Our team recently met with the CEO of a B2B tech company in Atlanta. Bootstrapped. ~$10M ARR.

Every SaaS company wants to scale their business; few companies know how to do it effectively and efficiently. 

Scaling requires executive and revenue leaders to think about the following:

A grueling part of the venture capital or private equity fundraising process is the due diligence phase. Potential investors will typically open up an investor data room, where the prospective company will provide as much data as they can to ensure investors that the business is a good investment.

It's common to think of data as just an operational component for sales and marketing teams.

But did you know that the quality of your data can actually inhibit company growth?

Has there been any phrase more overused in business lexicon over the last two decades than “data-driven”?

The ability to use data to optimize your go-to-market engine doesn’t happen overnight; it requires intentional work. Companies that are successful in executing a data-FIRST approach to customer acquisition build a layered data infrastructure. 

How healthy is your data integrity? According to many B2B revenue leaders, their data and methods of measuring key performance indicators could use a checkup:

Once you start capturing what your prospects are saying using a conversation intelligence tool like Gong.io, you’ll want to structure this data so it’s useful for optimizing marketing messaging, sales pitches, and product roadmaps.

Recorded calls between your prospects and your SDRs and Account Executives contain a gold mine of information for go-to-market leaders. Do you know how to properly mine those calls to extract useful insights, not just gather more data?

Making go-to-market decisions about strategy, positioning, and messaging without Voice of Prospect data is like driving at night in the countryside without turning on your high beams.

You can study your SDR activity metrics, sales pipeline growth, close rates, and lead attribution data all day and all night.

But performance KPIs only shine light on how you're doing - leaving it up to subjective opinion and collective reasoning to infer the rest.

This article is for revenue leaders and RevOps people who are frustrated with the inability to get trustworthy data to make smart analytical decisions.

Even if your sales and martech stack is a who’s who of G2 category leaders, your ability to manage can still be handcuffed by data inconsistencies, missing data, duplicate data or conflicting data in sales and marketing.

When growth flatlines for investor-backed tech companies, board members start pressing the CEO for answers...

“What’s going on?" "Can you get back on plan?" "How are you going to right the ship?”

CEOs and management teams often cite competition or business model challenges as culprits for slow growth. Other macro factors such as shifting market conditions, governmental bureaucracy, or economic downturns are sometimes blamed.

Rarely is poor data integrity mentioned as the reason for stalling out.

How the quest for simplification drove ignorance (not dissimilar to politics)

Lifetime Value / Customer Acquisition Costs (LTV/CAC) has long been a foundational metric to indicate the quality and health of a SaaS company’s business model. It is intended as a simple proxy for unit economics of a customer, or how valuable each customer is to a given company.

Unfortunately, inconsistencies in the way companies measure LTV/CAC and its oversimplification in considering the time value of money and cost of capital render it essentially useless in real-life practice.

Most early and growth stage B2B startups squander precious time and expensive capital thrashing through sales and marketing approaches that constantly change without any reliable data to inform their decision-making.

According to venture capitalists, at least 50 percent of sales and marketing spend by growth stage SaaS companies is nonproductive, resulting in skyrocketing customer acquisition costs (CAC), shortened capital runways, depressed growth, and ultimately lower valuations.

This article isn’t about blaming sales and marketing people, because it’s (usually) not their fault.

This is about reframing the way CEOs and revenue leadership teams manage their investments in new customer acquisition.

Over the last decade, we’ve observed a number of major sales and marketing pitfalls that hinder B2B startups from reaching their growth potential and often drive them into stagnation.

Spewing, hand-waving and back-pedaling.

I can’t even count how many times across so many companies as CEO or Board member that I’ve asked questions looking for specific information to help guide important Go-to-Market decisions only to have someone respond with a substance-free answer where useful information is indiscernible (all the while gesturing to add emphasis).

This combination is what I refer to as spewing and hand-waving. When I press a bit deeper the story changes, twisting and turning until it has no resemblance to what was originally proffered…back-pedaling if you will. If you're a top executive or investor you've most certainly experienced those painful moments yourself!