Break The Box

Break the box only ICP is SaaS-companies, start-ups and scale-ups. 
We go in, review and fix revenue issues. 

Are your teams deals staling?
​Do you have issues forecasting?
Is your team's win rate unreliable?

Let us fix it!

Chief Revenue Officer

Break the box drives change programs for commercial leaders.

Founder 

Emigreat

Strategic Revenue Advisor

Quantera.ai

- Processing 3.5M pages of financial data
- 500 Companies from the US market (With more companies and markets to come)
- Research companies effortlessly; we aren't talking about pure numbers. 
 We are looking at guidance, growth, sentiment, macro outlook, etc.

Women in Tech for Harris

I’m starting a new position as Co-Chair at Women in Tech for Harris!

Follow along with our journey to educate, inspire and raise funds to help elect Kamala Harris as US Next President.  

We will be supporting along with other great orgs like #FoundersForKamala + #BlackWomenandAlliesinTech4Harris + #vcsforkamala and so many more. 💙🦄

Co-Chair

Extrovert

Advising on GoExtroverts amazing journey in Sales tech stack. 
Revenue operations, GTM Midmarket, and sales tech stack and scaling the business.

Dinetix - Digital marketing agency

As a contracted Strategic Revenue Advisor I build and create sales strategy, GTM and work ongoingly with the Dinetix team on how to increase revenue for their agency. 

We drive workshops, drive a clear ICP and Buyer personas GTM, and support all things revenue!

Velocity AI

Sitting on the Advisory board at Velocity AI - advising on revenue operations, GTM Midmarket, and sales tech stack and scaling the business.

Business Advisor

Skills.

Running Revops, Marketing & Training-strategy!

Co-founder & CRO

HYPCCCYCL

Member of HYPCCCYCL - an invite-only, professional community where top B2B revenue leaders cross-train their GTM skills with VCs.

Member

RevGenius

Hey! 👋🏼
I drive sales excellence as an advisor, author and consultant specializing in sales strategy to the mid-sized market. I have been fortunate to get extensive hands-on operations experience that spans deep sales & marketing tech stack, branding, storytelling and messaging.

As a founder of 2 companies, Break the Box & skills., I am always looking for break-the-box moments - the moment when you break the comfort zone and just shine like a freakin unicorn! 🦄

Content: https://linktr.ee/Sarastorm

Welcome to the nordic N.Rich family, Lime - let’s make some magic 💃 💜 

If you’re a CMO in the CRM space in EMEA right now, you’re probably tired.

Tired of complexity.
Tired of endless tools.
Tired of being asked to “do more with less.”
Tired of markets that move faster than internal alignment ever will.

The CRM space alone has become a battlefield - everyone sounds the same, sells the same, promises the same.
And yet, results somehow feel harder than ever.

That’s why I love this partnership.

Lime is choosing a path that isn’t about volume or noise.
It’s about clarity.
Seeing what their buyers actually care about.
Creating real intent - not just collecting existing intent on the 3-5 % that are actively ready to buy. 
Giving their teams the visibility that removes guesswork and unlocks real momentum.

In a market this chaotic, clarity is the new competitive edge.

And Lime is playing to win. 🍿 

"With N.Rich, we’re not just amplifying our reach, we’re transforming our visibility into key
accounts, gaining real-time insight into how they move through the funnel” 
-  Lina Andolf-Orup, CMO of Lime Technologies.

Sara Storm

Targeting top mid market and enterprise buying committees, follow me -​> Sales director Nordics & UKI @ N.rich

My advice for 2026 besides ABM? 💃 😁 


Dinners. 

Last week in connection to #Slush we at N.Rich co-hosted a dinner with Luxid in Helsinki, on the theme of how AI will change GTM teams and output very fast in 2026. 

The convos around these tables are (to my surprise!) filled with a lot of opportunity driven view points. 

I was expecting more fear, honestly, but most of the marketing leaders we sat down at this dinner with was bursting with excitement of the AI-possibilities ahead. 

I want to give an extra thanks to the people who said yes to being interviewed during the night - with no warning! You guys are amazing! 

Noora Kulmala, Ingela Waismaa(cant wait to talk more in a couple of weeks), Pia Hämäri and Faateh Dhillon - thank you extra much! 💃 

A few of the people that participated in really interesting conversations with us (George Storm ⚡, Markus Ståhlberg and me) during the dinner:

Annariina Jaakkola, Essi Knuutila, Saija Korppi, Trey Tran (excited to talk more next week), Tanja Säde 🎇, Joni Helminen, Markku Havukainen, Outi Lilja, Jukka Knuutinen(thanks for a great chat today too!), Julia Alexeeva(Cant wait to continue our convos in jan!), Ingrid Debsia at Agileday(see you next week!), Maija Varjoranta, Aino Häkkinen, Jennifer Bailey(super curious about having a session with you, think Aika P. has reached out already), Jaime López and Pinja Dodik(see you in jan!)!

Linda Grönlund - sorry you could not make it, I was really looking forward to meeting you!  Lets find a time to meet soon!

Happy weekend, people! 😎

I dont disciminate....


But 80% of my contact requests are from people wanting to pitch me things that I actually really should not buy, like outsourcing development staff, or a sequence tool for SMB, or a platform for HR-process, or a recruitment tool for consultants etc. 

Why? Because its an AI-generated sequence, with AI-generated target audiences. 

Can we just stop, pls? 

Because for me, since I don't discriminate, I accept all connections and then I need to remove your contact. 

If you actually get an yes on a connection request, BE SMART. Like, please. *Yes I am pleading at this point...

Come at me like a person, with some research in your pocket and an actual interest for my day to day, I will consider meeting you in Q1. Start by saying hi. Ask me something. Qualify me before you pitch me. Learn from me. Read my posts. (They are all about your game, btw) - and then come to be with something worth my time. 

If you dont, please just leave me alone. 

PS. I am NOT blaiming the sales reps (or the founders, project leaders, or what ever title you have). I am just tired. And I am blaming your manager. Like, just stop.

Rant over. 

Kbye 😎

So here I am, planning for 2026… and I need some event recommendations.

We have seen our best results when we pre-influence ABM campaigns, run targeted dinners and micro-events, and then go heavy on account based campaigns for open pipe-accounts.

That combo beats standalone events every time. Win rates go up, ACV goes up, cycles get shorter.

So if we follow where the data and the deals lead us… 2026 will be an event heavy year.

Under here is my thoughts on events we probably should attend in one way or another, grouped by quarter. 

I also understand that we probably cant join all of these? How many is resonable per quarter? Probably 2 at max? 

What would you remove, add or recommend? 👇

Q1 2026
Prep, partner alignment, outbound to Tier 1 accounts
Dinners with Nordic and UK CMOs and CROs

Q2 2026

SaaSiest, Malmö, May
Goal: Speaking slot, clinic room, upstream dinner, meet SaaS scale-ups

Smart Factory Expo, UK, June
Goal: Joint session with ERP and MES partner, roundtable, industrial dinner

Manufacturing and Engineering Week, UK, June
Goal: ABM workshop, 20 to 30 meetings, enterprise tech dinner

Subcon, UK, June
Goal: 1 to 1 meetings, vendor dinner

Nordic Industry 4.0 or Smart Industry Expo, Spring
Goal: Breakfast session, vertical ABM case, Nordic industrial dinner

Q3 2026

B2B Marketing Ignite London, July
Goal: Speaking slot, case session, CMO meetings, ABM leaders dinner

Hi Tech and Industry Scandinavia, Denmark, Oct
Goal: ABM Masterclass, GTM pack, Copenhagen industrial dinner

eCommerce and Logistics Expo, Nordics
Goal: Speaker slot, supply chain tech dinner

Automotive Tech, UK
Goal: Speaker slot, enterprise automotive dinner

Q4 2026

Global ABM Conference, London
Goal: Speaking slot, ABM roundtable, private ABM dinner

B2B Marketing Live, London
Goal: Speaking slot, RevOps co-session, RevOps and Demand dinner

Salesforce and Agentforce World Tour, London
Goal: CRM and intent session, RevOps dinner

Nordic Business Forum, Helsinki, Sept
Goal: C-level meetings, speaking slot, enterprise GTM dinner

Oslo Business Forum, Oslo, Sept
Goal: Speaker slot, 1 to 1 enterprise meetings, executive dinner

Slush, Helsinki, Nov
Goal: Pre-book 20 plus meetings, CMO and CRO dinners, partner events

Gartner Supply Chain Symposium, EMEA
Goal: Curated meetings, supply chain tech dinner

What would you remove, add or recommend for 2026? 👇
What events will you attend?

Kbye 😎

Heading up marketing and feeling alone?



You’re not the only one.

Most heads of marketing I meet sit in this strange middle seat:
- CEO wants pipeline and a story for investors
- Sales wants leads yesterday
- Product wants launches and assets

…and you are the only one thinking about GTM as a system, not a set of tasks. 

So you end up making big decisions on positioning, ICP, channels, and budget more or less inside your own head.

If you’re lucky, you have a CRO who gets it.

If you’re not, you’re basically the internal agency who is supposed to “make noise”, what ever that means… 😒

That’s why N.Rich does our small dinners! 

Not for the food.

For the rooms where marketing, sales, and growth leaders can finally talk about what is really going on inside their funnel - without the corporate filter.

And the real value isn’t even the dinner.

It’s what happens after the dinner.

Like 2 deep-diving working session I had with one of the attendees the following weeks after dinner, where we discussed; 

- Who should actually own the BD function in a 4-5 year old SaaS
- How to build reporting when CRM data is broken.
- How to walk into a CEO’s office and say “give me top funnel fully, I’ll fix it” and what plan to have in place for you to be able to do just that.

…  how to build a GTM structure for enterprise investors will trust. 

Did we talk about N.rich ABM platform? 
Very very little. 

Because the problem is not the tech. 

Like, guys, it’s really not. 🫥

Are we amazing? 
Yes.
Do we have better data coverage than the big vendors in our space? 
Yes.
Do we have higher activation on target accounts that other vendors because of that?
Yes.
Do we create actual demand on our customers markets with our platform via the campaigns are customers launch?
Yes. 

Does any of this matter if the fruit of our marketing labour isn’t picked up by sales?
No.
Does any of that matter if you don’t have mandate or enough budget because your CEO doesn’t know why marketing is crucial?
No. 

So working sessions with peers is so very very important! 

The end of that second meeting, he said: 

“When I saw the invite for the dinner, I thought like, hey, well, this is actually very interesting to get to talk to other people who are doing GTM activities in similar kinds of companies.

And basically these kind of discussions that we have had now and previously were exactly the type of conversations that I was hoping for.

Like touching on exactly the kind of challenges that we are facing right now and thinking about the solutions and like really hitting the nail on the head. So that was like very, very nice.

Thank you.”

If you’re a marketing leader and you feel like you’re carrying the GTM logic of your entire company alone….

You probably just need a different room.

No alternative text description for this image

Flowla just saved you 1000 hours of scrolling on LinkedIn.
And somehow I ended up in the middle of it. 💃 


Flowla just dropped their Sales Almanac 2025 – the annual time capsule of the conversations, ideas, and rants that shaped this absolutely chaotic year in revenue.

And honestly… 2025 deserved an almanac. :D 
Pipelines swinging like a broken pendulum.
Buyers three steps ahead of most GTM teams.
Orgs drowning in complexity while trying to “do more with less.”

This year forced a hard reset.
On how we sell.
On how we retain.
On how we grow.
On how we lead.

So I’m ridiculously honoured to be included alongside people who’ve inspired my own thinking daily:

Scott Finden, Samantha McKenna, 👨‍🔬David Weiss, Jacco van der Kooij, Mafalda Johannsen, Alan Ruchtein, Matt Green, Sarah Allen-Short and the other Storm of N.Rich, George Storm ⚡ - and so many others who consistently push the revenue space forward.

And huge appreciation to the team behind this project:
Elen Udovichenko 🇺🇦, Dilara Başaran, Erdem Gelal, thank you for curating the real conversations happening in the trenches.

If you live in revenue - Sales, CS, RevOps, leadership - this is the kind of resource you bookmark and send to your team with “read this before 2026.” Find the link in the comment and get to reading. :D 

Steal ideas. Challenge your org.
And maybe - just maybe - build something that actually matches how buyers buy today.

Happy holidays and cheers to building what’s next. 💙🥂
Ps. Hope you all enjoy the reality of this quote below. 😁 😇

Outbound isn’t converting. Inbound isn’t scaling. 


And most GTM teams are still pretending it’s 2021. 😫 

I just said this on a pod with Georgi Furnadzhiev yesterday and I’ll say it again here, because it’s the conversation I’m having with CROs and CMOs every single week:

We’re running a GTM playbook that simply doesn’t work anymore.

- Inbound is too content-heavy, SEO returns are falling through the floor and the conversions are dropping. 
- Outbound is drowning in AI-written beige noise and connect rates are collapsing.
- And “hand raisers”? If you’re selling mid-market or enterprise, they basically don’t exist.

These buying committees are doing 95% of their journey in the dark - LLM searches, dark social, peer networks, Slack communities, dinner tables. Everything except talking to you.

So what actually works now?

It comes down to three uncomfortable truths:

1. You can’t scale on SMB forever.
If your ACV is low, you’re running twice as fast for a fraction the revenue.
Most companies need to go upstream, and they need to do it yesterday.

2. You need to start prioritising accounts based on signals - not hope.
Your best opportunities aren’t raising their hand.
But they are buying committees doing the following: 

- Browsing your category
- Hiring specific roles
- Reading about the problems they have in many many different places
- Engaging around pain points
- Moving talent
- Researching alternatives

All of this is visible.
And most teams completely ignore it.

3. Deep sales competence is missing in almost every organisation right now.
Everyone wants “AI-native sales teams”
Nobody wants to sit in 500 customer meetings and learn how enterprise buying actually works.
But here’s the catch: AI is only useful if you know what you’re even looking for in those meetings. And they are all recorded. So go mine the gold. 

The biggest mistake I see revenue leaders make?
- Collecting signals with zero idea why.
- Data for the sake of data.
- Dashboards that are snapshots, not trends of what to come.
- No connection between signals, pipeline, or team behaviour.

If you take one thing back to your GTM team today, let it be this:

👉 Your GTM will not thrive unless you build a signal-based engine that understands your buyer long before they ever talk to you.

Not “more leads.”
Not “more activity.”
Not “AI-written sequences.”
Actual visibility into the buying journey you’re currently blind to.

This is how the mid-market and enterprise actually buy.
It’s time GTM teams caught up.

Kbye 😎

So I am a bit frustrated now.... I am not gonna lie. 



Every CMO and marketing director I meet right now is looking for the thing.

The silver bullet.
The channel.
The platform.
The campaign that will “finally unlock pipeline.”

And then I look at their target for 2026. 

Enterprise accounts.
Complex buying committees.
18–24 month buying journeys. (Ergo, what we have in open PIPE now is what we will bring next year, just to clarify!) 
Next year, we primarily build for 2027.
ACVs north of €25k

And we look at their budget.

€5k / month. 😫 

And I genuinely don’t understand how those two things are supposed to meet.

Let’s be real for a second.

€5k a month is:

Half a marketer’s salary
A couple of weeks of LinkedIn reach (if you’re lucky)
Barely enough to warm a market, let alone create demand

Yet the expectation is:
“Marketing should create pipeline.”
“Marketing should support sales.”
“Marketing should prove ROI.”

How?

Enterprise buying doesn’t happen because someone saw your ad last Tuesday.
It happens because buyers have been educated, reminded, influenced, and reassured for months – sometimes years – before sales ever gets a meeting.

You don’t need a silver bullet.
You need math.

If you want:

35% of next year’s ARR from net new logos
3-4x pipeline coverage
Fewer cold calls and more “good timing” conversations

Then you need enough spend to:

Reach the entire buying committee (7-20 people, my friend)
Stay visible across the whole journey
Support sales way before 1-1 convos are happening AND while convos are happening.

Otherwise, let’s stop pretending.

With €5k a month, marketing isn’t a growth engine. 
IT CAN'T BE. 
It’s a visibility experiment.

And that’s fine - as long as leadership is honest about it.

The real problem isn’t performance.
It’s expectations that don’t match reality.

CMOs don’t need miracles.
They need permission to say:
“This budget cannot carry this ambition.”

And boards need to hear it.

Kbye 😎

Anna is the marketing director of a $900M manufacturing company - and she just had the kind of realization most marketing leaders don’t say out loud.

After another meeting about "lead quality", she walked back to her desk, opened her laptop… and it hit her:

"This has nothing to do with my tech stack."

For the first time, she understood why her company’s upstream accounts will never come inbound - no matter how many tools, campaigns, or optimisations she throws at it.

Because the real problem isn’t marketing ops. Or inbound funnels. 
If you want the full story - and the steps Anna should take - click here. 👇🏻

Anna is the marketing director of a global manufacturing company with around $900 million in annual revenue. She just walked out of yet another manage

Open article: Meet Marketing director Anna  by Sara Storm • 3 min read

I’m just like everyone else.
And so are you.



Let me explain.

Every week I hear the same thing from B2B companies:

“Our buyers are different.”
“Our industry is unique.”
“Our deals don’t follow the standard process.”
“Our GTM can’t be compared to others.”

Cool story.

But the more B2B companies I work with - across SaaS, manufacturing, fintech, energy,  you name it - the more obvious it becomes:

We’re all selling to the same humans.
With the same fears.
The same internal politics.
The same decision-making loops.

Your buyer wants:
- less risk
- more clarity
- proof something works
- internal alignment
- a story they can defend internally
- not getting fired for choosing you

Sound familiar?

Because you want the exact same things when you buy software, hire an agency, or choose a vendor.

Your GTM isn’t special.
Your sales cycle isn’t special.
Your “complex industry nuance” is 90% identical to everyone else’s.

The only difference is the context.
The patterns are universal.

If you stripped logos, industries, and product names off your pipeline and compared it to 20 other companies, you’d see the same things:

- buyers ghost when the risk feels high
- stakeholders multiply at the last second
- deals stall without an internal champion
- nobody reads your deck unless someone told them to
- procurement doesn’t care about your brand story
- executive buyers don’t engage until late
- timing kills deals more than competition

We are all playing the same human game.
Different jerseys, same rulebook.

And the companies who understand this - deeply - stop doing GTM based on how they want to sell… and start doing it based on how humans actually buy.

That’s when the pipeline grows.
That’s when deals move.
That’s when ACV jumps.

Because the best B2B GTM strategy is not “unique.”
It’s aligned with how people make decisions - across every industry, every vertical, every persona.

So no… your industry isn’t special.
Neither is mine.
And neither am I.

We’re all human.
We buy in the same ways.
We stall in the same places.
We move when something matters.

Accept that - and suddenly GTM becomes a lot simpler.

Kbye 😎

If you lead sales and think ABM “doesn’t work,” that’s not a data point..... 


that’s you telling on your own GTM leadership. Yeah, I said it.  

I’ve been reading the report we just launched: 
State of Account-based marketing 2025 report and… wow.

If you’re a sales leader, this one will sting. 

Here’s the truth:

ABM became a core GTM motion - but sales leadership never showed up.

Look at the data:
- 67% of companies say ABM is now a strategic GTM engine (not a marketing project).
- But 64% of ABM programs are still owned entirely by marketing. 
- ABM is 4-5x more likely to be owned by marketing than by sales
- Only 13% are led by Sales fully. 
- And just 31% of companies say sales and marketing actually collaborate effectively.

You know what that means?

Sales leaders are demanding pipeline from a motion they refuse to co-own and support. Even though ABM needs ABM for full success. Like, at the end of the day, we can create intent and engagement all we want, but on account level someone needs to actually fully activate this to a meeting with buying committee members on the activated accounts. 

And then sales and management complain that ABM “doesn’t work.”

Let’s be real for a second:

❌ ABM didn’t fail.

❌ The platforms didn’t fail.

❌ Marketing didn’t fail.

-> Sales leaders failed to integrate ABM into the revenue engine for full ABX. 
-> They treated it like ‘air cover’ instead of a GTM motion.
-> They kept running 2020 outbound against 2025 buying behavior.

And the outcomes show it:
-> 77% report increased engagement
-> 69% report stronger early-funnel movement - EARLY FUNNEL. Sales need to then step in and DO STUFF. 
-> Since ONLY 26% call their ABM program successful. 

Why?

Because engagement ≠ revenue when sales refuses to adjust their part of the motion.

ABM is providing movement, not momentum, because the handoff dies at sales.

You don't agree? 💃 
Feel free to tell me why in the comments, or just download the report for free... 

Kbye😎

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