We’re unveiling a new chapter of Pocus that triples down on our founding vision to unlock data for go-to-market teams.
Over the last 3 years, we’ve tackled the hardest data and go-to-market challenges with incredible customers like Asana, Canva, Monday, Digital Ocean, Miro, and more. This uniquely positioned us to understand how the best GTM teams operate and technology’s role in enabling them in the future.
I’m beyond excited to announce the next chapter of Pocus as the platform to run your GTM playbooks, powered by AI. This new era will provide even more value for our customers (both in PLG and beyond) who need to turn their data into revenue.
Before diving into a sneak peek of the platform, I want to share a few key insights that are driving this launch.
The problem with go-to-market in 2024
Macro changes to the market have broken the growth equation for SaaS businesses. The economic downturn has made it very hard for companies to hit their revenue goals.
Selling software has felt like a slog and cast a spotlight on the inefficiency of our GTM engines.
Revenue leaders across sales, marketing, and CS are struggling to hit their targets and worry that reps are focusing on the wrong things instead of being strategic.
How did we get here?
An overreliance on volume.
Sales leaders hired armies of SDRs to conduct spray and pray outreach and brute force their way to repeatable pipeline.
The focus has always been on volume rather than precision.
GenAI has made the situation worse. There are hundreds of startups that use genAI to send spammy “personalized” emails. It’s become even easier to do more, but not easier to do better.
Hitting pipeline targets and growing efficiently feels unachievable for so many companies in 2024.
There are 3 core reasons why so many revenue teams struggle.
- Bad data that prioritizes the wrong accounts
- Disjointed prospecting workflows that lead to slow pipeline growth
- Lack of consistency across reps
Let’s explore each of these
#1 Bad data = bad signals for reps
Access to accurate and relevant data to inform GTM is a huge challenge. We know this challenge well because Pocus was founded to enable go-to-market teams at PLG companies to access their 1st party product usage data.
The data challenge gets worse when you look at the state of 3rd party enrichment. We interviewed 50+ revenue leaders who all shared that despite spending 6 figures on multiple annual data enrichment contracts, they still can’t hit desired match rates. Teams are also bringing in 3rd party intent data and are similarly disappointed in the black-box nature of the insights these platforms could provide (i.e. this account is excellent but don’t ask us why).
The data available within these 3rd party platforms is also limited to some pretty rigid signals that don’t always capture how you think about your ICP or business. For example, if I only want to prioritize selling to companies with a free trial, I’ll have to do manual research to enrich my target account list.
#2 Disjointed and broken prospecting workflows
Prospecting is a broken process.
Reps are struggling to work across multiple tools, suffering from the toggle tax of flipping between Sales Navigator, CRM, sales engagement platforms, dashboards, and spreadsheets. Each prospecting workflow starts with a blank search bar in the data tool of choice (Sales Navigator, ZoomInfo, Lusha, etc). Reps then tediously build filters to create a list of prospects before going to another tool to dig for more insights (are they in the CRM? did they recently visit our website?) to get a holistic picture of the prospect.
The tool overload makes reps less productive. They spend more time digging for insights on who to reach out to and researching those users than on higher-value tasks, like talking to their prospects!
#3 Lack of consistency
By the predictable revenue principle, scaling the number of reps should, in theory, also scale pipeline generated. This is not the case in 2024.
Because of the disjointed prospecting workflow, individual reps don’t perform tasks in exactly the same way and you have little visibility into their processes (especially at scale). In an ideal world, you could copy and paste your best rep’s workflow and prescribe it to the rest of the team. But this is hard to put into practice.
GTM teams are under pressure to grow efficiently. Bloated tech stacks that force reps to work across multiple siloed solutions are under scrutiny by every budget holder. RevOps leaders are trying to understand why they spend 6 figures on enrichment tools yet reps still struggle to find the contacts they need for prospecting.
In 2024, GTM teams must work smarter, be more data-driven, and hold everyone to a higher bar.
A new era for GTM teams
So what do GTM teams need to successfully hit revenue goals and run efficiently?
There’s a new GTM playbook emerging that focuses on precision over spray and pray, warm leads over cold contacts, and prescriptive workflows over Wild West prospecting.
This playbook focuses on doing better, not just creating more signals, or adding more tools.
Teams with the best grasp on intent win
What’s stopping them now: a lack of accurate signals or too many signals without clear guidelines on how best to take action.
The best teams will arm sales and marketing with the right account and contact lists built from real buying signals (not their team’s best guess). This is a thoughtful approach to prospecting that focuses on precision—the right contact, message, and timing—rather than blasting hundreds of emails to an account.
Ditch the toggle tax
What’s stopping them now: critical data lives across too many tools for the typical rep workflow (prioritize accounts, research accounts, find contacts, personalize outreach).
Reduce the burden for reps by removing friction and saving them time spent digging for insights across tools. Put prospecting on autopilot for reps, making it 10x easier to do high-quality research and engagement that gets results.
Prescriptive workflows > Wild West prospecting
What’s stopping them now: reps lack the signals they need to target accounts strategically and leadership has no easy way to replicate and automate the proven workflows of their best reps.
Leadership will create more prescriptive workflows for the go-to-market team that streamline their prospecting and account research process, so reps can focus on building relationships (not digging for information). They'll use automation to replicate the playbooks and processes of their most successful reps across their team, improving performance at scale.
Pocus: Run your GTM playbooks, powered by AI
After talking to our customers and experts in our GTM community, we 1) got clarity that Pocus is already enabling this future for our customers and 2) identified areas of the product we should invest in to make this an even better experience.
So we're reintroducing Pocus. Still a platform to turn data into revenue...
We’re still a platform to turn data into revenue, but now bringing you more better data, out-of-the box playbooks, and AI workflows to streamline tedious prospecting and back office work.
Our platform has 3 core product pillars that together improve the jobs to be done by modern GTM teams.
Enrich: Unify signals across your data
Find every target account, every time. Connect the dots between your 1st party data with rich intent signals from Pocus to create a complete profile. Let us do the heavy lifting on 3rd party data—waterfall enrichment connects you with 14+ data providers to complete your customer profiles.
Engage: Put playbooks on autopilot with AI
Signals help you prioritize your team’s activity and improve speed to lead with prescriptive playbooks. Build playbooks based on website activity, job changes, product usage, and more. Automate playbooks to run in the background and generate pipeline without you.
Optimize: Hit your targets every time with reporting
Get visibility into which playbooks and reps are performing well. Get AI recommendations for how to iterate playbooks over time to drive consistency and repeatability in your GTM motion.
Built for every GTM motion
With investment in more, better data we’re unlocking hundreds of playbooks to help GTM teams hit their goals efficiently. Our focus is helping teams do 3 core revenue-generating activities better than anyone else:
- Build pipeline for net-new business with warm outbound playbooks
- Run your Product-Led Sales playbook to land and expand customers
- Empower success teams to defend and maintain existing customers
Thanks for being on the journey
More on the new features and updates to the platform in our next blog post.
Until then, a big thank you! Whether you’re a customer on this journey with us from day one or a new member of this community, we appreciate your support.
Let’s continue making magic for GTM teams together!
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