Eighteen months. Zero closed deals. Egidijus Pilypas spent a year and a half burning cash on enterprise sales outreach before realizing cold outreach doesn't work in complex B2B markets. In this episode, founders will learn how Exacaster transformed their pipeline by shifting from outbound sales to account-based marketing.
Egidijus reveals how he built trust with a total addressable market of just 1,300 telcos by launching a niche podcast, co-authoring an industry book with 30+ contributors, and over-investing in enterprise sales pitches with 20-person teams. Conference meetings went from 2-3 to 35 in a single year.
Exacaster is a $7M+ ARR bootstrapped SaaS company based in Lithuania, serving customers in nearly 20 countries with close to 100 team members.
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🔑 Key Lessons
- 📉 Cold outreach fails in complex enterprise sales: Exacaster burned cash for 18 months on cold calls and reactive RFP responses without closing a single deal, proving that enterprise buyers need trust before they'll engage.
- 🎯 Find your ICP's emotional pain: Customer value managers felt lonely and unrecognized. Exacaster built a podcast and community around that emotional need, creating genuine connections that became sales opportunities.
- 🤝 Build trust before the RFP arrives: By the time an enterprise buyer sends an RFP, they've already shortlisted vendors. Exacaster's ABM approach ensured they were known and trusted before any formal sales process began.
- 🛠️ Over-invest in the enterprise sales pitch: Switching from 1-2 person pitches to 20-person team presentations transformed Exacaster's win rate on RFPs from zero to consistently winning or placing top two.
- 🚀 Turn niche content into a sales engine: A podcast, benchmark tool, research reports, and a collaboratively written book gave Exacaster authority in a market of just 1,300 telcos.
- 💰 Validate by getting paid before building: Egidijus had no product and no coding experience but convinced a telecom to pay upfront, then taught himself to code and shipped in three months.
Chapters
- Introduction
- What Exacaster does and who it serves
- Revenue, team size, and global reach
- Bootstrapping from Lithuania to 20 countries
- Origin story - from statistics student to telecom
- Failed algorithmic trading and the pivot to SaaS
- Landing the first paying customer with no product
- Teaching themselves to code and shipping in 3 months
- The enterprise delivery trap - custom demands burying the team
- How conference sales landed customers in Alaska and Paraguay
- The danger of letting one large customer dominate
- Why sales was neglected for nearly a decade
- Breaking the delivery-growth cycle
- Hiring a salesperson and the 18-month enterprise sales failure
- The aha moment - realizing they sell trust, not software
- Moving to account-based marketing
- Why marketing was ignored for 8 years
- Building the CVM Stories podcast for 1,300 telcos
- Making customer value managers famous on LinkedIn
- Writing the CVM Body of Knowledge book with 30+ contributors
- Results - from zero to 35 meetings at a single conference
- Over-investing in enterprise sales pitches with 20-person teams
- Internal investment process for cross-functional sales
- Lightning round and closing
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