👉 Aubin Rioufol, Pennylane

It’s time to embrace growth once more! 

Over the past 18 months, we have all encountered the same advice: to prioritize profitability over growth. Fast forward to today : many startups have put their financial affairs in order, and some now find their competitors in less favorable positions. 

In this clearer landscape, it’s time to accelerate rather than waiting for things to pick up. It’s time to be bold and ambitious once more… but not in the same way as some did in the past (with three-quarters of the sales team focusing on Outbound and investing millions in Google Ads). 

Instead, we choose to invest in: 

• Sales training 

• Partnerships 

• Product-led growth 

Our experience at Pennylane has shown that this approach paid off much sooner than expected. The revenue per Sales doubled after just six months of coaching and the implementation of the right sales enablement strategy. Product-led growth began to yield results within a few months. 

Our vision for growth in 2024 at Pennylane also necessitates intelligent monitoring. We focus on two key metrics: 

• The Magic Number: measuring the extent to which every euro invested converts into ARR (…or vanishes) 

• The NRR: measuring how each euro of ARR either grows (…or vanishes

👉 Michele Rozzi, PSG

For a company that has reached the Product Market Fit stage, it is important to think about profitable growth. Developing a path to positive EBITDA can be done in conjunction with top-line growth. In order to get there, you really need to think about how to scale. Every investment in the business has to bring about more than proportional returns.

This is the time to think about what kind of organization you need to get your company to the next stage. It has to do with using a data-driven approach to track business as usual as well as different initiatives and make timely decisions about what to stop and what to continue. It may require professionalizing certain parts of you organization and fund that with fact-based trade-offs with other parts.

Innovation remains crucial and it can be enhanced by the right scale factors. All this requires good planning by the CEO and top management. It also needs orchestration and constant follow-through.