say no.

Test 2 — Pipeline Honesty

Do you have a systematic, ruthless, codified mechanism for killing deals that have shown zero meaningful behavioural movement from the customer in sixty days?

Not a gut feeling. Not a quarterly review where you challenge the rep and they tell you it is “still warm.” A mechanism, a defined trigger, a defined action by the customer, a defined outcome.

A false pipeline is worse than an empty one. With an empty pipeline you know exactly where you stand. With a false pipeline you make wrong decisions on hiring, on forecasting, on how you present the business to your board and your investors. You build organisational confidence on a foundation of fiction.

Most founders fall into a trap at this exact point: a pipeline that looks full feels like a signal that it is time to delegate. Time to bring in a sales leader. Time to step back from the deals and focus on the company.

But before you make that move, ask yourself one question. If you removed yourself from the pipeline entirely — no calls, no introductions, no behind-the-scenes interventions — how many of those deals would survive the next sixty days?

If the honest answer is “most of them would stall,” that pipeline is not a pipeline. It is your contact book with a CRM wrapper.

That gap, between a pipeline that looks real and a pipeline that survives without you, is exactly what the next test is designed to expose. And it is where most founders make the most expensive mistake.

Test 3 — Founder Transferability

Could a recently hired AE take a deal from first call to signature, without the founders entering the process to save the close, accelerate the timeline, or rescue the relationship?

This is the test that generates the most resistance, and I understand why. The founder’s involvement feels like an asset. Clients want to talk to the CEO. The founder knows the product better than anyone. The founder can navigate political complexity in ways a junior AE simply cannot.

All of that is true. And none of it is scalable.

The goal at this stage is not to remove the founder from every deal. It is to build a motion that does not depend on the founder to survive. There is a significant difference between a founder who chooses to be involved in strategic deals and a founder who must be involved in every deal or the deal dies.

Test 4 — Codified Choreography

Does a codified playbook exist?

Written down, not living in someone’s head, not a collection of tribal knowledge passed from one rep to the next.

Can a new hire understand who participates in which meetings, what questions to ask in session one versus follow-up sessions, how stakeholder alignment is built progressively, how risk is reduced throughout the buying journey, and how executive sponsorship is secured before the deal reaches the client’s board?

And if that playbook exists on paper, is it actually shaping behaviour in the field, or sitting in a shared folder no one opens?

If the answers live primarily inside someone’s head, you do not have a process. You have a dependency disguised as experience.

Test 5 — Post-Sale Value Governance

What happens after the signature?

This is where many scaling stories quietly break. Customer Success is often asked to compensate for weaknesses elsewhere.

Does your Customer Success team have a framework for governing the transition of value and managing executive relationships at your enterprise accounts, or are they spending most of their time responding to support tickets and defending product gaps?

When a strategic client escalates an issue, it is rarely a technical software failure; it is almost always a breakdown in commercial governance.

If you scale your sales apparatus while your post-sale delivery relies on heroic, chaotic
manual intervention, you are simply accelerating a churn factory.

This test matters because churn is a GTM problem, not just a product problem.

A company that cannot consistently deliver value after the sale has not earned the right to accelerate acquisition.

Test 6 — Quota Attainment Consistency

One question only. How many of your AEs are hitting quota consistently? Not in their best month, not in the quarter where a single large deal inflated the number, but consistently, quarter after quarter?

I am not going to give you a benchmark from any study. The benchmark is simpler than that: if the answer is zero, or one out of three on a good day, the problem is not the next hire. The problem is the system those AEs are operating inside.

Adding a sales leader or more headcount to a broken model simply multiplies the number of people missing their numbers.

The board wants a CRO. The company needs fundamentals.

Recently I was working with a CEO who was under board pressure to hire a senior CRO. The board believed the timing was right. Revenue had been flat for a while and in the meanwhile the company had been put in a position to be EBITDA and cash neutral.

My first question was not about candidate profiles. It was not about compensation structures or equity packages.

It was this: how many of your AEs are consistently hitting quota?

Silence. None.

That one factual answer reframed the entire conversation. Because when no AE is hitting quota, the problem is not leadership. The problem is the system.

And bringing in a VP of Sales or a CRO to lead a system that is not working does not fix the system. It adds an expensive layer of management on top of a broken foundation, and gives the board a human being to blame when the foundation fails.

You Cannot Manage What You Haven’t Built

I told that CEO something that I believe more every year I do this work: you cannot manage what you have not yet built.

The board was not wrong to want a GTM leader. Boards are right to think about scale. The mistake was conflating the desire to scale with the readiness to scale. Those are two different things, and confusing them is one of the most expensive errors an early-stage company can make.

The right response to board pressure at that stage was not defensiveness.

It was, first of all, to prepare the right question from the CEO to the investors at that Board meeting:

In a situation like ours, how often have you seen that hiring an experienced CRO now brought the expected results? 

The answer was unanimous: “Now that you make me think, it never worked! ”

Second, bring to the board a clear and factual argument: here is where we are, what we have built, here is what still needs to be built, and here is the profile of leadership we need when, not before, those foundations are in place.

The wrong question

Most founders eventually ask: “When should I hire a CRO?”

It’s the wrong question.

The better question is: “Have we built a GTM system that someone else can successfully lead?”

If the answer is no, keep building. Strengthen the foundations. Improve transferability. Increase discipline. Remove dependencies. Create repeatability.

Only then does scaling become leverage instead of risk.

Have you earned the right to scale?

Most complex B2B tech startups that think they are ready to scale do not fail because they build a bad product, nor do they fail because their target market doesn’t exist or because they scale too late.

They fail because they scale assumptions before they scale fundamentals. Because they mistake funding for readiness. Often, they confuse a great product with a great go-to-market. Ultimately, they hire for the company they want to be instead of building the system the company needs right now.

The GTM Litmus Test is not a graduation ceremony. Passing it does not mean you are done building. It means you have earned the right to add resources without multiplying your problems.

Before hiring your next CRO. Before pitching your next round, or doubling the sales team.

Ask yourself one question.

Have you earned the right to scale?

Featured image: Steve Lipofsky (Lipofsky.com), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Ready to Scale? The GTM Litmus Test for Complex B2B Tech Startups appeared first on Luigi Mallardo.

It’s also the most dangerous moment in the journey.

From the outside, everything looks right. The founder has sold every significant deal personally. The team is growing. Investors are happy.

From the inside, something doesn’t add up as far as GTM is concerned.

The paradox has three layers

Everything starts moving at once. Hiring. Pipeline. Product. Board pressure.

The first layer of paradox is having enough success to stop questioning anything. An initial base of enterprise clients came in. Founders tend to interprets this as validation of the method. But almost always, those deals came in because of their direct presence, their personal credibility, their ability to read the room in real time, their willingness to do whatever it takes to close.

That’s not a system. That’s them.

And as ACV goes up, friction explodes. More enterprise means more complexity, more stakeholders, longer cycles, harder qualification. The team isn’t ready for that. The founder was.

Then the second layer is having enough resources to make the wrong moves with confidence. With the round in the bank, the temptation is to hire before having a transferable playbook. A senior AE, a head of sales, someone who “knows how it’s done.” But without a codified first meeting choreography, without a surgical ICP, without pipeline architecture, that person arrives in a vacuum and can’t perform. Not because they’re wrong. Because there’s nothing to land on.

The third layer is the most dangerous: traction is not repeatability. Pipeline is moving. Deals are closing. The founder reads this as confirmation that the GTM is working. In reality, the founder is working. The GTM is still them. The difference only becomes visible when the team scales, and by then the cost is already high.

Looks like scaling. It’s not. The founder is still the system.

The founder pitch is never the scalable pitch

The founder runs the first enterprise meetings and closes. Then the team runs the same meetings and doesn’t. The instinctive diagnosis is that the team isn’t strong enough. But the real diagnosis is that nobody has ever codified what needs to happen in the first 20 minutes of that meeting. The founders know how to do it their way, but the founder pitch is never the scalable pitch.

I’ve seen a founder rebuild their entire approach to the first meeting from scratch: map it out, test it, then hand it to a newly hired AE. Three months later the team was closing deals that previously required the founder’s direct presence. The difference wasn’t the team. It was having a “translation” from the founder pitch to a scalable choreography that existed outside the founder’s head.

The revenue math nobody has done

In this window, founders know they’re growing but they don’t know yet what that growth actually requires. The round creates the illusion of runway.

The pipeline math is rarely done out loud.

Take a founder with a €1.5M end-of-year target, a €15K average ticket, and an 8-month sales cycle. The math requires 75 new clients.

At their current pace of meetings, it’s not difficult. It’s impossible.

Nobody had calculated it before. When they do, every decision that follows changes.

Hiring comes too early, or wrong

Post-round pressure is real. Investors want to see hiring, execution, GTM momentum.

Founders hires. But they hire into a structure that doesn’t exist yet.

The first SDRs arrive without a defined prospecting system.

AEs arrives without a codified first meeting choreography and a clear qualification framework.

The first CS hire arrives without a written onboarding playbook.

I’ve watched a founding team hire an SDR with exactly the right criteria: outbound experience, startup background, someone who picks up the phone. Everything correct on paper. But there was no qualified account list. No tested call choreography. No shared definition of what a “connect” actually means. The first weeks were noise. Not because the hire was wrong.

Because there was nothing to plug into.

The pipeline looks alive. It isn’t

The CRM is full. There are deals in every stage. Weekly pipeline reviews feel productive. There’s always something to talk about.

But when you look at the age of the deals, the last meaningful interaction, the actual probability of closing before year end, the picture changes completely.

A pipeline full of deals that haven’t moved in 60 days isn’t a pipeline. It’s a list of conversations the founder doesn’t want to kill because killing them means admitting the math doesn’t work.

The movement is an illusion. The real pipeline is a fraction of what the CRM shows.

Why Product becomes the default diagnosis

In this window, the product is still evolving. Every deal brings feedback, every client asks for something different. When commercial progress stalls, the founder’s instinct is to look at the product roadmap. Something is missing. One more feature and the deals will close.

Almost always, that’s wrong.

I watched a founding team lose a significant enterprise deal after two hours of technical demo. Team’s diagnosis: missing features. Real diagnosis: nobody had qualified the economic buyer, nobody had understood that the real concern was implementation and change management, not the product. The product wasn’t the problem.

It was the easiest place to look.

Founders who navigate this window VS those who don’t.

It’s not resources or product. It’s GTM sequence.

The founders who come through this window intact do one thing before anything else: they codify the method before they scale the team. Then they don’t hire until they have something to transfer. Also, they don’t scale the pipeline until they have a choreography that works without them in the room.

It’s slower. It’s also the only way to build something that holds.

The round doesn’t create the system. It funds the illusion that the system already exists.

The founders who treat the post-round window as a building phase, not a scaling phase, are the ones who actually scale.

The round is not the end of the hard part. It’s the beginning of the harder part.

When money is scarce, the founder is forced to be precise. Every decision counts, every hire counts, every deal counts.

When money is available, precision becomes a choice, and many founders stop choosing it.

The post-round window is where you decide whether you’re building a machine, an architecture, or still selling yourself.

That decision doesn’t depend on the market. It depends on how willing you are to do the unglamorous work of codifying what you know, before the team has to learn it alone.

Post-PMF doesn’t mean you’re ready to scale. It means you’ve run out of excuses.

This is the moment where most companies don’t fail fast.

They lose momentum quietly..

Featured image image from Pexels by Mikhail Nilov

The post The Post-Round Window: Where Startups Don’t Fail. They Lose Momentum Quietly. appeared first on Luigi Mallardo.

I ask him one question: how many deals do you need to get there?

Silence. I let it hang.

Then we do the math out loud. Average ticket €45K ACV. To close a €2M gap, he needs 45 new enterprise clients in 9 months. With an 8-month sales cycle. So he needs 5 new Enterprise clients every month, for the next 9 months.

With 10 deals in pipeline today for a total amount of 550K.

The conversation changes completely.

I work with a small number of founders building complex B2B tech — AI-driven SaaS, deep tech, vertical software, AI agents — selling into mid-market and enterprise. ARR between €500K and €10M. Different geographies. Different products.

They are post-product-market fit, but pre-scale. The hardest moment in the journey.

Over the last six months I started tracking what kept repeating — across operational meetings, live pipeline reviews, hiring decisions, deal post-mortems. Hundreds of hours of deep work. I later used AI on top of those transcripts to surface what was repeating. The logos changed. The patterns didn’t.

They have the product. They have customers. They have proof the market exists. The early deals came through relationships, instinct, sheer founder energy. It worked. Until it didn’t.

When the commercial engine stalls in B2B AI SaaS, the instinctive reaction is always the same. Look at the product. Add a feature. Hire a superhero rep. Wait for the market to “get it.”

The problem is almost never the product. It’s almost always how the founder interprets what they see, and the gap between instinct-driven selling and the architecture that scaling actually requires.

The Revenue Math Nobody Does

The opening scene is not an isolated case. It’s systematic. Almost every founder I work with has a clear target and a math that doesn’t add up. Not because they’re naive, because nobody has ever forced them to do the calculation out loud. When they do, priorities shift immediately.

The question is never “what’s your target?” The question is “what does hitting that target actually require: in deals, in meetings, in weeks?” That calculation, done honestly, is one of the most disorienting things a founder can experience. It exposes the distance between the narrative they carry and the reality they’re operating in. And it changes every decision that follows.

The Bottleneck Has A Name

In every company the commercial bottleneck has a name.

• Sometimes it’s a long-standing team member who knows the product inside out but can’t qualify a prospect.
• Sometimes it’s an external hire who produces theoretical go-to-market plans instead of getting in front of customers.
• In other cases it’s the Board, especially the lead investor, who pushes the founder to hire a pedigreed CRO when the company is not ready yet.

The founder already knows. They’ve always known. The work isn’t identifying the problem. It’s confronting the cost of inaction.

I’ve recently watched a salesperson lose a significant enterprise deal after two hours of technical demo without ever reaching the economic buyer and without understanding that the concern was about implementation and change management, not the product.

The problem wasn’t the demo. It was that nobody had ever defined what needed to happen in the first 20 minutes of that meeting. And nobody had held anyone accountable for it. The founder knew the meeting had gone wrong. They let it go anyway. That pattern, repeated across five or six deals, is what a stalled pipeline looks like from the inside.

The Founder Who Needs To Stop Being The Best Salesman In The Room

The founder is almost always the best salesperson in the company. That’s also the reason the machine doesn’t scale. As long as the first meeting choreography lives only in their head, the company depends on them for every deal that matters.

The work is first of all to codify that method: the opening, the qualification questions, the structure of the conversation, the next step, and transfer it. Not in theory. In practice, meeting by meeting.

I’ve seen a founder rebuild their entire approach to the first meeting from scratch, put it on paper, test it, then hand it to a newly hired Account Executive. Three months later the team was closing deals that previously required the founder’s direct presence. The founder was still in the room sometimes, but not as the salesperson anymore.

That’s the transition. It’s slower than it sounds and more important than almost anything else on the GTM agenda.

The Product As Refuge

When the commercial conversation becomes uncomfortable, founders retreat to the product. It’s human. It’s also dangerous.

I’ve seen pipelines blocked not because of missing features but because average ticket sizes were too low for the target segment, account profiles were wrong, and sales cycles were too short to indicate real enterprise engagement. The numbers said all of this clearly. The founder was looking at the roadmap.

I looked at a pipeline recently with an average ticket of €1,300 and a 50-day closing cycle. SMB numbers inside an Enterprise strategy. The founder’s diagnosis was that the product needed agentic AI integration before it could compete and justify higher pricing.

The actual diagnosis was simpler and harder to hear: the team was selling to the wrong accounts with the wrong motion. The product wasn’t the problem. The product was the excuse.

The Architecture That Never Ends

There’s a moment in every engagement where structural work needs to give way to execution. Revenue model, account list, ideal customer profile, first meeting choreography. All necessary, all worth the investment. But I’ve seen founders stay in “let’s build the system” mode for months while the pipeline sits empty.

A founding team once spent several months building what I’d consider a genuinely solid GTM architecture. Revenue model finalized. ICP defined. First meeting choreography on paper. Account list enriched. SOA ready. Every session produced a new layer of structure.

Then I asked a simple question: how many first meetings have you had this month? Four. I asked the same question the following month.

Six.

The architecture was immaculate. The pipeline was empty. At some point I stopped asking about the architecture and asked a different question: what are you afraid of?

The market doesn’t wait for perfect. At some point, you have to pick up the phone.

The Pattern That Divides Everything

This isn’t a pattern among others. It’s the variable that determines the speed of everything else — and the one that’s hardest to talk about directly.

Exposed to the same inputs — revenue math that doesn’t work, pipeline that isn’t moving, a sales motion that depends entirely on the founder — founders react in radically different ways.

Some upgrade fast. They take the feedback, kill the old deck overnight, rewrite the pitch, raise their prices, and are executing the new motion the next morning. The discomfort of seeing reality clearly is visceral, but brief. The action follows immediately.

Others resist quietly. They protect their existing worldview. They find reasons why their market is “different”, why the timing isn’t right, why the product needs one more thing before the commercial motion can really work. They schedule another product review. This week ends. The next week starts. Nothing has moved.

This isn’t a question of intelligence. It isn’t a question of experience. It’s the capacity to update your mental model when the data says something different from what you expected. It is GTM Cognitive Elasticity.

Take two founders with the same structural problem: pitch too technical, deals lost because the conversation never reached the economic buyer. One rebuilds the entire approach in a week, tests it on the next meeting, closes. The other spends the same week thinking about how to improve the product to make the pitch easier.

Same diagnosis. Opposite reactions. Very different outcomes three months later.

Cognitive elasticity can’t be taught directly. But it can be pressured. Weekly work — inside the real numbers, inside the live deals, inside the decisions that can’t be postponed — is one of the few environments where this update happens under conditions that actually matter.

The Market Timeline

Founders absorb GTM reality at different speeds. That’s normal. What isn’t normal is assuming the market will adjust to that pace.

I’ve worked with founders at €500K ARR and founders approaching €10M in the same period. Different revenue, different geographies, different products, different teams. The same patterns. The same delays. The same resistance in the same places.

The difference between those who scale and those who stall is almost never the product, the market, or the size of the opportunity. It’s the speed at which the founder can see what they don’t want to see, and act on it before the window closes.

Go-to-market was intuitive when the early customers came through relationships and conviction. It stops being intuitive the moment you need a machine, not a founder. That transition, from instinct to architecture and how you phase it, is where most of the game is won or lost.

The market has no patience for the gap.

Picture on pexels by Ali Borgiba

The post Scaling Complex B2B Tech: When GTM Instinct Ends and Architecture Begins appeared first on Luigi Mallardo.

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Especially if you are selling into Middle Market and Enterprise.

Thanks to “The Last Dance” on Netflix many people know that Phil Jackson was the head coach of the Chicago Bulls.

He let the Bulls to six NBA championships.

Not everyone knows that Jackson also coached the Los Angeles Lakers after the Bulls.

He won further 5 championships.

The secret formula was a Framework: The Triangle.

Having Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant in the team does not explain on its own the continuity of the successes of these two teams.

GTM Framework in B2B SaaS is a Four Pillar Game plan

People & Organization

There is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to building a B2B revenue organisation.

Too many variable in the game.

The stage of the company for example:

• Are you just starting up and have a lot of VC money in the bank?
• Are you bootstrapping?
• Are you a 5 or 10M in ARR with the revenue team to be rebuilt from scratch because things did not go as you expected?

Different situations, different solutions.

To provide another example, also the average deal size has an influence on the type of organisational strategy and plan.

As far as Go-To-Market leadership is concerned, in a previous post we discussed that ideally before hiring a Revenue Leader you should first build a team of 5-10 people:

• Two-three BDRs (Business Development Representatives)
• A few Account Executives with proven experience on similar deal sizes, of which at least two of them should be “on quota”.
• One Revenue Operation Lead with experience in Salesforce and B2B SaaS.
• Two Customer Success Managers with B2B SaaS experience on similar ARPA (Average Revenue Per Account).

If you want to be attractive for good and experienced Revenue Leaders the company must demonstrate traction and a decent initial revenue organisation in place.

When good candidates understand they have to transform, cut, build from scratch, and so on, they know that this process can take up to one year and a lot of energy and risk.

Many of them, the good ones, will pass.

Watch out for the young pros and their “title inflation”.

Would you let someone drive your Ferrari as soon as they got the driving license?

Concerning the sales profiles that are able to deliver quotas of 500K-1M+ in bookings per year, there are no shortcuts neither.

Don’t go cheap. Extend the search to key European hubs.

Look for people that have the key skills and proven experience to be successful.

Individual contributors motivated by the possibility to join a serious project and earn good money.

A great Leader finds a way to tie her stars to the destiny of the company. They’re carrying the day for her.

Sales is a hard job. If someone’s going to succeed, they need to truly believe that what they’re selling is going to be an enormous benefit to the customer.

From day one, the good Leader helps her team understand why the product is the equivalent of the cure for the worst sickness for the target customers.

It’s that sense of belief in what they are selling that will sustain the people through the frequent drudgery of the sales process.

Proposition & Focus

In recent years Customers have been demanding more depth, expertise and proof of performance.

They expect salespeople to teach them things they don’t know.

These are the skills of the future, and any revenue force that ignores this message does so at its peril.

You should formalise a Strategic Statement as the matrix of the GTM Framework in B2B SaaS.

As soon as the product-market fit is kind of validated, the CEO and the Go-To-Market Leader should build a one pager of Strategic Statement. 

The one pager clearly defines the foundational why and value proposition of the company.

At the same time, you need also to be able to quantify the business impact and value you bring to your customers.

Most European companies have a good understanding of what they are selling, and who is buying.

They have nice scrolling websites filled with all sort of products features and client case studies.

But lots of them are missing a foundational why. A bigger reason to exist.

They don’t have a why (much less a why now). And that’s the story you should really be starting with.

You want to create your version of an art gallery, where the goal is to walk the viewer through three rooms in sequence.

Room One isn’t about your company at all – it’s about the context of your company.

It’s about what you see going on in the broader commercial world that makes you relevant.

Once you have established the context, only then do you head into Room Two and articulate the value – the objective benefits based on roles and industries.

That’s when you start drilling a little deeper in order to provide specific role-based advice and relevant case studies.

Finally Room Three, what your service really does – its features and mechanics.

A template of Strategic Statement would need to include things like

• market insight and trends
• company ambition
• why us  and why now
• how we deliver our why
• what is that we sell
• success stories
• how to quantify the value for each of our customer. ROI simulator
• pricing and business model.

Is price more important than ARPA (Average Revenue Per Account)?

Pricing and the way the business model should be communicated to prospects deserve a special place within the  GTM Framework in B2B SaaS.

Pricing is a key growth lever, 4 times more powerful than Customer Acquisition and twice stronger than Retention.

Your product could be sitting on vast amount of unrealised value, simply because it hasn’t taken the time to test the market with new pricing strategies.

Or because it is not packaged or communicated properly.

You don’t need to guess anymore, but you do need to test.

It is certain that successful scaleups, generally, update their pricing at least annually. It means they are thinking about pricing constantly throughout the year.

In the era of AI the pricing frameworks are changing.

SaaS is moving from “Software as a Service” to “Service as a Software” and this is going to have a huge impact on the way pricing will work.

Dave Kellogg wrote a very interesting article about how the concept of ARR is challenged AI bringing new forms of value-based pricing, e.g, unit-of-work, usage-based or outcome-based pricing. Link to the article.

Teaching & Qualifying Choreography

As far as the GTM Framework in B2B SaaS is concerned the most important driver of sales success is the capability to be educational and insightful towards the Prospects.

Your team narrative should challenge the mindset of the Prospect and propose a unique perspective of the market and therefore of the company value proposition.

As a matter of fact as soon as you will have defined the Strategic Statement, you should focus on Product Marketing and build a Teaching & Qualifying Choreography to guide the sales conversations.

In the emerging sales model the direction of the information flow with the prospects is supplier-generated insight valuable to the customer.

This is the new physics of sales – it’s like the whole world is spinning in the opposite direction than it used to be a few years ago when the conversation was focused on customer-generated intelligence valuable to the supplier.

The first meeting in agenda with a prospect should never be a demo, as many still practice against all the evidence and industry best practices.

To sell into Mid-Market and Enterprise you need to say goodbye to features in your initial conversations.

Build a customizable Simulator of ROI

Let’s assume the sales team has qualified that the Prospect is actively looking for a solution like yours.

If they are not looking, at least they should have internally a “concrete anxiety” for the issue.

In that case your team should try asap to direct the conversation towards the build up of a customised Simulator/Business Case.

The business case should become the focus of the engagement in order to involve the right people internally and move the agenda forward.

You want the CFO or a finance senior person involved as soon as possible on that table as well.

Playbook

Do you think that the Playbook is a set of documents that explain to the team:

• how the process works
• what the Sales protocol is
• what are the stages of an Opportunity
• how they should use Salesforce and the rest of the tech stack?

If that is the case, you are not looking at Playbook with the appropriate perspective. Read more in this previous article.

You could write down the best SaaS GTM playbook (with or without the help of AI) and it could be worthless in reality.

The GTM Playbook is Behavior in Execution, Not a piece of Paper.

Basketball provides other good analogies when it comes to Playbook.

I will use a statement of Elad Gil in “High Growth Handbook” and adapt it to basketball.

“You know why playing a game is fun? Because it has rules, and you have a way to win”.

Picture a bunch of people showing in basketball playground with no rules. People are going to get hurt. You don’t know what you are playing for, you don’t know how to win, you don’t know how to score, and you don’t know what the objectives are.

The real challenge is not the process or the tech stack, the real challenge of the GTM Playbook in B2B SaaS is how to find the right people and help them execute well.

Building a world-class revenue engine is a journey, not an overnight trip.

To kick-off the GTM Framework in B2B SaaS rapidly and efficiently you should focus initially on a set of priorities:

• Get the Account List right.
• Get the Value Proposition & Pricing & Packaging right.
• Set the right “cadences” for getting good qualified meetings for the Account Executives
• Build teaching choreographies to get Account Executives manage authentic and straight-to-the-point conversations.
• Salesforce in place with initial and basic configuration mirroring the Playbook.
• A solid Funnel and two key Salesforce dashboards (one for the team activities, one for the sales pipeline).
• Continuous coaching and regular team meetings.
• As soon as Sales ramps up, a similar approach for Customer Success.
• KEEP IT SIMPLE.

Planning & Real Time Execution of the GTM Framework in B2B SaaS

There are different lives when you scale up a B2B SaaS company.

From 0 to 1M in ARR is Childhood. You enjoy the journey with your first employees. You have a good product and it doesn’t hurt not to have the right process, the right price, the right strategy, the right pitch. It’s all about Founders’ energy.

From 1M to 5M, you would typically spend a lot of energy in building a professional machine. The right People, the right Pitch, the right Playbook. It’s the Teen age.

The third life – Adulthood – starts at 5M when you aim to the magic number of 10M ARR, after which you would be in Major League with your valuation of 50-100M+ .

In adulthood the GTM leader should spends 50% of her time to look for and nurture the best people in the industry (VPs, Sales, Customer Success, Marketing). She hunts for experience and talent.

The effective leader knows that she needs to develop internally a great Zoom-in / Zoom-out capability: the ability to be fast, very strategic and very operational at the same time. Planning and Execution happens in Real Time, all the time.

In Operational terms her team works in SQUADS made of SDRs, Lead generators, AEs, CSs, Demand Gen, Revenue Operation.

Targets and Activities are organised around clear and measurable Outcomes.

The “court” of the Go-To-Market strategy game, at the center of the action, is the Customer Funnel. Everything is transparente and well organized in Salesforce. Continuous coaching becomes critical.

Conclusions for the GTM Framework in B2B SaaS

Growing healthily a B2B Sales business to 5-10-30M in revenue has become also a Science. It’s not only Art and Passion.

It can become simple and natural if you follow a proven framework. I’m not saying easy.

It’s about knowing What to focus on, When and with Which Framework.

Jeoffrey West brings great evidence of scaling as a law of nature in his great book “Scale”: ” Scaling simply refers, in its most elementary form, to how a system responds when its size changes”.

Modern and effective go-to-market leaders learn from their mistakes and from industry knowledge.

They know how to attract and retain the best talent with experience and never stop focusing obsessively on a GTM Framework in B2B SaaS made of 4 Pillars and 10 main Fundamentals.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like:

[A Founder Guide to Choosing the Right Help]

[The GTM Playbook Behind Woffu’s 9-Year SaaS Journey and Exit]

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The post Framework for a Healthy Go-To-Market in B2B SaaS appeared first on Luigi Mallardo.

It’s not surprising that each of those leaders has kept on a successful trajectory and the companies have been successful.

Michael Schimmel , Chief Commercial Officer at Kantox, acquired for 120 million euros in 2022 by BNP Paribas. Michael is still at Kantox as for December 2023 when this article had its last update.

Chris Evens, at that time VP of Global Sales at Red Point, now a powerhouse in brand protection that has more than 300 employees split between Europe and US at the end of 2023.

Oscar Macia, Founder and CEO at ForceManager, headquartered in Barcelona, with international offices in London, Berlin, Venice, Mexico City, Madrid, Bogota and Boston. With more than 100 employees and 1,500 customers worldwide.

The meeting was organized by my friend Jaime Novoa who was an Analyst (and now a Partner) at K Fund that had just started with a fund of 50 million euros at that time. In the meanwhile K Fund has become a world-class Venture Capital firms and one of the top ones in Southern Europe.

Playbook execution, finding the right people and choosing the right segmentation focus are some of the really interesting points that Michael, Chris and Oscar shared with me and an audience made by sales professionals and sales leaders working in the B2B SaaS industry.

Enjoy the video on this LINK and find below the main takeouts

PLAYBOOK AND SALES PROCESS

Chris:
Make sure you have the sales process and Playbook right. This is necessary when you hire 25 people in a quarter.
A concise 20-30 page Playbook to allow new hires ramp up quickly.
Focus on SMB or Entreprise? Make the right choices. It’s key segmenting well with simple criteria

Oscar:
Do the right qualification from the early stage of the Sales Development conversation.
Continued evolution of the Playbook for the different stages of the company.
Outbound works!.

Michael:
First step: understand the business of the client. Step 2: build a business case: ROI simulations to demonstrate business impact of the solution. Middle  and bottom of the funnel: Second presentation. Commercial discussion. Implementation.

SALESFORCE AS THE SCALABLE AND SOLID CRM

The 3 companies use Salesforce.

PEOPLE

Oscar:
Need different sales profiles for selling to SMB vs larger Accounts.
Hire based on proven deal size experience.
SDRs – Sales Development reps as the key engine of qualified meetings and opportunities.

Chris:
Successful sales people pitch on the business impact of the solution.
All the 3 companies recruit sales people based on role plays.

IMPLICATIONS OF MOVING TO A SAAS BUSINESS MODEL

Michael:
Change of Ideal Customer. Vertical strategies. Focus on Outbound. Impact on average deal size and sales cycle.

If you enjoyed this post, you will also like this Game Plan for a Healthy Go-To-Market in early-stage B2B SaaS.

If you found the content interesting please share with your network on social media and subscribe to my SaaSification newsletter.

The post Sales Fundamentals for 3 high-growth European scaleups appeared first on Luigi Mallardo.

How many SaaS B2B startups and scaleups are still following a GTM Playbook that is obsolete although it used to work well in 2015-2020?

In this article I’m sharing my perspective on what are the basic “Fundamentals” of a Go-To-Market Playbook. The elements that do not change with time or specific circumstances or industries.

Go-to-Market Playbook is not a template.

Search for “SaaS Sales Playbook” on Google and you will find a good selection of downloadable templates ready to deploy. Go to this link.

It happens more or less the same if you search for “SaaS Customer Success Playbook” or “SaaS Marketing Playbook”.

I had a meeting few years ago with the co-founder and the Sales VP of a Berlin-based SaaS startup backed by renowned Venture Capital firms. They were at around 5 million € in ARR but revenue had been flat for a while.

At some point during the meeting I asked whether the sales team had a Playbook and their answer was: yes of course!

At that point the VP started to screen share a word document of around 15-20 pages. Each page had a link to several other detailed word or excel files. At least 100 links. 5-10 links per page. There was truly everything a sales person needed to know to work in a structured way and be successful in that company. Everything. Nevertheless it was not working.

After 15 minutes of meticulous presentation I interrupted the VP and asked: does the team comply with this Playbook? Are they executing it properly?

Unsurprisingly, the co-founder replied: Luigi, that’s the issue. People don’t comply. We tried everything.

Well, I gave feedback to that team and it was that they thought they had a Playbook but they didn’t have any, as a matter of fact!

Playbook is behaviour in execution and not a piece of paper.

It’s not just a codified process. It’s a set of rules about the whole go-to-market strategy and how the revenue teams must work together.

“You know why playing a game is fun? Because it has rules, and you have a way to win. Picture a bunch of people showing up at some athletic field with random equipment and no rules. People are going to get hurt. You don’t know what you are playing for, you don’t know how to win, you don’t know how to score, and you don’t know what the objectives are.”

From “High growth Handbook” by Elad Gil.

Photo Ono Kosuki on Pexels

Playbook should work like the “imprinting” for animals.

“Imprinting, in psychobiology, is a form of learning in which a very young animal fixes its attention on the first object with which it has visual, auditory, or tactile experience and thereafter follows that object.”  From britannica.com

Understanding, digesting and seeing the Go-To-Market Playbook in action should be the priority activity that any new SDR, Account Executive, Customer Success or Demand Generation / Marketing person should get assigned as soon as they join the company.

On the contrary, it’s quite common that a new hire in the Revenue team is given endless product trainings at the very beginning.

When I joined a corporation like Kellogg’s at the start of my career they didn’t bring me to the factory at the very beginning, to learn everything about corn flakes.

The onboarding was focused on inductions about the value propositions, the competitive landscape, the positioning, the market data and most importantly they sent me on the court to spend time in supermarkets and see customers in action.

Product knowledge is important. Too much product knowledge may be counter productive for new hires.

Photo Racler Claire on Pexels

It’s a religion and not a dictatorship.

You need to build an army of devotees who believe in the game plan expressed by your Playbook.

They should execute driven by trust and not by fear.

As a revenue leader you need to behave with the passion of an evangelical pastor to explain obsessively the Why How and What of the playbook. For example I like to name the team shared folder “go-To-Market Bible”

It helps to generate that sense of the sacred that the documentation loaded on it (centrally managed) should have in order to drive the appropriate team behaviour.

Playbook is theory and practice and practice and practice again. Continuous enablement is the key.

Why did the team in Germany at the start of this article struggle to get the team execute the Playbook?

You can’t expect execution without building the conditions for the team to practice and you should provide continuous support and feedback.

For example in Sales during the first 12 months (at least) of Playbook implementation the agenda of the weekly one2many team meetings of a sales manager should always include a learning session of 20-30 minutes:

• Use the ‘learning’ section of your weekly meeting to review a section of your current playbook with the team and confirm, edit or remove plays as appropriate.
• It is an easy way to engage the team in a productive learning context
• Reps have the best advice on improving plays
• Gets buy-in to standard plays because they are co-created
• Sharpens the saw for everyone by thinking critically about our plays

Photo Monstera on Pexels

The Go-To-Market Playbook is a never-ending work in progress. It’s not a one-off exercise.

There is not such a thing as a Playbook for all seasons.

For the first 12 months since kick-off there should be structured reviews and edits at least once a month.

For the second year a review every quarter should be fine. Then twice a year is ok.

Example of structure for a SaaS B2B startup

Strategic

• About the company
• Roles within the team (the Why, How and What)
  • Sales Development Rep (SDR)
  • Business Development Manager (BDM)
  • Account Executive (AE)
• Which verticals do we target?
• Buyer personas
  • Job roles
  • Seniority
  • Others
• More details about our ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)

Sales Process

• Outbound
• Inbound

Sales Development

• Objective – Outbound
• Onboarding Plan for SDR
• Daily Planning of SDRs
• Prospecting and finding leads/contact details
• From contact to first meeting – steps to make
• Cadences
• Prospecting emails
• Elevator pitch – phone call
  • Outbound
  • Inbound

Sales protocol, Salesforce and tools

• Account Executives
• SDRs

Contract Conditions 

Customer Success

• Understanding the differences between Customer Success & Customer Service
• Customer Segmentation
• Funnel
  • Onboarding and Ramp-up
    • Viability check
    • Set up
  • Ramp-up
  • Full adoption
    • Full adoption
    • Follow up
  • Upgrade or Lockdown
  • Business Case
• Customer Health Score
• Support pack hours
• Churn
• Cases
• Communications
• Support requests + BUG

Featured photo by Cottonbro on Pexels

This article was originally written in 2021 and updated in October 2023.

If you enjoyed this post, you will also like Game Plan for a Healthy Go-To-Market in B2B SaaS and Game plan for going upmarket in B2B SaaS  and Is the “classic” VP Sales model broken in mainland Europe? and SaaS Revenue Leaders. How to reduce the 3 main risks in VC-backed startups.

If you found the content interesting please share with your network on social media and subscribe to my SaaSification newsletter.

The post The Fundamentals of Go-To-Market Playbooks appeared first on Luigi Mallardo.