MODERATOR

Thank you Asya, Laetitia, and Richard for joining this discussion.

To begin with, I suggest discussing briefly the current context of pipeline generation. Where do we stand, and what are the key limitations?  

ASYA

I will start with the fact that most companies are struggling with pipeline generation because it’s harder and harder to create a unique value proposition and describe which gap exactly you are solving that is not a commodity.

To do that, you need to break through a lot of noise. Everyone is doing massive marketing campaigns and massive outbounding. And it’s very difficult to get to the right personas, especially if you want to sell topdown. Those personas, they’re already blind to any noise. Even if the message you’re trying to get across is valuable, they cannot hear it because it’s just too muffled.

MODERATOR

How can companies cut through the noise to reach their personas? 

ASYA

I think to build the right type of pipeline, you need to be hyperfocused. 

Your ICP, beyond the fact that it needs to be revamped and reviewed all the time, has to grow beyond Persona and company signals to actual intent signals.

The data-driven approach of understanding who to reach out to and how to prioritize who you are reaching out to is key. Collect the data on certain product or marketing activities your persona did, and then help the sales population use this data.

RICHARD

Earlier, in the golden age of SaaS, there was a lot of money flowing through the market, and we created a system where things were kind of easy: we’ve built a demand gen machine, yet SDRs and AEs created their own whole revenue engine.

And now, when budgets are lower, you need to sell to more personas than ever and that takes longer. That’s why it’s so important to be laser-focused. 

If sales teams are under pressure, what tends to happen is that they spread their horizon. But with this approach, you are diluting your message and setting yourself up for failure down the pipeline, wasting your time on wrong leads. 

Today, it’s really all about building that value proposition that makes sense. And that’s why it’s super important to have that clear ICP, perhaps going through a full ICP workshop with your entire organization to make sure that the product roadmap is aligned with the needs and the challenges of your buyer persona.

The old days of rolling out some email campaigns are over. You really need to specify where you make an impact.

LAETITIA

The recent tendency that we observe is B2B buyers demonstrating the same behaviors as B2C buyers. 

They do a lot of research before going for a product, and we tend to contact them thinking that they don’t know much about our product and about the competition, which is a mistake.

There is something that we need to be better at in B2B, which is lead gen. People need to have more content, they need to be able to find documents online that they can consult to perceive you as a company of trust. 

And here we can touch on the subject of referral as well. If your own clients are giving referrals for your product, it’s actually easier for you to get new leads, and new leads will convert faster as well.

Another thing that we are noticing is increased personalisation. Now, when we send a message, we need to understand our buyer persona very well. We need to do research and see if they have participated in a talk / written an article / have been published somewhere; we need to see what’s on their LinkedIn page, and so on. We need to be very personal when reaching out to them.

It’s not easy to do at scale. But trying to catch maximum leads in your net to see what comes out of it is not working anymore. Because these B2B buyers are becoming more and more aware and educated about what’s outside. 

And perhaps, for SMB prospects, there should be much more self-serve, while we focus our efforts on building a sales machine and a sales population ready to tackle enterprise and more complex deals.

MODERATOR

Could you specify when it makes sense to have self-serve, and when it doesn’t?

RICHARD

It comes down to the good old people-process-technology assessment.

It would make sense, indeed, to create a big demand organization if your customers bring 5K or 10K A/C on the yearly contract value. So, first of all, look at your ACV. Then, look at the seniority of your buyer. And, finally, at the complexity of the implementation. Those three elements together will decide what type of go-to-market motion you should have.

For your mid-market part, you have maybe a full sales cycle. We’ve created a world where we all have SDRs and AEs and where AEs become kind of lazy. The new generation of AEs was used to having those booked meetings on their agendas. But now the market is changing. You see, actually, that lower value deals are going through this process as well — there are a lot of handovers and it’s a terrible user experience. You can lose a lot of information, and there are a lot of moments where prospects can drop out.

Now I’m slowly getting into the people part already because we need to move more to an outbound situation. And you have to assess if you have the right people in place — the ones who can actually prospect and hunt for new leads.

ASYA

I think many companies are trying to win on too many fronts simultaneously. 

One of the things we notice is start-ups and scale-ups trying to do what they call PLG, which is not PLG at all, it’s self-serve, but they use the buzzword for their investor’s sake, I guess. 

And then they are also trying to sell enterprise top-down strategic level value.

So, on the one hand, you need to be able to talk to VP or C-level buyers to learn about their industry before you can really start a meaningful conversation. 

On the other hand, you need to build a self-serve journey with conversion points and intent signals.

They put the same AEs to do both things, and they use the same landing page or website content to generate leads from both ends. It doesn’t work and this is where, in fact, over the last 2 years they saw the biggest break of the pipeline. 

People were lying to themselves that if they didn’t have a lot of enterprise pipeline, they would launch this self-serve and immediately get tons of leads. 

First of all, people who are coming to self-serve are users, they are not buyers. So, you don’t have leads — those are not leads.

And then obviously, you don’t invest in the right type of content deliverables. So, you actually mess up on all fronts. That’s what we’ve seen in startups that launched around 2018 onwards.

So, what I push my customers to do is to really evaluate if my product is highly adoptable and highly consumed. If the adoption is very high and fast, maybe you should pull all your bets on the self-serve go-to-market, and then, you need other sellers for mid-market and enterprise, as Richard said — and that’s a different ball game. 

But most companies — they don’t have that. Most companies don’t have software that is adopted like a flame in a field. So, then don’t waste your time and resources and very big marketing budgets to acquire those self-serve users. Put everything into the right enterprise motion, and then, if you are going with an enterprise motion, don’t try to win all industries.

And I think companies are not doing enough industry depth, which is unfortunate.

MODERATOR

Let’s dive into the verticals and industry specialization. What should companies consider?

RICHARD

I think it’s extremely important to become your industry expert, building on what we mentioned before about the importance of providing value to customers.

This will help later on in referrals and case studies, and it can help with building a solid renowned brand. For B2B, it’s extremely important to make that business case. First, create a clear vision of ICPs and then show them that you understand their challenges and present the business case to overcome them and achieve real impact.

LAETITIA

At the same time, though, companies need to be careful as well not to be too niche. It’s a delicate balance — while it’s important to become an expert in your industry, you don’t want to steer into being too niche; otherwise, if something happens with that specific industry, your business will suffer.

MODERATOR

Let’s deep dive into this for a moment, how can you recognize if you’re going after the right amount of verticals, and then, how can you define which verticals to tackle?

RICHARD

What you could do is look at your current customers, and where do you make the most impact. And you can look at this from two perspectives:

• One is your go-t-market fit. On a scale from 0 to 10, how hard is it to sell to this company?

• Then, you can look at your product market fit. On a scale from 0 to 10, how much impact do we make for this company? 

LAETITIA

And then, once you have acquired a bit of experience, and you start to have a portfolio of clients, you can start diversifying as well. But step by step, as Asya mentioned, instead of trying to go everywhere at the same time. 

ASYA

I can’t agree more with Richard about learning about your existing customers. Going forward into 2024 and 2025, improving your NRR will become more important because ARR has been, I would say, over-mooched. 

And finally, I think people understand that, hey, we should grow the pipeline from existing accounts.

One reason is referrals, and it’s my golden tip for everyone — don’t stop asking for referrals from existing clients and prospects. Even if the prospect says you’re not a fit, you can always ask if they know anyone who can benefit from it, like a referral.

But then the second reason — our customers always understand our value proposition better, so collecting feedback is crucial. And this is another golden nugget that I use often to acquire a new pipeline.

RICHARD

One huge trend is to create customer advisory boards or user advisory boards to really collect quality feedback. First of all, celebrate your users. And second of all, there are so many valuable tips there. That’s what we mean by becoming customer-obsessed. 

LAETITIA

Companies mention this often, but they rarely actually go ahead and execute it. We see that they reinforce their acquisition team, and they don’t do it for their existing portfolio clients. But it’s so important to put all the effort into your existing clients. They are your backbone, and we need to nurture that relationship.

MODERATOR

How can companies safely invest in working with a pipeline of existing clients without having this parachute of a large number of new leads?

LAETITIA

I think companies should be relying more and more on data. Companies retain a lot of information, but most of the time, this information is not transformed into data. And most importantly, this data rarely turns into insights to help your teams make smart decisions. Instead, people rely a lot on feelings and perceptions. 

RICHARD

I see a shift in the market where more and more companies understand that CS is not only about churn prevention and a supporting type of role. Instead, they can actually grow business as an actual revenue driver, if you actually train the team to sell. 

ASYA

It’s very true. We haven’t spoken about partnerships yet. What do you guys think? What is the role of partnerships today?

RICHARD

More important than ever.

ASYA

Why, what type of partnerships? 

RICHARD

I think it’s more about building an ecosystem together. I think in the past many companies were keen to go direct to control the full cycle. But you can only go so far by yourself, especially when expanding into new territories. Partners can actually help you because they have a network already. Yes, you need to give them a fair share, but I would rather have a small piece of a really big pie than a very small pie. 

LAETITIA

If you have complementary strength, it works very well. 

ASYA

I have a complicated relationship with partnerships, and I will explain why.

You need to have a lot of patience, and you need to invest a lot upfront before you get to build a strong partnership. You will only see fruit if you invest in the long term. 

RICHARD

It takes longer, indeed. And I think that’s why a lot of leaders were favoring the direct approach. I used to work for an e-commerce company, where we were expanding into Southern Europe. 

The sales population was incentivized on the direct part, so we had to change the compensation plans, but it wasn’t effective enough. In the end, we had to split the team into a partner team and a direct team. So, the issue is also how do you incentivize your people because indeed, it’s not something that will pay off straightaway.

LAETITIA

I think you really need the right people for a partnership manager position — people who thrive in relationship building and have a lot of patience, yet who are capable of making a sale at the right time.

MODERATOR

So, we can say that partnerships have to be approached in the right way, which implies resource allocation. Since not every company can afford to pour resources into partnerships, can we label it a nice-to-have option?

LAETITIA

Absolutely.

ASYA

I will share one interesting option of partnerships that emerged last year in the SaaS market here in Israel, which was a very shaky year and still is. But this is something very curious to learn from. 

Many startups created technological partnerships. So, they actually brought together complementary value propositions and sold them as bundles. And this is something very unusual. We haven’t seen a lot of it, for example, security and cost optimization selling together as a bundle. It’s almost like going back into services, selling packages as a whole assessment. This is how we can also maximize every dollar, every customer.

RICHARD

Yes, so the go-to-market motion is completely different from the direct model. I think that’s where a lot of companies fail as well because they evaluate the growth rates of partnerships the same way as they evaluate the direct channel. 

It really is a long game, but it’s extremely powerful. And yes, bundles and partnerships with software complementary types of solutions are a great idea.

Q1/8:
How can organizations effectively transition their GTM from SMB & Mid-Market segment to Enterprise in 2024?

👉 Stephane:

What we have seen, I think, during the last 6 to 12 months is that it’s becoming harder and harder for SMB and Mid-Market businesses to have sustainable growth. 

The markets and VCs, in particular, want startups to have a faster path to profitability, and one way of doing it is to move up market.

But the reality is that it implies very big changes for the company itself, starting with product, obviously, but also in terms of company DNA when it comes to selling.

I would say that from what I’m seeing, enterprise is basically like the new El Dorado. Everybody wants to move up market, but I very rarely see the company roadmap to transition from SMB/Mid-Market motion towards an Enterprise motion.

Q2/8:
What are the main pitfalls of this transition?

👉 Asya:

I really connect with what Stephane said because when we are doing very well in transactional sales, we often work on volume. So we have a lot of small deals, we can break down and multiply the actions that led us to the targets very easily.

However, when we move up market, we need to develop a much richer offering. Often, we don’t have the time to really develop new models, but we do need to provide more service. We need to provide more enterprise security or SLA. 

So when we package our enterprise offering, now we need a channel to distribute this offering, but we might not have this mechanism in mind yet. Not the people nor the process of how to even break down this into tangible milestones. 

And I will give you a very simple example. Amplitude has just now made the change in their pricing offering. As an enterprise, they are trying to win more market share and add another pricing tier because they understand that the way they were going up until now was not enough. They had to add another team that will do a different type of qualification, deal management, and customer management after closing. So you basically need to think about three pillars there: in pipeline generation, in closing, and then in management. 

And that’s a lot to take for a company. Usually, companies trying to transition succeed at getting their first customer, but they don’t know how to keep them,  or how to increase the customer’s adoption.

And you know what? When I think about it, one of the bigger problems is that the ICP is not being redefined well enough. And based on that, we don’t know what needs to be the win for our enterprise buyer. 

So the cost of inaction that we identify when we sell to mid-market doesn’t have to be that drastic because the cost is not very high. 

But when we are going up market, we have to build very strong business cases, and we need to carry them across multiple personas, huge committees. So, as an account executive leading this type of engagement, you need to perfect process leadership.

And then, you need to have a strong business case and ROI understanding. So, you need to understand the market, competition, and current processes much better.

Q3/8:
How deep do the changes have to be?

👉 Asya:

Well, obviously, we’re keeping the main value proposition, but we have to change the way we package it, including the wording. So if our value proposition was to a certain team, now we need to think not on a team level but on an organizational level. 

No one is putting 50K or 100K today on a solution that is not directly triggering action and affecting a company’s KPIs. 

This is where it usually breaks: teams are going with the same messaging and value proposition, which is not tailored to a higher seniority persona. They end up underselling the value, and the ROI is not there.

👉 Stephane:

It reminds me of a situation I’ve had recently with a client targeting mid-market businesses who happened to have signed large enterprise deals and clients.

This client is backed by a top-tier American VC who was very impressed that this startup managed to do that without an enterprise sales team.

But unfortunately, what happens is that they’re experiencing a significant churn. And it’s actually logical, not only from a product standpoint but because the company itself is not yet structured with the right profiles to manage those accounts at the right level. 

They don’t have churn monitoring programs. They don’t have those triggers that basically can prevent and detect churn before it happens.

When you need to be in touch with the boss of the boss and so on, if those very basic techniques of account management are not very well mastered by the teams, it will ultimately lead to churn, even for outstanding products like the one I’m talking about. 

I think that a lot of companies are not equipped to handle enterprise when they are coming from an SMB environment. This is the case for sales teams, but it is even more important on the account management side.

👉 Laetitia:

It reminds me of a situation I’ve had recently with a client targeting mid-market businesses who happened to have signed large enterprise deals and clients.

I would say that what is very important as well is the alignment between marketing, product, and sales. We talk a lot about sales and the fact that the people in the sales team need to upskill because selling to an enterprise market is different from the SMB or mid-market. 

But it’s the same with the misalignment that you can have between marketing, sales, and product. This is also a common issue that we can see: upskilling the AEs to go after bigger deals but not helping them with marketing and product adaptability.

Q4/8:
What are the ingredients for success if you want to move up market?

👉 Laetitia:

I would say that companies have to, as we mentioned earlier, upskill their sales population, upskill their account managers, and everyone in the company.

They have to make sure that they really have the right message for the right person. Sending a message out there to see what happens doesn’t work. 

This is why I was talking about the alignment between marketing, sales, and product. It’s important to ensure that each of these organizational structures within the company has a roadmap that ties up together.

👉 Stephane:

When I ask myself that question, I’m also thinking of all the companies which are not yet executing well enough on the SMB and mid-market side. 

It’s interesting, this human way of thinking by design that if something is not performing on the left, you should go to the right, where actually maybe you haven’t spent enough time fixing what should have been fixed on your current SMB and mid-market business.

Because you probably can still extract a lot of performance out of it instead of moving up market, which requires a tremendous amount of effort and financial investments. 

So I think the very first item leadership teams and founders should consider is, am I entirely sure that I’ve extracted the full potential from my SMB and mid-market motion? 

Q5/8:
Hedi, the CEO of Cachet, shared in the Forum her advice for CEOs and founders to try to avoid FOMO.
Is moving up-market a time-sensitive action?

👉 Stephane:

I think that, on the contrary, it is time-sensitive in a sense that you should not make this move too fast.

Because those who have the fear of missing out, as Hedi said, and I think she’s very right, are jumping into the enterprise shift without preparing the architecture that needs to be implemented and orchestrated within the company to go in that direction. 

If you want to transition, regardless of the size of your company, I would say that either between series A to series C – it’s going to take a minimum of a year, eventually two, if you want to win enterprise accounts in the right fashion. 

So, you should not expect any result at all from making such a move in 2024. If you’re making it right now, it will eventually pay off in Q4 2024 or in Q1 2025. 

👉 Asya:

It’s a fun question about FOMO that I touch on a lot because we all remember less than a year ago when the VCs were pressuring absolutely everyone to go into PLG. And most of the companies that jumped into it did it with a surface motivation. 

And now most of those companies (actually the same ones who jumped to PLG) are doing the opposite. Now, they are jumping to sales-led growth or enterprise-led growth in the same fashion. 

When you choose your distribution motion, you have to understand in which market specifically you operate, who is your ICP and target persona, and what your budget is. 

And I really agree that if you haven’t succeeded in mid-market, the chances of just going up market and succeeding, let’s be honest, are slim. 

Why did you even choose to start from the mid-market? What led you to this decision? Is it because you believe that you cannot take too much money that the ACV is relatively low? Is it because you have a very light implementation, and it’s an easy and transactional sale? 

Let’s not forget that moving to enterprise also means that you have to change the sources of where you generate your leads from. It’s not going to be VPs of sales, marketing, or engineering from banks clicking on your ads and leaving their contact details, right? That’s not going to happen. So you also need to change the whole motion. 

Q6/8:
And for those who have excelled in their current segment, what will be the winning formula for moving upmarket, specifically in 2024?

👉 Stephane:

Well, I think that the losers – the companies that will not succeed – won’t change much. 

Except maybe hiring enterprise account executives. So I think we will see across all companies trying to move up market, an increased tension in hiring enterprise account executives. So we could expect higher competition for those profiles and eventually higher salaries and scarcity in finding the right profiles. But I think it will stop there for the losers. I don’t think they will change much in their own organization. And that’s the reason why it’s not going to work out. 

I think that the winners, on the other hand, will probably give sales enablement and marketing a much bigger seat at the table. And eventually, though Asya will speak much better about it than I do, all the enterprise-related sales functions like solution consultants which are kind of mandatory in the enterprise segment.

And I think we will probably see bigger marketing budgets and bigger sales enablement budgets, which are required for a company to transition towards an enterprise motion. 

👉 Asya:

We have to consider that in order to invest in marketing and sales enablement, especially sales enablement or product enablement even, which are not revenue-generating functions, a company has to have funds. 

So, if we look at the timeline, most companies that want to do this transition, they want to do it because they want to get the funds.

So it’s kind of a catch-22. They cannot invest, or they feel that they cannot invest in functions that are not revenue-generating directly before they complete their round, but they cannot complete their round without bringing big customers with huge deals to the table. 

And I agree with you that there will be a difference in actions, like always, between the leaders and the ladders. 

And for the leaders, I think the first and most valuable act will be focusing not only on new lead generation but also on internal and external loops, especially using their existing customer base. Investing in smart referral programs, expanding the landed accounts, looking into how my mid-market customer can bring me to my next enterprise customer, and putting the right people in customer success and enablement from the other side of the bowtie. 

And in terms of marketing, I have to say I’m not sure that there will be more money invested there, because, especially in enterprise, there are less and less paid activities that will generate leads. So, where will you put the money? Will you put the money into branding, in content, or in market education?

👉 Stephane:

In branding.

👉 Asya:

Yes, in branding, in market education, and in content. And this is interesting because this has already become sort of a different function in marketing. Not a lead-generating function but an educational one.

👉 Laetitia:

And just to build on what you were saying, Asya, right now, the companies need to focus much more on their existing customers. This is something that was left aside for a long time in favor of acquiring new clients relatively easily. But keeping your clients is so important because it costs much more for a company to acquire a new client than to retain the one that they have.

👉 Stephane:

I couldn’t agree more with you, Laetitia, and I think that this is a huge topic that has been left out. And to loop a little bit on the enterprise topic, I can tell for a fact that if you are not exceptional when it comes to account management and dealing with client relationships in the enterprise field, you have no chance of building a big business there. 

Q7/8:
Speaking about topics that are frequently neglected, is there any other function that you believe is not receiving the attention it deserves?

👉 Asya:

I actually wanted to jump in with another layer that was overlooked, and that’s partnerships. 

I myself built quite a few partnership processes, and I know that it was always like: let’s work with partners who can bring us revenue today or partners whose name is a huge alliance that will benefit our brand. 

But it wasn’t strategic enough. I think companies that want to expand to enterprise have to incorporate a partnership mindset, both as technological, reselling, and consulting partners. All of those three layers create so much segway into the markets.

When we want to expand to new markets, how do we do that? 

In the past, it was going to all the events in this market, paying for a booth because it’s located in the region where we want to create a presence. Or putting a huge marketing budget to create campaigns and a visual presence. 

I think today it’s a very valid decision to shift those budgets, or part of those budgets into partnership motions and bring people who really know to build partnerships. 

👉 Stephane:

In Europe, at least from what I know, partnership is also like the new El Dorado. So everybody wants to have a partnership team, usually composed of one person, eventually two. But there is no structure, no senior leadership in it. And this can be a reason why partnerships may just not be working yet.

👉 Asya:

A very strong sign that something is becoming urgent is that startups in this space start to emerge. So one of the bigger areas where new startups are born are partnerships, leadership, and management. So, I think it will have to become an intentional process. How do you generate revenue out of it? How do you create a process to create this stability of huge partnerships and alliances?

Q8/8:
So what would be the concrete next steps for companies who decided to transition to the enterprise segment?

👉 Asya:

I think you have to put together a very robust 12-month plan that you have to present to your board and to your investors. 

And it has to include what Laetitia said in the beginning, the entire leadership alignment, starting with a product. It has to be a profound change in the DNA of how the company is operating. And we also discussed that with Asya: the types of profiles and expertise you will need. 

And probably, this 12-month plan will require a much bigger investment than was initially planned in your business plan. So you will have to rework it. And I think it’s a collective exercise to do with the leadership team of your company. That’s one direction. 

I think the other direction, which is still very valid, is to say, okay,  folks, have we done everything we were supposed to do on the SMB and Mid-Market segment? Are we entirely sure that we do everything right? You will never do 100% of success in everything, but are you entirely sure that you’re still operating in the best fashion possible when it comes to extracting performance in your current segments? I would really explore that first before trying to put the 12-months business plan.

👉 Asya:

Also, always remember to experiment before building a 12-months plan. You can also just try one deal with one customer and one use case to learn how big your gaps are.