RESOURCES
Insights, ideas, and practical guidance from our team. Explore our latest articles and thought leadership pieces published on LinkedIn.
NAVIGATING GROWTH IN A CHANGING MARKET
MOST AI-NATIVE ADTECH COMPANIES WON'T STALL BECAUSE THEIR PRODUCT FAILS. THEY'LL STALL BECAUSE NOBODY BUILT THE SALES ENGINE TO MATCH IT.
In his latest article, Don Knapp, And1 Advisors' GTM & Sales Strategy Practice Leader, breaks down why founder-led momentum runs out around $12M, why enterprise buyers move on a fundamentally different clock than AI startups, and the three places repeatable revenue engines usually break down.
Hope is not a strategy. Neither is a great product on its own.
Read the full breakdown and the five-point framework for building a GTM motion that keeps pace with the technology.
THE SC JOB DESCRIPTION FROM 18 MONTHS AGO IS ALREADY OBSOLETE.
Not because the role is disappearing. Because the parts that used to eat 60% of the week can now be automated.
Stephanie Shah is a practice leader at And1, specializing in Solutions Consulting and Sales Enablement. She knows where the real capacity problem lives, and it's not where most CROs think it is.
Her latest $100M Playbook article gets specific on what AI is actually taking off the plate, and what it will never be able to replace. If you lead an SC team, the framing on where your real bottleneck is hiding is worth 8 minutes.
One line that landed: "You have an automation problem masquerading as a capacity problem."
A FULL ROOM IS NOT A PIPELINE. A LONG SCAN LIST IS NOT A NEXT STEP.
Most event programs are built to fill the booth, not close deals. The planning goes into what people will see on the floor. The follow-up gets written on the plane home when everyone is already checked out.
Two weeks later, sales has a list with 300 names and no idea what to do with any of them.
In the latest issue of The $100M Playbook, Natalie Golden breaks down how B2B SaaS teams can build event, field, and partner programs that generate real pipeline. The work starts before the contract is signed and runs well past the time the doors close.
MOST PIPELINE PROBLEMS AREN’T PIPELINE PROBLEMS.
They're what happens when your GTM motion was never built to scale in the first place. One rep's "Proposal" is another's "Verbal." Customer Success is inheriting deals with no record of what was promised. Leadership asks for a Q3 forecast and gets five different answers.
You don't fix that with a new tool.
John Koopman has run RevOps inside companies from $1M to unicorn exit. His read: the companies that stall aren't missing software. They're missing the foundation the software was supposed to sit on.
MOST B2B SAAS COMPANIES DON'T STALL BECAUSE OF THE PRODUCT.
They stall because of the founder.
Don Knapp has spent 25+ years watching founder-led SaaS companies hit the same two walls. At $5M. And again at $15 to $25M. The warning signs are almost always the same. So are the mistakes.
A few things he sees consistently at the $5M plateau:
No pipeline discipline. Revenue is episodic because business development stops the moment selling starts.
Shiny Object Syndrome. The pond with the fish is right there. Founders go looking for a different pond anyway.
No bench. When a key person leaves and there's no one behind them, the ramp time is nine months. Growth stops with them.
The $15 to $25M wall looks different. By then, there's a VP of Sales, a marketing director, a CS team. But departments aren't talking to each other, and nobody is letting their hires actually do the job they were hired for.
Don's latest piece in the $100M Playbook series breaks down both walls and what it actually takes to break through them.
YOUR CUSTOMER JUST GAVE YOU A 10/10 NPS. TWO WEEKS LATER, YOUR CHAMPION IS LEAVING THE COMPANY.
You had no idea they were at risk.
That scenario is exactly why NPS is not a retention strategy. It's also why And1 Advisors Customer Success Practice Leader Allen Guthier argues that most B2B SaaS CS teams are tracking the wrong metrics entirely.
In his latest article for The $100M Playbook series, Allen introduces the Hero Metric: the one number that proves your product is actually delivering what your customer hired you to produce. Not a dashboard full of health scores. Not quarterly satisfaction surveys. One metric. The one that gets worse if your product disappears tomorrow.
Allen brings 20 years of CS experience to this, including leading a global Customer Success team at VMware, supporting $650M in ARR. He has seen both scenarios in this article play out in real companies. He knows what separates the teams that catch churn risk early from the ones writing the post-mortem.
START-UP & SCALE-UP TECH COMPANIES HIT COMMON REVENUE PLATEAUS.
A “Bring The Team” Approach Is Required To Help Them Break Through.
Most GTM advisors will only tell you what to do; not how to do it.
For growth-stage tech companies the real challenge is building the capability, discipline, and execution muscle to actually do it consistently and at scale.
At And1 Advisors, we don’t just advise GTM teams. We roll up our sleeves to get the execution done.
Instead of a single advisor or generic recommendations, we bring a functional GTM leadership team to every engagement. Leaders who have actually run Sales, Marketing, Solutions Consulting, Customer Success, and RevOps in high-growth environments.
Because GTM challenges don’t live in silos, and neither should the solution.
MOST GTM FAILURES AREN’T STRATEGY PROBLEMS. THEY’RE EXECUTION PROBLEMS.
That's the uncomfortable truth And1's Natalie Golden unpacks in the first installment of The $100M Playbook: Proven GTM Strategies for Scaling SaaS Revenue, and she backs it with a real story: millions spent, strategy was solid, and the activation still failed before it left the starting line.
The culprit? No one pressure-tested the execution layer.
For B2B SaaS companies in the $5M to $50M ARR range, this is exactly where growth compounds or stalls. And it almost always breaks down around three questions:
1) Can every team clearly articulate what you're selling and why it's different? 2) Can you tie each tactic directly to your ICP?
3) Do shared metrics and workflows exist so nothing falls apart in the handoff?
Natalie also names a pattern most revenue teams won't admit to: L.Y.P.O.M. (Last Year Plus or Minus). It's the easiest scapegoat in GTM planning, and it's costing companies more than wasted budget. It's costing them signal.
Strategy sets the direction. Execution determines the outcome.
MOST B2B SAAS SALES TEAMS BRING IN THEIR SOLUTIONS ENGINEER TO RUN THE DEMO.
That's too late.
By the time your SE is in the room, the buyer's shortlist is already set. According to 6sense's 2025 B2B Buyer Experience study, 95% of deals are decided before the first sales conversation even starts.
The window to shape that shortlist belongs to the SE. And most organizations are leaving it wide open.
And1 Advisors Practice Leader Stephanie Shah has spent her career building presales organizations that close efficiently and scale without sacrificing the technical precision buyers demand. In her latest article, she breaks down five principles that create the structural space for your Solutions team to enter the cycle earlier and make a real impact.
CUSTOMER SUCCESS ISN’T BROKEN. BUT THE WAY SAAS LEADERS ARE “FIXING” IT IS.
The most expensive restructuring decision in SaaS right now isn't headcount. It's what happens when you turn your Customer Success team into Sales 2.0.
Revenue pressure is real. AI disruption is real. But collapsing CS into a quota-carrying revenue function isn't a strategy. It's a fear response. And it quietly dismantles the trust layer that makes your installed base worth protecting in the first place.
Our Practice Leader Allen Guthier has worked through this structural decision with CS and GTM leaders across B2B SaaS. His take: expansion is an outcome. The moment you make it an incentive, you've already started losing.
He breaks down the structural guardrails every CEO should put in place before the next renewal cycle. Worth a read before that conversation comes up in your next board meeting.
We've watched dozens of B2B SaaS companies hit $30M ARR and stall. Same pattern every time.
Great product. Strong funding. Smart founders.
But they plateau because they built a product machine and forgot to build a culture machine.
Our founder Scott Anderson spent 15 years leading GTM teams (3 exits, including 1 unicorn at InfoScout). And1's practice leaders have contributed to 16 exits. Here's what we've learned:
Product-market fit gets you to $20M. Culture gets you to $100M.
Real unicorn culture has 6 specific building blocks:
→ Living your values through "Epic Fails" sessions
→ Hiring professional athletes who vet YOU
→ Building coaches, not managers (huge mindset shift)
→ Aligning incentives across GTM teams (one team, one dream)
→ Making customers part of your culture, not just recipients
→ Systematizing learning and development
Scott just published the complete framework with specific examples, client stories, and a 90-day action plan.
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