Seven GTM Lessons from Admiral’s Journey to Landing NBC Universal and Paramount

 

Seven GTM Lessons from Admiral’s Journey to Landing NBC Universal and Paramount

Your sales team is excited. A major enterprise prospect wants to see the full platform demo. Multiple stakeholders join the call—the VP of subscriptions, the head of ad ops, the privacy officer, the CTO. Everyone’s engaged. You’re going to close this deal.

Three months later, you’re still trying to coordinate calendars for the next meeting.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Dan Rua, CEO of Admiral, explained how his visitor relationship management platform escaped this trap and built a business now serving NBC Universal, Paramount, and News Corp. The lessons from Admiral’s journey cut to the core of what actually works in enterprise SaaS—and what founders only think works.

Lesson 1: Your Vision Is Probably Your Biggest Sales Obstacle

Admiral built a comprehensive platform with modules for ad block recovery, subscription paywalls, email capture, privacy consent, and first-party data management. When prospects showed interest in the full vision, the sales team would naturally pull in stakeholders for each area.

Bad idea.

“We realized fairly quickly that it was actually complicating the go to market approach because now you’ve brought five decision makers in the room and there’s a whole range of questions you’re now in hoops you’re jumping through,” Dan explains.

Each stakeholder had different priorities, different approval processes, different timelines. What started as an excited conversation about Admiral’s capabilities devolved into coordination hell. The solution wasn’t to simplify the product—it was to simplify what they sold first.

Lesson 2: Model Your GTM After Companies That Already Solved This Problem

Dan had spent two decades in venture capital, watching countless SaaS companies grow. He noticed a pattern in how the best platforms actually landed customers.

“Not many people buy HubSpot all at once. They buy the sales module or the CRM module or the support module,” Dan notes. This wasn’t just product strategy—it was sales simplification strategy.

Admiral restructured their entire go-to-market motion around land-and-expand. Instead of pitching the full VRM platform, they’d identify the single pain point that brought the prospect to the table. “Let’s focus on solving the one problem that brought you here. That might have been ad block losses, it might have been you need a paywall, it might have been that you need privacy consent. Let’s do that for you and do it great and build trust with you.”

Sales cycles shortened immediately. Win rates improved. Expansion revenue followed naturally once publishers saw results.

Lesson 3: Give Away Problem Visibility, Not Product Features

Most freemium models offer limited functionality and hope users upgrade for more features. Admiral took a different approach: they give away the ability to see how much money you’re losing.

Ad blockers don’t just block ads—they break analytics. Publishers look at Google Analytics and see maybe 70% of their actual traffic because blocked visitors never get tracked. “Blockers don’t just break ads, they actually break analytics and a mix of other things. And so there’s just a river of people that are like skating under the radar that the average web publisher doesn’t even realize,” Dan explains.

Admiral built a free analytics tag that reveals this hidden traffic. Publishers install one line of code and suddenly see the full picture: how many visitors use ad blockers, how much revenue they’re losing, which content attracts blocked users.

“We got ourselves a really nice installed base just off of installing our analytics tag to understand the problem. Then once they saw the problem, they realized, geez, I’m losing $100,000 or a million dollars or whatever you had built incentive to go solve it with one of our modules,” Dan says.

This transforms the buying decision. It’s no longer “Should we try this tool?” It becomes “How fast can we stop the bleeding?”

Lesson 4: Build Technical Architecture That Makes Expansion Frictionless

The free analytics tag does more than generate leads—it’s the infrastructure for Admiral’s entire platform. Once installed, publishers can activate any module by flipping a switch.

“Once that tag is on page, they can just flick a switch to turn on everything across the journey with one decision engine that can avoid overlap of engagements and all sorts of things,” Dan explains.

This creates asymmetric advantage. A publisher starts with ad block recovery. Three months later, they activate the paywall. Six months after that, email capture. Each expansion requires minimal effort because the infrastructure is already deployed.

Compare this to the industry standard: publishers cobble together five or six point solutions from different vendors. Each requires separate implementation, separate tags, separate decision engines. The result is destroyed page performance and overlapping popup messages.

Admiral consolidated everything under one tag while maintaining modularity. It’s unified infrastructure with flexible monetization—and it’s what drives their 130% net revenue retention.

Lesson 5: Execution Discipline Beats Clever Tactics

By 2022, Admiral had product-market fit and growing SMB traction. But enterprise sales remained inconsistent. They brought on their first CRO who implemented what Dan describes as “just even more and better discipline on the outbound motion and picking up the phone, driving the email and account based marketing way.”

Notice the language. Dan doesn’t describe revolutionary methodology. He describes execution: systematic account-based marketing, consistent outbound cadence, rigorous follow-through.

“The lesson there was no magic to it. The CRO and I often talk about it like it wasn’t magic, it was discipline to execute the game plan,” Dan says.

This disciplined execution, combined with the simplified land-and-expand motion and problem-revealing analytics tag, transformed Admiral’s enterprise trajectory. The logos that seemed unreachable became customers.

Lesson 6: Preach the Vision While Selling the Pain Point

Here’s the nuance most founders miss: Admiral still educates prospects about the full VRM vision—they just don’t require buying into it immediately.

“We’re not selling VRM all at once as much as we are selling a pain point. But we are kind of preaching the VRM philosophy along the way,” Dan explains.

This creates asymmetric advantage. Prospects who understand the broader vision are more likely to expand because they see the roadmap. They appreciate “the road to expansion and really owning and getting that whole visitor journey under control.”

But prospects who just need one urgent problem solved can still move forward quickly. You don’t sacrifice vision—you sequence it better.

Lesson 7: Efficiency Metrics Trump Growth Metrics in Tough Markets

When Admiral raised their Series A in 2024, the funding environment was brutal. Investors demanded proof of efficient growth, not just growth.

Admiral delivered with three key metrics: “Burn multiple, just really strong birth, you know, well under one on burn multiple, really strong NRR 130% plus, really strong rule of X, you know, 100% plus.”

These numbers weren’t accidental. They were the direct result of GTM decisions made over years. The free analytics tag kept CAC low. Land-and-expand drove high expansion revenue. Disciplined outbound improved win rates without bloating the sales team.

The 130% NRR tells the complete story: publishers start with one pain point, then expand into multiple modules as they see results. Initial CAC gets amortized across multiple purchases over time. Unit economics compound.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Enterprise GTM

Admiral’s journey reveals a pattern that applies beyond media publishing. Enterprise buyers don’t want to evaluate your entire platform on day one. They want you to solve their immediate problem exceptionally well.

Your job isn’t to convince them to buy everything. It’s to solve one problem so well that they trust you to solve the next one. As Dan frames it, “Don’t ask to get married on the first date, right? Cultivate the relationship.”

The companies that win enterprise deals aren’t the ones with the most comprehensive platforms or the cleverest sales tactics. They’re the ones that simplify their initial sale, build trust through results, and create technical architecture that makes expansion inevitable.

There’s no magic to it. Just disciplined execution of a well-designed game plan—one that meets customers where they are rather than where you wish they were.