SCANBOT'S $6.5M+ SUCCESS STORY:
How Scanbot 3X’d growth in 3 months
UGLY TRUTH: GROWTH CAN'T DEPEND ON ONE SENIOR HIRE
What do you do when your marketing efforts are doing everything but helping your business grow? A lot of startups depend on a senior hire to figure out their growth strategy. But if you don’t know how to grow your own company, how can you expect someone on the outside to?
This crossroads is where we met Scanbot — a B2B SaaS platform — whose growth had actually decreased for two years in a row.
"I had heard about SYSTM in 2018 and our leadership team was on board to join the cohort,” says Max Stratmann, Chief Revenue Officer. “Unfortunately, our marketing team at the time thought differently. So marketing spun their wheels for two years, failing (and not learning anything). We finally decided that growth was a team effort, and not dependent on one person.”
Pretty strong words, but there’s a good amount of evidence in the numbers. (Keep reading.)
SNAPSHOT:
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Company name: Scanbot
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Industry: SaaS/B2B
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Results since graduating: Grew 3X in 3 months, moving from theories and hunches to experiments and data.
In 2021, Scanbot was already a multi-million dollar startup with a decent amount of success. Their multipurpose scanning software provided solutions for B2B companies around the world, including Docusign, Aflac, and T-mobile.
But the company was struggling to grow beyond its $4.5M in annual revenue, with a serious decline in YoY performance. Part of the issue was their failing marketing strategy. But the other side had to do with any startup's worst nightmare: their own teams working in silos.
“Marketing was competing with sales, and it slowed us down.”
As Max puts it, “One of the worst things we did in the company was separating marketing and sales. It slowed down our growth significantly. We had competing KPIs and were working with completely separate metrics.”
Frustrated with the lack of qualified leads, negative change in growth, and teams heading in multiple directions, the senior leadership team decided to revamp their marketing efforts and get back in-touch with the team at SYSTM.
THE WORST THING YOU CAN DO AS A STARTUP
“I regret we didn’t do this sooner. SYSTM helped us to align the marketing and sales team all around the same targets and methods, so we are achieving results way faster than before.”
CHRISTOPH WAGNER
Founder & CEO, Scanbot GmbH
“We worried that being in a cohort with so many other startups would dilute the direct impact the program would have on our business. But working 1-on-1 with our coach led to some of the most profound breakthrough changes in our business. I can honestly say our coach helped us change the outlook of our business entirely.”
Max Stratmann
Chief Revenue Officer
“WE HAD SERIOUS CONCERNS ABOUT THE PROGRAM”
When Scanbot’s team joined SYSTM, they knew there was a ton of work they could be doing and they needed help figuring out what to focus on first. But this didn’t mean the team had no reservations.
One of their biggest concerns was that the content would be too general. They wanted harsh feedback and specific direction on how to find, and use, their big growth levers. And that’s exactly what they got.
THE RESULTS:
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Experienced increase in revenue generation (3x in 3 months)
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Established a unified revenue operations team (formerly marketing and sales working in silos), which increased productivity
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Started the program at about $3-4M ARR and grew to $6.5M
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Quality of leads significantly increased
GROWTH TEAM? GROWTH COMPANY
A key emphasis of the program is aligning the entire company on one North Star Metric. Growth is not the responsibility of one team, it’s everyone’s job. In the past, their marketing team would send all leads from the top of the funnel to their sales team. The sales team would then spend time and resources sifting through a large list of both qualified and unqualified leads. Once Scanbot identified their North Star Metric, they realized there needed to be a shift in their approach to marketing and sales. During the program, they united the two teams into one large, revenue operations department that worked collaboratively against a single set of KPIs. This led to tighter innovation, higher-quality leads, and a sense of collective ownership throughout the sales cycle.
THE CRITICAL INSIGHT: HOW SYSTM “REBOOTED [THEIR] BRAIN”
During their 1-on-1 coaching session, Scanbot was stretched beyond their comfort zone. As Max puts it, their coach “rebooted [their] brain,” changing the entire approach to their business model.
The critical insight came early in the program. In the first few weeks, each startup works with its coach to map out its customers’ “Jobs-to-Be-Done.” This framework helped Scanbot define, categorize, capture, and organise all its customers’ needs. After doing customer interviews, they quickly realized their previous marketing and sales strategies were “headed in the absolute wrong direction.” The team was under the impression that they should target CEOs and founders, etc. But through their customer interviews, they realized their primary stakeholders were developers, the ones who would actually implement the product. Developers are allergic to marketing strategies, and needed to be approached differently than CEOs and executives. This insight completely changed their sales and marketing approach and led to significant increases in the quality of leads.
THE MINDSET SHIFT
While these results are impressive, Scanbot’s transformational success is a result of a team of people who weren’t afraid to be challenged, confront past mistakes, and make necessary changes, even if it meant starting from scratch.
Throughout the team, Scanbot have adopted a growth mindset that allows them to see failure as learnings that they can build on and leverage for even more growth. And even though they are now one of the industry leaders in their product category, their newly formed revenue operations team continues to practice the discipline they learned in SYSTM — prioritise, execute, learn, and scale.
“A lot of people talk about growth but SYSTM actually enable you to do it. Everyone tries to improve their marketing strategies, their revenues, etc. But SYSTM walks you through every single step you need to actually see that growth come to fruition.”
— Max Stratmann
“I saw a notable mindset shift... Before we were like ‘I believe this thing… so let's do this’ without really knowing. Those things usually didn’t work. And what’s worse, to be honest, when things failed there still wasn't a lot of learning going on. Now everything is experiment-based, everyone makes predictions and works from data.”
Christoph Wagner
Founder & CEO