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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

3 of 34 outputs

Research

Competition

Segment, position and price

Message

Launch and enable

Measure and maintain

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

02 · The decision

Answer 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 wasn't yes or no. It was that this expansion is a product investment wearing marketing clothes, and if the data-source work doesn't happen first, the segment can't be served regardless of how good the messaging is. The most useful thing a market analysis can do is tell you which function actually 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.

01Make the differences explicit

01 Research

  • Existing and proposed ICP sets written side by side rather than described in sequence
  • 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 actually 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 rather than from LinkedIn alone
  • Named as the gating item rather than as a nice-to-have
  • 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.

A go-to-market assessment that concludes this is engineering's problem first is not what anyone hopes to receive. It also isn't a refusal to answer, the how was in the deck, in order, with product at the front of it.

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 it's doing an enormous amount of work in the argument. Any number carrying that much weight deserves a sensitivity range rather than a point estimate.

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 platform is still described, by itself and by everyone reviewing it, 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 exactly 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.