The situation
Six months ago, this company was one of the more-cited workflow automation success stories in their space. $40M ARR built in five years, a category-defining product, and a sales team that was winning deals with logos they were genuinely proud of. Then, almost overnight, the growth stopped.
Not a decline. Not a crisis. Just flatness. New logos were coming in at roughly the same rate as churn was taking them out. Expansion revenue, which had been the engine of their growth, plateaued. The board asked the obvious question. The CEO didn't have a clear answer.
They brought me in to find one.
The diagnosis
The real problem wasn't sales execution. Sales was working. The problem was that they were selling to the wrong buyers with the wrong message.
Their ICP was defined by firmographics, not by the specific situation that made their product transformative. "Mid-market ops teams" could describe a thousand different companies with a thousand different needs. The sales team was spending 60 days with prospects who had no real urgency, no strong fit, and no compelling reason to prioritise the purchase.
Meanwhile, their best customers — the ones who expanded aggressively, referred others, and became genuine advocates — all shared a specific characteristic: they were ops teams in the process of scaling from one region to multiple, who had outgrown their existing workflow tools but couldn't afford the enterprise complexity of the alternatives. This wasn't a firmographic. It was a situational trigger.
Their positioning wasn't helping. "Most flexible" is a claim that every workflow tool makes. It doesn't create urgency or exclusivity. And it was actively attracting the wrong buyers — people who wanted to evaluate flexibility rather than solve an urgent problem.
The sales team was doing their jobs well. They were just doing them for the wrong buyers, with messaging that invited comparison shopping rather than urgent action.
The work
We ran a four-phase engagement:
Phase 1: Win/loss analysis. We interviewed 12 recent wins and 8 recent losses. The pattern in wins was remarkably consistent — and almost entirely absent from the existing ICP definition. The situational trigger was everything.
Phase 2: ICP rebuild. We rewrote the ICP around the situational trigger: "Ops teams at post-Series A SaaS companies scaling from a single-region to multi-region operations, who have outgrown Zapier-style tools but find Salesforce Flows too complex." This excluded many of the company's current prospects but described almost all of their best customers.
Phase 3: Positioning rebuild. Out went "most flexible workflow automation." In came a specific, differentiated claim: "The workflow platform for ops teams crossing the complexity threshold." This claimed a specific moment — the crossing — rather than a generic capability. It created urgency for the right buyer and disqualified the wrong one.
Phase 4: Sales motion update. With a tighter ICP, we redesigned the qualification process to surface situational fit in the first call. Deals that met the new ICP criteria moved into a 30-day motion. Deals that didn't were either disqualified or handed to a lighter-touch motion.
What I'd do differently
In hindsight
The fundamental finding here applies to many companies at this stage: the ICP that got you to $10M ARR is rarely the ICP that gets you to $100M. Growth plateaus are often a sign that the original ICP has been largely saturated — not that sales is broken.