Having been a part of building Growth teams for the last 7 years across two different startups, I’ve learned a good deal about how and when to invest in sales and marketing, from things that have worked and things that have not.

At BloomReach, there were about 50 people when I joined and about 350 when I left. We grew from the low teens to much higher double-digit millions of ARR. The company raised nearly $100M and we learned a lot about growth tactics that worked for us—every bet certainly wasn’t a success. At Atrium, we’ve gone from 40 people to about 200 in the last year and a half and raised $75M.

This post focuses on the lessons I’ve learned here at Atrium from things that we’ve done well and things that we could have done better at these stages. Altogether, this sums up how I generally think about investing in sales and marketing in the B2B space, at Seed and Series A.

Seed: When product & brand are your limitations
Atrium has hundreds of startup clients, many of which are at the seed stage. I’ve spent a lot of time talking with these companies and I’ve observed that, regardless of how clever a solution is, how “right” the founders are for the job, or how much early momentum a company has gained, most seed stage products are not at the same level of sophistication as their incumbent counterparts. But often founders see only the vision of what their product can be, not what it is today.

That doesn’t mean your product won’t blow competitors out of the water at some point, but, at this stage, it’s just typically not there yet. And I think it’s important to accept this in order to be smart about the way you convince people to use your product while it’s still being refined.

Seed stage customers are like investors
If you’re in the process of building an early product to revolutionize sales forecasting, you are not as good as Clari, you are not as good as Aviso, and you are not as good as what’s built into Salesforce—but you probably understand the remaining problems with all of those products.

So at the seed stage, teams should understand that they’re not going to convince people that they’re the best product on the block through marketing and sales efforts. At this point, you should be looking for customers who would be interested in partnering with you, to take a bet on you, the way that investors have so far. Investors understand that you won’t make them money now, but if all goes well, you’ll provide them with some great ROI. Use this same appeal to get …