Building a Successful GTM Motion in Germany for a Swedish SaaS Company and the Art of Entrepreneurial Selling

It’s been a month since starting at Scrive, a leading provider of secure and compliant e-signature and digital identity solutions, competing with DocuSign and AdobeSign to expand its reach further in Europe. In my new role I acquire new clients in Germany but also help support building the German GTM Motion in the Berlin Office — it is a brand new challenge that is forcing me to adopt a new skillset: entrepreneurial selling. 

What is entrepreneurial selling?

It starts with a certain mindset — while a more traditional Account Executive see his responsibility in purely managing his pipeline and hitting his quota, an entrepreneurial one sees his scope much farther than that. He takes responsibility for everything happening in his environment. Whether it has to do with setting up a proper tech. stack for the team, building his own partnership network and working with marketing to optimize landing pages, one-pagers and ad-campaigns. 

Building a GTM Motion in a company that is not yet widely recognized as a brand in Germany has its own challenges — setting the foundation in the beginning with a strong team to support and enable this motion is crucial. I’ve realized that when building something from the ground up into a serious operation, apart from taking on an attitude of extreme ownership, velocity is also key. It means not waiting for things to be perfectly aligned before making that first cold-call, setting up that first partnership, or sending out your first quote to a big customer. 

It is better to place higher value on velocity as opposed to perfection. Gaining market share is a race against the clock and one cannot afford to over-analyze every step along the way. As we are gaining ground in Germany the product positioning is a work in progress – instead of waiting to get all the data we need, we are trying to generate as many customer facing conversations as possible to generate those insights in real time — as the conversations and data points increase, the picture becomes a lot clearer and we can adjust and improve our positioning along the way. 

It is building a plane while flying in it with many parts still missing. But taking off in the first place will get you much farther than staying on the landing strip. 

In the face of this new responsibility and challenges ahead, I’ve also had to learn how to be extremely careful with my time. Being disciplined about what NOT to focus on and what to prioritize. The idea of solving every challenge at once might be romantic but barely feasible. Getting one thing done properly means that another item might have to be deprioritized. This is easier said than done but in practice it means writing done one item that I absolutely have to get done to keep the ball moving in the morning. Identifying this one thing has been helpful in keeping focus and not getting side-tracked with too many responsibilities on the side. 

Another helpful resource guiding me through this role has been my coach Frederik from justclose.de who has been a great mentor and sparring partner, especially when identifying which items I should really prioritize and which to abandon (for now). That’s another crucial aspect of entrepreneurial sellers — they seek outside support, like a business owner hiring consultants, they see the value of having a pair of eyes outside of your organization to help you guide you through unexpected roadblocks. 

Stay tuned for more content like this, as Scrive expands its reach in the DACH space, and like always make sure to subscribe to this newsletter, if you enjoy my blog posts!