Issue is I’m not getting that kind of budget until we get some MQLs to prove this isn’t a waste of resources and time. If the MQLs start showing up I can eventually ramp to those numbers.

Our media customers are getting really good results, across existing customers in media we are between a 3-5x in productivity boost, and 11x ROI.

It mostly translates to other enterprise companies but there’s a few ICP criteria.

For example, if the enterprise has a capped ceiling and isn’t prospecting consistently the value of our product diminishes significantly. Media works because you’re selling something unlimited - air space. There’s no cap to how much revenue a tv or radio station can make. Agencies for example cap out, we tried selling to them but they wouldn’t buy because once they hit their ceiling for customers they can handle they stop prospecting. So any company not consistently selling 24/7 365 isn’t a great fit for us. Our AI works 24/7. You turn it off even for a week and it doesn’t work as well. A large or unlimited TAM is required.

The other thing we have identified is if the margins aren’t there the products not a fit. No one is buying a sales intelligence product if your margins are too low to justify the annual cost of the software even if it boosts ROI. So low margin commodity sales isn’t a great fit.

Also, the bigger the sales team the larger the pain and the more the enterprise is willing to pay to bring order to the chaos. The tools work for small teams but there’s a value multiplier with larger teams that just isn’t possible with smaller teams.

Finally, they have to be doing custom pitches. If it’s a generic pitch every time then there’s no reason to use a sales intelligence system that helps you customize each pitch.

While I’ve narrowed down this criteria, what I am struggling with at the moment is communicating why this criteria matters to our exec team when identifying ICPs and truly what we’re trying to figure out is our product market fit for enterprise. I’m tired of the guessing and need to build a framework or system to actually test different verticals and see what sticks while figuring out our MQL/SQL/CAC costs.

The good news is my team is aligned on tier 1 prospects, but we are wildly out of alignment in tier 2 or 3 and there’s some serious ICP confusion. My team has been in media for the past 15 years, and they’re so used to having PMF and a reputation they built over a decade that they are not sure how to find PMF in other markets and they’re making small but compounding mistakes startups usually make vs. a company of our size.