How B2B software scales beyond direct sales: three levers from three operator roles

The trader who didn't push the button

In my time as CCO of a platform mandate in OTC commodity trading, I watched something that has stayed with me. Traders sat in front of our platform. Contract signed, onboarding done, first trade set up. And they didn't push the button. They stayed on the phone, in their brokerage routines, in their Excel files. The platform was open. It was paid for. It wasn't being used.

So we hired former traders and brokers. People who spoke the same language as our customers. They sat with the traders in their rooms and walked them through the first real trades. In parallel, we checked every day which orders had only been partly entered, where problems might come up, where liquidity was running thin. Near-trades became trades. Active licenses became active volume.

That was my first real lesson. Sales isn't finished when the contract is signed. It's finished when the customer pushes the button. And the button is almost never where the sales team sits.

That's where my thesis for this piece comes from. In 2026, B2B software in most markets no longer scales through direct sales alone. It scales through three levers beyond it. Pricing would be the fourth lever, but it has its own logic and goes into a separate follow-up.

What's shifting right now

In 2026, I see three shifts. The conversations I'm having with PE partners, growth VCs, and boards all point to the same picture. The nuances differ, the pattern doesn't.

First, the return math is getting harder. Bain showed in its Global Private Equity Report 2026 that in the past decade, 5 percent annual EBITDA growth was enough to deliver a 2.5x return on invested capital over a five-year hold. Today, with borrowing costs at 8 to 9 percent and entry valuations at record levels, you need 10 to 12 percent.^[1] Bain calls it: 12 is the new 5. A growth story without an efficiency component is telling a 2021 story.

Second, the buyer has changed. A software purchase in mid-market and enterprise now runs through a buying committee with an average of 13 stakeholders. Forrester measured this in 2024 across more than 16,000 B2B buyers globally. The sobering result: 86 percent of these purchases stall during the buying process. 81 percent of buyers are dissatisfied with the provider they end up choosing.^[2] Gartner shows that 80 percent of failed deals don't fail on the vendor pitch. They fail on internal consensus.^[3] Buyers spend only 17 percent of their time with the sales team. The rest goes to web search, internal conversations, AI answers, and peer reviews.

Third, sellers pitch less. They equip an internal champion to sell internally. Anyone building scale in 2026 needs to be very close to the customer's internal stakeholders and help them push the product through their own house. That's where the three levers come in.

Lever 1: A machine, not a collection of good sellers

When I look at a B2B SaaS setup, I check one thing first. Does the sales motion run like a machine, or does the level depend on individual sales champions delivering through luck and relationships? I recognize a machine when three things are repeatable: a sharp ideal customer profile, a clean pipeline, and account executives who all sell roughly the same amount.

When the first AE delivers 1.2 million ARR per year and the third AE in the same market delivers only 280,000, that's not a machine. That's luck with individual sellers.

What I see in the sales data right now is a direct mirror of the buyer shift. The Bridge Group measured in 2024 across 287 SaaS companies that median quota attainment dropped from 66 percent in 2022 to 51 percent. Win rate fell from 23 to 19 percent.^[4] That matches what I've seen in my own roles and conversations. Anyone running the same machine in 2026 as in 2022 sees the erosion in quarterly numbers.

What I learned in the platform mandates: when a machine is weakening, the first move is almost always the same. Sharpen the ideal customer profile, the ICP. Focus on a small set of high-quality logos that the AE can actually serve. Pipeline without activity goes out, clear criteria go in. The machine gets smaller before it can get bigger again. Activity is not the same as productivity.

In diligence, I want to see this: are lead quality, win rate, and new ARR per AE stable across the last four quarters? If not, there's no machine yet. The company is running on luck.

Lever 2: Multipliers alongside your own sales team

In my experience, multipliers and partnerships are often underestimated. And direct sales is often overestimated, especially in later stages. Both distort the scaling thesis. Multipliers don't replace direct sales. They extend it. The partner delivers pipeline and trust. Your own sales team structures the close.

The data is clear. Forrester reported in 2025 that 60 to 70 percent of B2B deals now involve partners or ecosystems. 67 percent of companies expect partner-led revenue to grow more than 30 percent year over year.^[5] Bridge Partners, in its Ecosystem Compass 2025, measured across more than 5,000 partner programs that partner-led deals show 40 percent higher order values, 53 percent higher close rates, and close 46 percent faster.^[6] Ebsta arrived at the same magnitude in 2024 with an independent dataset.^[6] 72 percent of companies report that their acquisition costs through partner channels are lower.^[6]

This matches what I've experienced. In the OTC commodity trading platform mandate, the pipeline coming through utility sales teams was orders of magnitude more efficient than anything we could have built with our own outbound. But: a multiplier alone almost never closes a complex B2B deal. The last ten meters require your own account executive.

The theory behind the pattern is well documented. Eisenmann, Parker, and Van Alstyne showed in HBR 2006 that two-sided markets tend toward concentration. One platform per market often takes most of it.^[7] In 2011, they introduced platform envelopment in the Strategic Management Journal. If you control an existing user relationship, you can use it to enter an adjacent market.^[8]

In B2B, I see this mechanic in three concrete patterns.

In a corporate mandate within an energy data division, the corporate sales team itself was the multiplier. We shifted that team toward SaaS and subscription-based data products. New territory for the corporation at the time. Sales training, joint customer meetings, mushrooming inside the corporation, commercial integration of several acquisitions. The leverage didn't come from the size of my own team. It came from activating an existing apparatus with hundreds of sales people across 7 locations on 3 continents.

In an industrial commodities marketplace, the mechanic was different. We got two or three anchor corporations to require their supplier base to trade exclusively through the platform. One corporation activates hundreds of suppliers in a short period. The GMV curve didn't shift because we hired more sellers. It shifted because the suppliers of the anchor corporations suddenly had an economic reason to use the platform productively. The lock-in ran through the business relationship, not through a contract clause.

In another platform mandate in the energy sector, it was a third type. We worked with the leadership of a large Swiss utility, alongside their eight-person sales team, to address end customers in industry and municipal utilities. The utility sales team became our multiplier. The result: 80 new customers in the Swiss market with a short sales cycle. The reach came through the utility team. What we'd done beforehand: read the utility's strategy and anchored our platform exactly where their strategy was already heading.

Three mandates, three types. Corporate sales. Anchor customer with a supplier base. Utility as channel partner. There are other models. Platform providers often build three layers in parallel. Channel partners as a sales route. OEM hardware partners as platform participants. Distributors as market penetration into the installer chain. Each layer has its own incentives and its own touchpoints. Anyone who masters all three builds reach that direct sales can't match.

The prerequisite isn't magic. The platform has to hold up technically. The provider has to be trustworthy enough that a corporation or utility sends its own sales force or its own suppliers to the platform. And it takes solid relationships. Anyone delivering only functionality won't get there. Rob Bernshteyn, former CEO of Coupa, put it in a 2025 ICONIQ piece: channel partnerships are an efficient lever for scalable growth. But the foundation has to be laid early, ideally before 25 million ARR.^[9] From my own experience, I'd go one layer deeper. The foundation is relationships. A few well-positioned multipliers make the difference because they open doors no in-house sales team can open from outside.

As compelling as the data is, I see three clear limits.

In the early stage, before stable product-market fit, multipliers don't work. Partners sell what's easy to sell. They don't iterate a storyline and they don't prove a category. Until roughly 10 to 20 million ARR, direct sales is the primary learning mechanism. In my first co-founder role in an early startup phase, I was effectively the sales team. If we'd tried to activate a channel back then, we'd have had nothing to activate. Too little was in place for a partner to work with.

In highly complex enterprise deals, the multiplier is enough as a referrer. But the close is done by your own account executive. Security audits, custom pricing, the choreography between CFO, IT, compliance, and the business unit, no corporate sales team delegates that to its platform vendor. And rightly so. In the industrial commodities marketplace, the anchor corporation sent its suppliers to the platform. The contract with each of those suppliers was structured by our sales team.

In product-led growth models, like developer tools or collaboration software, the multiplier doesn't beat direct sales. The product itself beats both. Sales only enters at the up-sell.

What I've taken from three mandates is a different reading than what most ELG reports say. Ecosystem-led growth is the right idea with the wrong packaging. The productive form is co-selling. It's not a replacement for direct sales, it's a model alongside it. The multiplier delivers pipeline, trust, and ICP validation. Your own sales team structures the deal, negotiates the contract, runs the close. Partners and integrators handle implementation and drive adoption with the customer. Anyone running one without the other is leaving a lever on the table.

In diligence, I check three concrete things. Does the company have one or more multipliers whose adoption demonstrably pulls in follow-on customers? Is this activation actively curated, or is it just a logo on the website? Is the co-selling between partner pipeline and in-house sales team documented? A logo list isn't a multiplier. A utility sales team running a documented sales process for an external partner, aligned with that partner's AE team in quarterly reviews, is one.

Lever 3: Coaching at the customer touchpoint

Back to the trader who didn't push the button. What worked in that platform mandate was not a better contract clause and not a better demo. It was being present in the moment when the customer actually used the product. The former broker who spoke the language of traders ran the first real trade alongside them. Near-trades became trades.

This mechanic carries over to many other B2B software models. Whenever adoption requires a behavior change in the end user, and that's true in most productive software markets, support at the touchpoint determines growth from the existing customer base. Net revenue retention hangs on it. In an industrial marketplace, it was the activity density of a user cohort over time. In a platform with an end-customer component, where a utility or an OEM rolls out a white-label product to households or installers, the question is whether the end customer actually uses the platform, or whether the software runs on the server without anyone touching it.

In the sales funnel, this is multi-threading. Forrester documented in 2024 that buying committees in 60 percent of B2B purchases include more than six stakeholders. Win rate increases significantly with the depth of stakeholder engagement.^[2] Buyer enablement is the term. ROI templates the champion can take into a CFO meeting. Security one-pagers the IT lead can present in an architecture review. Reference cases the procurement lead can cite in a vendor comparison. From my own experience, this is the only structural answer to the reality of buying committees. Anyone still relying primarily on single-champion selling will systematically perform below their potential.

AI changes the touchpoint here, without replacing it. Buyers increasingly pull their research ammunition from AI answers. Aggarwal et al. showed in a 2024 peer-reviewed paper at the KDD conference that targeted optimization of content for AI answers can increase visibility there by up to 40 percent.^[10] That's solid evidence at one of the top conferences for applied AI.

What this means in practice: if a buyer's champion today pulls their internal argumentation from ChatGPT or Perplexity, and your company isn't represented there, you're not citable in the buying committee. Not even when the champion sits at the executive level. That's coaching at the touchpoint, one stage before the contract.

A second place where AI helps is multiplier sales itself. When a utility sales team or a corporate BU apparatus is supposed to sell someone else's product alongside their own, sales enablement is the real bottleneck. AI-driven roleplay platforms replace low-stakes practice runs.^[11] ROI calculations, battle cards, and industry reference syntheses that used to take weeks now take hours. In channel sales with three multiplier layers, exactly this enablement is the bottleneck. AI makes it significantly cheaper.

In diligence, I check whether the company runs multi-threading systematically or whether deals hang on individual champions. Whether adoption is actively supported or the platform is „running on the server.” Whether AI visibility is monitored as its own channel. On AI SDRs as a replacement for classic outbound, I'm skeptical. Activity increases are documented, a hard pipeline impact has not yet shown up in peer-reviewed form. On visibility, buyer enablement, and multiplier training, the evidence is solid.

Speedboat and tanker

Three levers are the mechanics. What holds them together is leadership. There's an observation I've taken from two very different worlds. Corporate and Mittelstand on one side, startup on the other. Both modes have their own rules. Anyone moving from a startup at startup speed into a corporation, expecting to operate with the same directness, runs into walls regularly. Anyone going the other way and importing corporate processes into a startup takes away the speed that made the startup what it is.

What's underestimated in both worlds is the politics inside a corporation. Corporations are rarely a homogeneous whole. They are fragmented, political, and held together by a hidden organization of internal sponsors, door openers, and microcosms. In my corporate mandate in the energy data division, the productive question in every internal contact was the same: what's in it for this SVP if they support me? Whom can they influence? Where do their own interests come in? Anyone who doesn't clarify this early doesn't fail on strategy. They fail on internal activation. The formal hierarchy is not the mechanism. It's only the map. The mechanism is the relationship structure behind it.

Operating rhythm, the cadence of quarterly reviews, weekly pipeline reviews, and 14-day forecasting horizons, is the operational answer to this tension. Without that cadence, a machine doesn't hit its plan. ICONIQ showed in 2024 that the median plan attainment has fallen to 80 to 90 percent. Historically it sat at 100.^[12] A machine that doesn't know whether it'll hit 80 or 100 ends up being run by the week, not by the plan.

Trust is the other side of the same coin. A GTM machine without trust in the sales team is just an administration of quarterly numbers. An anchor customer without a personal relationship is a logo on the website. A pricing sprint without trust in the sales team ends in internal sabotage.

When the buyer is an industrial corporation

One last shift, missing from most classical scaling frameworks. When a software company is acquired by an industrial corporation rather than a PE fund, the logic changes. Three points matter. They deserve their own follow-up piece, here's just the outline.

The corporate parent channel can be the largest possible multiplier. An industrial corporation with country subsidiaries, sales teams, end-customer relationships, and regulatory licenses can roll out a software platform at a speed no PE vehicle achieves. BCG documented in 2025 that more than half of all M&A deals fail or underperform expectations. With a structured PMI framework, around 9 percent more value can be captured.^[13] The lever is real, but it's hard to pull.

Then there's the third-market question. When the corporation itself becomes the lighthouse customer, there's a risk the company turns into an internal services provider and loses its external product-market fit. McKinsey documented in 2024 that fewer than 20 percent of the studied transactions hit their cross-sell targets.^[14] From my S&P experience: the productive question isn't „are we allowed to sell externally”. The productive question is how the roadmap prioritization between corporate requirements and external product-market fit is documented.

And then integration versus autonomy. Greven et al. showed in 2023 in R&D Management, with 118 M&A and integration managers, that the decision-making autonomy of the acquired company supports the radical innovativeness of the acquirer.^[15] Too much integration destroys speed. Too little integration leaves synergies on the table. From three corporate mandates, my answer is a hybrid architecture. High decision-making autonomy combined with structured integration at the right interfaces: compliance, IT, data governance, regulatory reporting lines.

Anyone leading in this kind of constellation has to keep the speedboat-tanker tension productive. Speedboat means: the company keeps its speed, its product cadence, its direct line to the customer. Tanker means: the corporation brings reach, regulatory adjacency, capex effects, cross-BU adoption. Anyone running one without the other loses the value of the transaction. Anyone connecting both builds platform impact that neither PE nor pure standalone growth reaches.

My take

Three findings from three mandates that have more to do with each other than they look at first.

Relationships are the hardest remaining GTM lever in 2026. In a world where 80 percent of the buying journey runs self-directed and 86 percent of deals stall on internal consensus, no software function replaces the trust between champion, multiplier, and provider.

Operators with multi-stage experience beyond pure GTM logic are getting scarce in 2026. The intersection of operational GTM scaling, organizational scaling beyond sales, and regulatory depth in vertical markets is becoming rare. Anyone bringing all three has a scaling premium that will only grow.

And my contrarian thesis after three mandates: anyone evaluating a B2B software target in 2026 shouldn't only ask how big the sales team is. They should ask who the three multipliers are whose adoption opens the next 50 logos. And how the co-selling between those multipliers and the in-house sales team works operationally. In the early stage, in highly complex enterprise deals, and in product-led models, direct sales remains essential, I wouldn't change that. What I would add after three mandates: in most mature mid-market segments I've seen recently, the largest unused lever was the multiplier channel. Forrester sees this structurally in 60 to 70 percent of all B2B deals. My read aligns with that magnitude.

Pricing is missing from this three-lever story on purpose. It follows its own logic and gets its own follow-up. So does the strategic-acquirer angle I sketched above. If you'd like to talk about a specific mandate or a diligence question, I'm reachable at calendly.com/gausmannoliver/30min.