Positioning for Sales-Led SaaS companies | My clients win 6+ out of 10 deals, in 3x less time, at 40%+ higher value using my 4-week "Pressure Cooker" program.

Tired of losing to better-funded US competitors?
Stuck at 20–30% win rates?
I help Sales-led SaaS scaleups reach 60%+ — without new features or price cuts. Unlike consultants who deliver frameworks and disappear, I stay until your revenue proves it works.

The symptoms I fix:

- Sales teams explain features, not why you’re the only logical choice
- Losing to “do nothing” more than competitors
- Discounting because you can’t create urgency

If you’re closing less than 60% of qualified deals, we should talk.

Like Arrow Labs CEO Rami Darwish:

“My mind was stuck on the solution. Ton kept reframing me out of it by constantly asking ‘who cares? Why is that important?’
It was annoying. It pissed me off several times. But that’s exactly what I needed.
Win rates jumped from 30% to 60%, cycles were 3-4× faster. Now there are fewer competitors because we’re their people, not just another option.”

The root cause?
Almost always the same: positioning confusion.

The solution isn’t more features or lower prices.

It’s learning to own the remarkable effect—when your positioning, value proposition, and sales execution align to double win rates, halve sales cycles, and increase deal sizes by 40%. Not incremental improvement—pure leverage.

After 30 years in enterprise software, I’ve codified this in my book The Remarkable Effect—the playbook for how three strategic levers (Value, Viability, Volume) create 11x impact instead of 3x.

From “just another option” → must-have choice for the right customers.

Not with decks. Not with theory.
With positioning your sales team wants to use — because they can confidently explain how you’re different, why that matters, and close more deals.

I stay until your revenue proves it works.
That’s why my fees are tied to your actual growth, not just deliverables.
Because outcomes > input.

What your peer CEOs say:

- “No BS. Outcome-obsessed.”
- “Laser-sharp pipeline. Doubled our win rate.”
- “Not just advice — Ton stays until it works.”

I’m Ton — son of a Dutch tulip farmer. I live with my beautiful wife. 2 sons and 3 dogs in sunny Jávea, Spain.
Host of the weekly Remarkable SaaS podcast and creator of the Growth Catalyst Program.

Start here → https://valueinspiration.com/growthcatalyst
Or DM me for a no-pitch sanity check.

Ton Dobbe 🔆

He quadrupled revenue in 2 years by shrinking his focus.

Jim Whatmore (CEO of Joblogic Service Management Software) spent over a decade building patiently. 

From a management buyout in 2013 with 11 people and £500k in revenue, the priority was never speed. It was depth. Product. People. Customers. 

Rather than overstretching the business in pursuit of rapid expansion, Jim opted to focus on home territory and build market dominance before embarking on global presence. 
 
The platform was rebuilt properly from the ground up. Trade-agnostic workflows unlocked a much larger market. Strong customer relationships turned into long-term growth.Joblogic grew to £9M over ten years. 
 
Then quadrupled in the next two. 
Largely through organic growth and disciplined acquisitions.Not by chasing every opportunity. 
 
By executing well on the right ones.  

Most SaaS companies optimise for reach before they have real dominance. Jim’s story is a reminder that focus, patience, and consistency often outperform speed.

Losing to better-funded US competitors? I help Sales-led SaaS scaleups turn 5% win rates into 50+%—same team, zero discounting.

Wednesday I was in Germany for a full day Pitch Battle.
Six sales teams pitched, got scored and ranked.

Daniel did everything right. 
Researched the customer. 
Opened with their reality. 
Quantified the pain perfectly.

He scored a 7.

Lisa won with an 8.9.

The difference? 
She stood for her case. Full conviction. 
The kind you feel in your chest before you process it in your head.

Everyone can teach structure. 
Everyone can train frameworks.

Good coaching creates solid 7s.

But Lisa didn't win because her mechanics were better. 
She won because there was no gap between what she said and what she believed.

Customers feel that gap - instantly.
Even when the deck is perfect.

This nuance is exactly why I stay on after I've repositioned a sales-led software company.

Cause a new value proposition means nothing until sales get dangerous with it.
That's where the magic happens. Not in the slides. In the conviction.

Average software companies train salespeople what to present.

Remarkable software companies build salespeople who believe every word they say.

€6M ARR. Growing 40%. Clear ICP. Strong positioning. Everything working.

Except you can see the ceiling. And the board sees it too.

So now it's Germany. Or France. Or the US. 
Expansion isn't a choice anymore - it's what comes next.

And here's what most CEOs assume: 
The hard part is behind us. Product is built. Now we just need to sell it there.

That assumption kills expansion.

I watched Exact try this in the early 2000s. Greenfield expansion into international markets. "We figured out the Netherlands, we'll figure out Germany." They underestimated what it actually takes. Years of struggle.

At Unit4 we learned from their pain. We bought what we couldn't rebuild fast enough - local credibility, customer base, trusted relationships. Expensive. Integration risk. But we started from somewhere, not nowhere.

Your product crosses borders. Everything else that made you win at home - the brand recognition, the trust, the network, the references - that doesn't travel with you.

So before you expand, ask yourself: 

If you walked into that new market tomorrow with just your product - no reputation, no network, no local references - why would anyone choose you over the local alternative?

Tal Peretz's (CEO of Onfire AI) customers are generating 4x more pipeline with the same headcount. 

On the podcast interview I had with him, he explained how: 

"AI makes sales harder, not easier. Everyone's adding AI features. The noise-to-signal ratio exploded. Everyone can now send 1,000 personalized emails. Everyone can generate content at scale."

But Tal didn't add AI features to an existing product. 
He built AI on top of proprietary data infrastructure—what he calls a "Onfire knowledge graph." 

While competitors chased obvious AI wins, he spent months building invisible infrastructure. Signal detection, not feature addition. 

This is Trait 3 from The Remarkable Effect: Be different, not just better. 

Tal didn't play the AI feature race. 
He built a data moat first, then added AI on top. 

Average software companies mindlessly add AI to existing products. 
Remarkable software companies rethink and rebuild their foundations first. 

That's what creates outcomes customers start talking about and keep talking about - like 4x more pipeline growth. 
(And yes, that also attracted funding. But that's the outcome, not the strategy.) 

To listen to the full conversation: link in comments

"We're totally focused. We target €5M-€25M manufacturing companies selling to enterprise."

I asked: "When's the last time you sent a prospect to a competitor?"

Silence.

"So... you're not focused at all."

Here's the thing most SaaS CEOs miss: ICP isn't a targeting tool. It's a shield.

You don't just use it to find the right customers. 
You use it to actively reject the wrong ones.

If you're not regularly sending prospects to your competitors, you're treating your entire market as your test market.

I worked with a CEO last quarter. His pipeline looked healthy - 40 deals, average €50K. But win rates were stuck at 22%.

We scored every deal against his ICP. Twelve of them had no business being there. Not that he couldn't offer the functionality they wanted. He could. 

No, because there was no obvious differentiation.

"Send them to your competitors," I told him.

"But that's €600K in pipeline!"

"It's €600K in false hope that's killing your team's velocity."

He did it. Pipeline shrank by 30%. Win rates jumped to 58%.

This is Trait 1 from The Remarkable Effect: Acknowledge you can't please everyone.

The real test of ICP commitment isn't in who you pursue. 
It's in who you turn away.

Average software companies chase every qualified lead. 
Remarkable software companies use their ICP as both compass and shield - knowing exactly who to pursue and who to reject.

How many deals in your pipeline right now have no business being there?

"We've implemented BANT, MEDDIC, CHAMP—you name it. Yet deals we rate as highly qualified still slip through our fingers."

90% qualification scores. 20% win rate.

Here's what all those frameworks miss:

They measure if prospects can buy. 
They measure if prospects will buy.

Not one forces you to honestly answer: Will they buy from you?

Because you solve something they can't solve without you.

Without that, you're guessing.

"We grew last year, but not as much as we hoped for."

A CEO of a software company from Norway told me this last week.

"We made enough calls. Booked enough demos. Pipeline looked healthy. My team did everything right. Yet we came up 23% short."

I asked him one question: "When you review pipeline, what do you look for?"

Silence.

Then: "Size. We need 3x, ideally 4x, our target."

There it is.

He'd built a culture where looking good mattered more than being accurate.
Reps stuff their pipeline with 'opportunities.' They keep deals alive too long because 'it's not lost yet, we still have a chance.' And they're genuinely too optimistic.

Deals check every box. Budget. Timeline. Champion. Yet they slip anyway.

Because nobody asks the only question that predicts close rates: 
Will they buy from us?

Not just buy. 
Buy from us.

He looked at me. "We never ask that."

Most don't.

Average software companies celebrate pipeline size.
Remarkable software companies celebrate pipeline accuracy.

10% of your home market captured. 90% still available.
But your board wants Germany.

I had this conversation with a CEO of sales-led software business from the Netherlands last week. 

€8M ARR. Growing 30%. Investors pushing hard for expansion. Board meeting in two weeks where he needs to present the plan.

I asked: "What percentage of your home market have you actually won?"


Long pause.


"Maybe 10%. There's still a lot of companies we haven't reached."

"So there's 90% of your market still available. Why Germany now?"


Another pause.


"The board wants to see we can scale internationally. And honestly - closing deals here has gotten harder. Takes longer. More competition. Germany feels like a fresh start."

There it is.

Germany isn't strategy. It's relief.

I've heard this conversation dozens of times - with clients, in my own career at Unit4, with CEOs planning expansion now.

The problem isn't that expansion is wrong. 
It's that most CEOs expand for the wrong reason at the wrong time.

Here's the question that changes everything:

Is this expansion strategy - or an escape route?

I reviewed a pipeline with a SaaS CEO last month. 
Numbers looked fine. Healthy, even.

Then I asked a simple question: 
"How many of these deals are nice-to-have for the customer?"

Long pause.

"9 out of 10."

That was fine in 2021. 
It's death in 2025.

Budgets are tight. Committees are cautious. 

If your solution isn't tied to something keeping someone awake at night, you're not managing a pipeline.

You're managing a wish list.

And wish lists don't close.

"Three competitors just stole our biggest enterprise deals."

The CEO across from me looks different. Six months ago: celebrating Rule of 40. Today: exhausted.

"Companies we'd been nurturing for years. And these competitors? They're at Rule of 30. Burning cash. Growing faster than us."

He pulls up their investor decks on his phone.

"Look at this. One just raised €50M at 3x our valuation. Another got acquired for €400M - ten times revenue. We're profitable, they're not. We hit Rule of 40, they didn't."

Pause.

"So what are we doing wrong?"

Rule of 40 measures whether you're financially healthy today. 
It doesn't measure whether you'll matter tomorrow.

You can hit Rule of 40 while losing your strategic edge. 
The metrics say you're winning this quarter while your position erodes for next year.

Those competitors burning cash? 

They're not being reckless. They're building strategic moats. Their win rates are climbing. Their deal sizes are expanding. 

They're accepting Rule of 30 today to build Rule of 60 tomorrow.

While he was cutting his way to 40, they were investing their way to dominance.

The question isn't whether you hit Rule of 40. 
The question is whether it's the outcome of strategic clarity or financial engineering.

Is your Rule of 40 driven by pricing power or cost reduction?

I just had a conversation with Panos Siozos from LearnWorlds about what actually makes expansion work.

He told me: "We failed to find any traction within Greece."

This was 2014. Middle of the Greek financial crisis. Big businesses had no budgets. Nobody was investing in software. Nobody cared about online learning platforms.

So Panos had two choices: Give up. Or go international.

Most founders would have waited. Built more local relationships. Tried harder at home.

Panos didn't have that luxury.

The crisis forced him out. Within months he was approaching European and American markets. No local reputation. No network. No references.

"We put the scientists in the backseat," he said. "These customers had real problems. We needed to solve their problems - not the things we had in our minds."

American customers were already selling online courses at scale. They knew what they wanted. Strong e-commerce. Checkout funnels. Coupons. Black Friday strategies.

All stuff that felt exotic to a European team.

But LearnWorlds didn't argue. They listened. They adapted. They shipped features almost daily.

100 customers in 2015. 1,000 by 2019. 12,500 today across 150 countries.

I've seen this pattern before. At Unit4. With clients expanding now.

When you choose to expand, you bring assumptions. 
You think you know what will work.

When you're forced to expand, you become curious. 
You listen because survival depends on it.

This is Trait 4 of The Remarkable Effect: They master the art of curiosity.

Average software companies expand with confidence. 
"We figured it out here, we'll figure it out there."

Remarkable software companies expand with curiosity. 
"What would it take to be the obvious choice here?"

That question changes everything.


Full conversation with Panos:

Open article: #388 – How Panos Siozos reached 12.5K customers across 150 countries - Value Inspiration by valueinspiration.com

#388 – How Panos Siozos reached 12.5K customers across 150 countries - Value Inspiration

"We went from number four to number two in under three years. For greenfield, we're number one."

Pete Hunt , CEO of Dagster Labs , told me this on my podcast last week.

Same market. Same competitors. Less funding than most of them.

So I asked him: What changed?

"We decided our product is for the technical buyer. The less technical ones - we're just not going to serve them."

They picked a side.

Their users started picking sides too. Defending the product like it was personal.

That's what happens when you choose a side. Your customers notice. And they choose sides too.

Average software companies try to serve everyone.

Remarkable software companies pick a side - and attract people who'll fight for it.

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Yesterday I left Spain. +17 degrees. Four hours later I landed in Helsinki. -18 degrees. 35 degrees difference. One flight.

You know what was NOT my problem? 
The temperature. I had my winter coat.

I see this too often with sales teams. 

They come back from a meeting and say: 
"Maybe they're interested—but it felt a bit cold."

The prospect wasn't cold. 
You walked in with the wrong message.

"We're the market leader in..." → ice-cold reception. 
"I spoke to three CFOs last week who had exactly this problem..." → warm welcome.

Same prospect. Same day. Different temperature.

Average software companies blame cold prospects. 
Remarkable software companies bring the right coat.

Most modernization efforts fail not because of technology, but because of forgotten knowledge, disconnected teams, and fragile systems.

Aging infrastructure. Siloed IT/OT/Ops departments. Critical expertise walking out the door.

I work with industrial leaders who’ve had enough of tech-driven chaos and want to modernize *without disruption*.

I’ve spent 35+ years in the trenches of industrial IT, OT, and telecommunications and one thing has become crystal clear to me: I stand for industrial leaders who refuse to let legacy systems trap their future. 

That’s why at fieldcloud SAS I help teams bridge OT/IT silos, recover tribal knowledge, and build modernization roadmaps that move without pilot purgatory or vendor lock-in.

⚡ Whether you’re navigating stalled digital transformation, facing vendor fatigue, or trying to future-proof your infrastructure without ripping and replacing everything I bring clarity, strategy, and sleeves-up expertise to the table.

🧭 My approach:
• Map what still works and what’s limiting progress
• Recover knowledge before it’s lost for good
• Align teams across tech and territory
• Deliver a clear modernization playbook you can act on

🎯 Typical results we deliver:
• Recovered critical knowledge and extended legacy system lifespans — saved millions by preserving Windows 2000 systems instead of rip & replace.
• Deployed next-gen infrastructure at scale — prototype to international rollout of edge-compute gateways in just 12 months
• Restarted stalled digitization programs — field-tested LTE-enabled service delivery now active across 3 regions after prior innovation loss
• Uncovered strategy and governance blind spots — helped industrial startup leadership pre-empt bottlenecks and derailers to their 5-year growth plan
• Accelerated modernization without disruption — aligned teams, recovered lost insight, and delivered results in weeks, not years

🧠 Legacy doesn’t have to be a liability. It can be your greatest strategic asset if you know how to read it.

🔹 Built for mid-to-large industrials with mission-critical systems, tech fatigue, and untapped knowledge.  
📩 DM me or connect here to explore how Legacy Lift unlocks sustainable modernization.

🇫🇷 Résumé en français :  
Je travaille avec des leaders industriels qui souhaitent moderniser sans perturber leurs opérations. Grâce à fieldcloud, j’aide les équipes OT/IT à récupérer les connaissances perdues, cartographier leur environnement, et bâtir une feuille de route claire et pragmatique pour l’avenir.  
Vous êtes confronté à une transition numérique difficile ? Parlons-en.

Matthew Smith

"You look so good wearing my future" 😉
Best antidote to AI slop, shoot a music video on vintage VHS tape! 📼

We interrupt your regular programming to share a fun highlight during the end of year break - my guest appearance as cable news TV anchor "Johnny Beaumont" introducing my son's latest music video. Shot entirely on obsolete equipment, a beat up old Hitachi VK-C600 camera from 1981 which uses a Vidicon tube (and not a solid state charge-coupled device aka CCD sensor chip!) and an Akai VHS deck for recording onto tape. We digitized the raw footage via a composite analog video to HDMI to USB convertor combo using OBS for aspect ratio correction and upscaling to 1440x1080 resolution. Final edit and mixdown was done using Davinci Resolve. Full music video will be online in about two weeks time. Fun fact, that world map shown on the Sony video monitor on my desk is from a real ZX Spectrum SCREEN$😁.

There's something special about the warmth of a Vidicon tube which you just don't get on a CCD camera. 📹

And there's something equally cool about bringing together vintage analog and modern digital audiovisual production just like how I work with Legacy Lift program clients for industrial automation, monitoring and control modernization. 💪🏼

Matthew D. Smith

Legacy Lift | CEO | I show you what’s hiding in your legacy systems that could cripple your factory tomorrow and help you fix it before it costs you your reputation. | Connected Manufacturing | Risk & Continuity Advisor

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