(Re-)Finding Product-Market-SALES Fit, a Tale of Learning the Hard Way

Since I joined Appway 2010 the company’s trajectory had been constantly upwards at rates well over industry average (with a compound annual growth rate of more than 44%). When growth started to stall in 2016 the decision was to expand our solution portfolio from 1 to 4 solutions, to enter a new adjacent industry and additional countries. In parallel we evolved our product stack introducing a set of microapps on top of our low code platform and we worked on improving the sales process and sales organization.
Two painful years, a lot of reading, podcasts, discussions internally and with peers later I learned: 1. We lost product-market-sales fit, 2. We changed too many variables at the same time, loosing focus and ability to understand impact of changes, 3. We massively underestimated the impact of a change of product on the product-market-sales fit.
Last year I moved from being in charge of product to being in charge of go-to-market at Appway. I will share what I learned from the change in perspective and why product-market fit is not enough when selling Enterprise Products. I will explain what product-market-sales fit is and what we have done to overcome our challenges and get back on track.