Building a SaaS Commercial Org

Intro

Nominow - An Assist Digital Company is a SaaS CDP which has been developed over the last decade or so under the wings of The Valley - CX Agency .?

It always had an indirect sales motion through the account team at The Valley - CX Agency .

It started off as a platform that needed a lot of implementation efforts prior to it running at the clients’ location.?

Luckily Nominow had a launching customer that immediately tested the platform's boundaries as they loaded more than 12mio customer profiles in it.?

Oh, and they had to integrate 23 different customer data sources.

Here is where the idea of the current form of Nominow arose.

Over the years, 10+ customers were onboarded?with an overseeable dedicated team with a strong (technical) drive.

Meaning low overhead and steady (but slow) product development.?

It proved its worth though as the launching customer 10+ years ago is still with us, which we are proud of.

As it always had an indirect sales motion, it meant there was barely a GTM strategy, hardly any outbound activities, no ICP, no content strategy, no own CRM, etc. etc.??

Greenfield

So, starting at Nominow feels like a Greenfield.?

Auke Meijer & Philip Kok RM give me the mandate to do as I see fit whilst the team is sharing their learnings over the years.???

1st month activities:

1. GTM strategy
2. ICP + Target persona definitions
3. Content Strategy + Social Calendar
4. Hubspot set up (thanks Sharen Murnaghan !)
5. Sales enablement content + design updates
6. Website updates
7. Partnership explorations (including with our parent company Assist Digital )
8. Outreach automation to scale in outbound efforts ( ChatGPT works wonders in this to drive personalised messaging at scale)
9. Outbound motion started???

Loads of work done with the team, good initial steps.

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Highs & Lows

• We are looking still at whether we resonate in the market well enough as a CDP.? This is because the market is super fragmented in different types of CDPs and we are a data CDP rather than a campaign CDP where marketers really operate in themselves. Different perspectives, different values.
• There are loads of benefits of working in a larger organisation ( The Valley - CX Agency ) where you have many different expertise that could help you speed up a lot in the production of content/design assets/etc.?However, all these experts are also working for our clients and those generate revenue, internal projects don’t directly generate it. Balancing this is key.???
• Coming from a more SaaS/Consulting agency background I have seen many many kitchens from the inside out but these have always been from a high-over perspective.?Now it’s really getting into the nitty-gritty of it all and I read loads of tips/tricks from other SaaS revenue leaders and implement what seems logical for our business.
• First prospect meetings were held, I was nervous as hell as I was trying to uncover the prospects’ pain points and focus areas for a completely different product than I was used to.?Thanks, Beer Zandt & Koen de Groot for showing me how this is done because even as this is a different product/service, it’s not about pitching your product.?It’s about understanding the prospect.?Follow-up booked???
• Working on finding the email sequence angle I should use.?Currently send out two different sequences, total amount of 198 contacts, +/- 26% bounce rate, +/- 9% open rate and +/- 3% reply rate.?Oh, and about 70 out-of-office replies.?Perfect timing.

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So, as I have loads of SaaS Revenue leaders in my network, what were the things you would have done (done differently) if you could redo it all again?

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Keen to hear, see you next week.

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