Turn a working SaaS business into a repeatable commercial engine.
You have product-market fit. Customers renew. The product wins fair fights. But revenue still arrives instead of being manufactured. That is an architecture problem — and it has a 90-day fix.
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Where working businesses stall
Six faults show up in almost every SaaS company that has PMF but can’t scale. None of them are effort problems. All of them are architecture.
Pipeline that lies
Coverage looks like 3× until you filter for ICP fit — then it’s 1.4× and the quarter was always going to miss.
Deals “waiting to hear back”
Cycle length drifts a week per quarter. No deal has a next step with a date in it, so no deal is actually moving.
Three reps, three pitches
Ask your team for the one-sentence positioning. If you get three different sentences, you have zero positioning.
The shadow spreadsheet
The real forecast lives in someone’s spreadsheet because nobody trusts the CRM. Month-end is a clean-up sprint.
Marketing–sales purgatory
No signed definition of qualified. Speed-to-first-touch measured in days. Marketing paid on volume sales ignores.
European tempo, NA market
Courtesy cadence, modest messaging, EU logos as proof. The US buyer reads all three as reasons to buy elsewhere.
When AI re-draws your category overnight
AI hasn’t just changed the product roadmap — it’s rewritten the commercial rules underneath it. The SaaS businesses in trouble aren’t the ones with bad software. They’re the ones running a pre-AI go-to-market into a post-AI market. Four shifts, four fixes.
Features are being repriced to zero
Buyers can get yesterday’s premium feature from a chatbot, so they interrogate every renewal and resist seat-based pricing.
Re-architect positioning and packaging around outcomes and workflows AI can’t replicate — sold on value, not features. One sentence the whole team repeats.
The top of funnel is evaporating
AI answers and AI overviews absorb the searches that used to become demos. Hope-based inbound dries up.
Manufacture pipeline with a disciplined outbound engine — the motion built at Paligo ($2.6M/qtr, 130 net-new opps). Pipeline you build, not pipeline you wait for.
The buyer has AI on their side of the table
Buyers use AI to shortlist, compare and challenge. Cycles get longer, more technical, more multi-threaded; deals stall “waiting to hear back”.
MEDDPICC-grade qualification and exec-level, multi-threaded selling. Every deal carries a next step with a date — or it isn’t real.
Grow the number, not the headcount
Boards want AI-era efficiency — more revenue per rep, leaner teams, faster.
An AI-augmented GTM motion: agentic AI for research, outbound and follow-up, so a small team performs like a large one. It’s how I run my own.
The companies that win the AI shift don’t freeze — they re-engineer the commercial engine for the new rules. That’s the 90-day work.
Run the diagnostic →What changes in 90 days
A fixed sequence, borrowed from consulting discipline: diagnose before designing, design before executing. Every phase ends with something your team owns — not a slide, an asset.
Diagnose
The engine mapped end to end. Three baseline metrics agreed and measured. The binding constraint identified, quantified, and put in front of your leadership team.
Rebuild
ICP and positioning locked into one sentence the whole team repeats. One outbound or conversion play redesigned and launched. A weekly scoreboard with leading indicators, installed.
Transfer
Your managers run the cadence without me in the room. The play is documented as an internal playbook. The three baselines re-measured — you present the delta to your board, not me.
An engine you can inspect
At Paligo, the outbound motion went from opportunistic to manufactured: territory and ICP defined, multi-channel plays sequenced, a weekly cadence installed. The result was $2.6M in quarterly outbound pipeline, 130 net-new opportunities a quarter, the largest deal in company history (over $500k), and revenue from $7.2M to $10M.
“Every engagement baselines three numbers and re-measures the same three — you grade the work, not me.”
Built the outbound engine
$2.6M/qtr pipeline · 130 opps/qtr · largest deal in company history (>$500k) · revenue $7.2M→$10M.
VP Sales & Demand Gen
HR-tech SaaS. Monthly pipeline €0→€500k · ACV €19.2k→€74.3k · MEDDICC embedded.
Early team, first ~20 hires
Built enterprise motion in the first Dublin cohort · >$1M ACV enterprise business.
EMEA Sales Director
Ran a $5M business unit and a 12-person team across the EMEA region.
Single Focus & Get Focused
GTM exec-search placing revenue leaders into Datadog, DocuSign, Qualtrics · plus a 7-figure HubSpot agency.
Adviser & board member
Integral Board Group, New York · Computer Science, Trinity College Dublin.
Three ways in
C-level outcomes at mid-level cost. Fixed prices, fixed scope, and a week-4 stop clause on the flagship: if the diagnosis doesn’t surface a constraint worth attacking, we stop and the balance is never invoiced.
Commercial Engine Diagnostic
The full map. Data review, five stakeholder interviews, and a findings readout naming the binding constraint and the plan to break it.
- Engine map, end to end
- Constraint, quantified
- 90-day plan you can run yourself
The 90-Day Rebuild
Diagnostic plus the rebuild and transfer: positioning locked, one play redesigned and launched, cadence installed, capability handed over.
- Weekly working sessions
- Scoreboard your team runs
- Board-ready before/after readout
Growth Chair Seat
Ongoing board-level commercial leadership: monthly board-style session, weekly scoreboard review, counsel on call. Five seats. Never more.
- Continuity after the Rebuild
- NA expansion steering
- Direct line, not a ticket queue
WEEK-4 STOP CLAUSE — On the 90-Day Rebuild: if week four’s diagnosis doesn’t surface a constraint worth attacking, we stop and the balance is never invoiced. The risk sits with me, not you.
The culture bridge, made concrete
The gap between a European engine and a North American market isn’t talent — it’s calibration. Six places momentum dies, and the countermove for each.
| Where momentum dies | What it looks like | The countermove |
|---|---|---|
| Pace of follow-up | Courtesy cadence — days between touches — reads as disinterest to US buyers. | NA-speed SLAs: first touch in minutes, next step booked inside every meeting. |
| Understatement | Modest, feature-accurate messaging loses to competitors who claim the category. | Answer-first positioning with a claim you can defend, in every rep’s mouth. |
| Pipeline math | EU conversion assumptions imported into a colder, noisier market. | Rebase on NA benchmarks: 3–4× coverage, kill criteria for non-ICP deals. |
| Proof that doesn’t travel | Reference logos nobody in Ohio has heard of. | Manufacture NA proof: two lighthouse accounts, case studies inside two quarters. |
| Procurement shock | US enterprise plays hardball late; teams give away 30% in week 13. | Pre-built negotiation plan: trade terms, not price. Security pack ready by stage 4. |
| Timezone-starved coverage | Demos at 5pm CET read as a side project. | Dedicated NA hours or NA capacity, with an escalation path on the buyer’s clock. |
What’s the binding constraint?
One honest paragraph about where revenue stalls is enough to start. You’ll get a considered reply — not a calendar link and a brochure.
Email Ross directly →