Matt Christian

Your POC process is probably why you're not closing enterprise deals.   After analyzing POC outcomes across our portfolio, the data is clear: Companies with structured and priced POCs close 3x more deals than those running free pilots.   Why charge? Price signals seriousness. Even nominal fees filter serious buyers from tire-kickers. Frame your pilots as fixed-fee engagements: Say "we structure this as a 4-week, fixed-fee engagement to quantify value and build your business case."   Be sure to clarify pricing expectations in the process: If your pilot costs $5K but commercial deals are $100K-$300K based on the value unlocked, state this explicitly to avoid anchoring.   Here are 5 best POC best practices we see:   1. Define success criteria, not scope Align on specific KPIs, business outcomes, and who signs off before writing a line of code.   2. Time-box ruthlessly with weekly checkpoints POCs should run 30-90 days max. Set weekly or bi-weekly checkpoints to maintain urgency.   3. Pre-commit the path to commercial discussions Before starting any pilot, confirm that hitting the success metrics will trigger stakeholder presentations and commercial negotiations.   4. Demand access to the full buying center Technical users alone can't close deals. Ensure you meet decision-makers and budget holders during the POC, not after.   5. Document like a contract Formalize scope, terms, and deliverables in the agreement. Include specific responsibilities for both sides, data access requirements, success metrics, timelines, and post-POC commitments.   --   POCs are where your enterprise motion gets built. Treat them that way.   I wrote a guide to AI pricing with Madhavan Ramanujam and Joshua Bloom that discusses these ideas in more detail. If you're curious to dive deeper, I'll leave that link below. Also, Madhavan just released a new book called Scaling Innovation that also explores these topics. Highly recommend!

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Unify crossed $1M closed-won ARR in June - it was a record month for us. Here are 5 ways we leveled up to hit that milestone:   (1) We refreshed all our Sales collateral   It had been 8 months since we last updated our sales pitch deck. In June, we built new pitch decks and scripts. I personally spent 10-20 hours a week for a few weeks on this workstream. Long overdue, but its important that we present as a more polished org today.   (2) Momentum is at our backs   Sales is all about momentum—when you're winning, everyone prospects harder, pitches better, and closes faster because they're doing it with confidence. After some tough months, the team's energy closing out June and into July is electric.   (3) We adopted a more rigorous forecasting process   We used to have a very limited forecasting process. Now we run separate rep and manager forecasts with multiple weekly calls. This revamped process means we're more on top of deals and executing at a higher level.   (4) 4 new Account Executives and 2 new Account Managers   We have a record amount of pipeline and need to grow the team to provide a better customer experience.   Zachary Bergman, CPA and Erika Fuchs started as Account Executives earlier in the month. This week Andrew Kim and Zach Herman started.   And Emma Strupp and Tyler W. joined our Account Management team to help us level up how we work with current customers.   (5) We launched Unify for Sales reps   We've been hearing the same pain point from customers for months: Growth teams generate positive customer engagements, but the handoff to Sales is broken. Sellers juggle 5+ tools. Context gets lost. Prospects are left unresponded to.   Unify for Sales Reps is one of our biggest launches ever. We're bringing AI-powered research directly to sellers—AI research assistants, browser extension for 1-click email & phone enrichment, manual sequence steps, and a unified task dashboard to help reps move 10x faster while AI handles the busywork.   Excited to share our July update soon 🚀

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The fastest-growing SaaS companies don’t start with messaging. They start with reality. Not personas. (Seems like a joke but no shortage of personas out there like "Digital-First Dave" and "Cost-Conscious Carla") The best companies go straight to the source: their target market. What’s actually happening in their target customers’ world? I’ve seen it play out across 200+ buyer research projects at Wynter. The companies that nail positioning and marketing? They ask sharper questions: → What slows you down in your workflow? → What’s the trigger that gets you searching for a solution? → What would actually make your job easier? They don’t assume. They investigate. The quality of your decisions comes from the quality of your information. And the results show up fast because now you’re speaking to real problems, in real language, with real stakes. It’s not just tighter messaging. It's marketing that finally lands. Stop guessing what matters to your buyers, ask them. It's the only way to know, really. Use tools like Wynter to get insights straight from the source. Run a target customer survey with Wynter to learn what your ICPs want https://wynter.com

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3 Lessons from Building a B2B SaaS Business in the Middle East After 3 years building in the GCC, here are the lessons that surprised me most: 🎯 Lesson 1: Relationships First, Automation Second In the Valley, scale comes from automation. In the GCC, the biggest deals are still sealed over coffee. We tested automated outreach, AI-driven lead scoring, the full playbook. Response rate? 2%. We shifted to relationship-first selling: warm introductions, industry events, and real conversations about business challenges. Result? 40%+ meeting-to-demo conversion rates. 📊 Lesson 2: Technical Excellence Isn’t Enough We built enterprise-grade infrastructure: sub-100ms response times, 99.9% uptime. The engineering team was proud. Our first customers? Lost. The lesson: In B2B SaaS here, education comes before adoption. We spent as much time showing why the solution mattered as we did building it. Now onboarding starts with a “Data Activation 101 for Growth” session, and customer success improved 60%. 🚀 Lesson 3: Regional Solutions Beat Global Players At first, we thought we had to outcompete global platforms feature for feature. Wrong. Local compliance, Arabic language support, regional payment rails, Ramadan marketing cycles, and GCC-specific business practices aren’t “extras.” They’re competitive moats. We’ve won deals against billion-dollar players simply by understanding how business is done here. The bigger picture: The GCC isn’t a smaller version of the US. It’s a unique market with its own dynamics, culture, and opportunities. The SaaS companies that win here aren’t always the most advanced. They’re the most adapted. Your turn: If you’ve built or scaled SaaS in the Middle East, what lessons caught you off guard?

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Clay just gave its AI the one skill RevOps and GTM teams have been begging for: the ability to actually use a website like a human, to do deeper GTM research on its own. It’s called Claygent Navigator. 🦾🩵 Think of it like the GTM version of OpenAI’s Operator — AI that doesn’t just look at a page, but actually interacts with it: filling out forms, applying filters, clicking through results, and surfacing insights. Here's a problem I used Navigator to solve in the attached video: 🐦‍⬛ Sales needs ad intelligence (how many ads, key terms, themes) to have better conversations with prospects. 🪺 The data exists in public ad libraries, but it’s a nightmare to click through hundreds of ads manually. 🪹 Traditional enrichment vendors give you the numbers, but not the context. With Navigator, I can now: 🦾 Autonomously search LinkedIn’s Ad Library 🦾 Pull back total ads, top terms, and key themes 🦾 Package it into a report for sales without them ever touching the library It runs the research in the background, skips the tedious tabs and back and forth, and delivers something sales can actually use. Honestly, it feels a little creepy to watch 😅…but also amazing and mind-blowing! If you’re a Clay customer, this is already in your instance. Go try it out! And if you want to check out the prompt I used in the demo, drop a comment and I'll share. :) #ClayPartner #sponsored #revenueoperations #ai

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Many prospects ask me how Docket's sales agent differs from a simple enterprise search tool. The four types of questions customers ask our agent are the best way to explain it👇🏻 1. Simple retrieval: "Do we integrate with Slack?" 2. File search: "Where do I find a case study in healthcare?" 3. Reasoning: "What are our top objections and how do we handle them?" 4. Scenario: "If a customer has 110 salespeople, each closing 3 deals, what would our ROI impact look like?" The first two are just fancy search, and any enterprise search tool can help you do that. The last two questions are where Docket's sales agent stands out. Multi-hop reasoning questions (question #3) require AI to connect dots across multiple data points, synthesize patterns, and provide strategic insights. Scenario questions like #4 go even further. They're asking AI to model outcomes, calculate impact, and essentially become a sales consultant on demand. Instead of scrambling to find a calculator or ping the sales engineer, the sales rep gets an instant, customized analysis. Answering this really well is the difference between a consultation call and a conversion call. That is the difference between an enterprise search tool and an always-on sales agent like Docket.

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Most companies don’t hire their first customer marketing lead until they’ve scaled to around 500 employees. That’s been my observation after more than 1,000 conversations with growing teams these past few years. Of course, some do it sooner, some later. But that seems to be a general benchmark. But I believe we’re on the edge of a shift. Startups will begin making this investment much earlier and as part of their foundational marketing strategy. At Champion, as example, our GTM investments haven’t been SDRs, ads, or trade show sponsorships to date. Rather, they’ve been customer success, community building, advocacy, and partnerships. Why? Because human-driven, trust-based relationships go beyond a GTM strategy. They're a foundation for sustainable growth. And it’s worked. The obvious part: successful customers are more likely to drive word of mouth, referrals, and growth. The less obvious part: building through customers and community accelerates learning, helping you focus on the right problems to solve. This prevents you from spreading yourself too thin, which is one of the fastest killers of early-stage companies. And it's far more cost-effective than outbound or paid channels. We've seen customers: -Bring us into new organizations. -Persuade or solidify opportunities as a reference -Proactively partner with us on expansions. -Provide critical market insights and product feedback that have helped us scale. The earlier you build these motions, the more they become your DNA. This is why the future of early-stage GTM belongs to customer marketing leaders. Those who drive growth through authenticity and relationships, especially in an era where trust is becoming diluted by AI and automation, have an edge that will be more critical than ever for organizations to invest early in.

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