Specialism 01 — Glendower Advisory

Market Analysis & GTM Strategy

The Problem

Your home market playbook is a liability somewhere else. So is a product story that GenAI has already flattened.

Most B2B SaaS businesses don't stall because the sales team stops executing. They stall because the team is executing a playbook written for a market structure that no longer exists on the ground — a different geography, or a category GenAI has quietly commoditised underneath them.

Whether you're a US company landing in Europe, or an incumbent defending margin against AI-native competitors, the problem is structural. It won't be fixed by a new deck or a more aggressive quota.

I don't bring generic frameworks. I audit the ground reality of your market, stress-test the ICP against it, and rebuild the GTM model on evidence — not assumption.

One pattern shows up often enough that I gave it a name: LEAPP — Large Enterprises And Pays Peanuts. Multi-billion-dollar companies, sitting right in your ICP, buying tactically at departmental budget levels instead of making the strategic platform decision they should be. It isn't unique to one company. Most software businesses I talk to recognise it the moment I describe it — and once they have the name for it, they can see exactly which accounts in their own base are LEAPP accounts.

The Approach

Clarity first. Infrastructure second. Capacity third.

Most scaling plans run this backwards — hire first, figure out the market second. I reverse it: define the real target market against local structural reality, build the localisation and partner infrastructure that market actually requires, then scale the team once there's a repeatable playbook to scale.

Proven, Not Theoretical

I've run this playbook from inside the P&L, not as an advisor watching from the side.

2×+ ARR growth after the EMEA/APAC GTM pivot
1 yr ahead of the wider business before the pivot was adopted globally
Solo built the TAM sizing and board case single-handedly, on a hunch

Case Studies

International Market Mismatch

The challenge. Inherited an anaemic EMEA/APAC pipeline and a team chasing low-margin deals on the false assumption that US Fortune 500 logos would carry the same weight in Europe.

The structural misalignment. The target ICP — B2C e-commerce — barely existed at scale in a fragmented European market.

The fix. Pivoted GTM focus to B2B distributors and manufacturers running complex, multi-country operations. Shifted demos to be hyper-evidential and brought in MEDDICC for forensic deal review.

The outcome. ARR more than doubled, the region reached sustainable profitability, and the vertical pivot was adopted as global corporate strategy roughly a year later.

The LEAPP Pattern: Large Enterprises And Pays Peanuts

The challenge. The same install base was full of accounts landed cheaply, through resellers, on price. Lots of logos, most of them small — but buried inside were companies that weren't small at all, just priced like they were.

The hidden opportunity. Segmenting differently surfaced around 20 accounts inside that "low-value" base that were actually multi-billion-dollar enterprises, sitting squarely in the ICP, buying tactically at departmental budget levels — large enterprises, and paying peanuts for it.

The fix. Built a cross-functional programme — BD, Sales, Marketing, CS and Partners — to move those accounts from tactical to strategic: qualify, gather internal intelligence, map the real executive buyer, reposition from tool to platform, then multi-thread the relationship.

The outcome. Converted accounts grew ACV more than 2× on average, several 3–6×. Combined with new business sold the strategic way from day one, the region more than doubled new ARR and beat its previous sales record. The pattern is now something I can name for a client on day one of a diagnostic, rather than something they discover the hard way three years in.

Technology Disruption & Modern GTM

The challenge. GenAI flattens features fast, and creates a positioning crisis the moment your software's value can be replicated by a general-purpose model.

Where most companies get it wrong. Treating AI as a marketing veneer, rather than redesigning pricing and defensibility around it.

The approach. Audit the product architecture for genuine data gravity — the parts a model can't simply replicate. Move packaging away from depreciating per-seat pricing. Arm the sales team to win "build vs. buy" objections on evidence, not assertion.

Thinking

Let's talk

If any of this sounds familiar, let's have a conversation. I work with a small number of businesses at any one time. Fit and timing matter to me as much as they do to you.

The diagnostic is £18,000, fixed scope, four weeks, with a board-ready report and a prioritised roadmap at the end. Fractional leadership to implement it runs from £9,600/month, two days a week flexing to three, typically a three-month engagement. If you move to fractional within 30 days, the diagnostic fee is credited against month one.

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