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Sales automation · United States · 2023

PhantomBuster: should a LinkedIn tool chase customers who don't sell on LinkedIn?

SECTOR

Sales automation, PLG

MARKET

United States

COMPANY

PhantomBuster

ROLE APPLIED FOR

Senior PMM

DATE

Dec 2023

DevTools

The situation

PhantomBuster grew product-led, no sales team, selling LinkedIn automation to tech, advertising and consulting firms. The expansion question was whether it could serve businesses selling to brick-and-mortar buyers instead.

The appeal is obvious in a spreadsheet. The existing market is 3 million US small businesses actively using LinkedIn for sales. The proposed one is 6 million engaged in brick-and-mortar B2B sales. Twice the size.

The problem is that the entire product is built on one platform those buyers don't use.

01 · What this engagement produced

4 of 34 outputs

4 of the 34 outputs, across four of the six stages.

01Research1 of 6
03Market report

5 not produced

Voice of customer, Win / loss, Why now, Assumption log, Pre-mortem

02Competition1 of 4
07The Fifty

3 not produced

Table-stakes read, AI visibility, Competitor monitor

03Segment, position and price1 of 6
11ICP and segments

5 not produced

Use cases, Buying committee, Positioning, Packaging and pricing, Deck spine

04Message0 of 4

4 not produced

Messaging framework, Claim check, Landing page review, Message drift

05Launch and enable1 of 8
22Launch brief

7 not produced

Launch tiers, Channel and funnel, Product Oracle, Sales enablement, FAQ, Onboarding journey, Release notes

06Measure and maintain0 of 6

6 not produced

Product funnel metrics, Launch post-mortem, Trust metrics, Customer case studies, Half-Life Map, Six-stage readout

Solid is what the brief produced. Dashed is what it did not reach, and could not from outside.

02 · The decision

I answered the market-size argument with a product argument.

The appeal is obvious in a spreadsheet. The existing market is 3 million US small businesses actively using LinkedIn for sales. The proposed one is 6 million engaged in brick-and-mortar B2B sales. Twice the size, and a number twice the size usually ends discussions.

The honest reading is that PhantomBuster's advantage is LinkedIn-shaped, the automation, the integrations, the onboarding assumptions all rest on one platform, and the new segment's buyers are discoverable on entirely different surfaces.

So the recommendation was that this expansion is a product investment first. If the data-source work doesn't happen, the company can't serve the segment, however good the messaging is. A market analysis is most useful when it tells you which function owns the decision.

03 · What I wasn't given

0

Customer interviews

0

Engineering estimates

20%

Assumption behind the 6M

Not givenNo product roadmap, no churn data, and no way to cost the thing I was about to say had to be built first.

04 · The work

3 moves

Two ICP sets, side by side.

01The differences, side by side

01 Research

  • Existing and proposed ICP sets written side by side
  • Digital versus physical market focus. B2B services versus mixed B2B and B2C dynamics. Tech-savvy versus mixed technical proficiency. Professional networking versus direct sales and distribution
  • Four differences, each of which breaks a different assumption inside the current product
02Who the new buyers are

03 Segment, position & price

  • Three new persona groups: local service providers, manufacturers and wholesalers, and supply and distribution companies
  • A competitive landscape for the new segment, which is a different set of tools from the LinkedIn automation category
03The product prerequisite

05 Launch & enable

  • Aggregating data from Google Maps, Yellowpages, Facebook and industry directories as well as LinkedIn
  • Named as the gating item
  • A go-to-market roadmap split across product, customer success, content and sales, with product first, because nothing downstream works otherwise

Where I pushed back

The brief asked whether and how. I said not yet, and not by marketing.

Nobody hopes to receive a go-to-market assessment that concludes this is engineering's problem first. I still answered the how: it was in the deck, in order, with product at the front.

The alternative was to write a segment strategy for buyers the product cannot currently find. That reads better in a slide and fails on contact with the first campaign.

05 · What I'd change

I'd have pressure-tested the 20% assumption behind the 6 million figure. It's a reasonable estimate, and the argument depends on it. Any number carrying that much weight deserves a sensitivity range.

What happened next

PARTLY

The product work happened. The repositioning didn't.

Dec 2023

I presented this, arguing that the data-source work had to come before the segment.

Today

PhantomBuster offers a Google Maps Search Export that pulls contact, social and website data from search results, and a data-scraping crawler that enriches those leads by visiting each business website for emails, phone numbers and social profiles. PhantomBuster

Today

Those sit among a hundred-plus automations, and the company and its reviewers still describe the platform as LinkedIn automation.

The prerequisite I named is now in the product. A tool that only knew LinkedIn can pull businesses off Google Maps and enrich them from their own websites, which is the capability the brick-and-mortar segment required.

What hasn't happened is the repositioning, and that is the more interesting half. Shipping the capability is necessary and nowhere near sufficient. The segment stays unserved until somebody decides the company is something other than a LinkedIn tool, and that is a decision no amount of feature work makes for you.

The brief, as it was set

Brief set by PhantomBuster

December 2023

Senior PMM, take-home

We sell LinkedIn automation to tech, advertising and consulting firms. Assess whether we should expand to businesses selling to brick-and-mortar buyers, and how.

Summarised from the brief. Answered from public information only.

What I wasn't given

0

Customer interviews

0

Engineering estimates

20%

Assumption behind the 6M

Not givenNo product roadmap, no churn data, and no way to cost the thing I was about to say had to be built first.

Set by the company.