Foxquilt’s Enterprise Sales Journey: From SMB Insurance to Large Platform Partnerships
The lightbulb moment for Foxquilt’s enterprise strategy came from an unexpected place – a failed attempt to get insurance for their own network of contractors. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, co-founding partner Mark Morissette shared how this experience revealed a massive opportunity in enterprise partnerships.
The Origin Story
While building Real Matters, a platform with 300,000 property professionals, Mark encountered a persistent problem. “The biggest pain point for us was onboarding these guys across North America. They never had the right insurance policy,” he recalls. When they approached legacy carriers about creating an embedded solution, they were met with silence. “We figured we’d get some response, but weren’t that naive. It was a multi million dollar opportunity for these legacy carriers.”
Identifying the Enterprise Opportunity
This experience highlighted a crucial gap in the market. As Mark explains, “When we really took office through these embedded enterprise channels, there just wasn’t any legacy carriers that could entertain opening up integrated environments and then customizing a tailor made offering for their program of liking kind subcontractors or ecommerce merchants.”
Building for Enterprise Scale
Rather than simply repackaging their SMB offering, Foxquilt built their platform with enterprise needs in mind. “We had to stay very disciplined to our approach around the integrity of the architecture,” Mark notes. This meant creating systems that could handle complex regulatory requirements across multiple jurisdictions.
Cross-Border Innovation
One of their key enterprise differentiators became their ability to handle cross-border commerce. “This is one of the largest trading partnerships in the world, US and Canada and SME businesses and mid market businesses trading back and forth. No legacy carrier has created a cross border vehicle, facility or product to support that trade,” Mark points out.
The Enterprise Product Evolution
Their enterprise offering evolved to serve specific platform needs. Mark shares an example: “My wife runs an ecommerce marketplace where she’s got 30,000 3rd party sellers across North America. Two really unique complex regulatory markets. 50 different states have 50 different regulatory environments. And then we got ten provinces of Canada. But her third party ecommerce merchants, they need a cross border solution.”
Building the Right Team
Success in enterprise sales required building a team with deep industry expertise. “If you look at our cross, our broad leadership team, we all have a underwriting and PNC background. Even our heads of sales have underwriting backgrounds,” Mark explains. This expertise helped them understand and address enterprise concerns about risk and compliance.
Results and Validation
The enterprise strategy has paid off significantly. Today, their embedded enterprise channel accounts for “like half of our business,” according to Mark. They’ve scaled to “writing like a couple, almost a couple of million dollars a month in revenue” while maintaining strong underwriting fundamentals.
Key Lessons for Founders
Foxquilt’s journey offers several important insights for founders transitioning to enterprise sales:
- Look for opportunities where legacy players are failing to serve enterprise needs
- Build your technology stack with enterprise requirements in mind from the start
- Focus on solving complex regulatory and compliance challenges
- Build a team with deep industry expertise to navigate enterprise sales
- Use your SMB experience to inform, but not limit, your enterprise offering
For founders considering the move to enterprise sales, Foxquilt’s experience shows that success often comes from identifying structural problems that legacy players can’t solve, rather than just offering better pricing or user experience. Their story suggests that sometimes the best way to enter enterprise markets is to solve problems that the incumbents don’t even recognize exist.