Ancoa was a trade surveillance platform for Chief Compliance Officers and Financial regulators in Europe and the United States.
The Challenge
Ancoa was a trade surveillance platform used by Chief Compliance Officers and financial regulators across Europe and the United States.
I joined Ancoa as the third employee. The two founders were exceptional software engineers, but they had limited experience in sales, marketing, and customer discovery. Despite having a technically advanced product, the company had acquired only one customer and had generated no additional revenue for more than 12 months.
The challenge was not the technology—it was understanding the customer’s problem, communicating the value proposition, and building a repeatable process for acquiring enterprise customers.
The Strategy
Rather than starting with sales pitches, I focused on understanding the customer.
I began meeting with our existing customer every week to learn how they used the platform, what problems they were trying to solve, and where the product did not match their expectations.
Through these conversations, I discovered that our assumptions about customer needs were incomplete. The product was technically capable, but customers were looking for a different workflow and a clearer business outcome.
Using Steve Blank’s Customer Development methodology, I established a continuous customer discovery process. I translated customer feedback into product requirements, worked with engineering to prioritize improvements, and helped align the product roadmap with real customer needs.
The Execution
I developed a consultative enterprise sales process built around customer discovery and tailored demonstrations.
Instead of showing prospects a generic product demo, we structured the sales process around three steps:
- Discovery: Understand the customer’s compliance challenges, workflows, and data requirements.
- Solution mapping: Take the customer’s own data and demonstrate how Ancoa could solve their specific problems.
- Implementation planning: Convert the sales process into a structured delivery plan.
I built custom demonstrations that mapped directly to each prospect’s requirements, allowing customers to see the product solving their own problems rather than viewing a generic feature presentation. I later scaled this process to a team of three technical pre-sales supporting six salespeople in London and the United States of America.
The Outcome
The company successfully transitioned from a single-customer business into a scalable enterprise software company.
By combining customer discovery, product refinement, and a repeatable sales and implementation process, Ancoa built a predictable enterprise sales engine.
At its peak, the company was closing approximately one new enterprise customer per day, generating significant revenue growth.
Note: This company eventually sold to Cinnober Financial Technologies, and then again to NASDAQ in XXXX.