Case Study · 03
How a B2B SaaS business shifted from an unsustainable mid-market model to enterprise and grew revenue 150% in 12 months.
- Sector:B2B SaaS · South Africa
- Stage:Post-product-market fit, scaling from mid-market to enterprise
- Markets:South Africa with UK expansion
The Gap
Scaling into enterprise while the mid-market model was creating costs the business could not sustain.
There was friction across the sales, development and customer functions. The development team was overloaded — carrying new client implementations, support tickets and product maintenance at the same time. The sales team was not converting the right clients, and when they did, what was committed in the sales process and what was scoped for implementation were not aligned. Without a formalised customer function, there were gaps in knowledge and process that clients could feel directly.
What the Numbers Revealed
The management team took a step back and assessed where the commercial problem actually sat.
When the management team assessed the numbers, the picture came into focus. Mid-market clients were demanding, expensive to service, lower volume, and created implementation complexity that exposed gaps in our own processes. Enterprise clients were also demanding — but differently. They had larger budgets, very high volumes and required strategic client management to stay alongside them over the long term. Their requirements pushed the product to stay market-leading and opened commercial growth in new markets.
It was the only model that was commercially viable and scalable. Once the direction was set, the sales, development and customer teams all needed to adapt to support it.
What We Did
Nine things, built in the right order for effective scale.
- 01
Built a solid business strategy for the enterprise pivot — covering commercials, resource planning across one, three and five years, and a product roadmap. This provided the foundation for deliberate business growth and defined a clear service model for existing mid-market clients in the interim.
- 02
Built and shared a product roadmap with enterprise clients that changed the nature of the conversations we were having with them. Seeing where we were planning to take the product illustrated our growth trajectory, changed our positioning and opened up a different kind of commercial conversation.
- 03
Embedded a Business Analyst and Engineer with deep product knowledge into the sales process — closing the gap between what was committed in sales and what was scoped for implementation.
- 04
Established high-level strategic sessions with enterprise clients to position the business as a thought leader and align the product roadmap with their business needs — making those relationships the driver of product development and commercial growth into new markets.
- 05
To ensure deep product knowledge across the organisation, an initiative was built and rolled out over three months to train everyone in the business to deliver effective product demos and answer key questions confidently. Gaps in product knowledge identified during this process were addressed as part of the same programme.
- 06
Built the customer function from the ground up — onboarding processes, retention framework, engagement model and voice-of-customer processes feeding insights back into the product team.
- 07
Split the development team into two: one focused on client delivery and support, one focused solely on product development — focusing capacity and skill sets where each was most effective.
- 08
Built a robust ticketing system to replace email-based client management, enabling the team to meet SLAs and giving the business clear visibility into where service time was going.
- 09
Developed a customer strategy and customer-based marketing approach to support retention and deepen existing client relationships as the business scaled.
What Changed
From two unsustainable models to a clear commercial focus and the operational structure to execute it.
The development team was restructured into two focused groups — client delivery and product — with each team focused on the capacity and skill sets where it was most effective. The product roadmap became client-aligned and industry-aligned, with the ability to push the boundaries of what the product could do. Sales, delivery and client management were aligned. Service costs became measurable and manageable as part of CLTV.
Dev team
restructured and focused
Product
roadmap built, client-aligned and industry-leading
150%
revenue growth in 12 months
UK GTM
successfully launched
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