When an ambitious growth bet fell short

This Swiss B2B technology services company, with a deep Services DNA and an established market presence, had invested heavily to accelerate growth, hiring new people, adding capacity, and setting ambitious revenue targets. Everything pointed upward. Then the plans didn't materialise.

The setback was financial at first, but it soon turned into something harder to manage: a crisis of confidence. A team that had been riding high was now facing downsizing, difficult conversations, and a question nobody could answer cleanly: What do we do now to get back on track?

Three challenges: strategic drift, GTM ambiguity, and an untested product bet

The company wasn't failing. They had clients, expertise, and a strong reputation. But the gap between plan and reality created real insecurity, and three challenges compounded it:

• Strategic drift. Years of organic growth, fuelled by a Services DNA that rewards saying yes to client needs, had blurred the line between what the company was best at and what it was simply willing to do. The offering had expanded without a clear direction.

• GTM ambiguity. New go-to-market staff had been hired to inject energy, and they were rightly pushing for validated buyer insights that went beyond assumptions. But the structured foundation to channel that energy didn't exist yet. Which customers were they truly winning, and what made those customers choose them over the competition? The answers weren't clear.

• An untested idea. Leadership saw an opportunity to evolve beyond pure services with a proprietary toolset: a design system, built on Microsoft 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform, that speeds up rolling out corporate design across internal and external web platforms. The toolset was already proven, having been used with several customers on implementation projects, where the company configured it to accelerate delivery and pitch more competitively. The tempting next step was to sell it to companies pursuing a buy-and-build approach, as a product customers would configure themselves. But the real unknowns went unexamined: who would actually do that configuration, IT or business-side citizen developers, and what turning a services asset into a software product would mean for a company built on services. Pursuing that shift without clarity risked compounding the problem.

A newly hired Head of Go-to-Market, still bringing an outsider's fresh perspective, was the first to see what was really needed. The company had to find a structured way to work through the confusion and land on a defensible path forward. It took some persuading, but the rest of the leadership team came round to the same view.

Three validation steps, from buyer clarity to a positioned offering

With leadership aligned, and having already begun communicating about the toolset on their website, the team knew that doubling down on an unvalidated direction would only raise the stakes. So they engaged Venture Guidebook to validate their assumptions before committing resources. Venture Guidebook brought two things to the effort: its PMF Engine, a proprietary system for evidence-based product-market fit, and a senior facilitator who worked alongside the team throughout. Together, this pairing of system and expert facilitation is what Venture Guidebook calls PMF Engineering.

They deliberately began with the toolset opportunity, where the need for clarity was greatest and the stakes highest. Concentrating there first delivered insights that mattered right away, while proving out a repeatable method the team could later extend across the wider company.

The biggest change was the vantage point. The company's instinct, like that of most Services DNA firms, was to reason inside-out, from its own capabilities and the pull of client requests. As a neutral outside partner, the senior facilitator flipped that, keeping the work outside-in: understand the buyers and the market first, then weigh the internal consequences. That external perspective also helped the team work through internal sensitivities and reach focus faster, and because the insights were built together rather than handed down, the choices ahead were ones the whole team stood behind.

Three validation steps in order: Target Sweet Spot for buyer clarity, the Offering Spectrum for offering direction, and Strategic Positioning for a defensible position.

The two roles that really decide

The first step tackled the GTM ambiguity: getting precise about which buyers to pursue, and about who inside those organisations actually shapes the decision. Using the Target Sweet Spot (TSS), a framework within Venture Guidebook's PMF Engine, the team mapped every role that shapes a purchase and its adoption, from first evaluation through rollout, and weighed each one's real influence. Many had a say, but only two groups consistently proved decisive, each with a distinct and sometimes conflicting agenda:

• Business decision-makers emerged as the primary drivers: leaders with a business background who owned the transformative changes and held the budget to fund them. They judge success by the business outcomes delivered, but, wary of a "big bang" shift of this magnitude, they preferred a staged approach that tackled the risks more diligently.

• Strategic IT leaders played the gatekeeping role: the people who set technology strategy and standards, such as a CIO or head of enterprise architecture, rather than the operational teams who keep systems running day to day. Because they owned platform governance and architectural fit, what they needed was confidence that whatever the business adopted would be technically sound and safe to run, not a sales pitch to win them over.

That distinction between drivers and gatekeepers was itself a key realisation. What struck the team most was the effective weight the IT stakeholders carried: even without holding the budget, their gatekeeping role could quietly stall or unblock a deal. So the company learned to win IT's confidence as deliberately as they made the business case to the drivers, tailoring each conversation to what the person in front of them cared about. It also shaped how they designed offerings, so that goals, scope, and price points reflected what each buyer segment valued. Knowing who decides and who adopts gave them an early read on the offering question they took up next.

A staged path to services with assets, and higher margins

This step took on the untested idea directly. The offering question was the hardest of the three, and the one the team understood least well. The two futures raised earlier, keeping the toolset in-house to accelerate their own delivery or selling it for customers to configure themselves, had never actually been weighed against each other as a choice. Nor had the question buried in that second path: who would do the configuring, and the different product, buyer, and support model each answer would imply. The consequences had never been thought through.

It got the same structured treatment as the buyer work. The PMF Engine's Offering Spectrum framework reframed the binary from the start. Rather than a straight choice between Pure Services and Pure Product, it laid out a spectrum of six offering types with several hybrids in between, from Services-Centric models that layer reusable assets onto services, through pre-configured solutions and platform models, to product-centric offerings. Seeing that middle ground made clear the toolset did not force an all-or-nothing leap into software. The framework then translated the toolset into the typical characteristics of the offering it could become, which gave the team something specific to test instead of an open-ended debate about direction. On that basis, they tested:

• where on that spectrum the company could credibly play, weighing their Services DNA, delivery capabilities, and how they charged customers today against where they wanted to move; and

• whether turning the proven toolset into a repeatable, productised asset was viable, and if so, what staged path would be digestible for an organisation already under pressure, given the demands it would place on the operating model and resources.

The answer turned out not to be a simple yes or no. It pointed toward a staged evolution into what the Offering Spectrum calls Services-Centric (with Assets). In this model the company's proprietary toolset, built on Microsoft 365 and the Microsoft Power Platform, becomes the reusable "assets" that speed up delivery and create repeatability while customers get higher implementation quality, and the configuration know-how stays in-house with the company's own delivery experts, where its Services DNA had always been strongest.

The engagement model stayed services-led: clients still contracted for projects and billable work. What changed was the delivery model behind it. Rather than scoping each project from the ground up, the team could now build on the toolset as a set of reusable assets, raising delivery leverage, strengthening its position in competitive bids, and widening project margins. They also came away clear-eyed that these gains would have to be earned: the toolset would need ongoing investment to keep its edge. A real but contained step along the spectrum, it gave the company the leverage of reusable assets without the full operating burden of a software product firm.

A position grounded in real buyer value

The last step took aim at the strategic drift itself. With the offering direction settled, the team turned to how to make it legible to buyers and hold it there. Building on both the Target Sweet Spot and the chosen Services-Centric (with Assets) direction, and using Venture Guidebook's Strategic Positioning framework, the PMF Engine synthesised what they'd learned into a draft Positioning Statement the team then sharpened. It spelled out what made the toolset distinct, grounded in the specific value it delivered to the validated buyer segments rather than in abstract claims. That settled the strategic direction for the toolset.

From there, the PMF Engine translated that strategic direction into a Unique Value Proposition that made the case for change from the customer's point of view: why they should move off the status quo (why change), why they could not afford to wait (why now), and why the toolset was best placed to make that change a success (why the toolset).

None of this was clever wording. The point was to keep the toolset's positioning anchored to a deliberate strategy, holding off what the team came to call positioning entropy: the natural tendency for a company's story to diffuse when client demand, rather than strategic intent, ends up defining the offering.

Their core expertise still sat at the centre of it. What was new was a structural advantage competitors couldn't easily copy, grounded in what their validated buyers valued and true to their Services DNA.

The outcome: clarity, alignment, and a same-year rebound

The company could finally answer the question that had hung over the stall: What do we do now to get back on track? The structured validation gave them a way through it, in three parts: What changed? What does it mean? What to do next? They worked through them first for the toolset opportunity they had chosen to tackle. The outside-in, customer-centric thinking they practised in those sessions then carried into the rest of the business, sharpening how they approached their traditional services too, in a market that had only grown more competitive.

• What changed. The structured validation traced the stall to fit, not people or market: buyers, positioning, and offering direction had drifted while the fundamentals held.

• What it means. The company didn't need to reinvent themselves. What they needed was precision: validated buyers, a defensible position, and a staged offering evolution that honoured their Services DNA while opening new territory.

• What to do next. The strategic direction became execution-ready. From the Positioning Statement and Unique Value Proposition, the PMF Engine derived the Ideal Customer Profile, then translated it, largely automatically, into a ranked target account list and a storyline for customer and partner meetings. With those in hand, the company took its case to market, engaging both the business drivers and the IT gatekeepers on what each cared about, and shortened the path from strategy to results.

This clarity took shape in parallel to daily operations, rather than as a separate strategy track.

Why Services DNA companies stall, and how clarity restarts growth

Growth stalls in B2B tech services rarely mean the fundamentals are broken. More often, they reveal that assumptions made during easier times (about who to target, how to position, and what to offer) have been shaped inside-out and never pressure-tested with a customer-centric lens.

This pattern is especially common in companies with a strong Services DNA: organisations built on client responsiveness and technical expertise that grew organically by saying yes. When the market shifts, that same adaptability becomes a liability, spreading the company across too many directions to do any of them justice. Enterprise contracts and loyal clients mask the fact that the offering was never designed to deliver self-evident value beyond the existing base, so growth comes to depend on heroics rather than fit.

The instinct is to move faster: more outreach, more pitches, more services to say yes to. But without a clear direction, going faster just deepens the problem. What they usually need is a sharper sense of where to focus.

Recovery is rarely about luck or market timing. It comes from getting the foundations right and holding to them. For the company in this story, clarity, not more activity, is what brought their momentum back.