Seriously Don’t Do That™

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A health tech founder gets on a call with Dan last year. Good product. Real customers. Clinical workflow tool. About 90 seconds in, he says: "Dan, we've spent about $80,000 on outbound in the last year, and I have nothing to show for it."

Three agencies. Three.

First one: six months, $12,000 a month. Booked meetings - but with office managers when he needed the compliance officer and the CMO. Second one: cheaper at $5,000 a month. Burned his sending domain so badly his own sales team couldn't get emails delivered to prospects they already knew. Third one was still running when they talked.

And here's the part that stuck - he wasn't angry at the agencies. He was angry at himself. "I don't know what I did wrong."

He didn't do anything wrong, except one thing. He bought activity when what he was missing was architecture. Seriously, don't do that.

This episode is for two people:
One of you has the proposal open in another tab right now. Twenty meetings a month, guaranteed. It feels like relief because pipeline is the one thing keeping you up, and here's somebody offering to just handle it.

It's the same reason 70% of first SaaS VPs of Sales don't make 12 months - a stat Jason Lemkin has documented for years. Not because they're bad. Because they got dropped into a motion that didn't exist. No documented ICP, no message-market fit, no process. The agency fails for the exact same structural reason. Not a vendor problem - a physics problem.

A composite story Dan's seen play out ~40 times:

Company has real traction - $2-3M in revenue, founder closed most of it personally. Growth flattens, nobody can name why. So they do the logical thing and buy pipeline. Nine to twelve months, $50-100K across two or three agencies. What comes back: meetings with a director of ops who's genuinely interested and has zero budget authority, in a market where the compliance officer can kill the deal in a single email. Sales team chases it. Forecast fills up with ghosts. Everybody's busy.

Twelve months in, Dan asks one question: what did you give them on day one? The answer: a list. Names, emails, a one-page product overview. The agency's onboarding doc had twelve questions - who's your ICP, what's your qualification criteria, who else is in the room on a deal, what's the message for each of them. The company answered all twelve. Every single answer was a confident, articulate, completely unvalidated guess. Nobody had ever done the work to know.

If you're the one about to write the check - sequence it. Architecture first, then capacity. In that order, every time.

If you're the one cleaning up - the domain will heal. The work you skipped is a two-week problem, not a $100,000 one.

This is the whole reason the BUILT Revenue Engine starts where it starts. Buyer clarity first - before outreach, before install, before anybody spends a dollar on volume. Not because it's clever, but because everything downstream is built on it. You can't skip a foundation and then wonder why the house moves.

Next week: we build the architecture itself - the actual thing a future partner or future hire would execute on day one. Segments, roles, messages, sequence. The complete handoff document.

🎙️ Subscribe for weekly GTM strategy for founder-led B2B companies entering regulated U.S. markets.

📩 Connect with Dan Griffith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dangriffithsr/
🌐 Greater Gain Group: https://greatergaingroup.com/
📅 Book a discovery call: +1 (864) 278-5044

Chapters:
0:00 The founder who spent $80K on outbound and got nothing
0:57 Seriously, don't do that
1:01 Two people watching this right now
1:26 The agency is not the villain
2:00 What agencies can and can't supply
2:11 Why your first VP of Sales fails for the same reason
2:42 The composite story - 40 times, same result
3:07 Meetings with the wrong people
3:50 The 12-question onboarding doc - answered with guesses
4:35 $100K spent amplifying an untested assumption
4:57 Why outbound fails specifically in regulated B2B
5:03 Forrester: 22 people touch a B2B deal
5:25 Six to eight distinct fears in the buying room
5:57 The personalization data - 5% vs 18% reply rates
6:30 Gartner: 73% of buyers actively avoid irrelevant outreach
6:52 The domain damage problem - expensive twice, maybe three times
7:23 Dan's verdict: stop before you write the check
7:43 Architecture first, capacity second - always
8:14 Five questions, 20 minutes, no vendor needed
8:46 Question 1: segments from closed-won data
8:57 Question 2: 8 buying committee roles and their specific fears
9:30 Question 3: written qualification standard
9:44 Question 4: documented sequence with owners
10:00 Question 5: where does a reply actually go?
10:45 If you're about to write the check
10:57 If you're cleaning up the wreckage
11:03 The BUILT Revenue Engine starts here — buyer clarity first
11:22 Next week preview: building the architecture itself


#OutboundSales #B2BSales #GTMStrategy #SeriouslyDontDoThat #FounderLedSales

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So, most founders think Latin America is one market with one playbook. It's not. And the part that surprises people most? The first move isn't picking a country — it's picking a channel strategy.

In this episode, Dan sits down with Franklin J. Perez — 25+ years of commercial leadership across LATAM and the Caribbean at Medtronic, Edwards Lifesciences, and Abbott — to unpack what companies get catastrophically wrong when they enter the Latin American MedTech market. The short version: they hire a distributor, disconnect, and treat the region as covered. Then they spend eighteen months wondering why the revenue never came. The product, as Franklin puts it, dies in the warehouse.

Franklin lays out his Three Parallel Channels framework — distributor alignment, physician adoption, and payer access, all running simultaneously from day one — and makes the contrarian case for Puerto Rico as the lowest-risk, highest-speed launch pad into the region: FDA-regulated, commercially Latin American, and small enough to let you make your mistakes cheaply before you scale into a 50-million-person Colombia or a 200-million-person Brazil. If you're a founder eyeing LATAM in the next 12 months, this one's a map.

Key Topics Covered

• Why treating LATAM as one homogeneous market is the fastest way to lose 18 months
• The distributor trap: why signing a distributor is step one, not the strategy
• The Three Parallel Channels framework — distributor alignment, physician adoption, and payer access run at the same time, not in sequence
• Why the payer landscape in LATAM is more varied than founders assume (Brazil's 65M private-insurance market vs. Chile's single-payer system vs. Colombia's US-style mix)
• The Puerto Rico launch pad: FDA-regulated, commercially Latin American, and built for cheap, fast validation
• The 30-year-old perception problem — and why Europeans and Asians already have a head start
• Building a three-year LATAM plan instead of a three-month one

Memorable Quotes (timestamps approximate — pending guest approval)

• "If it works in Mexico, it should work here… that is not the case." — on the myth of one homogeneous LATAM market (~02:10)
• "The companies that are successful in Latin America work the three channels in parallel." (~06:40)
• "Puerto Rico affords you the luxury of making mistakes and correcting them without a high ticket cost." (~17:30)
• "The Latin American market is like a chess game. If you learn how to move every piece on the board, you're going to be very successful." (~29:15)
• "We're leaving money on the table by not going after these countries that are neighbors." (~26:00)

Resources & Companies Mentioned

• LATAM MedTech Growth Partners — Franklin's firm
• Medtronic, Edwards Lifesciences, Abbott — Franklin's commercial-leadership background
• Concepts referenced: 3PL (third-party logistics coordinator), formulary systems, GPO (group purchasing organization), Colombia's former "tutela" appeals system

Timestamps (Major Segments)

• 00:00 — Welcome + Franklin's background
• 04:00 — The distributor trap: the #1 first-90-days mistake
• 11:00 — The Three Parallel Channels framework
• 19:00 — Puerto Rico as the LATAM launch pad
• 27:00 — The 30-year-old perception problem
• 35:00 — When LATAM stops being a side bet
• 40:00 — Three things to do this week + close

Call-to-Action
If you're thinking about the Latin American market — even if you're a year or two out — it's worth a conversation with Franklin now, before you sign anything. Connect with him on LinkedIn (link below) and tell him you heard him on Seriously Don't Do That. And if you're a founder eyeing the U.S. market, that's our home turf — reach out to us at Greater Gain Group. Either way, subscribe so you don't miss what's next

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In this tactical episode of Seriously Don't Do That™ — Week 3 of the 12-week SDDT program and Episode 3 of the ICP Sprint month — Dan Griffith breaks down the single most common (and most expensive) mistake founders make in regulated B2B sales: single-threading a deal through one champion when 22 people decide.

Using research from Forrester, Gartner, HBR, HIMSS, 6sense, and Prospeo, Dan reframes the ICP itself: it's not a persona, it's a committee blueprint.

Then he walks the full 8–10 seat regulated buying committee — champion, economic buyer, IT/security, compliance, legal, procurement, finance, executive sponsor, and adjacent influencers — giving the objection pattern and the role-specific message each seat needs.

You'll leave able to re-map your next three open deals this afternoon.

What you'll get from this episode:
✅ Why "they loved us" deals stall in 40–60% of B2B sales conversations
✅ The 22-person stat that should change how you build every deal strategy
✅ The 8–10 seat regulated buying committee, role-by-role
✅ The objection pattern and message each seat needs
✅ The 2–3x close-rate lift multi-threaded deals deliver vs. single-threaded
✅ Your assignment: re-map your next 3 open deals (20 minutes per deal)

⏱️ Chapters:
00:00 — Cold open: Greenville, Samson, and why "everybody's best friend" kills deals
01:15 — The Don't: single-threading your champion
03:45 — Why "no decision" is now the default — Forrester, Gartner, HBR, HIMSS data
07:15 — The reframe: your ICP is a committee blueprint, not a person
08:45 — The 8–10 seat committee walkthrough — objection + message + proof for each
17:45 — The multi-threading payoff: 2–3x close rate (Prospeo)
19:15 — Your assignment: re-map your next 3 open deals
20:45 — Week 4 tease: the hidden influencers most ICPs miss

🤝 Want help building your real, evidenced ICP — the full committee blueprint — for your market?

That's exactly what the ICP Sprint does inside our Revenue Growth Program — a 2–3 week, fixed-fee engagement where we build your prioritized segments, buyer intelligence, buying triggers, and your full buying-committee map. The whole room, not just the champion.

Capital-efficient. Practical. You walk away owning it.

Work with Greater Gain Group → https://calendly.com/greatergaingroup/q1-revenue-pressure-test

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Dan just got back from training for a sprint triathlon and realized something uncomfortable - he's not the athlete he thinks he is anymore. The video doesn't lie. The times don't lie. And that gap between who you think you are and who you actually are right now? That's the entire episode.

Last week was about founders with no ICP, just a fuzzy guess. This week is harder. These are founders who have a written ICP. It's in the deck. It's on the website. It's everywhere. And it's wrong - not sloppy wrong, aspirational wrong.

Two real examples:

A healthcare founder insisted his ICP was Enterprise Health Systems. When Dan asked him to pull his most recent closed-won deals, every single one was a regional payer under 300 employees - driven by a compliance deadline they didn't have the internal team to handle. Enterprise systems already had that team. They were never actually the buyer.

A fintech AI founder insisted his ICP was Tier 1 banks. Closed-won said otherwise - small local credit unions and community banks under $5 billion in assets, facing the exact same KYC scrutiny as the giants, with none of the internal compliance staff to handle it.

Both were winning deals. They just refused to look at who they were actually winning with.

This mistake has a name - writer João Fernandes calls it confusing your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) with your ACP (Average Customer Profile). Your ICP is the wish list, the ego logo. Your ACP is who you actually win with, repeatedly and profitably. The fix is building your ICP from your ACP - reverse-engineering from evidence, not ambition.

The data backs this up:
- Go to Market Playbook (March 2026): 80% of early-stage founders treat their ICP as aspiration rather than description
- Kalungi (January 2026): vague personas turn ICP into a horoscope - "a forward-thinking innovator who values efficiency"
- Salesforce 2026 State of Sales: ICP should come from real CRM data - revenue, sales cycles, product usage — not vibes
- 6sense Buyer Experience Report (2025): the buyer's pre-contract favorite wins over 80% of deals — meaning if you're not it, you're walking into a fight you've already lost
- Forecastio (2026): companies that scrapped their ICP and reverse-engineered real win triggers cut forecast variance from 25-30% down to under 10% in three quarters

That's not a marketing win. That's predictable revenue.

Your 4-move audit for this week:
Move 1 — Pull all your closed-won deals from the last 12-24 months. Lay out the hard attributes: company size, vertical, sub-segment, employee count, revenue band.
Move 2 - Find the cluster. It's almost always tighter and more boring than your deck admits.
Move 3 - Don't skip this one. Interview the customers you actually won. Ask what was happening the month they decided to buy. That trigger is your real ICP.

At Greater Gain Group, this is exactly what our ICP Sprint does - a fixed fee, $7,500, two to three week engagement covering stakeholder interviews, closed-won analysis, a full buyer committee map, and a 30-35 page strategic document with prioritized segments, buyer intelligence, triggers, messaging, and where your real buyers actually hang out. Not a persona deck in a drawer - revenue clarity.
Your ideal customer isn't the one you had in your head. It's the one who already said yes.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro — sprint triathlon training and a hard truth
0:54 The gap: chasing who you wish you were
1:11 Recap: Week 1's fuzzy ICP mistake
1:32 This week's harder problem: a written but wrong ICP
1:55 Story 1: the "Enterprise Health Systems" founder
2:24 What closed-won actually revealed
2:51 Story 2: the "Tier 1 banks" founder
2:59 What closed-won actually revealed (again)
3:23 Naming the mistake: ICP vs ACP
3:51 ICP is the wish list. ACP is who you actually win with.
4:34 The real trigger behind both stories: compliance deadlines
5:56 "If you don't know the target, everyone's a target"
6:14 Go to Market Playbook: 80% treat ICP as aspiration
6:26 Kalungi: vague personas are a horoscope
6:38 Salesforce: ICP should come from CRM data, not vibes
6:52 6sense: pre-contract favorite wins 80%+ of deals
7:34 Forecastio: forecast variance drops from 25-30% to under 10%
8:04 Move 1 — Pull your closed-won deals
8:30 Move 2 — Find the cluster
8:56 Move 3 — Interview the customers you won
9:18 Move 4 — Run it on closed-lost too
9:31 Firmographics = who. Triggers = when and why.
9:48 This week's challenge
9:54 Week 3 preview: mapping the buying committee
10:17 What the Greater Gain Group ICP Sprint includes
10:57 Closing: do the audit

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Welcome to Week 1 of a brand new 12-week run of Seriously Don't Do That™. We're opening with ICP Month - four episodes on your ideal customer, why they buy, and the choices you have to make to actually grow.

This is the episode Dan probably should have recorded a long time ago, because it covers the single most expensive mistake he sees founders make in regulated B2B markets.

The Don't: seriously, don't sell to everyone. Don't build a fuzzy ICP. Don't tell yourself your product is "for hospitals" or "for community banks" or "for insurance carriers." That's not an ICP. That's a TAM slide.

The anchor line of this episode: if you don't know the target you're shooting at, then everything's a target. Your sales team chases everyone at once. Your marketing produces content for everyone and no one simultaneously. And the founder becomes the only person who can tell, deal by deal, whether something's worth the effort - which doesn't scale.

- Tala Fakher (Medium, March 2026): 60-80% of sales and marketing budget at most B2B startups gets wasted on the wrong prospects
- Forrester (2025): 92% of B2B buyers start their evaluation with at least one vendor already in mind, and 41% already have a single preference before formal evaluation even starts

What ICP actually is (and isn't): not a TAM exercise, not a persona document. It's a strategic, written, shared choice about which buyers you pursue - and just as important, which you walk away from. Jason Lemkin (SaaStr) has written for years about how 70% of first VPs of Sales don't make it 12 months - largely because they inherit an undefined ICP, spend two quarters trying to figure it out, and get let go before they ever get traction.

A real ICP is documented and shared: which segments, which buyer roles, what triggers cause them to buy, what the buying committee looks like, where they hang out (the "digital watering hole"), and what language resonates. Once it's written, it becomes the foundation everything downstream depends on - hiring, marketing, CRM structure, conference strategy, and eventually, the founder stepping out of every single deal.

The objection Dan hears constantly: "But our product can help anyone." Narrowing your ICP is not the same as narrowing your market. Your market stays the same size - what changes is who you talk to first, when, what you say, and how compelling you sound saying it. A case pattern Dan's seen repeatedly: a B2B SaaS company selling broadly into "mid-market" ran 9-11 month sales cycles with mediocre conversion. They narrowed to a specific situational ICP - Series B companies that just hired their first VP of Sales - and cycles compressed to 3-4 months. You don't start broad and win narrow. You start narrow and win broad.
This week's homework: in your next leadership meeting, get sales, marketing, and customer success in the room (or whoever's doing GTM if you're early stage). Have each person individually write down, no discussion first, "describe our ideal customer in two sentences." Then read them out loud. The gap between the answers is exactly the gap costing you sales-focused conversations every week.

At Greater Gain Group, this is exactly what the ICP Sprint solves - a fixed fee, $7,500, two to three week engagement: structured market research, competitive review, real customer analysis (who's actually winning, not who you wish was winning), 3-5 prioritized segments with full buyer intelligence, messaging frameworks, buying committee mapping, and a market intelligence layer showing exactly where your buyers hang out. You walk away with a 30-35 page strategic document - but the real deliverable is shared clarity across your whole team.
Next week: Week 2 of ICP Month - the six predictable mistakes founders make when building their first real ICP.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro — Greenville, sprint triathlon training, and Samson
0:39 Welcome to ICP Month — a new 12-week run begins
1:05 Today's episode: the costliest mistake in regulated B2B
1:09 The Don't: seriously, don't sell to everyone
2:00 The anchor line: if you don't know the target, everything's a target
3:23 Why this mattered less 30 years ago at IBM
4:08 Salesforce 2026 State of Sales: buyers research before they call
4:55 Tala Fakher: 60-80% of budget wasted on wrong prospects
5:26 Forrester: 92% already have a vendor in mind
6:11 Why fuzzy ICP locks you out of consideration entirely
7:03 Composite case study: the post-acute care healthcare company
9:09 What "post-acute care" was actually hiding
10:18 Motion without momentum
10:33 Reframing what ICP actually is — not TAM, not a persona
11:11 ICP is a strategic choice, including who you walk away from
12:24 Jason Lemkin: 70% of first VPs of Sales fail in 12 months
12:58 What a real, documented ICP actually looks like
14:11 The shift from founder-led sales to team-run revenue
23:55 Closing

#ICP #IdealCustomerProfile #B2BSales #GTMStrategy #SeriouslyDontDoThat

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A seasoned British sales leader walks into his first U.S. meeting. No deck. No slides. Just ready to have a conversation. The buyer’s response? 

“Where’s your deck? You came unprepared.”

In this episode of Seriously Don’t Do That, Dan Griffith sits down with Todd Jenkins, VP of Revenue at Codility, to break down what EMEA founders consistently get wrong about the U.S. market and what it actually takes to build a repeatable go-to-market motion from abroad.

Todd was Employee #4 at Stack Overflow in Europe. He’s helped two UK-headquartered companies build and rebuild U.S. go-to-market strategies. He shares hard-won lessons on choosing the right U.S. beachhead, testing the playbook before hiring, and the cultural nuances that trip up even the most experienced international sellers.

Whether you’re an EMEA founder eyeing the U.S. or a revenue leader inheriting an international mess, this conversation delivers the pattern recognition you need to avoid the most expensive mistakes.

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Founders entering the U.S. often do everything “right”, strong product, great meetings, smart people and still go nowhere.

In this episode of Seriously Don’t Do That™, Dan Griffith sits down with Geir Arnhoff, founder of Dossier, to break down what actually went wrong in his first U.S. expansion attempt and what finally unlocked traction.

We cover:

• Why selling to the “logical buyer” often fails in the U.S.
  
  
• How assuming the U.S. works like Europe quietly kills deals
  
  
• The difference between influence and budget authority
  
  
• Why urgency (not vision) drives enterprise buying
  
  
• How one regulatory trigger changed everything
  
  

This isn’t theory. It’s lived experience, including the reset.

If you’re entering the U.S. market (or stuck in “good conversations”), this one will feel uncomfortably familiar.

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Entering the U.S. market isn’t just a sales problem.
It’s an operational one.

In this episode of Seriously Don’t Do That, Dan Griffith sits down with Sims Tullos of Amesto Global to break down the back-office mistakes that quietly derail U.S. expansion.

We cover:
• Why “we’ll fix ops later” becomes expensive fast
• Entity setup, payroll, banking, tax, and compliance traps founders miss
• The hidden costs that stall hiring and delay revenue
• Why U.S. expansion fails when operations lag go-to-market
• What to have in place before your first U.S. hire

This is not theory. It’s based on real founder cases, real cleanups, and real consequences.

If you’re planning U.S. expansion or already feeling friction, this is the conversation you want to hear before things break.

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Entering the U.S. market is not a spending problem — it’s a sequencing problem.

Every year, European SaaS and healthtech founders burn six figures on activities that feel productive but don’t create pipeline:
• Conference booths before ICP clarity
• PR campaigns without localized messaging
• Lead-gen vendors before a sales process exists
• Hiring U.S. reps before the system is built

In this session, Dan walks through the real $500K mistakes he’s seen over and over — and the exact sequence he uses to help founders turn U.S. interest into deals.

What you’ll learn:
• The three budget traps that drain runway fast
• Why visibility without clarity is useless
• How to define your real U.S. buyer before spending
• What to localize in your messaging (and why)
• The sales infrastructure you need before hiring
• The “small test” method that beats big spending
• How one founder went from $0 pipeline to 18 qualified U.S. meetings in 60 days

Who this session is for:
Founders entering the U.S.
European SaaS, healthtech, fintech, and insurtech teams
Revenue leaders looking to avoid expensive mistakes
VC-backed companies trying to protect runway

Why it matters right now:
The U.S. market rewards clarity, not activity.
Founders who get the sequence right gain traction fast.
Those who get it wrong… burn runway and stall out.

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Most founders walk into trade shows hoping for visibility and walk out with nothing more than badge scans, swag bags, and zero pipeline.

The issue isn’t the booth.
It’s the missing system behind it.

In this 45-minute session, I and Benjamin Griffith (Co-Founder, Grow DGTAL) break down the exact Trade Show Framework they use to turn chaotic conference floors into structured sales campaigns.

You’ll learn how to:

• Build your pre-show meeting schedule before you land
• Design a booth that optimizes for conversations, not foot traffic
• Run a 48-hour follow-up engine that converts badge scans into booked meetings
• Use trade shows as accelerants for existing opportunities
• Measure ROI in pipeline, not “brand buzz”

If you're investing $20K–$100K in events this year, this session will show you how to make every conversation count and ensure your booth turns into predictable pipeline, not expensive tourism.

When you’re ready to build a repeatable trade show system, book a Market Ready Assessment:
https://lnkd.in/ew7E-jfQ

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