Transparency
Radical transparency in everything: Straightforward pricing. Ungated content. Candid communication between executives and employees.
TL;DR - We productized our data-driven approach to customer acquisition that was successful at our last company, Salsa Labs. In 9 months, we reduced our sales cycle by 45% and lowered our customer acquisition costs by 75%.
At the time the scaleMatters founders all got involved at Salsa Labs back in 2015, it was a 10-year old (~$12M ARR) startup that sold fundraising, advocacy and marketing software to nonprofit organizations.
Growth had stagnated, the customer unit economics were unattractive, and we were running low on cash.
High customer acquisition costs, very low ACV deal sizes, and high touch customer base both pre-sale and post-sale made life especially challenging.
In order to position the company for a strategic sale, we had to turn those fundamentals around and rebuild a capital-efficient customer acquisition engine.
As detailed in the "Data-FIRST Manifesto: Why We Started scaleMatters," we didn't have the systems or people in place to run an engine like that.
What we built internally at that company would today be considered world-class Revenue and Data Operations...but at the time it was our only chance at a successful outcome.
Here's what we did:
The result after 9 months:
Even with those great results, we were constrained:
So, after putting Salsa Labs on faster growth path and selling the company to Accel-KKR, we realized we could replicate, enhance, and productize our approach and provide this "Data-FIRST" environment for any early or growth stage B2B company…dramatically improving their odds of success.
And that's how scaleMatters was born...
Fundamentally, we're on a mission to improve the odds of successful outcomes for early and growth stage B2B company founders, investors, shareholders, and employees.
With our Go-to-Market operations services and software exposing inefficiencies, friction, and wasted marketing and sales spend, our customers are:
Extending cash runways
And ultimately...getting better valuations!
Scott Stouffer is a serial tech entrepreneur, 5X CEO, and 3X Founder.
He took his first company (Visual Networks) public in 2001 and grew it to a peak market cap of $3 billion..
Since 2011, Scott has focused on early and growth-stage tech companies, building quantitative data and process models that uncover waste, inefficiency, and friction in the customer acquisition function.
Follow Scott on LinkedInRadical transparency in everything: Straightforward pricing. Ungated content. Candid communication between executives and employees.
We go deep. If you like superficial, we're not for you. We geek out over revenue tech stacks, data models, processes, and new bookings plans.
The "Essentialism" mindset guides how we work and how we build the product. The software is built to surface highest impact Go-to-Market issues helping our customers focus on what matters.