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When Five Stakeholders Kill Your Deal: Admiral’s Path to $28M by Simplifying Enterprise Sales

Most publishers don’t realize they’re bleeding money. Their analytics dashboards show traffic, impressions, revenue—a neat story of their digital business. What they don’t see is the parallel universe of invisible visitors: people whose ad blockers prevent tracking scripts from firing, whose privacy settings block cookies, whose behavior never registers in any dashboard.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Dan Rua, CEO of Admiral, explained how this hidden problem became the foundation for a visitor relationship management platform that now serves NBC Universal, Paramount, and News Corp. But the more interesting story isn’t what Admiral built—it’s how they learned to sell it.

The Multi-Stakeholder Death Spiral

Admiral’s early enterprise motion followed a pattern that kills thousands of SaaS deals every year. A publisher would express interest in the platform’s capabilities—ad block recovery, subscription paywalls, email capture, privacy consent, first-party data management. The sales team would get excited about the opportunity to land a big logo.

Then they’d make a fatal mistake.

“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 timelines, different approval processes. The head of subscriptions cared about paywall functionality. Ad ops wanted ad block recovery. The privacy officer needed GDPR compliance. The CTO worried about page load times. Marketing wanted email capture capabilities.

What started as an excited conversation about Admiral’s vision devolved into a coordination nightmare. Deals that should have closed in weeks stretched into months. Some never closed at all.

Stealing the HubSpot Playbook

The solution came from pattern recognition. Dan had spent two decades in venture capital, sitting in countless board meetings, watching SaaS companies grow. He noticed something about 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. The land-and-expand model wasn’t just a growth strategy—it was a sales simplification strategy.

Admiral restructured their entire go-to-market motion around solving one specific pain point first. Instead of pitching the full VRM vision, they’d identify which problem brought the prospect to the table. Was it revenue losses from ad blockers? The need for a paywall? Privacy compliance pressure?

“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,” Dan says.

The shift was immediate. Sales cycles shortened. Win rates improved. Expansion revenue followed naturally once publishers saw results from the initial module.

The Free Tag That Reveals Six-Figure Losses

But Admiral’s most powerful go-to-market weapon wasn’t a sales tactic—it was a free product that made the invisible visible.

Ad blockers and privacy tools don’t just block ads. They break analytics too. Publishers look at Google Analytics and see 70% of their actual traffic because the other 30% never gets tracked. It’s not that those visitors aren’t there—it’s that they’re completely invisible to standard measurement tools.

“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 they can see the full picture: how many visitors use ad blockers, how much revenue they’re losing, which content attracts the most 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 is product-led growth with a psychological twist. Admiral isn’t giving away limited product functionality to hook users. They’re giving away problem awareness. And problem awareness is the most powerful sales tool in enterprise software.

Once a publisher sees they’re losing six figures monthly to ad blockers, the buying decision transforms. It’s no longer “Should we try this new tool?” It becomes “How fast can we stop the bleeding?”

The Architecture of Expansion

The free analytics tag does more than generate leads. It’s the technical foundation for Admiral’s entire platform. Once installed, publishers can activate any module with a switch flip—no new implementation required.

“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 architecture creates frictionless expansion. A publisher starts with ad block recovery because that’s the obvious pain point. Three months later, they activate the paywall module. Six months after that, they add email capture. Each expansion requires minimal effort because the infrastructure is already deployed.

The contrast with the industry standard is stark. Most publishers cobble together five or six point solutions from different vendors. Each requires separate implementation, separate tags on the page, separate decision engines fighting over when to engage visitors. The result: destroyed page performance and overlapping popup messages that annoy users.

Admiral consolidates everything under one tag while maintaining modularity in feature activation. It’s the best of both worlds—unified infrastructure with flexible monetization.

The Discipline That Closed Enterprise Deals

By 2022, Admiral had achieved product-market fit. They had a growing base of SMB customers. The platform worked. The economics proved out. But enterprise sales remained inconsistent.

That’s when they brought on their first CRO and implemented what Dan calls “just even more and better discipline on the outbound motion and picking up the phone, driving the email and account based marketing way.”

The language here matters. Dan doesn’t describe some revolutionary new sales methodology. He describes execution discipline: systematic account-based marketing, consistent outbound cadence, rigorous follow-through on leads generated by the free analytics tag.

“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 the problem-revealing analytics tag, transformed Admiral’s enterprise trajectory. NBC Universal, Paramount, CBS, Gannett, News Corp—the logos that seemed unreachable became customers.

The Metrics That Matter in Tough Markets

When Admiral raised their Series A in 2024, the funding environment was brutal. SaaS companies with impressive growth numbers struggled to close rounds. Investors demanded more than growth—they wanted proof of efficient growth.

Admiral delivered. “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,” Dan notes.

These numbers didn’t happen accidentally. They were the direct result of the go-to-market decisions Admiral made over the previous years. The free analytics tag kept customer acquisition costs low. The land-and-expand model drove high expansion revenue. The disciplined outbound motion improved win rates without bloating the sales team.

The 130% net revenue retention tells the complete story. Publishers start with one pain point—often ad block recovery—then expand into paywalls, email capture, and consent management as they see results. The initial CAC gets amortized across multiple module purchases over time. The unit economics compound.

What This Means for Your GTM Motion

Admiral’s journey offers uncomfortable truths for enterprise SaaS companies. Your vision might be your biggest obstacle. Not because the vision is wrong, but because trying to sell the full vision upfront creates unnecessary complexity.

The alternative is deceptively simple. Identify the acute pain point. Solve it exceptionally well. Build trust through results. Expand methodically. Don’t ask prospects to get married on the first date—cultivate the relationship.

For companies with multi-module platforms, this approach offers escape from the multi-stakeholder nightmare. You don’t need to compromise your vision or build a simpler product. You need to change how you sequence the sale. Start narrow. Prove value. Let expansion follow naturally.

And if you can give away problem visibility before ever pitching the solution? Even better. Make the invisible visible. Quantify the pain. Let the data create urgency. Then step in with the fix.

As Dan frames it, there’s no magic to enterprise sales. Just disciplined execution of a well-designed game plan—one that meets customers where they are rather than where you wish they were.