How I built structure, focus, and scale into a growing SaaS business to achieve 3x ARR in nine months.
The starting point
In 2023 I joined an AI-powered SaaS company serving safety-critical industries as Chief Commercial Officer. The product was strong, but the commercial side was showing the typical growing pains of a founder-led startup.
The team was small and spread thin, handling everything from prospecting to selling, implementation, training, and even collections. Contracts were long and painful to negotiate. Pricing varied deal by deal. The CRM lacked structure, with different people building their own sales stages, which made data unreliable. And because the platform was positioned mainly as a safety app, it was harder to access the larger budgets and influence of operations leaders.
Laying the foundation
My first priority was to bring clarity and structure to the basics:
- Pricing clarity: Built a simple model that rewarded larger deployments, longer commitments, and upfront payments. This gave customers transparency and improved cash flow immediately.
- Positioning shift: Reframed the product from a safety app to a broader field work execution platform. Safety remained a trusted entry point, but now operations leaders saw the bigger picture and had the budgets to scale.
- Simplified contracts: Replaced a 20-page agreement with a short order form plus a standard MSA online. Negotiations moved faster and became far less painful.
- CRM discipline: Reset the CRM, standardized stages and gates, and required consistent usage. For the first time, we had reliable data and visibility into the pipeline.
Building for scale
With the fundamentals in place, I focused on making the team scalable and repeatable:
- Specialized pods: Organized the team into vertical-focused pods pairing sales, business development, and marketing. Each pod accelerated learning and credibility by speaking the customer’s language.
- ICP and buyer personas: Redefined our ideal customer profile — not just industries, but the right personas and seniority levels in both safety and operations. This sharpened inbound marketing and outbound prospecting, and was a key driver of our 45% conversion rate from MQLs to qualified opportunities.
- Sales enablement: Introduced weekly Challenger and MEDDICC training so the team spoke a common language for qualification, value selling, and deal control.
- Incentives that drove focus: Rolled out structured commission plans. The team shifted from chasing low-probability prospects to focusing on real opportunities. They even pushed back on “random” accounts that didn’t fit our strategy.
- Operating rhythm: Instituted Monday pipeline calls where deals were reviewed openly. This built accountability, helped the team learn from each other, and improved forecast accuracy.
3x ARR in 9 Months: The Results
The transformation was fast and measurable:
- 3x increase in ARR within nine months
- 7x growth in pipeline year over year
- 28% of pipeline from new markets (North America, LATAM, Australia)
- Sales cycle shortened by 30%
- 45% conversion rate from marketing-qualified leads to qualified opportunities
- Multi-year, upfront contracts signed with leading utilities and infrastructure firms
- Directly supported a successful £12M fundraising round led by a global institutional investor
Most importantly, revenue became credible and reliable. Instead of scattered invoices and inconsistent tracking, the company now had clear pricing, structured contracts, standardized CRM usage, and a repeatable sales process that was the basis for this SaaS transformation. That commercial discipline gave investors confidence. 3x ARR growth secured the fundraising.
Looking back
The company already had a strong product and vision. What it needed was structure, focus, and commercial discipline. By fixing the fundamentals and then building scalable processes around pricing, contracts, CRM, ICP, incentives, and team design, we created a high-performing commercial engine in less than a year.
That’s the same transformation I now deliver for SaaS and AI companies as a Fractional CRO: turning momentum into measurable growth with the right structure, process, and team focus.
Want to explore how I can help your business scale faster? Let’s talk or connect with me on LinkedIn or check delasotta.com/insights.
