Track 1 · Depth: Alex Sherman

Your engineering is fine.
Your pipeline is stalled.

For AdTech and MarTech product companies between $1.5M and $5M ARR. We close the gap between what your platform does and what your buyer can justify — positioning, sales motion, channel economics, and the churn that starts at onboarding.

Book a Diagnostic →$6,000 fixed · 2 weeks
Where the market actually is

The martech landscape grew 0.79% last year. That's not maturity.

1,488 products were added. 1,367 were removed. Look at who was removed and the pattern gets uncomfortable:

  • 45.5% of removed products were doing $1M–$10M in revenue
  • 38.7% had 11–50 employees
  • 51.7% came from the 2010–2019 SaaS wave

That is not a market clearing out failed experiments. It's a market cycling out companies that had already found product-market fit — real revenue, real teams, a decade of history.

The startups aren't dying. The survivors are.

And the money underneath is moving rather than disappearing. Consolidation is running hard in the commoditised middle — the parts of the stack where a dozen companies do roughly the same thing and buyers can't tell them apart. Budget is still growing at the ends: where the technology is genuinely hard to replicate, and where it's attached to a spend line the buyer can't cut. So the strategic question for a $2–5M ARR company isn't "how do we grow 30% this year." It's which of those two groups your buyer thinks you're in — and whether you're still running the pitch you wrote in 2021.

Landscape figures: 2026 Marketing Technology Landscape — chiefmartec + Martech Tribe.

Sound familiar?

If two of these are true, the Diagnostic will pay for itself.

Deals die above your champion.

Your demos land beautifully with the platform operator. Then the deal goes up for signature and stops. If understanding your value requires the buyer to be technical, the only person who can champion you is the person who can't sign.

You look like fifty other logos.

There are over 15,000 martech products and thousands of active adtech companies. Your homepage says "platform," "unified," "real-time," "AI-powered" — and so does everyone else's. Buyers can't articulate why you over the incumbent, so they stay with the incumbent.

More leads, same revenue.

Top of funnel looks fine. Acquisition costs keep climbing. And nobody can name which channel actually produces revenue, so nobody can decide what to cut. The leak isn't at the front door.

The founder is still the best salesperson.

Every real deal routes through one person. You hired a VP Sales or a CRO and they've spent two quarters rebuilding context that lives in the founder's head instead of selling.

They buy, then they don't onboard.

The contract signs, the client's data turns out messier than anyone admitted, implementation drags, value never lands, and the renewal conversation is over before it starts. This shows up on the churn report as a product problem. It almost never is.

Your sales team is really an accounting team.

Nobody is hunting. The people called "sales" are servicing existing accounts, the pipeline is whatever came inbound, and no one owns new logos as a number they're measured on.

These look like six problems. Usually they're one: a company that got very good at building, in a market that now pays for being understood.

Who this is for

Two minutes, and you'll know if this is you.

We work well with

  • AdTech and MarTech product companies, whatever vertical your own customers sell in
  • 15–50 people, roughly $1.5M–$5M ARR
  • US and EU
  • Demand and supply platforms · ad servers and campaign management · identity resolution and clean rooms · measurement and attribution · CTV and video · CDPs and customer data infrastructure · marketing automation · audience activation · product analytics · retail and commerce media
  • Founder-led, or with GTM leadership hired in the last 90 days
  • Growth flat for 3+ quarters, or a round raised 12–24 months ago that hasn't produced the growth it was meant to

We're the wrong fit if

  • You're a pure open-web SSP or DSP — that's a consolidating market, and the honest advice is usually corporate, not go-to-market
  • You're an agency or managed service rather than a product company
  • You're under 15 people — the constraint is usually still product, and we'd be an expensive way to find that out
  • You already have a full GTM bench: CRO, VP Sales and VP Marketing all in seat
  • You're currently hiring a full-time CMO or CRO — you're solving this with a hire, and you should
  • You're PE-owned with a mandate already set
What changes

What we actually change.

Positioning and category.

Who you're for, which category you want to be measured in, and the sentence a buyer repeats to their CFO when you're not in the room. This is where most of the value is — and it's the thing founders most consistently believe they've already solved.

The sales motion, moved up an altitude.

Rebuilding the narrative and the deck around a business case rather than a feature list. Discovery that surfaces the economic buyer on the first call. Enablement so the story survives contact with a rep who isn't the founder. Often this means restructuring the team itself — separating hunting from account growth, and giving each half a number it actually owns.

Channel economics.

Isolating revenue per channel so you can say, with evidence, which one to double and which two to delete. In our experience the companies that get unstuck rarely add anything.

Product decisions that follow the money.

Building against business goals rather than the loudest request, and cutting features that don't earn — decided by customer development, not opinion.

The first 90 days after signature.

Onboarding, implementation and the data-readiness conversation that should happen before the contract, not after. This is where martech churn is manufactured.

Track 1 work

What "fixed" has looked like.

AdTech & MarTech

$124K → $560K MRR in 6 months

A programmatic ad network with a working product and a stalled commercial engine. What the company called a sales team was really an account-servicing team — nobody owned new logos as a number, and growth was capped by whatever arrived inbound.

Rebuilt the sales organisation around the two jobs it was actually doing. We split the team into hunters and account managers, gave each half a single number it owned — new business on one side, account growth on the other — and rebuilt structure, targets and compensation around that split. In parallel we opened the US market with paid acquisition and the positioning to support it.

Read the case →
AdTech & MarTech

Roadmap rebuilt on a commercial footing

A supply-side platform building against the loudest request rather than the business case. The roadmap was full, engineering was busy, and it was impossible to say which features were earning anything.

Put the roadmap on a commercial footing — ran customer development to establish what buyers actually paid for, rebuilt prioritisation around business goals, and cut the features that didn't earn. Alongside that, we moved moderation and support to 24/7, which removed a class of friction that had been quietly costing deals in other time zones.

Read the case →
AdTech & MarTech

Repositioned from SMB to enterprise

A SaaS platform for automatic website translation, sold to help companies reach new local markets. Good product, aimed at SMBs — which meant small contracts, high churn, and a ceiling the company could feel but hadn't named.

Repositioned the product for enterprise buyers and rebuilt the offer to match. That meant an API so the platform could run as an internal tool inside a larger stack, and flexible pricing that fit enterprise procurement instead of fighting it. Then we built the demand engine to reach that buyer: a LinkedIn outbound funnel with email campaigns behind it.

Read the case →
All six case studies →

Every engagement starts with a Diagnostic.

Start here

Revenue Engine Diagnostic

Two weeks. 5–7 interviews across functions, plus your data. You get the three things capping revenue — named, quantified, ranked — and a 90-day plan.

$6,000 fixed

If we fix it together

90-Day Rebuild

We build the fix with your team, not a deck and a handshake. Weekly working sessions, async access to both of us, ownership transferred by week 13.

$12,000–$15,000/mo · 3 months min.

We run three Rebuilds at a time. That's the honest ceiling for two operators who are actually in the work.

The full method and pricing →
Book your Diagnostic

Find out what's actually capping your revenue.

Two weeks. $6,000 fixed. Evidence, not opinions — and the roadmap is yours whether or not we work together after.

Which describes you?
Annual revenue

We reply within one business day — hi@sdand.co