Rapid, sustainable growth.
Expansion while maintaining efficiency and cohesion in your market strategy.
Finding balance.
These are some of the (many) challenges of today’s B2B organization.
Harrison Rose saw great success at his first startup, Paddle, a London-based company that provides payment infrastructure solutions for software companies. Along with his best friend (and co-founder), Harrison turned a two-person operation into a unicorn.
In July 2022, Harrison co-founded GoodFit, a company specializing in Go-To-Market (GTM) functions, revenue, and strategy. He’s currently serving as GoodFit’s CEO.
In this article, Harrison discusses lessons learned at Paddle and GoodFit, and provides many powerful insights and best practices for scaling and thinking about overall GTM structure.
Harrison also touches on:
- Why building an outbound machine is a must-have ... once you know your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
- The power of strategic customer targeting
- The importance of timing and getting in front of the right customers
- How utilizing data to inform GTM strategies and sales processes is essential
Let’s start with outbound.
Outbound can be immensely successful — if you know your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Harrison and his team were all outbound in the early days at Paddle — mostly emails, with some cold calls peppered in.
Using this strategy, he and his cofounder grew Paddle into a $1B+ company. So, what was his secret for running this super-efficient and effective outbound machine?
“I really obsessed over who and how we operated our program,” said Harrison. “How we prioritized. It was ‘easy’ at Paddle because we had a very specific type of customer — software companies with some sort of checkout process.”
Find them. Sell to them.
Easier said than done.
But Harrison quickly realized there was an enormous market of software companies that didn't have a checkout. Reaching that audience became his new mission.
Find them. Sell to them.
However, it turned out this “no current checkout process” group really loved invoicing. Who knew?! So Harrison had to pivot (again). He “got really laser-focused on ensuring whatever ‘marketing experiment’ we ran was directed at the right customers from the start.”
That foundation — finding your ICP — is arguably the most critical aspect of outbound.
Too often, prospecting best practices and training programs are focused on tactics: How to write the best email. How to structure an ideal cold call. But tactics don’t matter if you are not reaching out to the right people at the right accounts at the right time.
How do you know you have defined the ideal customer profile? What are the leading indicators, the metrics, of success?
The right customers at the right time (your ICP)
For Harrison, it’s all about optimizing the “qualification rate.” What percentage of prospected contacts meet your criteria? What percentage are the right qualified customers to sell to?
That’s the qualification rate.
Set a baseline rate. Then, iterate and optimize.
For example, if only 30% of the leads you’ve sent to sales are qualified, you’ve wasted 70% of your time and spend.
Harrison has an analogy: If you want to sell your house, you need amazing photos (great emails), and a fantastic description (ideal subject line) to entice someone to book a tour. If your listing doesn’t get in front of people — those in the market to buy a house and those who qualify (financially) to buy a home — nothing else matters.
Here is the process he recommends:
- Start with the qualification, the ideal audience.
- Map your market with as many of those qualified customers as you can.
- Leverage as much firmographic and technographic information as possible to reach that Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
- Then, prioritize the accounts. Who will you target first?
Here’s a real-world case study of how Clari approached this prioritization challenge in 2020:
We reviewed our customer base and realized we had a few dozen that were private when they bought Clari and eventually IPO’d. Suddenly, we had a great story to tell. We then looked at our ICP and broke out a new cohort of potential customers — those undergoing the same strategic initiative as previous customers we had worked with successfully worked. This meant high-growth, late-stage companies with the “right” amount of revenue.
Our prospect universe shrunk from the unmanageable “tens of thousands” to nearly 100. From there, we ran a very targeted “Here’s exactly how we've helped companies like you achieve IPO campaign.”
The key lies in the data. While many data sources are available, nearly all are incomplete or insufficient.
If you can nail the data problem, you’re onto something.
For Harrison and team, the data became the real crux of how they went to market, how they aligned sales and marketing teams, and the messaging they delivered to a client based on what they knew about them ... even product decisions.
Excellent data.
Data is so powerful, but it comes with its own set of challenges
We all strive to optimize data, but it will never be 100%. There is no such thing as a perfect data set.
And the data you provide will never be “enough” for all parties.
So, how can you solve these data issues to empower fiscal year planning, territory lead distribution, and more?
The problem, according to Harrison, is that most reps today are given a “huge database of accounts and contacts to prospect from.” They can filter however they want, but they may be pretty junior and not really know how to prioritize. Even if they do know, they often don’t have the data necessary to filter the customers they want to sell to.
That means reps spend hours and hours on non-selling activities just to try and do their job.
- It’s frustrating for reps — they’re not selling; they can’t locate the accounts they need
- It’s costly for the organization — via wasted time, inefficient processes, and revenue leak
In an ideal world (one that is possible), a rep gets into their CRM and sees their set of accounts in an ordered queue prioritized based on fit. Next level: The best type of messaging that will resonate, lead to an open, a click, and a new qualified lead is predetermined, and set for the rep.
Essentially, this process removes as many of the top-of-funnel decisions, time sinks, and mental thought-processing exercises that are often needed for every single prospect.
The net result:
- Increased rep velocity and productivity using data
- Automation to increase efficiency
- Empowered reps doing what they do best (and are paid for): Selling, handling objections, pitching value propositions, and so on.
All of the above is arguably the job of RevOps. Having this robust data set helps tremendously. It’s a game-changer.
But outbound is not the only way to realize success.
The power of word of mouth (and balance)
While Paddle was primarily outbound-driven in its first five years, GoodFit’s marketing strategy has been the complete opposite — word of mouth, which most people will agree is the best form of marketing.
How has Harrison created this word-of-mouth machine?
GoodFit was a bit more of a known entity — at least in Europe — based on Harrison’s success at Paddle. “We were doing some quite interesting stuff with data. Because of this, people would refer qualified leads to us constantly. We were fortunate to have a queue of people lined up to buy GoodFit before it even started.”
Harrison confesses that one of the mistakes they made at Paddle was not investing in establishing themselves as payment/tech/recurring billing thought leaders. They didn’t build enough brand credibility out of the gate.
But it’s not one or the other. There has to be balance.
Invest in the channel that's working. Find the repeatable sweet spot. Sustained growth also requires individuals willing to experiment and enhance various programs. That’s often a very different type of profile with a very different set of skills.
The takeaway? Continue to do the things that work. Iterate. Grow. Find balance.
The instinct for traditional marketers is to throw money into the direct response channels that will generate pipeline and create opportunities immediately. But too often, that approach turns into “throwing good money after bad.” You can’t solely invest in lead generation without layering in demand creation, brand awareness, and thought leadership.
Balance.
The delicate balancing act of demand creation and lead generation
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to rapid, sustainable growth.
Navigating B2B growth requires a delicate negotiation — getting laser-focused on your ideal customer profile (ICP) while balancing marketing efforts.
The key: Finding the optimal mix of demand creation and lead generation.
Inbound. Outbound. Word-of-mouth marketing. All of it, with balance.
Invest in the channels that work, experiment with new ones, and build a team with diverse skills to adapt and thrive.
In B2B, it's not about the number of leads you have. It’s about converting the right leads.
Ready to learn more about RevTech? Check out our no-nonsense guide to Revenue Platforms to get started today.