The SaaS Podcast - AI, Growth & Product-Market Fit for SaaS Founders

Enterprise SaaS: Why Excited Customers Still Said No

14 snips

Apr 24, 2025

Rami Tamir, co-founder and CEO of Salto and serial entrepreneur with multiple exits, tells flashy validation can be a trap. He discusses misleading early praise, why design partners sometimes hurt product focus, pricing for director-level discretionary budgets, moving upmarket during downturns, and event-driven growth and follow-up tactics.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

Category Creation Forces ‘Do Nothing’ Response

Creating a new category means buyers look sideways and often do nothing.
You must build a reference base of customers to overcome the default 'wait' behavior.

ADVICE

Avoid Overfitting To One Partner

Avoid overfitting your product or GTM to a single design partner even for large checks.
Take multiple paying partners so no single customer steers your roadmap.

ADVICE

Use Targeted, Qualified Events

Focus events on medium-sized, work-focused conferences and pre-qualify attendees.
Use a two-layer qualification to surface meaningful leads before giving them swag.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

A prospective customer wanted to hug Rami Tamir after his pitch. Six months later, she rejected the product. That early lesson in misleading enterprise SaaS validation shaped how Salto grew from a self-funded idea to 8-figure ARR with $69M in funding. Founders will hear why building enterprise software in a new category is harder than it looks.

Rami reveals why he refuses design partners after a previous startup overfitted to one customer's $500K use case, how targeting discretionary budgets let director-level buyers approve enterprise SaaS deals without procurement, and what forced the team to reprice and move upmarket when the 2023 downturn wiped out their entire enterprise go-to-market strategy.

Salto helps teams manage and automate configuration of tools like Salesforce, NetSuite, and Okta. Rami previously built and sold three startups to Cisco, Red Hat, and Oracle - but selling to large companies in a brand-new category brought challenges even serial entrepreneurship couldn't shortcut.

🔑 Key Lessons

🎯 Early enthusiasm is not enterprise SaaS validation: A prospect wanted to hug Rami after his pitch but rejected the product six months later. Vague pitches let customers fill gaps with imagination that never matches reality.
📉 Design partners can overfit your enterprise go-to-market: Rami turned down a $500K design partnership because it led nowhere. At another startup, a $1M first customer couldn't be replicated for a year.
💰 Price for discretionary budgets to shorten sales cycles: Salto priced so a director-level buyer could approve enterprise SaaS deals without procurement, enabling fast land-and-expand across teams.
🔄 Reprice and move upmarket during downturns: When the 2023 downturn eliminated discretionary budgets, Salto raised prices and shifted ICP to larger companies - recognizing that selling to large companies requires higher deal values.
🏢 Build a two-layer qualification process for events: Salto filters visitors first for persona and ICP fit, then engages qualified prospects deeper. Medium-sized industry events outperform flashy conferences.

Chapters

Introduction
What Salto does and who it's for
Rami's background and three previous exits
Revenue, traction, and funding
Where the enterprise SaaS idea came from
The "can I hug you" moment and misleading feedback
Getting the first 10 customers
The dangers of design partners
Growth channels - events that work
Why Salto offers a free tier for enterprise software
Targeting discretionary budgets in a new category
How the 2023 downturn forced a pricing shift
Lightning round

Resources

Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/440
Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email