How pitch narrowed their ICP and accelerated growth (with Ulrik Bo Larsen)

How's PLG different from outbound? We asked someone who's worked with both motions. And the interesting part? 

They used a very simple trick to accelerate their PLG: Defining their ICP.

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (10:02) - Finding the ICP
• (19:37) - Acquisition and Sales Strategy
• (20:04) - Brand equity
• (22:53) - Trigger for engaging
• (25:55) - Self-Onboarding and Offboarding Dynamics
• (28:44) - Outbound Strategies and AI-Enabled Lifecycle
• (41:54) - Conclusion and Final Thoughts

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Creators and Guests

Host

Mikkel Plaehn

Marketing leader & b2b saas nerd

Host

Toni Hohlbein

2x exited CRO | 1x Founder | Podcast Host

Guest

Ulrik Bo Larsen

Exec Chair & President at Pitch

What is The Revenue Formula?

This podcast is about scaling tech startups.

Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Raul Porojan, together they look at the full funnel.

With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.

If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.

TRF - Ulrik / Pitch
[00:00:00] Toni: Today's episode is brought to you by ever stage, the top writer platform to automate sales commissions. You can create a single hub for your reps to track all their deals, earnings, and performance history thanks to EverStage's seamless integration with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Slack, and MS Teams.
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[00:00:31] Toni: And now, enjoy the show,
[00:00:33] Ulrik: There's no story slash master plan with a hair. It just kind of just kind of happened.
[00:00:38] Mikkel: So you have kids also, I believe, but I don't know, is it, do you have two kids and how, how many do you have?
[00:00:45] Ulrik: I have two kids. Yeah. I have a son turns 10 soon, and then I have my, our daughter at at three years old. So it's, busy household. One of the reasons why I sit down here in this particular room is that it has an acoustically sealed door that I can lock,
[00:01:02] Mikkel: wonderful
[00:01:02] Ulrik: useful in the afternoon when you work, when you work from home.
[00:01:06] Ulrik: Yes.
[00:01:07] Mikkel: You go in there and just scream every now and
[00:01:09] Mikkel: then.
[00:01:10] Ulrik: well, and that
[00:01:11] Ulrik: too, I think more importantly, I cannot hear the screaming on the outside while I'm doing my afternoon work. That's just as useful.
[00:01:19] Mikkel: No, I get that. That's I have like, no doll at all. So I just, I get all of it when the kids are home and I'm trying to work. So. I don't know if you So you end up not working, Mikkel. No, that's pretty much it. It's, I'm just clicking around. I don't know if you've seen that dog emoji that sits with a cup of coffee and there's just fire everywhere.
[00:01:36] Mikkel: That's like pretty much me trying to work from home. Yeah, I think that's an apt, apt kind of picture.
[00:01:41] Ulrik: I've seen a sales rep demo an app with that photo and and that was that was an interesting sign. So yeah, I know that photo well,
[00:01:48] Toni: So, What we wanted to chat about today with with dear Ulrik is talking a little bit about some of the surprises slash learning stepping into a PLG role, right? But before we jump there, because I think that's, you know, really part of the, the interesting bit here is. Ulrich, can you maybe talk a little bit about what you did before you joined Pitch, where you're currently working, kind of what was it you did before? And, you know, did you interact with PLG before, or was it maybe something else? Kind of give us a little bit of the background there. So we kind of understand the contrast later on.
[00:02:22] Ulrik: right? Yes. I'm, I mean, there's a potentially very long story. I'll try to keep it short, but I'm a, I'm a self taught software engineer turned entrepreneur turned SaaS executive. If you could say so wrote the first lines of code in a. Social Media SaaS app that you guys know well and basically became sort of a full stack founder and, and exec scaling that business.
[00:02:50] Ulrik: What we realized on that journey, which started in 10 all the way to the exit at 19 was that We, we probably needed to have a sales team to sell this. We, we had a lot of traction locally here in domestically here in Denmark, but it was clear that there was a huge opportunity. And at the time, for a lot of different reasons, it was pretty clear that one of the ways to scale that was probably to build out a sales team, which I had personally not done before.
[00:03:20] Ulrik: So had a, I think a happenstance very. Fortunate introduction to our you know, our first head of sales and scaled the first sales team around him. And even though we didn't have the language or the vernacular at the time, this was a. An SDR to AE, or at least it was pretty full stack in the beginning.
[00:03:43] Ulrik: It was mostly AEs that would, would self prospect and we would land sort of low end mid market type deals. And and basically I started looking at, at sales as something that was fairly systemic, which I think the head of sales at the time didn't.
[00:03:59] Ulrik: So I started to think about building out the things around around that, you know, basically the fuel rods inside of the reactor that were the sales team and kind of building out the the the, all the things around that to make sure it didn't completely wreck the business as it was trying to grow.
[00:04:17] Ulrik: And eventually that scaled from, from nothing to several hundred people in the in the go to market arc. That was, I think we've got to close to a hundred even before we did the exit.
[00:04:32] Ulrik: And then we, we, we sold to long story short, basically a PE company that we did a rollup with afterwards and combined a few other through other teams, and then ultimately took the go to market model that we had and rolled that out even in the companies that we integrated.
[00:04:48] Ulrik: So it ended up being, seeing it really from, from, yeah, soup to nuts, as they like to say in, in terms of scaling that out. But this was very, very sales led. It was, it was sales led to the extent where we, did try to do some PLG sort of augment that model with some PLG stuff which turned out to be fairly difficult.
[00:05:10] Ulrik: It never really got any meaningful traction. And it would often be a topic of discussion that you could argue caused more disturbance than it did additional growth in the setup where you started out being , so sales focused and so sales led.
[00:05:26] Toni: I, I still remember that you know, some folks in the city that knew us as a team really well. They were referring to the sales engine we've built as the Mordor of sales, right? So let's just be
[00:05:41] Toni: very clear for everyone
[00:05:43] Ulrik: that didn't, that didn't know and understand sales, but, but yes, there were, there were some folks who
[00:05:46] Ulrik: did
[00:05:46] Toni: So, meaning obviously it was very much performance culture very much focused on really hitting your targets, kind of getting, you know, and, and it worked we scaled this thing really, really far.
[00:05:56] Toni: And and this is kind of the backdrop of, of you as a, you said kind product guy, founder SaaS executive basically that's, that's the world that you've kind of been living in for what, 10, 12 years or something like this. You know, I want to, I want to say
[00:06:10] Toni: kind of roughly that timeframe. And, and, and, you know, this is, this is what, you know, well, this has been super successful.
[00:06:16] Toni: And then you were signed to You know, I want to say look a little bit for your next endeavor. Right. And then pitch came around which has a very different setup, right? The, do they, do they even have salespeople? I, I don't know what the setup day is. Right. And jumping into that, I think that's really the interesting piece that we want to explore here. You know, really coming from the sales led culture into this more PLG led culture, you know, I think that's the interesting bit.
[00:06:42] Ulrik: Right. Yeah. So that is it's a, there's a bunch of really interesting sort of findings that I've done sort of in the, so, so just for context, I've been at pitch for basically a little over a year. I started just after New Year's in 24. And Basically the, the, the task or sort of the journey for, for pitch up until then was very product focused, have built, you know, the team had built a fantastic product and platform.
[00:07:09] Ulrik: There had been little focus on, on monetization of that. So it was very focused on, on, on getting the product out to the maximum amount of people that you could, but not necessarily. Focused on AR growth to the same extent that there was a pivotal moment that was decided by by the board and leadership to, to do that.
[00:07:30] Ulrik: And I was brought on as part of, as a part of that I think definitely also because there was an understanding that as a part of being more revenue focused you should probably also build out more of a of a commercial team, perhaps even, you know, a classic sales teams and all those types of things with some of those things were, were, were discussed as a part of of devising that the 24 plan
[00:07:54] Toni: Mm
[00:07:54] Ulrik: We had a fantastic year in, in, in 24 at pitch.
[00:07:58] Ulrik: We set out to, to, to hit a pretty ambitious target coming from not really having revenue targets in the past, to be honest. And, and basically you know, did, did a ton of things to, to the financial profile of the company. The, the company was burning a ton of money in the beginning of the year and, and got that to basically cashflow break, even a profitability now.
[00:08:20] Ulrik: With, with marquee growth without going into the specifics of the growth numbers. So a great backdrop of, of of success. So, so, so how did we do that? Well, I think there was a, because of the, the, the restructuring of the team, one of the things that we needed to do was to figure out how to operate the company with, with much less burn.
[00:08:40] Ulrik: This has been a, obviously a very sort of sign of the times phenomenon throughout 24 and even earlier. And, and for some people still. And we did spend quite a bit of time figuring out what are the loose ends on these cables in terms of who were holding them before that, that weren't around and, and plugging and rewiring everything was the thing that we, that we did first off.
[00:09:01] Ulrik: Pitch is an incredible presentation platform and it. And what we figured out was that, but we hadn't really done the, the, the classic sort of validating work of figuring out what the, what the proper real ICP was, but there's no doubt that if you had a team that came on board pitch where the commercial folks were using Dex to win business, that was a, you know, just on by every measure, lifetime value.
[00:09:30] Ulrik: NRR, all those cohorts the cohorts that, that that fit this ICP were just completely magical and night and day compared to, to the ones that were outside of that. So that was one of the things that we did earlier on was that we, we decided to anchor on that with the go to market and frankly also with the product strategy going forward.
[00:09:49] Ulrik: So instead of being a broad presentation platform that wants to take on every other presentation platform out there. We we sort of early last year decided that that was the path we would take and obviously a bunch of product things then had and happened, happened along along that journey, but, but more specifically on the, on the go to market side well, first off, we needed to.
[00:10:14] Ulrik: We needed to gain control of the, of the sort of commercial stack. So there were, you know, some things around installing a CRM that and, and, and a revenue ops stack that was workable and, and having the right analytics right analytics platform and those things in place where, you know, the team had built a bunch of things in the past, but we needed to sort of we needed to make some more decisive scaling decisions on what is it we focus on at the stack and what, what can we then operate with a, with a more, with a more nimble team than what we, what we had before. And
[00:10:49] Ulrik: one thing that we really needed to, to to make sure that we could do was to reconcile the long tail of PLG which is the vast majority of, well, all the sources, the, the, the motion that we've had historically in, in pitch is purely PLG. But what has happened is that some of them, and especially the ICP the ICP segment that I mentioned here, which is.
[00:11:14] Ulrik: Far more than, even before we started doing it, it was far more than half of revenues that was for, were from the, from the ICP customers. All of them were also the ones obviously that had grown in terms of, you know, just expanded by themselves, largely. Sometimes they reached out, sometimes they didn't, but they've, they've grown into two attractive ACVs where you can start spending time on it.
[00:11:36] Ulrik: And you could essentially also spend time on the acquisition side, which we then had not done historically. But the, the type of ACV you would need. You know, getting into the the 12, the 15, the 20 K dollar ACVs. We, we had, we had, you know, a good amount of a good amount of those ICPs ending up there.
[00:11:53] Ulrik: But, but what we wanted to do first off, and this is a key thing that I think you need to be able to do if you have a PLG engine and a PLG acquisition model, especially is that we needed to reconcile all the revenue from the long tail and all the, all the smaller customers of, you know, 20 bucks a month, all the way up to the 20 K ACV deals in a system that would that would encompass all of them. And historically, and I think this is a very classic thing you have yourself serve somewhere, and then you've kind of replicated the larger deals into a CRM where the.
[00:12:27] Ulrik: You know, the CX folks or whoever the account managers then sit and look at that and it becomes pretty cherry picked. Maybe you have an ACV threshold where those things get into a CRM for somebody actually to actually work on those, on those accounts and try to expand them and make sure they renew. And, and we had, we also had a similar model where, you know, some of those customer stores, those accounts were being bumped to, to HubSpot.
[00:12:51] Ulrik: And then the team was working on them there. And it was pretty clear that. While everybody was trying to do a really great job of deciding who needs to go there, it, it, it just, it ends up being pretty cherry picked even with, even if you choose an ACV threshold, that doesn't take into account the potential just where the ACV is after its potential expansion.
[00:13:14] Ulrik: So one of the things we, we did is we now have a CRM that basically carries both the larger deals and, and the entire long tail and enables us to see, even on, you know, on an AR graph or a you know, a delta on, on sort of the anatomy of ARR per week, see if there's any sort of anomalies there, drill all the way down into the, to the specifics of those smaller deals.
[00:13:38] Ulrik: If there's a cohort of smaller deals that either, you know, expands or whatever it is. And and then in that same system also have the, have the larger deals,
[00:13:46] Toni: So double clicking a little bit on, on some of the things you said here. So, basically the, the kernel here is also about really understanding ICP, right? It's, you know, a lot of people are talking about this all the time, right? But it, it is very magical kind of once this is fully understood, you know, what he can do about this.
[00:14:03] Toni: Right. And then, you know, one of the things you mentioned here in terms of operationalizing around this, really then. Became the instrumentalization in the, in the CM, right? Kind of, instead of saying, Hey, these guys, you know, look good. Let's work on them a hotspot or these guys reach the threshold.
[00:14:17] Toni: Let's work on them a hotspot.
[00:14:19] Toni: You basically instrumented around that, you know, based on the ICP definition and how, you know, who used it and how they use it. And so that's what I'm guessing, right? Kind of. Already there a bunch of value unlocked where now you know, sales folks can go in, have a conversation with them and then drag those ACVs up.
[00:14:36] Toni: Right. Is that, is that correctly understood?
[00:14:38] Ulrik: Yes. Yeah, it is. And one of the things I didn't mention was that. Yes, we do tag the, we do have an ICP tag that goes into that, the same CRM. So that's the ICP tag that goes all the way from here's a single seed at 20 bucks a month, all the way up to the larger ones that, that then are also ICPs, which enables us to, you know, to do all the classic things, lifecycle stuff and and, and, and try to nurture them along a path where you can see that, well, from a graphically, there's clearly potential here.
[00:15:07] Ulrik: So somebody should, should work on that specific thing manually, even though it's still. It would mask itself as a part of the long tail somewhere if you didn't have that enrichment and, and we've done some sort of home baked asking chat GPT to look at the email domain and go there and say, is it a sales led company?
[00:15:24] Ulrik: Likely, do they have a, and then we give the, give it clues, you know, is there a enterprise plans or is there a contact sales button, those types of things, and it ends up you know. With surprisingly high accuracy, I would say, obviously not a hundred percent accurate, but with very, very useful level of accuracy you know, tags, the entire long tail of the CRM, including when we did the first load of this, we obviously ran it through also the larger handheld ones.
[00:15:52] Ulrik: And that's why we could see that the quality in terms of the accuracy there is really good. So, so yes, the ICP has been, I mean, it's been a revelation for the entire business to not only have a hunch. But then actually go in and say, well, now we've, first we had a hunch. Then we had, then we tried to mask that hunch with some, with an ACV threshold, look how wonderful this customer cohort is, but it's not really just, but you're kind of, you're trying to create a self fulfilling prophecy by just doing the ACV threshold.
[00:16:22] Ulrik: So we, we then ran all of this enrichment and it really aligns with the fact that if they are a sales led company of a certain size and especially in specific industries. So we kind of have this concentric circles for the, for the ICP. So you both have, if they're a sales led company, that's good, it's very good.
[00:16:39] Ulrik: And if they're also a sales led company in this, with this, these firmographic traits, then they're absolutely wonderful and we should be all over them. And if they're at a certain size, we should probably call them up immediately or as a part of part of the the self discovery of the, of the self onboarding self service acquisition channel that we, that we have now.
[00:16:59] Ulrik: So, so the ICP definition and the circulation and the sort of. Cultivation of that internally in the team has done a ton of things for, yeah, for the entire strategy of the business and and, and to align everybody on what, what are we building and why it has been incredibly valuable. And I think often ICPs are, it's, it's, you know, it, it can often be a founder that, you know, boldly, you know, comes in one morning and say, now this is the ICP and, you know, and,
[00:17:30] Toni: we're going to do enterprise now.
[00:17:31] Mikkel: Yeah. No, no, no.
[00:17:33] Ulrik: I've, I've woken up and now it's, now it's upmarket or whatever it might be. Right. And I think for, for me and in terms of, I, I realized that we needed to do a lot of work before we just said, Hey, this is a huge potential thing. Let's call up some of these guys, which is, you know, I have a lot of muscle memory and seeing how well that works.
[00:17:53] Ulrik: And you know, kept that, we are scaling the we, we, we call it the C, we call it the CX let. We have a CX led model, which is we get, get past a certain threshold. Then, then we have some very, very good consultative CX folks that were the commercial focus that, that then talks to the customers. And we're scaling that now.
[00:18:14] Ulrik: I'm very happy that we're scaling it only now. And we didn't get trigger happy doing it earlier before a lot of these things were in place.
[00:18:21] Mikkel: So I think it's super interesting that you figured out the ICP. It sounds like it's both through let's say quantitative research, but also talking with some of those users and then use external data. And AI to figure out, hey, is this, is this an ICP we should work?
[00:18:36] Mikkel: I think it would be really interesting for the listener to hear how are you first off acquiring these ICPs? Are you running a freemium? I think it's a reverse trial. And then what is the process, once you've identified one of, of those ICPs, what, what's the trigger for you to then start working I guess this account you can call it.
[00:18:54] Mikkel: But I think that would be very interesting also to understand because I'm guessing there's a bit of a sales assisted motion given your background as well.
[00:19:03] Ulrik: Yeah. Yeah. Good, good, good question. Let, let me try and explain how it, how it works currently. I think one aspect that you need to understand about pitch is that. It is a company that has in its history raised a lot of capital. And it has spent a lot on not only sort of classical acquisition and performance marketing, but also on branding including, you know, acquiring the pitch.
[00:19:28] Ulrik: com domain at some point along that journey. And so there is a lot of brand equity that has been built up. So there is. A very good amount of organic traffic. So the, so the, the, the background radiation of interest towards pitch and coming to, you know, to our website and, and, and other surface areas are quite strong and that is the and, and we have, you know, a combination of, of the classics going on, right?
[00:19:58] Ulrik: We have some paid we have some SEO and we have all those things. We have, have a nice long tail of SEO work that's been invested in throughout the years. We have a nice template gallery. A lot of things that bring, bring folks in from, from those channels. And, and those as a whole are, are basically the top of funnel and it is, and it's pretty sizable.
[00:20:17] Ulrik: And, and that's where that's where basically all of the acquisition starts as that then goes throughout the funnel. What we work with is it's basically a freemium model where you are able to sign up and there's a certain free plan in there now. That's, that is, I would say quite generous in terms of the functionality that you're able to to experience the product from some might say it's too generous even but
[00:20:43] Mikkel: Maybe the founder?
[00:20:45] Ulrik: Well, it's I mean, this is a journey, right?
[00:20:47] Ulrik: And, and it's something we're obviously, obviously looking at, but, but a good part of, of, of all that interest in that brand equity has also obviously been created. It's difficult to, to attribute how much of that is because of the free plan experience and the fact that people, people you know, are able to experience the product without necessarily whipping out the credit card.
[00:21:07] Ulrik: But it probably factored into sort of the. Yeah, the, the historic sort of surge in traffic that's been built up to where we're still, you know, enjoying and cultivating and, and, and growing further, but, but that is how it starts. And then you go through a, a, a funnel with a with a freemium you don't necessarily need to take out the credit card, at least not the current incarnation as you come in.
[00:21:30] Ulrik: And And then the product experience, especially for the ICPs are so good that they invite their teammates and then they go on to plans and
[00:21:40] Toni: Yeah, there
[00:21:40] Toni: they
[00:21:40] Ulrik: credit for it. So that's, that's how it works. And I have I have not interjected an SDI discovery call in, in, in that, even though you might think that, that, that would be.
[00:21:50] Ulrik: That would be muscle memory that we, we don't have that.
[00:21:52] Ulrik: What we do have is, so what's the trigger for, for us engaging? Well, that is a number of things. And it, that, that has, you know, changed a little over, over time. It also comes back to the capacity. Of the team. What's the, what's the high, most high value tasks that the team can spend time on, but we, we obviously do have folks that reach out specifically on an expansion as a part of them, them coming through the product experience.
[00:22:17] Ulrik: And we obviously triage those to the right folks. We have sort of firmographic triggers if somebody is a certain. So certain size and all that, you know, it lights up on, on the, on the dashboard. So we have a number of things. That sort of triggers a person to work on it in the in terms of, in terms of a CX led motion, as we like to call it.
[00:22:39] Ulrik: That, that's, that's in, in a nutshell, basically how, how we're, how we're working this. And, and you know, now knowing what the ICP is, having, seeing, you know, that being completely validated, both anecdotally, qualitatively, and quantitatively over, after putting that in place and seeing. Seeing how things work, we have a bunch of things that we want to do.
[00:23:02] Ulrik: So we're scaling we're scaling the. The GTM team right now to pull some of the levers that is now becoming available to us as we, as we as we see all these things sort of happening with the ICP in place.
[00:23:16] Toni: what I think is really cool is, you know, really, you know, mythological and almost scientifically going after the ICP definition, right, to kind of really figuring this out and then instrumenting around it. And I want to say in a sales led organization. ICP tends to end up being the one that the sales guys can sell the easiest to.
[00:23:38] Toni: Right. Which just isn't the same thing necessarily as ICP, right? Kind of, especially if you, you know, expand definition to upsell and how the courts are behaving, et cetera. Right. So I would say from my perspective, that's, you know, one of the difference between a sales led and a product led environment, but do you have, do you have a couple of other examples as well, where it kind of stumbled into?
[00:23:58] Toni: It was like, oh, wow, this is completely different than, than it used to be. Yeah,
[00:24:04] Ulrik: there, I think the ICP is is reset in every pipeline, a review call in itself. like, what, why are we talking to these guys? Well, they're, you know, they, they're, they're really interested. And I think I'll close it by Friday, boss. That's kind of how How the ICP works in a sales led organization, at least who gets to the sales folks.
[00:24:23] Ulrik: And you know, for, for good reason, more power, power to these folks that it's, it's not an easy task and they want to, they want to work what they have, obviously. So, but you know, other, other interesting things that that, that I've come across, I think one, one somewhat surprising dynamic, I mean, logically you can kind of obviously predict that this is how this would work, but.
[00:24:48] Ulrik: But it's, it's, it's pretty, it was pretty surprising to me how how, how this aspect pans out.
[00:24:54] Ulrik: So if you have, I just went through, you know, how the acquisition funnel works here and, and it's, you know, it's wonderful, right? It's, it's it's completely self onboarding. It's. Look, ma, no hands, you know, just customers just come in and they, you know, they, they, they they put in their credit card and know they invite their coworkers and they expand to juicy ACVs.
[00:25:14] Ulrik: And, you know, we did try to reach out, they didn't need any help. So we haven't really talked to them. And, and they are, you know, now at this wonderful spot and they're, you know, everything's fantastic. And CAC was, you know, basically zero or, or whatever, whatever low number you end up calculating for, for these types of deals.
[00:25:31] Ulrik: What? What's then pretty eerie is that if you had somebody that was completely self onboarded without be, you know, without you talking to them, without you necessarily being able to reach them because you didn't have motions in place that would ensure that as they went up these guys will also completely self offboard without you without necessarily feeling a need to give you any signal of why they're suddenly doing that.
[00:25:58] Ulrik: And and that is, I mean, it's not that we have a ton of those cases, but you would have seen, seen, you know, one or two where it's eerie that if you did not build a relationship on the way up, you know, you didn't have the first SDR call, you didn't have an AE where you, they were, there was some camaraderie build up and try to get this through legal and all that good stuff, and, and you didn't have a CS person that were onboarding these folks I think along those journeys, you just have so much, I A relationship being built that you will always get a pretty strong signal to some extent In terms of why something is probably not a good fit anymore if there's a competitor in play and all that by going through that type of acquisition model You will have a strong signal from your your customer base in terms of how they're doing Come renewal and and and through the expansion journey if you've not built that up.
[00:26:45] Ulrik: It is Eerie how difficult actually is to get that signal for some of those even though you You would usually, you know, if you reach out, you usually get to get a response. Sometimes you don't. If people have been you know, completely self sufficient on the way up, they will be self sufficient all the way down.
[00:27:02] Toni: I think that's a very interesting insight actually. And, and we just recently actually talked about this on a, on a, on a different episode where yes, there's no friction on the way in, but. No one is talking about that there then also isn't any friction on the way out like exactly to your point basic and maybe, maybe I was a little bit inspired by you and our pre talk on this. But the, you know, I, I almost want to kind of, take it to, you know, one, one step further. You from SL, you know, sales led background now kind of in this area, you guys figured out the ICP, you get it into a nice ACV range where some other ways of connecting to those folks opening up, you're hiring a little bit into the GTM, pulling those levers.
[00:27:43] Toni: I, I mean, I almost wonder, like, are you thinking about doing outbound? Are you thinking about, you know, starting to do some of those channels? Or do you maybe have a completely different view at this now? Because maybe you think like, hey, outbound is way too expensive. Or, hey, this doesn't work anymore.
[00:27:59] Toni: It doesn't work in this specific context. Kind of what's your thinking on and I'm just guessing and what the next levers is you're pulling here, Ulrich. But you know, what's your thinking on what's the next channel you want to build out?
[00:28:10] Ulrik: yeah, I mean, even being very much a guy who's most of backdrop and success have been on the back of outbound. I think, I don't think outbound is a, you know, it's not on the docket in the near term or even midterm for pitch. And that's for a number of reasons. I think there's just I think outbound probably has become less effective than, than through my, my journey there from, from 10 to 20.
[00:28:39] Ulrik: And, and, and beyond, I think in recent years you've just seen these things not be as effective as they usually was, especially, you know, the the internal email cadences and all that stuff. I don't believe very much in it anymore. I think that's completely. People have become desensitized to those. If, if you have a, if you have really good reps that know how to get on a call, I still think that's pretty powerful.
[00:29:01] Ulrik: But, but even though I don't think that's in terms of, you know, cold outbound or, or doing acquisition on the outbound side is, is not on the docket for us I, I do believe that, I mean, all the classic disciplines of, of having a commercial acumen and talking to to prospects or, or accounts in probably more so in our case is, you know, incredibly important.
[00:29:25] Ulrik: And we're, we're scaling that up. We're scaling up. Folks that are reaching out to, to high value accounts or high potential accounts. And and we want to get a lot more sophisticated as to the signals and the triaging of what those what those conversations are and, and at, and at what what cadence they should happen.
[00:29:47] Ulrik: So, so that, that's what we're spending far more time on right now. It's, it's, it's basically having the acquisition model be far more ICP centric, getting more of our ICPs. You know, finding out the ICP is wonderful it does a lot of, a lot of great things to align the business. It's not necessarily incredibly easy to say, well, then let's just 10X those.
[00:30:09] Ulrik: I mean, that's, that is a, that is slightly more, more difficult and takes more time. And it's not just, you know. A different, a different bid on a LinkedIn ad or, or, or paid, paid search. It is it, it, it's quite a few different tactics that you need to do in parallel that we're all, that we're all ramping up.
[00:30:27] Ulrik: But in terms of, in terms of outbound, no, not, not the case. I do believe in, in far more sophisticated AI enabled life cycle work that then eventually triggers and triages to a. To a an accounts person, I think that is, that's certainly the right for us with the richness of the funnel that we have.
[00:30:51] Ulrik: It, it's, I guess what you do next has to do with the bottlenecks you, you have also. Right. And, and, and for us, it's not, it's not really top funnel. It's it's, it's not necessarily even the ICP volume. It's, it's the sophistication of the engagement model. And ramping that up through that, that we. That, that we're working through and focusing a lot on.
[00:31:14] Mikkel: so one thing I'm, I'm curious about is when you were building Falcon, if there was anything related to revenue, it was to go to market team, marketing, sales, or CS. That would be the go to place, not product. Now you're at a PLG company. Is product now the go to market? How is that? It must be a key part, obviously, of, of growing the business.
[00:31:34] Mikkel: So how do you operate that machinery with the teams?
[00:31:37] Ulrik: Right. Yeah. So that's a really good question. I think for, for a lot of PLG companies, it's the only way you grow or did we get it, you get a new sort of growth hike, all of that starts in product. And that, that's, that's fascinating. I don't think it's entirely right to go all the way there, but, but it's because.
[00:31:58] Ulrik: Most, most PLG companies have been built by, by product builders only. And then, you know, any GTM or revenue focus often sort of comes in later. I think I've seen that a lot of places at least. And, and really you need, you need those things to ideally work in unison. But, but one of the things that we, we did that is clearly.
[00:32:18] Ulrik: You know, figuring out the ICP and not just doing, you know, go to market stuff. Let's change our, you know, let's add a few channels. Let's tweak you know, our messaging on our campaigns. No, actually going all the way back to, to to product. And, and one of the things we, we did late last year as, as sort of a consummation of, of, of being completely dedicated to the ICP was the launch of Pitch Rooms, which is an really interesting extension of the presentation platform that are all these commercial teams that are using, it's our version of the digital sales room, basically sitting on top of the presentation platform that holds all of the decks and the collateral that you often place inside a you know, a sales room or sales hub or whatever these things are called these days.
[00:33:05] Ulrik: I guess digital sales room is the sort of. Predominant moniker out there and you, you guys will will like this. I think that the digital sales room category is a one trick pony that needs a place to call home. And
[00:33:17] Mikkel: Wow. Took me back. This is like an inside joke just for the listener to know. Yeah.
[00:33:23] Ulrik: trick ponies categories out there, right. And they will all, you know, eventually need to find a place to call home. I strongly believe that this is one of them. And and we did actually consider acquiring a, a, a, a DSR, but didn't really find necessarily good fit at the time.
[00:33:39] Ulrik: And we also felt that with, with our strength in, in, in product engineering, we, we could do that better ourselves. And we think we did that. So that was, that was really happy about that call. That was us going back to product and saying, let's build towards the ICP and let, and we did that because we, we believe that will enable further growth.
[00:34:01] Ulrik: And for all of the ICP discussions that we're having, all the interaction, the engagements that we have from the CX lead team, that is now a, a key component. in the rollouts. So we're really excited about that. And, and what, what pitches become is really it's the moniker we use. We are the complete pitching platform.
[00:34:21] Ulrik: So we are not only sales decks for reps. No, we are all those things that is the surface area that that goes in part of into sort of the commercial deals. So it's really interesting to figure out how we. How we want to play in that area. We we're not, we're probably never going to be the full orchestration system or anything like that.
[00:34:41] Ulrik: Your, your, your sills lofts or your your gongs and all that. But there's something about the surface area that none of those folks, they use other pieces of collateral and then inject them in there. And we're we, we find it really exciting to to to basically emerge as As a player that has a lot of that surface area being built out in a nice way for.
[00:34:59] Ulrik: For sales leaders, reps, enablement folks designers to, to really enjoy. .
[00:35:04] Toni: I wanna ask a little bit of a question on The thinking, around the architecture of, of, of the go to market, maybe kind of, you know, it sounds like a little bit of high flying, but there's, there's a bit of a theme that I'm picking up on that is also around just being very efficient, like building a good, solid business here, right?
[00:35:21] Toni: That's
[00:35:21] Toni: part of it. We're talking about figuring out what the ICP is doubling down on that, building additional product for that ICP we're talking about, Oh, you know, actually top funnel is fine. We need to get better at, you know, figuring out whom we should contact, how, when, in the middle of the funnel, right?
[00:35:40] Toni: Instead of spending more dollars trying to generate more pipeline, right? We talked about, oh, we really want to do this additional on the product side, but instead of buying it somewhere, let's just build it, right? Kind of do it, do it, do it ourselves. My my question is actually kind of very much hypothetical.
[00:35:55] Toni: Like if you had 10, 20, 30 million dollars on the bank account, Do you think Pitch would go about some of those things differently? Is there, is there kind of a, is there an alternate universe where you would take this money and, and, and behave differently? or, or, you know, what's it, what's it, it's obviously hypothetical, right?
[00:36:12] Toni: And you probably haven't thought about this, but like, what's your thinking here? I
[00:36:16] Ulrik: actually thought quite a bit about that. And, and without spilling the beans on our actual cash balance that we do have some cash that we were, that we're able to, to to put, you know, put to work if we wanted to do any of those things, but so far we have. And I would say quite determined to do things efficiently.
[00:36:44] Ulrik: I mean, there is, there is a and, and also the experience of, of sort of revamping the entire team obviously the, the, the actually doing that, doing, you know, a right sizing compared to what, where the revenue scale was at and, and making sure that we could get to profitability, which was the, the, the initial task, what that was obviously.
[00:37:04] Ulrik: You know, difficult to initiate and, and, and carry out. But as we, as you get to that point, the the team is, you know, incredibly happy by the way we now operate. And the fact that we're actually the fact that you're a smaller team where people to a much larger extent, know what everybody else is doing.
[00:37:21] Ulrik: Just makes for a, a much better sort of employee experience that that's, that's completely clear within PitchGuardian. Obviously you could then go. Go overboard and, and try to just contain that and not make the growth bets that you should, especially because we have the ability to do some of the, and that, that's the thing we're, that's the thing we're actively discussing that there is, there's this, one of the more, more risky things you could do is to be risk averse.
[00:37:47] Ulrik: If you don't make any bets, then, then somebody else will, and then you're not, you're not going to stay as relevant. And we, that's the thing we. We we're pretty tuned into, I'd say. But, but would you still spend a million on something kind of random? That's a, that, that's where, you know, we, we, we would at least like to have some level of some level of assurance that, that is the right things.
[00:38:12] Ulrik: But we're, we, we now have, I think, a, a a palette of things that are, that, you know, with our ICP and the path we're taking where. Where it's a lot more clear that is this going to make a real difference for ICP, both existing customers in the future. And then it's a lot easier to make those types of bets.
[00:38:31] Ulrik: But, but it's along those lines rather than let's, let's ramp up a sales team or, or, or those types of things.
[00:38:41] Toni: think it was really cool. And I also think that obviously kind of bunch of learnings from, from the sales led to the product led journey here, but I think what I am picking up not only from, from a conversation like this year, but also talking to some other folks is there's a little bit of a shift in, in, in founders, CEOs, and kind of your role as a, what an executive you know, a board member or chairman of the board. There, there, there's a shift that goes from. Let's do some stuff to be more efficient for efficiency sake, kind of tweak the numbers on churn and tweak the numbers on kick payback and kind of hit those numbers in the right way. It turned towards, Hey folks, should we just try and build a good business here?
[00:39:20] Toni: Like, should we, should we just do that instead? And. And, and try and kind of make good, solid business decisions. And I've, and I'm seeing this trend more and more, and I actually really like it. Right. So, and this is for me, not this, Oh, this is the post growth at all cost world. This is almost one step further.
[00:39:36] Toni: You know, it's, it's really, you know, it's really the software category growing up a little bit, even in the smaller digits of, of AI. Growing up a little bit and being like, Hey, let's build a good business here. Let let's make that the, the thing that we're striving towards. Right. So I really, I really liked the kind of some of the takeaways there.
[00:39:54] Ulrik: I think what you said there is I see the same. I think the, and there's a lot of, that's incredibly, you know, very healthy. There is a flip side, which is that. You, it's a problem if you end up growing too slowly for a lot of reasons. Well, unless you want, you know, it's a, you're a small founding team, the cap table is pretty simple and you, you just want to build a lifestyle, like the 37 signals thing with dividends.
[00:40:18] Ulrik: So that's super cool. But that requires alignment on that, on how the lengthiness of that journey amongst those teams. And it requires, you know, no external capital raised by the way. So there's a lot of prerequisites to kind of do that. So if you, if you can't necessarily put yourself in that category, but still want to grow effectively, you, you're kind of up against the fact that you, you still need, you know, a bit of speed on the growth.
[00:40:40] Ulrik: Otherwise it's you could find yourself in a place where, you know, at least the optionality, whatever that is for, for the shareholders, founder, founding team and, and, and staff you know, contracts too much.
[00:40:53] Toni: thank you so much. Thanks for having the conversation.
[00:40:56] Toni: Thanks for spending time and kind of spilling some of the beans. What's, what's going on in that pitch and, and
[00:41:00] Toni: also in your head. Thanks everyone else for listening. Hit subscribe if you haven't, and see you next time. Have a good one.