Meeting Package’s Conversion Secret: How They Went from 10% to 70% Win Rates After Pivoting from Marketplace to Enterprise

Meeting Package’s Conversion Secret: How They Went from 10% to 70% Win Rates After Pivoting from Marketplace to Enterprise

A 7x improvement in conversion rates doesn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of fundamental changes in how you approach product, sales, and go-to-market strategy. For Meeting Package, this transformation began with a painful realization.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, CEO Joonas Ahola revealed how their initial marketplace model was fundamentally flawed. “If you just have an extranet marketplace, it will never fly because it’s not connected to the live inventory,” he explains. This insight kicked off a series of strategic shifts that would dramatically improve their win rates.

Here’s how they did it:

Redefining the Product Strategy

The first breakthrough came from understanding what hotels actually needed. Instead of trying to replace existing systems, Meeting Package built integrations with them. This wasn’t just a technical challenge – it required navigating complex vendor relationships.

“There’s a lot of, let’s say, legacy vendors who don’t necessarily have open APIs, and you need to go through a lot of politics to get to the right people to have access to the APIs,” Joonas notes. This integration-first approach turned what could have been a competitive disadvantage into a moat.

Surgical ICP Definition

Rather than targeting all hotels, Meeting Package refined their focus to properties where “30% of your revenue at least is coming from meetings and events and groups.” This clarity allowed them to eliminate poor-fit prospects early.

“Let’s say your mom and pop hotel, or your hotel is in the middle of nowhere and you don’t really have any p, two P customers or corporates coming in. That was super easy for us to remove,” Joonas explains. This precise ICP definition meant sales efforts were concentrated on prospects most likely to convert.

Industry-Expert Sales Team

Perhaps their most crucial insight was realizing that traditional SaaS sales experience wasn’t enough. “We acknowledge the fact that we need to have people who can challenge the hotels because we’re not creating a vertical, we’re changing the way they operate,” Joonas shares.

This meant hiring industry veterans who could engage in consultative selling. The impact was immediate: “closing the deal was much harder when you didn’t have that kind of industry knowledge or background to question those ways of operating that are in the hotel.”

The COVID Gambit

When the pandemic hit, Meeting Package made a contrarian bet. Instead of cutting across the board, they “decided that, okay, let’s rather shut down customer success and marketing and completely focus on engineering and R and D at that point.”

This focus on product development during market dormancy meant they emerged from the pandemic with superior technology – further improving their conversion rates.

Partnership-Driven Distribution

The final piece was turning potential competitors into distribution partners. “Today marketing is heavily driven by, lets say the whole GTM is driven heavily by our partnership strategy,” Joonas explains. These partnerships create a flywheel effect: partners drive demand to hotels, which need Meeting Package’s technology to efficiently capture that demand.

The results speak for themselves. From marketplace-era conversion rates below 10%, Meeting Package now sees “60% to 70% on average.” This dramatic improvement wasn’t the result of any single change, but rather the cumulative impact of redefining their product strategy, refining their ICP, building the right sales team, and creating powerful distribution partnerships.

For B2B founders, the lesson is clear: dramatic improvements in conversion rates don’t come from incremental optimization. They come from fundamental shifts in how you approach product, sales, and go-to-market strategy. Meeting Package’s journey shows that the key is having the courage to make these shifts – and the discipline to execute them completely.