432: N.Rich: From High Churn to Profitable ABM Platform - with Markus Ståhlberg

Summary

Episode 432: From High Churn to Profitable ABM Platform – Featuring Markus Ståhlberg

Podcast: The SaaS Podcast - SaaS, Startups, Growth Hacking & Entrepreneurship
Host: Omar Khan
Guest: Markus Ståhlberg, Co-Founder and CEO of Enrich
Release Date: February 27, 2025

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1. Introduction to Enrich and Markus Ståhlberg

In this episode, Omar Khan welcomes Markus Ståhlberg, the co-founder and CEO of Enrich, an account-based marketing (ABM) platform tailored for B2B companies aiming to acquire high-value customers efficiently. Markus shares his journey of building Enrich from its inception in 2015 to its current status as a profitable venture with a diverse, global team.

Notable Quote:
Markus Ståhlberg (04:08):

"Talk is cheap, life is short. What you do defines you."

2. The Genesis of Enrich: Identifying the ABM Opportunity

Markus and his co-founder identified a gap in the B2B marketing landscape while operating a B2B publishing business. They recognized the potential of ABM but struggled to achieve product-market fit initially. Their early product focused on native advertising within media platforms, which evolved into a comprehensive ABM solution powered by their own Demand-Side Platform (DSP).

Key Points:

• Shift from B2C to B2B focus after initial customer success.
• Development of a proprietary DSP to enhance targeting and optimization.
• Benchmarking against industry leaders like Demandbase to refine their product.

3. Overcoming Early Challenges: Product-Market Fit and High Churn

Securing the first 10 customers took nearly a year, with significant challenges related to high churn rates. Customers expected immediate results from ABM, misunderstanding its long-term nature. This period highlighted the necessity of aligning customer expectations with the strategic nature of ABM.

Notable Quote:
Markus Ståhlberg (21:06):

"When people first hear ABM, they think lead generation, but it's actually a long-term effort toward selected accounts."

4. Growth, Funding, and the Impact of Tragedy

By 2020, Enrich achieved its first million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) and secured a $4 million Series A funding round. However, a rapid expansion strategy, including hiring an oversized sales team in the Philippines, led to mismanagement and financial strain. The situation worsened when Markus’s co-founder was diagnosed with cancer and subsequently passed away, leaving Markus to steer the company alone with dwindling resources.

Key Points:

• Rapid scaling with 150 sales development representatives (SDRs) in the Philippines proved unsustainable.
• Lack of proper management structures exacerbated financial issues.
• Personal loss of the co-founder necessitated a complete business reorganization.

5. Rebuilding Enrich: Strategic Realignment and Team Restructuring

Faced with financial constraints and the loss of his co-founder, Markus undertook a strategic overhaul of Enrich. He focused on building a robust in-house team, prioritizing cash flow management, and fostering innovative sales and marketing alignment strategies. This pivot led to Enrich becoming a profitable company with a team of 55 people across 25 countries.

Notable Quote:
Markus Ståhlberg (22:12):

"We were overpromising and underdelivering from the customer's perspective."

6. Defining the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

A critical realization for Enrich was distinguishing between their Total Addressable Market (TAM) and their true Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). They discovered that companies with significant digital ad spend were more likely to benefit from their ABM solutions. By leveraging public data sources like LinkedIn Ads Library to proxy ad spend, Enrich refined its ICP to target high-investment companies likely to derive substantial value from ABM.

Key Points:

• Differentiating ICP from TAM to improve targeting and conversion rates.
• Using LinkedIn Ads Library as a proxy to identify high ad spend companies.
• Iterative process of testing and refining ICP hypotheses quarterly.

Notable Quote:
Markus Ståhlberg (28:53):

"TAM is not the same as ICP. Optimize your ICP based on how your metrics align with revenue goals."

7. Differentiating ABM from Traditional Lead Generation

Markus emphasizes that ABM is distinct from lead generation. While lead generation focuses on acquiring a large number of leads with varying quality, ABM targets specific high-value accounts with personalized marketing efforts. This strategic approach leads to higher win rates, larger deal sizes, and shorter sales cycles.

Key Points:

• ABM involves selecting and nurturing specific accounts rather than mass outreach.
• Enhanced efficiency and effectiveness in the go-to-market strategy.
• Importance of intent data and long-term relationship building in ABM.

Notable Quote:
Markus Ståhlberg (07:12):

"ABM is not about lead generation; it's about long-term efforts toward selected accounts."

8. Aligning Sales and Marketing for ABM Success

Enrich faced internal challenges in aligning sales and marketing teams. Initially, the company had a sales-heavy structure with minimal marketing support, leading to misconceptions about ABM’s objectives. To address this, Markus implemented a creative compensation model that incentivized sales to prioritize warm accounts nurtured by marketing, ensuring better collaboration and higher conversion rates.

Key Points:

• Separation of inbound, cold outreach, and warm outbound accounts.
• Incentive restructuring: 100% commission for marketing and 120% for sales on warm accounts.
• Enhanced collaboration led to improved sales effectiveness and customer retention.

Notable Quote:
Markus Ståhlberg (55:56):

"Instead of splitting the commission equally, we pay marketing 100% and sales 120% to prioritize warm accounts."

9. Product Evolution and Enhanced ABM Features

Markus discusses the evolution of Enrich’s platform from a native advertising tool to a full-fledged ABM solution. Key additions included intent data and advanced analytics, enabling more precise targeting and performance tracking. These enhancements positioned Enrich competitively against larger ABM platforms by offering comprehensive features at a more affordable price point.

Key Points:

• Transition from advertising formats to incorporating intent data and analytics.
• Continuous R&D to add unique capabilities beyond existing market players.
• Focus on affordability and ease of use to attract a broader range of B2B clients.

10. Expanding into the US Market and Future Growth

Initially focused on the Finnish market, Enrich expanded internationally, with the US becoming a primary growth driver. Markus notes that US companies are more aware of ABM’s benefits but find existing solutions too costly or complex. Enrich positions itself as a challenger brand, offering robust ABM features at competitive prices, thereby capturing significant market share.

Key Points:

• Early focus on Finland, followed by rapid international expansion.
• US market adoption driven by awareness and need for cost-effective ABM solutions.
• Strategic positioning as a more affordable yet comprehensive ABM platform.

Notable Quote:
Markus Ståhlberg (57:22):

"In the US, companies understand ABM but find existing solutions too expensive or complicated. We fit perfectly by offering what they need at a better price."

11. Personal Insights and Leadership

In the lightning round, Markus shares personal philosophies and productivity habits that have contributed to his success:

• Business Advice:
  Markus Ståhlberg (58:54):

  "Always think about return on investment. If you expect a certain return, plan your investments realistically."

• Recommended Book:
  Markus Ståhlberg (59:35):

  "Presenting to Win by Chris Anderson is essential for storytelling and presenting ideas effectively."

• Successful Founder Attribute:
  Markus Ståhlberg (60:24):

  "Tenacity. Entrepreneurs must embrace the roller coaster of highs and lows to succeed."

• Productivity Habit:
  Markus Ståhlberg (61:11):

  "I schedule dedicated focus time in my calendar, blocking out days to avoid meetings and concentrate on strategic thinking."

• Passion Outside Work:
  Markus Ståhlberg (63:24):

  "Running and sports are vital for me to manage stress and reset my mindset."

12. Conclusion and Future Directions

Markus expresses enthusiasm about Enrich’s journey and growth, emphasizing the importance of strategic alignment, realistic customer expectations, and continuous product enhancement. Omar Khan concludes the episode by highlighting the actionable insights shared, encouraging listeners to consider ABM with a balanced understanding of its demands and benefits.

Final Thoughts:
Markus reiterates Enrich’s commitment to supporting B2B companies in optimizing their ABM strategies, inviting interested parties to connect via LinkedIn or visit Enrich’s website for more information.

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Useful Links:

• Enrich Website: enrich.io
• Markus Ståhlberg on LinkedIn: LinkedIn Profile

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This comprehensive summary captures the essence of episode 432, detailing Markus Ståhlberg’s experiences, strategies, and insights in transforming Enrich from a struggling venture into a profitable ABM platform. The discussion provides valuable lessons on defining ICP, aligning sales and marketing, managing growth, and navigating personal and professional challenges in the entrepreneurial journey.

Transcript

[Omar Khan]

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[Markus Stahlberg]

Their product, they hit their first million.

[Omar Khan]

In ARR and raised a series round of around $4 million in 2020. But a series of missteps towards rapid.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Growth nearly bankrupted the company.

[Omar Khan]

Then tragedy struck.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Marcus's co founder was diagnosed with cancer and passed away a year later, leaving.

[Omar Khan]

Marcus to run the company alone with little Runway left. Rather than give up, Marcus rebuilt the company from scratch. He focused on building a proper in house team, got serious about cash flow and created innovative ways to align their sales and marketing. Today, after years of persistence and hard.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Lessons, Enrich is profitable, generating multiple seven.

[Omar Khan]

Figures in ARR with a team of 55 people across 25 countries. In this episode, you'll learn how Marcus discovered their true ideal customer profile by looking beyond basic company demographics. Why positioning as a challenger to expensive big box ABM platforms transform their growth.

[Markus Stahlberg]

How they solved the sales and marketing alignment problem with a creative compensation model. We talk about the surprising way they.

[Omar Khan]

Use the LinkedIn ads library to identify perfect fit customers and why their approach to content based advertising delivers better results than traditional formats. So I hope you enjoy it. Markus, welcome to the show.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

My pleasure.

[Omar Khan]

Do you have a favorite quote, something.

[Markus Stahlberg]

That inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?

Yeah, I can share my own motto. It's talk is cheap, life is short. So basically early in my career I came to conclusion that what you do is what defines you. And then maybe a bit later I.

[Unknown]

Realized that life is short and you.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Just need to, you know, you just need to do those things you like and you want to do during your life.

I think we're going to talk about that as well because that was a very relevant part of your story. Tell us about Enrich. What does the product do? Who's it for? What's the main problem you're helping to solve?

Yeah, Enrich is an account based marketing platform and we help B2B companies who are targeting this upmarket or like high annual contract value customers and want to basically grow their business without wasting their resources.

And give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, customers, size of team?

Yeah, so we are 55 people at the moment. The revenue is ARR is like between 5 and 10 million and we are growing fast.

[Unknown]

We are fully remote.

[Markus Stahlberg]

So like 25 countries with this kind of team. So it is no offices anywhere. So it's like fully remote setup and.

You'Ve raised somewhere between 4 and 5 million, is that right?

Yeah, that's right. In 2020 it was a fair say practically like more like a seed round. And now we are profitable and like just investing everything that comes into growth.

Profitable, that's a word we don't hear enough. So nice job on that. All right, so we're going to talk about where this all started, where you came up with the idea for this business. Before we do that, let's just make sure that we've got everybody up to speed here. I think a lot of people listening to this will understand what ABM is, but just give us like the two minute spiel on how ABM is maybe different to something else that, you know, organizations may be doing.

Yeah, so account based marketing is based on the idea that you select the companies you want to sell to during the next few years. So that's called the ICP ideal customer profile.

[Unknown]

You define your ICP and then you just center everything you do around those accounts. It's the marketing and sales collaborating together.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Like from the start of the buyer journey from like we call it cold stage until the accounts eventually are hot. And then passing the baton to sales while like marketing keeping, supporting this like by targeting these companies with advertising and.

[Unknown]

Ensuring the buying committee is on board.

[Markus Stahlberg]

So the idea is that you waste much less resources here because like everybody knows what they do. There's also intent data which is very important part of ABM so that you collect this data about the account's propensity to buy. And when you know that the account is ready or hot, then only sales starts to work on them. And maybe also as an important thing.

[Unknown]

This is not lead generation.

[Markus Stahlberg]

It is not about beginning MQLs or form fills. It is about really long term effort towards these accounts that you have selected from early awareness, building a relationship, making.

[Unknown]

Sure that they know you, they know what you stand for.

[Markus Stahlberg]

And then eventually when they become sales opportunities, usually the sales cycles are shorter.

[Unknown]

Deal sizes higher and win rates higher as well.

[Markus Stahlberg]

So it just improves the efficiency of the overall go to market motion.

I think that was a good distinction in terms of, I mean you said icp, every company should have an icp. But with lead generation you're basically just going out there and saying this is the kind of buyer I want and I'm just going to go out and do cold outreach or marketing or whatever. And with abm, I guess one big distinction would be is it's almost like building a wish list, right? Or a dream list of these are the hundred companies I'd love to be doing business with. And then these are the ones we're going to focus on building relationships with and make sure they understand what we do and how we can help. And eventually that leads to good things happening.

[Omar Khan]

Great.

[Markus Stahlberg]

So let's go back to 2015. Where did the idea come from?

So we started from, actually we started from advertising format.

[Unknown]

Like so we have within the platform.

[Markus Stahlberg]

We have like this, we call it native article. So the idea was that it's about content marketing, essentially like advertising directly with an article within the media. That's where we started. And then within the first year or so it clear that B2B is where we want to focus. And then soon after that it was ABM that we started realizing that okay, there is a lot of potential in the B2B market. These companies are evolving very slowly compared to B2C. Like the transformation to digital just is going to take years, tens of years, always takes a lot of time in B2B and that there is a big potential, long term potential in this market. So then we started building the product and we have our own DSP or we built our own DSP which is basically a programmatic advertising platform which then gives us a lot of capabilities that many players in the market don't have. And just a lot of focus in.

[Unknown]

The R and D, not so much.

[Markus Stahlberg]

On the go to market side, but.

[Unknown]

More on the R and D and.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Building this really, let's say unique product for this account based marketing.

What did you see happening in the market at the time? So you have this idea, were there other products out there? What was the driver that told you that, hey, there's this opportunity here?

Yeah, that's a good question. So we actually we started with like very early, we started doing B2C and B2B at the same time. And then our first B2B customer, big B2B customer we got, they were like, we were able to invoice them something like 20, 20,000, whereas the other B2C customers were something like 1,500 or something like that. So we realized, okay, so these guys are willing to pay a lot. And then with this customer who is.

[Unknown]

By the way still our Customer after.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Almost 10 years, we kind of realized.

[Unknown]

That this account based data is super valuable like that.

[Markus Stahlberg]

If you think about B2C, it's like every, it's just like this pray and pray. Like you just do a lot of things and then hope that something hits. Whereas there it's really about one individual account visiting your website or engaging with your ad. And there we realized that there is a lot of potential in this market and these companies have a lot of money also that they can invest in this. So there was kind of this realization.

[Unknown]

That there could be something here.

[Markus Stahlberg]

There was also one big player who.

[Unknown]

Is still there in the market called.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Demandbase, who we actually did a lot of, let's say benchmarking from them that.

[Unknown]

Was really helpful for us in our.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Early journey to just understand how these kind of products work and then building.

[Unknown]

Our own DSP based on those requirements.

[Markus Stahlberg]

And of course we had a lot of these unique features or capabilities that those players didn't have. But it was super valuable to realize that there is a market and like that we kind of fit ourselves into that market rather than like, I think that was actually, that was also something that we worked with quite a bit about finding our position. And one of the early important milestones were when we realized that, okay, let's not try to come up with a new category, like something completely new.

[Unknown]

Let's just be an account based marketing.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Platform because that's what people know and that's where they are going to find us better. So yeah, that was basically the early, early journey.

So part of the positioning of the value prop is that Enrich is a more affordable ABM solution compared to some of these other products. How much could someone, an organization typically pay? Like what sort of difference are we talking about here?

So affordable is usually the last one we mentioned. So it's more starting from the, starting from the fact that with those other.

[Unknown]

We call them big box AVM, like.

[Markus Stahlberg]

You'Ll get 180% of what you need and with Enrich you get like 100% of what you need. And the price is probably 30% or 20% of what those big platforms cost. So the price is important, the ease of use is important. And also implementing ABM is not about buying a tool. So that's something we just tell to every customer that if you imagine that by buying an ABM platform that's going to solve all your ABM needs and.

[Unknown]

You'Ll get great results. It's not.

[Markus Stahlberg]

So there's a lot of transformation that needs to happen within the organization and that's where we are with the customer. So we are basically providing support no matter if you are, let's say 50 employees or a smaller company. Whereas these bigger players, they only really care about these huge enterprises. So we really want to help customers to achieve sales and marketing and really.

[Unknown]

Get those results and understand what ABM means because it's a different motion altogether.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Of what many companies are used to doing.

How long did it take to build that first version of the product and what did it do? I'm sure it didn't have everything that you would have loved to build when you launched that product. So in simple terms, what were the specific problems and the solutions you were offering in those early days when you were trying to get those first 10 customers.

Yeah, this is good. So we really started from this very simple solution with this advertising format that you can advertise, do this native advertising to specific audiences. And then we built the DSP which then gave us more, let's say accuracy and more optimization in terms of the targeting. So then customers started seeing really good results in terms of the low cost per engagement and so forth. And then eventually, let's say the third stage of evolution was that we added several features or capabilities into our platform that actually made us a platform rather than just an advertising tool. So intent data was one of those.

[Unknown]

Important capabilities that we added.

[Markus Stahlberg]

And then I think at that point we were on par with or we became on par with the market with these big box players. Until that point we had been just, you can use us for account targeted advertising. We have these unique ad formats. You can get great results and then some analytics, but you can't really kind of do the full ABM implementation. So that was kind of the third stage then.

So in terms of the ad piece, just explain how that was working in simple terms. So you're somebody buys the product and they want to do some kind of advertising. What are they setting up, what platforms or where are these ads showing up and what sort of results are they trying to get?

So it's a content based format.

[Unknown]

So you create an article which is,500.

[Markus Stahlberg]

To 2,000 characters long and you basically.

[Unknown]

See it as an advertisement.

[Markus Stahlberg]

So you go to let's say Forbes and then you see a scrollable article there which is talking about something about the advertiser's B2B product.

[Unknown]

And when you scroll it, our system is tracking the scrolling so we'll know.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Who is interested in the content.

[Unknown]

So it's not about impression, but it's.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Actually about the engagement with the content.

[Unknown]

And in terms of where it's shown.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Like we used Programmatic already in the beginning, but we used third party dsp.

[Unknown]

So it could be essentially anywhere where you see ads.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Like we were targeting those accounts like.

[Unknown]

That you want to target, like you.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Select the accounts you want to target and then they can see these ads basically anywhere they go where ads could be visible. And this eventually became the way that we optimize this advertising delivery or distribution that since we can learn who is interested in specific content, like let's say you are targeting a CFO within let's.

[Unknown]

Say an IT company, you'll have a certain kind of an article, certain kind of content.

[Markus Stahlberg]

And if you have another Persona, like let's say a marketing person, they are.

[Unknown]

Not interested in that.

[Markus Stahlberg]

So this way the system learns who is interested in the content and this.

[Unknown]

Way the results keep getting better over time.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Great. And how do you tie it back to helping the customer understand who's actually engaging with this content? So knowing that it's potentially somebody from this company or it's a CFO versus a marketing person or maybe even like individual level, trying to figure out, okay, it's a person in this, you know, the CFO of this company, how far or how specific are you able to get?

Yeah, yeah, this is a good question. And there is a big difference in.

[Unknown]

International regulation in Europe.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Like it's absolutely not possible to get to the job title level that we would know who the person is without having a consent. And obviously nobody has consent for these CEOs or like C level people.

[Unknown]

So then we know that it's this.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Company and like they are interested in this specific content. So it's up to the user to create content that is relevant to a certain Persona.

[Unknown]

Of course we don't know it for sure.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Like you know, you can have a.

[Unknown]

Janitor who is interested in financial things.

[Markus Stahlberg]

But like most likely it is like somebody from the finance department in the U.S. then again we can go to the job title level. So basically selecting the chop titles you want to target and also get the analytics on the job title level. So that's possible in the US where you don't have so strict regulations in terms of the privacy.

Great. You mentioned getting some customers early on fairly quickly. How long did it take to get those first 10 customers and how easy or hard was it?

So my and my co founders experience were really in sales. So it wasn't I'd say super hard. We had our former venture which was about B2B. It included this B2B publishing. It's more like a publishing company. And through that we were able to get some which served as early references for us. So eventually I think during the, I'd say still it probably took the first year or so like to get these first 10 customers.

[Unknown]

But we had huge churn back then.

[Markus Stahlberg]

So it's like it was very hard to keep customers. Also it was more like campaign type.

[Unknown]

Implementations that they did rather than us.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Being able to retain them for long term.

[Omar Khan]

Yeah, let's talk about that.

[Markus Stahlberg]

So you're doing a great job finding these customers, getting them excited about the product and then when they start using it, they're not really getting the kinds of results that they were hoping for. And then so they're churning tell Me a little bit about what was going on and what was the problem behind this.

So maybe I just fast forward a bit because talking about that early solution, maybe better to talk about like a bit when we had a bit more advanced solution. But we still face the same problem and it is really related to first of all the expectations that the customers had. So we were able to we actually packaged our offering into this three month paid trial. So customers commit to three months. They pay us you know, quite a bit. Typically like 20,000, 30,000, something like that.

For that pilot as an annual.

No, no, during that three months. So we were really like pushing this like kind of it's you know, from the advertising spend, pushing it quite high. And then the results expectations from customers were huge during those three months. And what we learned the hard way and it just took very much time to really kind of understand it that when people first time when they hear ABM they think lead generation and whatever.

[Unknown]

They are doing within ABM often they.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Are still waiting for those form fields. There's this idea that previously they were.

[Unknown]

Doing spray and pray just targeting anybody.

[Markus Stahlberg]

On Google or Facebook or whatever. And then they get a certain conversion.

[Unknown]

Rate, certain number of leads and now they're expecting okay, with ABM we'll just get still the same number of leads and it's just going to be from these great companies and it's going to be this great Personas from the companies.

[Markus Stahlberg]

And obviously that's not going to happen. So this is something we learned that.

[Unknown]

In order to get value from ABM it takes time.

[Markus Stahlberg]

It takes 6 months, 12 months, even.

[Unknown]

18 months depending on our sales cycle. You need to get your sales on.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Board to really get value from abm. Typically also whether it's CEO or whoever.

[Unknown]

Is leading the go to market, that person needs to be involved.

[Markus Stahlberg]

So it really takes a lot of effort from customers. So we realized that we were kind of over promising under delivering from customers perspective. And then we switched this more in.

[Unknown]

A way that we started telling customers.

[Markus Stahlberg]

That, that this is not easy and.

[Unknown]

The product is not going to be.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Solving all of this.

[Unknown]

You also need to do a lot.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Of things like within your organization you need to change. We are going to help you hold your hand and what you are going to have to listen to us.

[Unknown]

And if you are not willing to.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Change then you're not going to get this result. So we don't want to make it sound hard and definitely we don't want to make it sound that like you.

[Unknown]

Shouldn'T start today, you should start today.

[Markus Stahlberg]

If you are not doing it, but at the same time it's not going to be easy. Like it's going to take a lot of effort. And I think that was one of the main learnings that we did from the start and then like actually quite.

[Unknown]

Far away in the, in our journey.

[Markus Stahlberg]

That we realized that like, you know, we just need to ensure that the customer understands how they get the value and that we are there like for.

[Unknown]

Them, like to support them from start to finish.

[Omar Khan]

Yeah, yeah.

[Markus Stahlberg]

I've seen you mentioned getting the sales team on board and I've seen this in the past working with different companies.

[Omar Khan]

Where.

[Markus Stahlberg]

From a C level there was this desire to have some kind of ABM motion in place. You can get from a marketing perspective it looks good because you're really targeting the companies that matter. But there was a lot of resistance from sales where the spray and pray kind of approach was like, okay, they're doing something, they're getting out and reaching people. Sending a whole bunch of cold outreach. And I think for many of them it seemed like this ABM stuff, it just sounds like we're wasting a lot of energy in cycles doing this stuff that doesn't result in leads. Right. So there's this thing about setting expectations and getting people on board about the value of doing abm. But then if they're not getting leads out of this, what were you promising them? What was the outcome that you said that this is what you're going to get from doing this.

What you're going to get if you.

[Unknown]

Do things right, is that you're going.

[Markus Stahlberg]

To get more of these high ACV customers. Normally you should have at least 50,000 as the annual contract value or 30,000.

[Unknown]

For ABM to make sense.

[Markus Stahlberg]

So you're just going to get more of those great fit customers. But it is exactly like you said, that if sales is used to dealing with those marketing leads, then they expect.

[Unknown]

That it's going to be super easy.

[Markus Stahlberg]

They just get the lead, they do the meeting qualification and then create the opportunity or disqualify.

[Unknown]

It's super easy.

[Markus Stahlberg]

They don't need to do anything.

[Unknown]

But then with ABM you actually need to do prospecting. So it's actually closer to code outreach.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Than to this inbound leads. So it's just, it's warm outreach. So in code outreach, salesys, you know.

[Unknown]

Needs to prospect these accounts, they need.

[Markus Stahlberg]

To find who to contact, they need to send messages, you know, make calls and so forth. But these are cold accounts, whereas in ABM the accounts are warm already. They know about you. They've visited your website several times. Maybe they've interacted with your content on LinkedIn, they've seen your ads and so forth. Like it's kind of they already know about you and which should be clear.

[Unknown]

Sign that this is going to be.

[Markus Stahlberg]

An easier process for sales than doing a cold outreach. But this is what many companies don't understand, or let's say many salespeople don't.

[Unknown]

Understand, is they just have this experience.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Of doing that marketing is going to.

[Unknown]

Help us with providing, providing leads.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Yeah, yeah, it's a tough sell because you've got to sell the product, but you also got to sell this education piece and you've got to make sure culturally the organization is ready to do this. You know, across, across the board.

[Omar Khan]

The.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Let's talk about, okay, beyond the first 10 customers, let's talk about getting to the first million in ARR and how you got there. And in many ways you are having to apply the same principles and strategies that you were talking to your customers about. And when you and I were talking earlier, it seemed like that you yourself weren't that clear about your ICP initially. Is that right?

Yeah, yeah. So we had somewhat of an idea of what the ICP is like. We started with the tech software companies that are still icp. But the problem that we faced and that many companies face is that when you do it in such a trivial.

[Unknown]

Simple way just to define the industries.

[Markus Stahlberg]

And company sizes, there's like you don't really have an icp, you have a.

[Unknown]

TAM or target addressable market.

[Markus Stahlberg]

So okay, you can sell to these companies and they can buy from you, but that's it. They are not really an ideal fit. So then we faced this over many years. We don't really get great conversions, especially from cold outreach. And even with our ABM efforts, we were not able to really hit the message, get the message home to these accounts. So the important realization was that ICP actually means like why is this company within the tam like a perfect fit for your product? And for us, what it meant was that we realized that companies who get.

[Unknown]

Most value from our products immediately are.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Those that are already spending like significantly on digital advertising. So if they are spending let's say 50,000 on LinkedIn and Facebook and Google and so forth, like they are probably wasting a lot of money like if they want to go UP market because.

[Unknown]

LinkedIn is the only channel where you.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Can do targeting like in a precise. That it's actually the account based. But not every company is using LinkedIn.

[Unknown]

So you can't reach everybody.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Then you use Facebook, you use Google, like you are going to do. It's almost like spray and pray. You are just going to target a lot of different accounts and then just hope that something goes to the right icp.

[Unknown]

So then we realized that, okay, by refining this ICP of ours into these companies who are actually big spenders, they.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Are advertising a lot, we can get very easily to the discussion.

[Unknown]

Okay, let's reallocate. Let's say if you are spending now 50,000, reallocate 20,000 to ABM.

[Markus Stahlberg]

And that's an easy decision and it's.

[Unknown]

Also very easy to show the improvement.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Compared to what they did before. So I think the call out here.

[Unknown]

Is that TAM is not the same as icp. And at least my advice would be.

[Markus Stahlberg]

To think about how can you optimize.

[Unknown]

Certain metrics like acv, like in our.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Case, like how can you find companies that are really good fit for your.

[Unknown]

Product and for your offering in terms of like this eventual revenue metrics.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Great. You talked about a lot of really interesting things there. And I want to drill down a little bit more into that. Let's start with the icp. So you've figured out over time who that ICP is really is. You talked about the ad spend and so on. How are you figuring out who these people were, how much money they were spending and all of that sort of stuff?

Yeah, that's a good question. So we call this that there are these visible attributes and dark attributes and.

[Unknown]

This is their dark attribute.

[Markus Stahlberg]

So you know, nobody advertises on their page that, you know, this is how much we spent to do advertising. And there is no databases really like that would include this for B2B. So usually in this kind of cases you need to think about proxies. So there is something in public data sets that correlates with this attribute, with.

[Unknown]

This dark attribute, which is high spend.

[Markus Stahlberg]

In our case, like it's a very simple metric. So the question or like what we have found is that like for instance, LinkedIn, they have a ads library, like.

[Unknown]

Where you can see for any company you want, you can see which ads they're running. And the number of those ads they're.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Running has a direct correlation to their ad spend.

That's smart. I think Facebook has something similar.

Yeah, Facebook and Google has it as well. So it's required because of this political ads and the transparency.

So okay, so you're basically saying, okay, this is our icp, let's go and find some of those. Let's narrow down that list of potential companies. And then let's take a look at like the LinkedIn ads library. How many ads are they? You know, do they have how. Maybe, maybe I think you can even tell like how recent they are or something like that. Right. So you get a general idea of, okay, this wasn't like some ad stuff they did like 20 years ago. Like, they're actually, you know, doing this stuff now.

[Omar Khan]

I also really liked what you said.

[Markus Stahlberg]

About going in saying, okay, well, they've.

[Omar Khan]

Got this big ad spend and they're.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Probably not getting a great return on that. Or our ICP is hopefully not getting a great result on that. And so we're not saying to them, you need to find additional budget to invest in our product. You're talking about reallocating ad spend budget to this. How did you come up with that? Was that like something you discovered over time or you were pretty, you knew early on this is the way we need to try and sell this?

No, it's really over time. The way we approach this is that we, we come up with hypothesis every quarter to our icp. We want to test certain things. Typically it's based on some ideas that somebody has, like intuition or then we have some just insights from some data. Okay, let's see, does this hold? And this was one of those cases where we just decided to test, let's see if it works or not. And it did work.

[Unknown]

So then it's stuck.

[Markus Stahlberg]

So that's how we do it. And that's actually how I recommend anybody to do it. So you shouldn't change your ICP constantly. But at least the way we approach.

[Unknown]

It is that every quarter we do this iteration.

[Markus Stahlberg]

So it's an iterative process like incrementally.

[Unknown]

Improving it based on the current situation.

[Markus Stahlberg]

And current data that we have instead of overhauling it completely every quarter or even more frequently than that.

[Omar Khan]

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[Markus Stahlberg]

So a lot of the we talked about LinkedIn and so you can use that as targeting for your ICP. You're running. You start running LinkedIn ads and I think you were successful at doing that. I think a lot of founders I talk to always say tried ads, never worked, waste of money, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But you got to the point where you were clear enough about your icp, you figured out how to target those people and then you're running LinkedIn ads. But you were also doing your, you were using Enrich as well alongside it. Right. Can you explain what you were doing?

So this is one of the interesting sides of being in this business that we actually do the same thing for our own GTM as we are offering to our customers, like drinking our own champagne. It also took quite a bit of time to really get it working. So we even had challenges with getting the sales and marketing aligned. But generally the way we do it is that we have the ICP defined. We use LinkedIn. It's a very effective channel because we can be so targeted. But then you can't target everybody on LinkedIn.

[Unknown]

So then ABM is there like it's.

[Markus Stahlberg]

A more, you know, it doesn't cost so much to run like ABM ads, a programmatic abm. So it's kind of a constant nurturing like that we do like in both channels with our product. We can also go into more granular like details. So like based on the stage of the buyer journey, like some accounts are cold, some accounts are like closer to buying or some accounts are researching online based on intent data.

[Unknown]

So then there's a different message, different.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Campaigns that are being run run to those, those accounts and eventually the target is to get those accounts from cold to hot. But that can take a lot of time. And this is like, you know when.

[Unknown]

You say that advertising doesn't work normally.

[Markus Stahlberg]

It means that you didn't get any leads. That's normally the thing, like you're just doing this tactical short term thing. But with abm, with this ICP based approach, you need to be prepared to doing it for like two years or something. Like it's a very long cycle.

[Unknown]

You are looking for this big fish.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Not for this transactional small deals. So you need to be prepared to building awareness, investing to it for 6 months, 12 months.

[Unknown]

Even for individual company, it's still cheaper.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Than doing cold outreach.

[Unknown]

It's much more scalable and marketing doesn't cost so much.

[Markus Stahlberg]

But if you have sales trying to close or even generate opportunities from those companies, nothing is going to happen when you reach out to these code accounts.

So when you're running these ads, you're doing the LinkedIn ads along with this programmatic ABM ads through Enrich. If you're not focusing on leads as the KPI, what were you focusing on? Was this mostly about just engagement with the right people?

Yeah.

[Unknown]

So here we get exactly to the point that we actually tried to get.

[Markus Stahlberg]

These accounts from cold to hot. So when they are hot then sales conversions increase about 10% points. Like we can say that. Okay. It's like significantly better conversion that sales is getting like when they are targeting.

[Unknown]

Accounts that already know us and already engage with us.

[Markus Stahlberg]

So it's actually quite simple.

[Unknown]

Somebody might call this marketing qualified accounts like MQA rather than mql.

[Markus Stahlberg]

But I think this warm versus cold is a better comparison because like when you compare to MQLs then you immediately start to think that you have something tangible. Like you have a person who wants.

[Unknown]

To talk to you, but here you don't. You just have a signal or like an indication that this account is likely to be ready to talk with your.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Sales and interested in your offering.

Right. And you were doing a combination of say on LinkedIn paid ads as well as organic. And so you posting regularly, members of the team posting and trying to use that as a way to build authority and relationships as well. I think you still do that today, right?

Yeah, yeah. And that's actually a super important thing, something I really recommend to everybody. So I started personally I started posting every day last summer and it's, it's very clear that it is working well. So we are like, we get to the radar of these ICP accounts. Of course we need to connect first and it's of course not just me.

[Unknown]

It's.

[Markus Stahlberg]

It's like you know, we want to, it's not all of our management team members but like that's the direction we.

[Unknown]

Are going to so that everybody's posting.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Quite frequently and it's all about content. Like it's all about like when. I guess Everybody who uses LinkedIn actively knows that when you start seeing the same people having smart comments or smart posts, then you start to feel like that you know them, like okay, this, this guy again and then he has.

[Unknown]

Good ideas and this leads to a kind of a relationship.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Of course it's not real like one to one relationship, but it is in a way that they recognize to you and know you. And that's really like a strong and absolutely free. You just build your audience, you just keep posting and it's surprisingly easy. I have to say that as a CEO, I would have expected when I started posting that we had a board meeting where the board members were just pointing out that you are posting so frequently and I was expecting that they'll be telling me that you should stop it and focus on something more important. It was the other way around. They said that great, that you're building authority and so on. That's really important I think.

So you started the business in 2015. It took about a year to get the first 10 customers. I think getting to the first million in ARR was somewhere around 2017, 2018 and then 2020 was the big milestone I guess for you because you were running a multiple seven figure business at that time. You raised your Series A round which we talked about. So things are starting to look good. Right. It's taken a little bit of time to get to this point. You've got some traction now. You're generating decent revenue. You raised the Series A and then kind of things started to fall apart a bit. What happened?

Yeah, so first of all it's good to tell everybody that we were self.

[Unknown]

Funded so we didn't have any funding.

[Markus Stahlberg]

So we were basically funding this from our own pockets. And then also we got some funding from there's like a Finnish government like this institution where you can get grants and funding. So we didn't have this luxury of having pre seed or seed financing. And we were always with my co.

[Unknown]

Founder like very strict on money, like.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Not, not to overspend or something. Then we got our like round first 2 million and then like a few months later 2, 2 more. And then we just, you know like there was this idea that okay, now you need to Burn money. Like you just need to spend it, you need to be really fast and like just, just you know, start, start investing it. And that we did just in a.

[Unknown]

Very, let's say not an ideal way.

[Markus Stahlberg]

So, so with my co were kind of the brain of the operation in all of our companies. And like instead of hiring like a team and like kind of building this management structure gradually like we instead like.

[Unknown]

We just hired a huge number of.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Like SDRs, sales development people in Philippines. Like I think at first we had maybe 150 people. Like we were first like you know.

[Unknown]

20 or so like when we got.

[Markus Stahlberg]

The funding and then like we probably in six months we grew to 150 people. So having this huge team which was.

[Unknown]

Not managed properly, we didn't get any.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Managers or management level people there. So you can imagine how it went.

It was like the two of you trying to manage this remote team of 150 sales folks.

So I'm not super proud of that but it's always good to learn from your mistakes. So I'm happy to share that. This. So nobody else does it and our idea was that it was just kind of Excel money in a sense. This is how much one SDR brings and then you just multiply it and we actually did it. We actually implemented this. So we had every month we had a batch of new candidates coming in and had to train them. Obviously it's. But there were people who then managed, managed that but not everybody was kind.

[Unknown]

Of grown from ground up. So first they were SDRs and then they moved to training and or managing.

[Markus Stahlberg]

A small team or something. Anyway that was like a lot of took a lot of money and a lot of effort. Even if it's Philippines it cost a lot so it's not really something that I could recommend to anybody. And then eventually, not maybe 10 months after we got the financing, my co.

[Unknown]

Founder got diagnosed with cancer.

[Markus Stahlberg]

And that was completely surprised. So there was nothing to indicate that, which was of course a huge shock. And it was then there was an operation and he was able to continue still for maybe seven, eight months and then just had to leave the day to day operations. And then I was left running this organization by myself. And then after a second operation, after.

[Unknown]

A year from the diagnosis, he eventually died.

[Markus Stahlberg]

And then that was the situation. Obviously we weren't anymore having 150 people in Philippines, it was much less already.

[Unknown]

But we had burned almost all the.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Money so there was not a lot left. So it was pretty, let's say challenging situation. Had to rethink A lot of things at that point.

Sorry to hear that. That's a really tough situation. And your co founder, you two had known each other for a long time and worked together on a bunch of different businesses, right?

[Unknown]

Yeah, correct.

[Markus Stahlberg]

So we started in maybe 2002 with our first or maybe 2004 with our first venture and just work together really. We called it almost like symbiotic.

[Unknown]

We had very different roles in every.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Company that we were running. So it was huge, huge change then like when he was, when he was gone.

So I'm just trying to paint a picture here. So you, you took the series A money, you, you kind of, you guys threw it at, you know, this kind of army of sales people in the Philippines that wasn't working. Your co founder gets a diagnosis and you know, he's kind of focused on, on, on that. And obviously I think that that means that the momentum that you guys were building probably slows down anyway, right? It just has to. And then you end up losing your co founder. So you're dealing with that loss. And then you said you spent all, you know, pretty much most of the money that you had raised. What was going through your mind? Like, did you, did you like, how did you get the energy back to then go, you know, go back and start saying, okay, I'm going to do this alone. I'm going to go and rebuild this business and get it to where it needs to be.

I had the intention. So I think like this is one of the things that I have, like.

[Unknown]

When I want to do something I.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Will really like, you know, put effort to was hard. But also I had a very, very clear vision and intention to start doing it. I'd say within four months or so.

[Unknown]

Five months, it was already clear what the direction is going to be.

[Markus Stahlberg]

So there was still enough of these funds left so I could start hiring people. So like started hiring proper sales team first like AES, AES supported then by the SDRs who were remaining at that point and then expanding to getting an SDR leader, getting customer success like manager, who quite soon became the leader revenue operations kind of expanding gradually to all the core functions that you need for a functional go to market. So that was kind of, I think it happened quite fast and I think like surprisingly easily, even with this very difficult situation at that time.

Okay, so you started building this in house team around you and it was a much smaller team than what you were trying to do in the Philippines that, that time you said, you also mentioned this idea but like being very clear about the Direction. Was there something about the, the business or the product or just, you know, your kind of go to market motion? What, what were the, the two or three things that you said, okay, I'm going to build the team around me and then I'm going to do these other things strategically to move the business in the right direction.

Yeah. So I think it kind of gradually became clear what the direction is. I think the first point was about realizing that it's a good idea to build this team. We had actually our sales director, eventual.

[Unknown]

Sales director, who was the only AE.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Back when we had this big Philippines team, like was ramping up really nicely like to do the sales director role. And I think that was, that was like one of the, you know, where, where I saw that okay, this actually, actually can work. And, and this is this the way like I should do it. So I think like we, we had this early indicators that you know, this is working, like we are getting some results. Results I could have selected as the, also as the quote. This like, you know, short term predicts long term, which usually works like when, when you start to see results with.

[Unknown]

Any decision like in the short term.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Like then, you know, it, it's probably.

[Unknown]

Going to continue to the long term.

[Markus Stahlberg]

But when you, especially when you don't.

[Unknown]

See results in the short term, then.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Like you probably need to do something about it quite quickly. So this is also something. I think this is one of the, one of the things that like, you.

[Unknown]

Know, I realized that, that this needs.

[Markus Stahlberg]

To be, this needs to be happening in terms of the other, let's say strategic things. I think this came a bit later. So there was still one important milestone here in the, in the process before.

[Unknown]

I could really kind of focus on like, you know, long term and strategy.

[Markus Stahlberg]

And that was a situation like, you know, after I started hiring like these people, of course, you know, it's much more expensive like, than, than like the Philippines team. So I started looking at the balance sheet and P and L and just realized that okay, every month we have 200,000 less.

[Unknown]

We had 800,000 in the account and.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Every month it's 200,000 less. Everything looked good from the, let's say.

[Unknown]

Accounting perspective, but cash flow was the problem.

[Markus Stahlberg]

So it looked like that, okay, now if I don't do something, we are going to run out of money in just a few months. So that was a big shock and I realized that, okay, now something needs to be done here. Like I did a lot of calculation myself and I think I built some kind of a system like to just mitigate it. But then I had to hire actual finance person who can work on this and just ensure that we have the money. And that's when we built this system, which is based on cash flow. So we just invest what we have money for. And now we are in a stage that we can already predict a bit like we can already invest next quarter's revenue. But at that point it was really close. It felt like that, okay, now we can go bust even if we don't do something about that. So at that point, once we got that sorted, then it became possible to actually start looking into the future and.

[Unknown]

Into more strategic things.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Cool. Just going back to hiring the sales team. Earlier we talked about getting a sales team on board with ABM and having marketing and sales alignment and making sure that customers are set up to do that to be successful. That turned out to be an issue in your own company as well, right?

Yeah, yeah. It's like, yeah, it's maybe surprising, but we were like very sales led. Obviously you can understand it also from this, from our background and then on the other hand, from the fact that we had such a big team around sales, so we had one person in marketing and 150 people in sales. So that was kind of the situation back at that time. I don't think any kind of alignment.

[Unknown]

Would have been even possible.

[Markus Stahlberg]

But eventually when we started having some kind of a reasonable team, we started working on this more like alignment initiatives and just realized that sales is not really realizing what value marketing can bring. And then on the other hand, marketing didn't really know what sales is doing, doing. So it took a lot of time before we actually got to a point where we found a solution of how marketing and sales should collaborate. And the solution was actually quite simple. So we have those inbound opportunities, so those who come only through marketing, Somebody is filling a form and then just sales is qualifying and then opportunity is created. Then you have the code outreach. So sales is reaching out to the account.

[Unknown]

There's no signals.

[Markus Stahlberg]

There's no, I mean, there's no data.

[Unknown]

About them interacting with us within the.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Website or interacting with the ads. And then, you know, we just came up with this third category, which is warm, outbound or mixed influence, we call it. So marketing and sales work together with this category.

[Unknown]

So marketing tries to warm up as.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Many, you know, accounts as possible. And sales prioritizes those high those accounts, so they first go like and target those accounts. The main, I think one of the main innovations there was that instead of splitting the commission in A way that marketing gets half and sales gets half. We actually pay 100% to marketing and 120% to sales. So we actually pay 2.2 times the commission that normally we would pay. And this was the way to really communicate to the sales that you should focus on these accounts. And then, of course, it was motivating for marketing as well. And it was a profitable decision in the end because the conversion rates of these accounts is much higher than for those code outreach.

[Omar Khan]

Right.

[Markus Stahlberg]

So just to be clear, you mentioned, like, three different types, but the incentives were all around them going after the warm leads, right?

Yeah, yeah. And it's warm accounts, so we don't have the contacts. And that's what makes this a bit challenging from sales perspective always because you just have. Have a name of company you have.

[Unknown]

You know, like what they did, like, which, you know, pages, which ads they engage with, where.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Where this engagement comes from, like on a city level.

[Unknown]

But then still you don't know who it is.

[Markus Stahlberg]

So you still need to do prospecting, find the contact, get in touch with them, like, you know, do the, you know, all this. What.

[Unknown]

What sales needs to do with.

[Markus Stahlberg]

With outreach.

So, yeah, I mean, I think that's a pretty clever solution. And it turned out you said the ROI was there. It's kind of interesting that on one hand you're already like, every month, okay, 200,000 gone. 200,000 gone. And then it was like, oh, let's.

[Omar Khan]

Pay twice as much to sales and marketing for the leads.

[Markus Stahlberg]

It's kind of a creative solution. I'm glad it kind of worked out, but I mean, we could talk more about that, but there's a few other things I want to cover, so let's kind of keep moving. You started initially, I think, focusing on customers in Finland. You had customers in Europe that you were kind of growing, and then now you're spending a lot of time in the U.S. i just want to understand, like, where is your focus? Which, you know, what's your biggest market today?

Yeah, so actually, like, very early, we did like, focus to Finland, maybe first, second year, but then after that, it was already, like, quite, quite international. Like you said, in recent, like, recent years, US has been growing fastest. And what we see in the US Market especially is that companies are more.

[Unknown]

Aware of ABM and they realize that.

[Markus Stahlberg]

They need it, they understand what it is. But then, like, the solutions that are out there are too expensive, too complicated or. So we put a lot of focus into the US Market at the moment, but also to the European market. So this is a very, let's say interesting market because like there are so many companies who don't do ABM yet who know that they should be doing it. And like if you look at Gartner Magic Quadrant, there are only like, you know, there are two of these so called or three of these big box players and then like there aren't so many. So we are there which is like, you know, really good place to be be.

[Unknown]

So, so we want to be this.

[Markus Stahlberg]

You know, challenger, challenger in the market. Market. And yeah, that's, that's why we get like, you know, that's why we get nice, nice growth at the moment.

Yeah, awesome. Love it.

[Omar Khan]

All right, we should wrap up.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Let's get on to the lightning round. I've got seven quick fire questions for you. Are you ready?

Yep.

What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

So this is something that came from my co founder. So he pointed out that we should always think about return on investment. So if you invest 1,000, it's unrealistic to expect that you get 100,000 in return. So the ROI should be, you should.

[Unknown]

Have that in mind when you invest.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Or when you calculate your expected returns. So if you expect 100,000 in return, maybe investing 20,000 already would be a huge ROI. So I think that was really important, clever advice.

What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

So there's a book I read a while back, it's called Presenting to Win. I think it's written by Cherry Wiseman. So I learned to present thanks to this book. And I see a lot of people who are not very good at presenting.

[Unknown]

Creating slides, creating nerds.

[Markus Stahlberg]

And that's why I recommend this book to anybody. Because especially in this today's world, being almost all online, you need something to tell a story. You need something that people really can relate to and attach to. And that's an important, very valuable book, at least for me.

What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

Tenacity is the word I would select here. So this entrepreneurship is always like a roller coaster. So you always can expect that after.

[Unknown]

You get high, then you'll get low as well.

[Markus Stahlberg]

So I like this metaphor or approach that many cold callers have that every no takes you closer to a yes. And it is kind of this way that you just need to, to take those series of no's because eventually there will be a yes. And I think those people, those entrepreneurs who are willing to work on a.

[Unknown]

Very long term, they're the ones who.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Are going to win.

No is the way. Right. What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

I was thinking about this and I think I had this focus time in my calendar. So I book half a day every day, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday from my calendar to focus time and generally I don't take meetings during that time and that has been huge. Being fully remote, you have a lot of meetings. I have up to 40 meetings to 50 meetings things a week. So then it's, it's really important. Otherwise you have no time to think not how to really work. Like so that has been super important, at least for me.

What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?

There are so many. There are so many. Like I just had a today like a great chat with our discussion with ChatGPT but at the moment I would say like what I'm like I would be, let's say top of mind for me would be this AI based marketplace for AI solutions. So basically for B2B buyers like who.

[Unknown]

Want to leverage AI to make their.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Organization more efficient, like to be able.

[Unknown]

To find those because it's super hard.

[Markus Stahlberg]

Like there are a lot of solutions out there but you know, you just don't know like what is the right fit and what does not the right thing for you.

Yeah, yeah. It's kind of a. It's like a gold rush right now with all these crazy tools and it's really hard I think for people to make sense of all of that. What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

Yeah, so my both parents are professional or were professional at least track and field. So father is shot poacher and mother is runner. And like they were both like in the international level. My dad was even in the Olympics. But there was enough like sport in the family back then so I didn't do anything like that. So I kind of found sports later and nowadays I couldn't really live without it.

Love it. And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

Yeah, so it would be running and sport in general. Like doing this exercise. I think it's what I realize when I'm ill or like when there's a lot of stress that it just accumulates without, without having this way to get it out. Especially running this long. I do half marathons quite often so that's a good way for me to reset and also get my thinking going.

Awesome. Well, Markus, it's been a Pleasure chatting. Thank you for making the time. I think we covered a lot here. Hopefully we gave people listening some ideas, some insights that they can take away and apply to their own business. Hopefully we got people also, if they're not already doing abm, a little bit more interested in that, with a realistic set of expectations on how to succeed with abm. So if that's awesome, if people want to check out more, learn more about Enrich, they can go to Enrich. That's, that's nletterrich IO. And if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

LinkedIn definitely. So you'll find me there.

Awesome. Thanks man. It's been a pleasure. Wish you and the team the best of success.

Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. It was great.

Awesome. Cheers.

[Omar Khan]

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