Customer discovery for reconfigured.io
Discovering a customer acquisition method for a modern data stack product
Founders of reconfigured.io, a pre-seed stage data solution for modern analytics teams, wanted to improve the amount of direct conversations with customers after summer of 2023. After experimenting several product-led-growth tactics, the founding team seeked alternatives in a more direct, sales-led go to market (GTM) strategy. With 6 paying customers, the team wanted to grow and create traction to support a seed round during 2024.
In 6 months, by implementing some best practices of early stage sales-led GTM, we enabled the reconfigured team to systematically source more sales & customer discovery meetings every month. During this time, 3 new recurring revenue customers were acquired, along with lessons about how to start conversations, move pipeline, and onboard new customers.
While we were able to increase the amount of discovery conversations per week with systematic outbound messaging and close new business, the GTM motion still lacked traction and scalability that a venture capital seed round required. The insights of our customer discovery work resulted in a decision to pivot the future direction of the company and starting re-discovery for a new, different product built to serve the needs of data teams.
"Miikka is a person that can both understand big picture context quickly, and get things done. We hired him to kickstart our outreach, but he was able to provide so much more - from technical account list building to turning customer discovery into messaging insights. If you're looking for early stage GTM help, definitely consider hiring Miikka."
Richard Makara, CEO, and Co-founder of reconfigured
How did we achieve this?
During a 6 month collaboration, we built on reconfigured’s existing “bottom-up” go to market strategy. The team’s fundamental belief was that the product gives value to individual contributors in data teams of small, growing tech companies (data analysts, data engineers, business analysts). What they lacked at the time was the amount of conversations in the sales pipeline, and speed in closing new sales.
We built a habit of iterating on their Ideal Customer Profile, user & buyer personas, messaging and website copy experimentations in weekly recurring meetings and monthly workshops. In a 4-person commercial team, we shared responsibilities based on tasks: product marketing narrative formulation, website & message copywriting, ICP filtering, contact list building, messaging, and intro meetings.
In sync with the meeting cadence, we introduced a series of experiments to reach customers, including a top-down approach. We targeted product leaders, CTO’s and growth leaders with a different value proposition that spoke more about business value than technical benefits.
Besides a new target persona and value proposition, we experimented and understood several signals among our target customers that proved to support the success of our messaging, including recent funding rounds, data team recruiting job ads, or business verticals (internet platforms and micro-mobility platforms). We also began to talk to the enterprise segment, in addition to growth companies that were the initial ICP.
- Product Marketing narrative, including outbound messaging and website copy
- Ideal Customer Profile and buyer & user personas
- Lead generation using Linkedin (DM’s + Ads), Apollo, Clay, and Lemlist in Northern European and North American markets
- Early design of a repeatable sales process