Footprint’s Enterprise Transition: From SMB Chaos to Multi-Million Dollar Accounts

Footprint’s Enterprise Transition: From SMB Chaos to Multi-Million Dollar Accounts

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Eli Wachs, CEO of Footprint, shared a metric that reveals everything about how his business evolved: despite serving 400 retailers, the company’s top 25 customers drive meaningful revenue concentration. “Some of our customers are spending multiple millions of dollars a year with us,” Eli says.

This isn’t a vanity metric about customer count. It’s a signal that Footprint successfully made one of the hardest transitions in B2B software: moving from high-volume SMB chaos to concentrated enterprise revenue. The operational and strategic changes required to make that shift aren’t obvious, and most companies that attempt it fail. Here’s what actually changed.

Why Customer Concentration Became the Strategy

Footprint didn’t start out targeting enterprise retailers. Their early GTM motion was built on Facebook ads arbitrage and fast sales cycles to mid-market retailers. The product was designed for quick implementation and self-service where possible. This worked brilliantly for getting to ten million in ARR.

But the unit economics of that business model had a ceiling. Mid-market retailers might spend fifty to a hundred thousand annually. Enterprise retailers could spend millions. More importantly, enterprise deals had better retention, higher expansion rates, and created deeper competitive moats through integration complexity.

The math eventually becomes unavoidable: you can either manage 400 mid-market accounts each spending modest amounts, or you can focus resources on 25 enterprise accounts that collectively drive more revenue. The latter requires fewer account managers, creates more predictable expansion, and builds deeper product defensibility.

“That was really the point at which we said, okay, we’ve figured out product market fit, we’ve figured out our initial go-to-market motion, now we need to scale everything,” Eli reflects on their Series B. The scaling he’s referring to wasn’t just hiring more reps to sell the same product—it was fundamentally changing what they sold and how they sold it.

The Product Infrastructure Nobody Sees

Moving upmarket isn’t primarily a sales or marketing challenge—it’s a product and infrastructure problem. Enterprise retailers won’t adopt software that can’t meet their security, compliance, and integration requirements. The scrappy marketing automation tool that worked for mid-market accounts wouldn’t pass muster with credit committees at major retail chains.

Footprint invested heavily in the unglamorous but essential infrastructure that enterprise buyers require: enhanced data security, SOC 2 compliance, advanced user permissions, audit logs, and complex integration capabilities. None of these features help you sell to SMBs—they’re just table stakes for enterprise conversations.

This created a difficult resource allocation decision. Every dollar spent on enterprise infrastructure was a dollar not spent on features that could help close more mid-market deals. Every engineering sprint focused on security compliance was a sprint not building new marketing capabilities. The opportunity cost was real and immediate.

But enterprise deals don’t happen without this foundation. You can have the best sales team in the world, but if your product can’t meet enterprise technical requirements, you’re not getting past procurement. This infrastructure work had to come first, even though it didn’t directly generate revenue.

The People You Can’t Promote Into

The most painful realization for many founders moving upmarket is that the team that got you to ten million can’t necessarily get you to one hundred million. The sales reps who excel at closing fifty-thousand-dollar deals in two-week cycles often struggle with six-figure deals that take nine months and involve five stakeholders.

“We had to hire a bunch of senior execs who had done it before,” Eli explains. “People who had scaled sales teams from 10 to 100, people who had built out marketing organizations.”

This isn’t about the existing team lacking talent or commitment. It’s about pattern recognition. Enterprise sales requires navigating procurement processes, building consensus across buying committees, and managing multi-quarter sales cycles. These are learned skills that come from repetition, and you can’t learn them quickly enough when the business needs them now.

The alternative—promoting your best SMB rep to run enterprise sales—usually fails. They’re learning on the company’s most important deals with the most sophisticated buyers. The stakes are too high for on-the-job training.

This creates difficult conversations with early employees who expect to scale with the company. The IC who was employee number five isn’t automatically qualified to run a fifty-person enterprise sales org. Managing this transition while preserving culture and morale is one of the hardest parts of moving upmarket.

How Positioning Changes Everything

The Footprint that sold to mid-market retailers and the Footprint that sells to enterprise retailers are functionally different companies with different positioning, different messaging, and different proof points.

Mid-market buyers care about speed to value, ease of implementation, and clear ROI. They want to see the product work quickly and don’t have patience for lengthy deployment cycles. The marketing emphasizes fast wins and concrete results.

Enterprise buyers care about strategic fit, technical architecture, vendor stability, and long-term partnership. They’re not making a twelve-month bet—they’re making a five-year bet. They need to believe the vendor will still exist, the product will continue evolving, and the technical architecture will scale with their business.

This requires completely different marketing materials, case studies, and sales collateral. The mid-market one-pager about quick wins doesn’t resonate in enterprise evaluation committees. Enterprise buyers want architectural diagrams, security documentation, and references from similar-sized companies.

Footprint had to build an entirely parallel marketing and sales operation for enterprise while maintaining their mid-market business. You can’t just rebrand the mid-market materials—they’re solving for different buying criteria with different stakeholders.

The Sales Motion That Actually Works

Enterprise retail isn’t sold through inbound demos and two-call closes. It requires account-based strategies, relationship development, and multi-threading across the organization. Footprint’s sales motion had to evolve from transactional to strategic.

This meant building relationships with retail executives before they were actively buying. It meant understanding the retailer’s broader technology roadmap and strategic priorities. It meant positioning Footprint not as a marketing tool but as strategic infrastructure for retail intelligence.

The sales cycle lengthened from weeks to quarters. Deal sizes grew from five figures to seven figures. But the close rate actually improved because by the time a deal reached contracting, Footprint had already built consensus across the buying committee.

This longer cycle required different sales compensation structures, different pipeline management, and different forecast models. The metrics that mattered for mid-market—volume of demos, speed to close—became less relevant than enterprise metrics like multi-threading effectiveness and champion development.

Why the Top 25 Matter More Than the Other 375

The revenue concentration Eli describes isn’t a bug—it’s the strategy working. Those top 25 accounts represent retailers where Footprint has become embedded infrastructure, expanded across multiple use cases, and built deep integration with the retailer’s technology stack.

These accounts are also dramatically more defensible. Ripping out Footprint from an enterprise retailer where it’s integrated into campaign workflows, connected to multiple data sources, and used across teams would be expensive and disruptive. Mid-market accounts using basic features are easier to switch.

The expansion economics are also better. Enterprise accounts that are spending millions can expand to spend more millions as they add use cases, integrate deeper, and adopt new product capabilities. Mid-market accounts hit spending ceilings faster because they have less complexity to solve for.

Today, Footprint generates over one hundred million in ARR growing thirty to forty percent year over year. That growth is increasingly driven by expansion within enterprise accounts rather than new logo acquisition—exactly the pattern you want to see in a mature enterprise software business.

The lesson isn’t that every company should move upmarket. It’s that if you do, everything changes: your product infrastructure, your team composition, your positioning, your sales motion, and your definition of success.