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The Great SaaS Pipeline Crisis of 2023-2024 (explained in 60 seconds):

• Cold outreach is a fraction as effective as it was last year
• 10/8/6/4/2% response rates are now 5/4/3/2/1%
• Sales leaders are responding with higher activity targets
• AI copywriting and sending tools are increasing volume even further
• Cheap domains and tools like instantly make more volume even easier
• Higher volume drowns out any attempt at great personalization
• LinkedIn inboxes are even worse (mine is like nothing I have ever seen before)
• Fed at 5%+ interest rates has every company (and person) spending less $
• Follow-on rounds are questionable at best
• “Buy less SaaS” is the world-wide directive

TAKEAWAY:

The Predictable Revenue model (born in 2012) died in 2023.

Anything your reps did to create pipeline 24mos ago produces 50% the result.

Luckily, certain pipeline-generating tactics are working better than ever.

There’s a NEW MODEL centered around C-level executives creating content that cuts through, which builds trust over months (if not years) directly with the market.

Signal-based selling allows you to nudge prospects down the funnel, capturing them when they’re ready to buy.

You close MORE ARR and grow FASTER, because your reps are senior, can handle more, been around a long time, and make fewer mistakes.

Plus, sales cycles are 2/3 shorter because your reps aren’t spending any time with people who aren’t ready to buy.

Your company culture improves dramatically because hyper-efficient companies are fun to work in, and you don’t have a single person who isn’t crushing it.

It’s a Push Model vs. a Pull Model.

One side of that equation ISN’T feeling the Pipeline Crisis.

In 2024, pull wins.

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Over the past 60 days, my COO and I have spoken to 80 founders, marketers, and sales leaders about 6Sense and DemandBase. Not a SINGLE PERSON said it was a “slam dunk”, despite spending $50-100k/yr or more. Why?

To set the stage:

• We have been doing market research for our person-level identity product
• We’ve been speaking to customers of 6Sense, Demandbase, Clearbit
• All vendors stop resolving anonymous visitors at the company/account level
• We’ve been trying to figure out why nobody has closed the loop on ABM

There seem to be six MAJOR problems with the existing ABM technology.

1. The 3rd party intent signals provided were never actually “intent”

6Sense and Demandbase build audiences based on CONTENT CONSUMPTION, rather than actual intent to buy. Genius marketing, pioneered by the concept of the Dark Funnel, combined with teaching marketers how to show claimed revenue reporting to execs, fueled exponential growth of the two companies over the past 5 years.

2. Most of the value of the products comes from retargeting website visitors

There was consensus that the intent-based audiences were somewhat “meh” and most of the conversions came from retargeting of people who hit the site. Retargeting tech in general introduces the problem of whether or not the tech actually created a NEW conversion, or just got in the way of something that was going to happen anyways, and claimed the $.

3. False positives can be a MAJOR problem for high-ACV SaaS companies.

There wasn’t a single person we spoke to who had a high level of confidence in the accuracy of the website visitor reporting below true enterprise (which isn’t valuable anyway - who cares if someone from Microsoft in Atlanta is on your site).

4. It’s hard to use, and time consuming to onboard.

I saw a few actual DemandBase instances and they made me want to vomit. Apparently 6Sense is moving towards an easier-to-use platform built for sales, but I’ve heard it can currently take up to 90 days for a larger org to onboard.

5. It’s expensive.

I spoke to people paying $50-250k/year for the tech, I’m sure at larger companies the bill is even higher. Part of the reason the sentiment was so “meh” is because there were few (if any) cases where tremendous ROI was obvious.

6. Their website visitor resolution stops at the account/company.

I'm beating a dead horse here, but people actually want to know the individual who was on the site, not the company.

TAKEAWAY:

I have a deep respect for 6Sense and DemandBase.

Especially the go-to-market efforts.

But I think there’s room for something new and wildly different.

People want to close the loop on ABM.

They want to figure out the PERSON who hits their site.

That's why we’re launching a person-level ID tech that you can use alongside 6Sense, DemandBase, and ClearBit, where we push the LinkedIn profiles of your website visitors to a Slack channel in real-time.

It’s 100% free.

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1. strong hook
2. context (setting up the stage)
3. six major problems with ABM Tools
4. Takeaway/ conclusion;

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During my career I helped price 10+ SaaS products that have generated over $3B in revenues. Recently my CEO Adam Robinson and I discussed how to price our new B2B product. Here's a breakdown of our thinking:

BACKGROUND:

We are launching a new identity-resolution product that is arguably superior to other substitutes in the market.

The market we operate in has organized itself into two tiers:

High and lower priced solutions.

Here’s a pricing wisdom that I have developed over time :

1. If you want to increase revenue incrementally, increase price

2. If you want to increase revenue exponentially, decrease price

3. If you want to dominate your space, give it away for free and charge later

When pricing, it’s important to understand your motivation:

• Are you trying to capture more revenues?
• Are you trying to compete more effectively?
• Do you want to switch market segment or increase TAM?
• Do you want to comfortably win or completely dominate the space?

Once there’s clarity, it becomes easy to use pricing as a lever to navigate the business towards the desired outcome.

We are fortunate to have a profitable business that’s generating $22M+ in ARR.

This allows us to go slow on monetization.

From our initial discussions, it was clear we needed to optimize our pricing and GTM for rapid market adoption and not short term revenues.

Largest growth always happens at the latter end of the curve, but for that we need to have a bulk of the market already using us.

We will try and get 250K+ domains (including free signups) in the next 2 years.

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