Why Sherpa
How we decided to research and build a new GTM technology.
The gap nobody talks about
With my cofounder Damian, we spent years building GTM Data organisations inside large enterprise tech companies. Early on I was embedded directly in a regional Sales Hub. Not reporting to IT, not to a central analytics team. To Sales leadership.
That changed everything.
I got to live their problems day to day. And the primary thing I noticed was a massive gap. Huge centralized investment in tech and data on one side. Low usage on the ground on the other. This was true across every region we worked in.
What existed and why it failed
Some models were developed centrally by teams in IT. Usage was random. The data world was evolving fast. It was the era of “dump everything in the S3 datalake.” Governance practices were not mature.
Damian and I always took a pragmatic approach. Simple but useful. If a regression was enough to solve the problem, we used a regression. No need for the fancy stuff. We found that simpler models people could understand and trust consistently beat complex ones that performed similarly but were black boxes. Nobody used what they couldn’t explain.
We built a lot. Forecasting and opportunity scoring to reduce time spent by entire sales teams, from rep to line manager to director, on heavy forecast processes. Account scoring to identify the best targets in a territory for bundles or newer offerings. Pipeline quality assessment to give Sales Directors real data for coaching conversations.
It was good work. Pushed to production in Salesforce and Anaplan. But we knew something. If even well-funded enterprises with significant investment in data roles were struggling with adoption, the rest of the market was in worse shape. Especially the midmarket. Complex GTM orgs, but no resources for data science and ops.
We also got front row seats to the vendor landscape. Apollo, 6Sense, ZoomInfo. We observed others like Clari. The gap between the promise and what the field actually experienced was painful to watch from inside the sales org. Very expensive solutions. Overkill for many problems. Overpromise on many others.
Why us two
Damian was originally my manager. We grew the team from zero together over four years. We knew we worked well together despite the distance. We had fun. We’d built real remote work discipline between us.
What made us complementary was clear. Damian brings maturity, Director-level experience sitting in Leadership, deep Marketing and CRM knowledge from his Salesforce admin days, real passion for ML, and genuine product vision. I was more the pure Data Science and CS engineer. The one who loves customer-facing conversations, enjoys the building, and wants to design a solution from scratch as CTO.
We balanced each other out. That matters more than most founders realize.
The pivot to ICP alignment
We initially started around Market Segmentation. We pivoted quickly to a problem we had experienced ourselves and kept hearing about from other companies we talked to.
Complete misalignment across teams. Sales, CS, Marketing. Nobody agreed on what a good account looks like. Nobody agreed on who to target and why.
The play was to help organizations agree on an ABM strategy. We are true believers in ABM. Surgical, highly precise targeting eventually produces better customers than volume. We had seen it work.
On top of that, LLM progress was changing the game. The ability to leverage unstructured data increased dramatically. We also noticed limited analytics built into HubSpot, the pure midmarket CRM play. Good gap. Real opportunity. Concrete problem to solve.
The ICP Company
This is how we set ourselves up to be the ICP Company.
Help teams make sense of their CRM data chaos. A key LLM flow we built let us create our own Account database and enrich fields for very cheap. With more powerful models, we could offer further enrichment. More complex. Adaptable to any ICP definition a team could come up with.
We had stable careers. We had families. But we couldn’t stop talking about this problem.
At some point you either build the thing or stop complaining about it.
We built the thing.
