When to add these capabilities—phased approach

Every B2B company’s RevTech journey looks different, shaped by factors like product complexity, go-to-market motion, and average contract value (ACV). However, most organizations evolve through four broad stages:

• Pre-PMF (Pre-Product-Market Fit): Before the company has validated its product and found a repeatable growth engine.
• Post-PMF: The product-market fit is validated, but the company is still working on refining its go-to-market strategy.
• Growth: The company is rapidly scaling, growing its customer base, and expanding its market presence.
• Scale: The company has established itself as a leader and is focused on optimizing operations, expanding product lines, and increasing efficiency.

Below, we outline what each stage typically looks like in B2B, the key priorities at that moment, and the RevTech capabilities you might introduce. We’ll highlight relevant case studies from your library to show how real startups and enterprises tackled these transitions.

A Note on PLG, B2B2C, and Hybrid Models

• If you’re product-led (PLG), you’ll likely introduce in-product usage tracking, scoring, and “try before you buy” funnels earlier—sometimes even at Pre-PMF.
• If you’re B2B2C or hybrid (selling both to organizations and individual consumers), your marketing automation might look more consumer-ish (coupons, referral flows), and your post-sales might need more intense usage analytics.
• The four phases remain the same, but your roadmap may reorder or emphasize certain tools (e.g. usage-based scoring) earlier. We’ll try to address these companies as we go through it.

1) Pre-PMF

What’s Going On?

• You’re still testing your product with early customers or design partners.
• Sales is often founder-led, and you’re unsure if you should invest heavily in marketing or an SDR team yet.
• Your main focus: Gather feedback, validate that people want your product, and be ready to pivot quickly if needed.

Key Capabilities

1. Basic CRM: You need somewhere to store leads and track your handful of deals—even a spreadsheet or a free CRM tier can work.
2. Lightweight Analytics: This could be Google Analytics or a small event-tracking tool. Aim for just enough insight to see if people are engaging.
3. Simple Data Enrichment: If you’re picking up business cards at trade shows or scanning LinkedIn leads manually, you might enrich them with tools like Clay or Apollo.io.
4. Calendaring & Slack Alerts: For early inbound leads, you might trigger a Slack notification so you can “pounce” immediately, and use Calendly or Cal.com to schedule calls without back-and-forth emails.

Examples at this stage - Pre-PMF

• Volca: A four-person startup selling referral marketing software to home services businesses. They get most leads from trade shows, where they physically meet HVAC or plumbing entrepreneurs. After the show, they import contact lists into Clay to clean and enrich them, then upload to a simple CRM (Clarify). They do everything via CSV—no fancy integrations, because they’re still experimenting with their ICP and pivoting product features weekly if needed.

• Clarify: They rely on a minimal funnel: sign-ups hit PostHog for basic usage tracking, and each new lead triggers a Slack alert so a founder can reach out personally. They’ve avoided multi-tool automation because they want direct, conversational feedback with each lead.

• Ravenna: A 13-person team that sells an AI-powered internal help desk platform. They focus on founder-led LinkedIn outreach to land design partners. Their inbound form triggers a Slack DM, and they track each opportunity in a small CRM. No heavy marketing automation, no big-scale ad campaigns—just personal conversations to refine the product.

Stack Components

• Flexible CRM: A lightweight CRM (Clarify, HubSpot’s free tier, Pipedrive) to log sales conversations, add basic lead/contact info, and store your handful of deals. A single pipeline stage view (e.g., “Interested → Demo → Contract”) is often enough.
• Basic Analytics: Tools like Google Analytics (for web traffic) or PostHog (for light product-event tracking). You only need to see if potential customers visit your site, fill out a form, or engage with a core feature—no advanced funnel breakdowns yet.
• Calendaring App: Calendly or Cal.com to simplify booking demos or discovery calls. Embedding a scheduling link in your website or email signature can reduce friction, and at Pre-PMF, quick personal conversations often matter more than automated marketing.
• Basic Proposal & Contract Management: Google Docs (for proposals/SOWs) and a free-tier e-sign platform (like DocuSign) for quick turnarounds on pilot agreements or NDAs. Storing one or two core templates in a shared folder is often all you need at this stage.
• Outreach with Built-In Enrichment: Clay or Apollo.io to enrich small sets of leads from events, LinkedIn, or personal networks. This ensures you have accurate emails, job titles, and basic firmographics without complex workflows or advanced routing.

Case-Specific Notes

• SaaS: Early funnel tracking (via PostHog, Mixpanel) can tell you if alpha users are discovering essential product features. For instance, you might look at how many times they open the dashboard or complete a “hello world” tutorial—crucial signals of potential product-market fit.
• Professional Services: Storing client proposals or SOWs in your CRM accelerates the “send-approve” cycle. Even a simple spreadsheet link or Google Docs URL inside each CRM record ensures your proposals don’t get lost, letting you quickly adjust scope or pricing based on early feedback.
• PLG: If you offer a free trial or alpha, add minimal usage tracking—something as simple as Mixpanel for “login,” “create project,” and “invite colleague” events. Seeing these events early can confirm whether users are truly testing your product or just poking around.
• B2B2C or B2B/B2C Hybrids: Your earliest traffic could include both individuals (exploring a consumer-like experience) and small businesses. Sorting them in your CRM (e.g., a custom “Account Type” field) helps you decide where to invest time. If you plan to rely on SEO, start building a few pages on your site around relevant keywords, so you gradually gain traction in search results.

Bottom Line:

Keep your stack lean. You want tools to help you stay organized but not weigh you down. You want direct feedback loops and minimal overhead—no one wants to rip out a complex system if you pivot in six weeks. Tools like Slack alerts, Calendly, and a basic CRM are enough to keep deals organized while you validate your solution.

2) Post-PMF

What’s Going On?

• You’ve proven that there’s real demand and have paying customers.
• Now you need more structure around lead generation, sales, and possibly customer support.
• You might hire a small SDR/BDR team, start running ad campaigns, or set up marketing automation so you’re not manually emailing every lead.

Key Capabilities

1. Marketing Automation: Automate inbound lead nurture and track which ads or campaigns generate the best leads. Tag managers (GTM, Segment) can help measure inbound performance.
2. Lead Scoring & Routing: If inbound lead volume rises, a tool like HubSpot’s built-in scoring or LeanData can rank leads and assign them to the right rep.
3. Proposal & E-Signature Tools: As deals increase, you’ll want PandaDoc, DocuSign, or something similar to streamline quoting and contract signing.
4. Customer Support / Basic CS: Tools like Zendesk or Freshdesk if you’re starting to juggle multiple customers with real tickets or questions.

Example: Thena

Thena is still fairly small, but they’ve hit product-market fit for their customer conversation platform. Suddenly, they have two major GTM motions:

• Inbound: They run ads on Google and LinkedIn, using Branch and Google Tag Manager to measure which ads actually bring qualified leads. They funnel these leads into HubSpot, which sends a series of automated nurture emails introducing Thena’s value props.

• Outbound: They’ve added a small SDR team that uses Clay to enrich and filter potential leads (from KeyPlay or LinkedIn) and then launch targeted email sequences. They also test La Growth Machine to nurture prospects on LinkedIn before funneling them into HubSpot.

• Automation Setup:
  • HubSpot is the central system for inbound leads; it assigns lead scores (e.g., “If they clicked on a pricing page or requested a demo, score +10”), then notifies an SDR if the score is high enough.
  • For outbound prospects curated via Clay, they do a data-enrichment pass, then upload those contacts into HubSpot or a sales engagement tool.
  • They keep it intentionally focused on three channels: ads, LinkedIn, and email, so they don’t over-complicate the funnel.

Thena recognizes they need enough automation to handle their new lead flow but don’t want to add 12 different platforms. By focusing on three channels, they ensure each is measurable, scalable, and not redundant.

Stack Components

• CRM + Marketing Automation: Some CRMs (e.g., HubSpot) offer in-house lead scoring or email sequences to nurture inbound leads. If you prefer something more robust, tools like Marketo are common additions, though they typically require a bigger ops effort.
• Enhanced Lead Scoring & Routing: Most CRMs have basic scoring built in. For something more advanced, tools like LeanData or MadKudu help prioritize leads by firmographics, user activity, and campaign engagement. This is especially handy if you’re seeing a big influx of leads and want to assign them efficiently.
• Proposal & E-Signature: Tools like PandaDoc can streamline sending quotes, updating pricing, and tracking status (e.g., “Viewed,” “Awaiting Signature”). If you’re on DocuSign, you might expand to a paid tier with branding and extra automation features.
• Customer Support / Basic Success: Tools like Zendesk or Intercom can help you create a simple ticketing workflow, track response times, and categorize common issues. This is often where you begin seeing patterns like “onboarding” vs. “technical support”—invaluable for shaping your product roadmap.
• Tag Manager & Ad Measurement: Tools like Google Tag Manager let you see which ad channels are truly converting (e.g., LinkedIn vs. Google search). This data guides where you spend your limited marketing budget—especially important when you’re pushing beyond word-of-mouth. This is also a good time to start thinking about adding an Attribution vendor depending on how much

Case-Specific Notes

• SaaS: A small SDR team can hand off leads from inbound forms or chatbots. Tie your marketing automation to in-app usage data (via Segment or an API) to send re-engagement emails if a new sign-up goes dormant in the first week.
• Professional Services: Automated marketing can highlight your expertise. For instance, after someone downloads a white paper or attends a webinar, you can trigger a short email nurture sequence showcasing relevant case studies or ROI stats. That can help nudge them toward a discovery call.
• PLG: This is where a usage-based nurturing flow becomes important. If free-tier users cross certain thresholds—like creating 10 projects or inviting 5 teammates—your system can trigger a personalized email (“You’re clearly seeing value. Let’s chat about our Pro tier!”). Tools like Mixpanel + HubSpot or Amplitude + Customer.io can handle that.
• B2B2C or B2B/B2C Hybrids: You might want to see larger inbound volume at this stage. Set up simple rules to route B2B leads to an SDR for personal outreach, while B2C leads might get an automated email flow or a self-serve path. Make sure your CRM data structure (e.g., “Account Type,” “Company Size”) is clear so you don’t waste time chasing the wrong leads.
• Note for PLG or B2B companies with a B2C component: This is likely the stage where you want to make sure you have a CDP in place (or a compostable equivalent using a Warehouse + ETL + rETL).

Bottom Line:

Once you have paying customers and a sense of your best channels, it’s time to invest in marketing automation, better lead routing, and a more robust CRM. But don’t feel pressured to buy every shiny tool—focus on the channels that fit your product’s ACV and target buyer, and make sure you can properly measure and nurture leads from those channels.

3) Growth

What’s Going On?

• You have a repeatable sales process, and demand is climbing fast.
• You’re adding specialized roles like RevOps, Marketing Ops, or even a Data team.
• Complexity rises: your CRM now has thousands of leads, you might run both inbound and outbound at large scale, and your marketing and product usage data can get siloed.

Key Capabilities

1. Data Warehouse & Reverse-ETL: A place like Snowflake or BigQuery to unify data from your CRM, marketing automation, and possibly your product. Tools like Hightouch or Census push segments back to the CRM or ad platforms so you can do more personalized outreach at scale.
2. Advanced Lead Scoring & Enrichment: If you’re going after bigger deals, you might use 6sense or MadKudu to predict high-intent accounts or set up multi-channel “account-based marketing” campaigns.
3. Full-Funnel Analytics: Tools like Looker, Tableau, or Mode to track the entire funnel from first touch to closed deal, plus any post-sales usage patterns.
4. Sales Engagement & Customer Success: Outreach or Salesloft for big outbound teams, Gainsight or Catalyst for post-sales expansions and churn prevention.

Real Example: Hightouch

Hightouch sells a Reverse-ETL platform and uses its own product for Growth-stage RevOps. Here’s how they do it:

• Warehouse-First Mindset: All data—Salesforce opportunities, Stripe subscriptions, product usage logs—lands in Snowflake. Then they build SQL models to define, for instance, “power users” or “at-risk accounts.”
• Reverse-ETL: Using Hightouch itself, they push these curated segments back into Salesforce, HubSpot, or LinkedIn Ads. For example, if someone hits a certain usage threshold, they automatically appear on the “upsell opportunity” list in Salesforce.
• Minimal CRM Bloat: They keep just enough fields in Salesforce to close deals and track pipeline. All the complicated logic (like territory assignments or advanced lead scoring) happens in the warehouse.
• Small Ops Team: With only a couple of RevOps specialists, they rely on SQL transformations rather than building huge automation flows in each tool. That means less overhead and easier maintenance at scale.

Stack Components

• Data Warehouse + Reverse-ETL: A place like Snowflake or BigQuery consolidates data from your CRM, marketing tools, and product usage logs. Then, Hightouch or dbt. can push that cleaned data back into Salesforce or HubSpot, letting sales and marketing act on deeper insights (like usage patterns or advanced segmentation).
• Advanced Lead Scoring and Enrichment: Tools like 6sense or MadKudu can help you identify high-intent accounts and run account-based marketing across channels, pulling in data from enrichment tools like Clearbit or Zoominfo. This is crucial if you’re moving into bigger deal sizes and want to focus on fewer, more qualified prospects.
• Full-Funnel Analytics & BI: Tools like Looker, Tableau, or Mode can unify everything from ad spend to closed deals in real time. Building dashboards around pipeline velocity or conversion by channel can help you see bottlenecks—like if deals stall after a product trial or a discovery call.
• Sales Engagement & Customer Success: Tools like Outreach or Salesloft to manage multi-touch outbound cadences (calls, emails, LinkedIn messages), plus Gainsight or Catalyst to handle onboarding and renewal workflows. This ensures you have a strong process for both new sales and existing customer expansions.
• Integrations & Data Sync: If you haven’t already, you might add a CDP (like Segment) to handle real-time event tracking. This data can then be piped into the warehouse and any specialized tools you’re running.

Case-Specific Notes

• SaaS: As your user base grows, advanced usage metrics can reveal upsell and cross-sell opportunities. For example, Gainsight might track “health scores” that combine usage frequency, support tickets, and contract renewal data—alerting your CSMs to accounts at risk.
• Professional Services: You might be expanding into new regions or offering multiple services. Having a central BI tool can show revenue by line of service, region, or marketing channel. Then your sales engagement platform can personalize outreach (e.g., “Focus on healthcare prospects in APAC” if that’s a hot region).
• PLG: Reverse-ETL becomes a game-changer. If your warehouse sees an account has 30 daily active users but only paid for 20 seats, you can automatically log a new “Expansion Opportunity” in Salesforce or send the account manager a Slack alert. This helps you systematically capture usage-based revenue.
• B2B2C or B2B/B2C Hybrids: Combining B2C data and B2B account data in a single warehouse can reveal interesting patterns—like consumer-level adoption that leads to a bigger enterprise deal. It’s worth building dashboards that show how many users from the same domain are signing up, potentially triggering an ABM campaign for that domain.

Bottom Line:

When you’re scaling, data can slip through the cracks if you don’t unify it. A warehouse approach—and possibly reverse-ETL—lets you build a “single source of truth,” then feed those insights to the CRM and marketing channels. You’ll also want advanced analytics (Looker, etc.) to see precisely how leads move through the funnel and which ones are ripe for an upsell.

4) Scale

What’s Going On?

• You’re a market leader with large or enterprise customers.
• Deals may be multi-year with complex pricing, requiring formal CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) solutions and advanced contracting.
• You might have multiple product lines or even multiple business units, each with its own mini-stack.
• Data governance, compliance, and cross-team collaboration become major hurdles.

Key Capabilities

1. Enterprise CRM + CPQ: Tools like Salesforce CPQ to manage sophisticated pricing structures and approvals.
2. Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM): Ironclad, Apttus, or others to handle large enterprise contract negotiation, version control, and e-signature.
3. Advanced Forecasting & Commission Management: Clari, Anaplan, or Xactly for real-time pipeline forecasting and commission modeling on a large scale.
4. Global Support & Governance: Gainsight or Catalyst for large Customer Success teams, data governance solutions (OneTrust, Collibra) for compliance, and possibly a multi-BU data warehouse architecture.

Real Example: SecuraOne (Anonymized)

SecuraOne is a massive cybersecurity leader with thousands of enterprise clients and a single flagship product. At their scale:

• CRM + CPQ: They stuck with spreadsheets for pricing until they passed $500M ARR, then realized deals had become too complex. They adopted Salesforce CPQ to handle custom discounting, approvals, and multi-year enterprise agreements.
• 24/7 Customer Support: They use Gainsight for success metrics and PagerDuty for immediate breach-related escalations. If a customer’s system is under attack, they can respond instantly. This level of real-time synergy was impossible with a smaller, more basic stack.
• Global Compliance: Their clients operate in finance, healthcare, and government, so compliance and data sovereignty are huge. SecuraOne invests heavily in data governance, building on top of an in-house warehouse approach.

Early on, they could manage with a simpler system. But once they had thousands of enterprise customers with large contracts, they needed CPQ for quoting, Gainsight for success, and layered security tools for compliance.

Stack Components

• Enterprise CRM & CPQ: Salesforce Enterprise plus Salesforce CPQ (or Apttus/Conga) to handle complex product bundles, discount approvals, and advanced quoting rules—critical if you’re closing multi-year, high-ACV deals.
• CLM (Contract Lifecycle Management): Tools like Ironclad, LinkSquares, or DocuSign CLM to manage legal approvals, version history, and e-sign workflows for enterprise customers who expect a more formal contracting process.
• Advanced Forecasting & Commission Tools: Tools like Clari, Anaplan, or Xactly to model revenue projections and automate sales rep compensation. These platforms can integrate with your CRM to forecast pipeline more accurately and handle multi-tier commissions.
• Global Support & Governance: Tools like Gainsight or Catalyst for large-scale customer success teams, plus solutions like OneTrust or Collibra for data privacy and compliance, especially if you operate across multiple geographies.
• Multi-BU or Product Line Architecture: Often each business unit (BU) has its own marketing automation or unique CRM instance, with a master warehouse bridging them all. A consistent data governance policy (naming conventions, duplicate management) helps avoid chaos.

Case-Specific Notes

• SaaS: Enterprise deals may involve advanced usage-based pricing, multi-year terms, or co-terminus renewals across multiple SKUs. CPQ ensures reps follow consistent rules. CLM speeds up negotiations by standardizing redlines and approvals.
• Professional Services: A large global client might require localized contracts, compliance checks, or elaborate multi-phase proposals. CLM ensures each iteration is tracked, and advanced forecasting tools factor in project timelines and resourcing.
• PLG: You may keep a self-serve path for smaller teams while negotiating enterprise deals for bigger customers. At scale, some PLG companies build custom usage-based billing systems rather than relying entirely on off-the-shelf tools like Chargebee or Paddle—especially if their product pricing is highly specialized. Integrating that custom system with CPQ ensures expansions (e.g., going from 500 seats to 1,000 seats) get auto-calculated, and your ops team doesn’t have to manually reconcile usage vs. billing.
• B2B2C or B2B/B2C Hybrids: Different product lines may cater to both consumer and corporate markets. A robust centralized warehouse ensures your finance team, marketing team, and global channel partners work from one “source of truth,” preventing data silos or repeated contract negotiations with the same entity under different business units.

Bottom Line:

At an enterprise level, deals and data complexity skyrocket. Formal CPQ, robust contract management, and advanced forecasting become essential. You also need strong governance so data stays consistent across potentially many business units or product lines.

Final Thoughts

1. Pre-PMF: Focus on direct conversations and minimal overhead.
2. Post-PMF: Add marketing automation, lead scoring, and a stronger CRM to handle your growing pipeline.
3. Growth: Unify data with a warehouse or advanced analytics, and invest in robust sales engagement, ABM, and Customer Success.
4. Scale: Standardize on CPQ, CLM, advanced forecasting, and data governance to handle big-enterprise deals and global expansion.

No single approach is perfect—each stage has different priorities. But by studying how real companies (like Thena at Post-PMF or Hightouch at Growth) set up their stacks, you can borrow the most relevant ideas for your situation and gradually layer on capabilities as your business evolves. And if you’re a PLG or B2B2C hybrid, just keep an eye on product usage analytics or consumer-style marketing tactics; you might need them earlier than a traditional B2B might. The key is to build the right systems when you need them—not before.

In Module 5, we’ll explore how to evaluate an existing RevTech stack, uncover inefficiencies or gaps, and systematically upgrade your tools and workflows so they align with your current stage and business goals.