The Week in Review, visiting our HQ in Stockholm
I spent the week at Scrive’s HQ in Stockholm, feeding off the energy of the colleagues who are responsible for building a dominant E-Signing player in the Nordics. Now, the aim is to expand into the DACH Market, which comes with a massive green field opportunity but also some challenges.
The first challenge being that when you have such a big addressable market as a software company, without a massive client base yet, you are in a phase of validating the verticals and customer profiles you are most successful in — there are certainly parallels between the Nordics and the DACH space, but these markets often require a different messaging / approach.
Operating with Data from outbound conversations, gathering customer feedback and analyzing closed won and lost reasons, every day you inch closer to a better-run growth strategy - but the diligence between collecting all this data and actually executing on customer meetings is challenging, given there are only a limited amount of hours in a day.
Since starting 4 Months ago, we have a much better idea of who to target, and what products sell best / offer the best deal value for time invested. After closing a deal in with a group of pharmacies, I am currently validating whether other pharmacies are experiencing a similar pain that we are solving for our client - if that is the case, it could be another exciting vertical to dive into.
Another challenge we are working on is improving our product to match the needs of German customers, building out our integration portfolio to increase our value-add and consistently giving feedback to our product team to put features on the roadmap this year. It is crucial to stay on the cutting-edge and have a pulse on what the market wants and needs, so as to not lose our competitive edge. SaaS vendors who stall and get complacent, just get left behind. The speed of innovation, exacerbated by the use of AI in programming, is dazzling but makes it even more important to stay up-to-date with industry trends.
The E-Signing market is a very competitive one - and e-signing itself, when talking about the very basic functionality of getting a contract signed digitally, is a commoditized market, meaning that buyers behave like people going to the grocery store to buy milk or butter - they don't pay much attention to the brand but want something that is a certain price and that's it.
Luckily, though, we offer much more than just that basic functionality - we have many products that can help with the creating of contracts, signing in various forms and delivery methods, and storing them - without disrupting existing tech stack. Offering a plug-and- play solution for complex customer needs makes us stand out in a market flooded with competition - and most of the money to be made is in these complex cases, we just have to figure out how to increase awareness of our capability in this space, so we have more conversations with our ICP in this area.
Beyond that, we are facing challenges growing our inbound flow - it is partially due to the competitiveness of the market we operate in - increasing Adspend does not correlate to higher amount of MQLs always, making it more important to diversify into other channels beyond Google Ads (expensive / not always scaleable), such as partnerships and outbound sales. After onboarding a new tool, away from Zoom.Info to Dealfront, we are already seeing a lot more traction on that front and adjusting the script and targeting, such that we can predictably generate outbound pipeline without having to rely to heavily on inbound.
These are the topics I am working on with GTM Team here in Germany and I’m excited to provide a hopefully positive update in a few months when we have achieved new breakthroughs!
Happy selling!