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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
Actionable
Takeaways
Fire customers who don't fit your ICP — even when it hurts the quarter:
Nominal made the deliberate call to walk away from customers that didn't fit their mid-market and enterprise ICP. Guy is explicit: it cost them hundreds of thousands in ARR at seed stage, and it hurt. But carrying the wrong customers slows everything — product focus, team energy, positioning. They raised their Series A with traction that actually reflected the market they were going after. If the customer can be better served elsewhere, let them go.
Your real competition might not be software at all:
Nominal's primary competitor isn't another SaaS tool — it's humans running Excel and offshore BPO teams in the Philippines and India doing the work instead. That reframe completely changes the sales motion: you're not on the software budget, you're on the labor budget. That's a different buyer, a different ROI conversation, and a different reason to act.
The ICP pivot rarely announces itself — follow the thread anyway:
Nominal's enterprise pivot didn't come from a market map or a board deck. It came from a casual conversation at an event where a friend in energy said "we really need what you're doing." Guy called everyone he knew, followed the chain, and landed his first enterprise customer — Green Street Power Partners — through a founder's neighbor who happened to be their CFO. That customer is still with them two and a half years later. The signal came before the data. Act on it.
Push value before you ever ask for anything:
The Nobu Series works because Nominal shows up as an industry steward, not a vendor. Ten CFOs or finance leaders, a high-end sushi dinner, a speaker from a public company sharing a real transformation story — and no pitch at the table. Guy is explicit: "I'm not going to pitch you while we're eating." Prospects come back and ask for the demo. Field marketing that leads with genuine value, without an agenda, builds the kind of trust that seven cold emails never will.
GTM engineering alone doesn't close enterprise — pair it with field marketing:
Neither motion worked in isolation. What Nominal found is that AI-powered outbound at scale creates reach, but it's the field marketing touchpoint that creates the trust needed to move an enterprise CFO. The combination — researched, signal-based outreach followed by a high-value in-person moment — is the multi-touch motion that actually converts. Guy's word for it: unstoppable.
Build ROI tracking for every marketing activity or you'll bleed budget on vanity:
Nominal built their own internal system to track ROI across every event and marketing channel. What they found: a lot of industry events looked good on paper — fly out to a four-season hotel, fill a room — but the attendees weren't buying. They cut those. Now they go fewer places but go bigger, including a major Gartner event where they're investing at a level Guy compared to a seed round. The discipline is in the measurement, not the spend.
Conversation
Highlights
How Nominal Rebuilt Its Entire GTM Motion After Betting on the Wrong Customer
A contract was out in legal. The deal was close.
Then Guy Leibovitz’s phone rang.
The CEO of Commit had news: they’d just been acquired. The deal was dead.
It wasn’t a one-off. It was a pattern. Startups churn. They get acquired mid-cycle. They run out of runway. Guy had built Nominal’s early go-to-market around selling to founders — and founders, it turned out, were structurally the wrong customer for what Nominal was building.
What followed wasn’t a clean pivot. It was a series of hard calls: a new ICP, a new sales motion, a decision to walk away from real revenue, and a GTM rebuild that didn’t come from a board deck — it came from a chance conversation at an industry event.
In a recent episode of BUILDERS, Guy Leibovitz, Co-Founder and CEO of Nominal, laid out exactly how that rebuild happened.
The Signal Came Before the Data
After the Commit deal collapsed, Guy went to a casual event. A friend working at a large energy company pulled him aside: “The energy space really needs what you guys are doing.”
He started calling everyone he knew. One founder knew another founder. That founder’s neighbor was the CFO of Green Street Power Partners. That CFO became Nominal’s first enterprise customer — and is still with them two and a half years later.
There was no market analysis that pointed to energy. No TAM slide. The signal was a conversation, and Guy moved on it.
This matters for how founders think about ICP discovery. The data that confirms a pivot almost always lags behind the instinct that precedes it. The founders who move fast on a credible signal — and follow the thread all the way to a real customer — compress that lag into something useful.
Reframe the Competitive Set Before You Rebuild the Pitch
Before Nominal could fix its go-to-market, Guy had to reframe who they were actually competing against.
Most B2B SaaS founders default to a software-versus-software competitive frame. Nominal’s real competition was never another platform.
“We’re competing not on the software budget, we’re competing on the labor budget,” Guy said. “So it’s a bit different.”
Nominal’s AI agents replace the manual workload of controllers and accountants — the Excel sprawl, the month-end reconciliations, the offshore BPO teams in the Philippines and India that mid-market and enterprise finance teams rely on to get the work done. The buyer isn’t evaluating Nominal against other software. They’re looking at a labor line item and asking whether there’s a smarter allocation.
That one reframe cascades into everything: who you call, what you put in the first email, how you structure the ROI conversation, which budget you’re asking them to reallocate. Getting it wrong means you’re in the wrong room having the wrong conversation with the wrong stakeholder.
The Revenue That Had to Go
Reorienting around a new ICP required Nominal to make a decision most seed-stage founders won’t make.
They fired customers who didn’t fit.
“We had customers that we actually decided to kind of break up with them,” Guy said. “And that really hurt one quarter… we said go to hundreds of thousands of dollars. And you know, as a seed stage company you’re like, that could kill the company.”
The logic behind the decision is worth sitting with. Wrong-fit customers don’t just cost you revenue when you lose them — they cost you while you keep them. They pull product in directions that don’t serve your core ICP. They generate support load that taxes a small team. They muddy the signal on what’s actually working. And they make it harder to tell a clean story to the market you actually want to own.
Guy’s position is direct: “If we cannot really serve our customers well, why even engage? If there are better solutions than Nominal for a customer, they should just go and work with the best solution they can find.”
That’s not a consolation framing. It’s the operating principle behind a focused GTM motion.
The GTM Motion That Actually Works
Once the ICP was locked, the question became how to reach enterprise CFOs — a buyer who is over-solicited, under-trusting of vendors, and not moving on a cold email.
Nominal’s current motion runs on three channels working in combination.
The first is outbound — cold calling with power dialers, backed by deep per-account research. Every BDR at Nominal works with what Guy described as their own AI-powered research coworker that preps each outreach. The calls are warm before they’re made.
The second is go-to-market engineering — a small team using Clay and signal-based tooling to run personalized outreach at scale, triggered by real buying signals rather than list pulls.
The third is the Nobu Series — and it’s the one that deserves the most attention.
Ten CFOs or finance leaders. A high-end sushi restaurant. A speaker from a public company walking through a real AI transformation story. No pitch at the table. Guy is explicit about this: “I’m not going to pitch you while I’m eating this sushi.”
The reaction from attendees is consistently surprise. The follow-up is consistently a call asking for a demo.
Neither the outbound nor the dinners performed at the level Nominal needed in isolation. The combination is what changed the math. “If you combine field marketing with go-to-market engineering, this is a combo that is unstoppable,” Guy said.
The mechanism behind why it works is something Guy describes as pushing value rather than pulling it. Every touchpoint — the researched outreach, the dinner, the speaker — delivers something real to the prospect before Nominal ever asks for anything. By the time the demo request comes, it comes from the prospect. That’s a fundamentally different sales dynamic than the one most outbound motions create.
Nominal also built an internal system to track ROI across every marketing channel and event. Most industry conferences didn’t survive the analysis. The ones that did — including a Gartner event Guy committed what he described as a seed-round-level budget to — earned their place with evidence, not assumption.
What the Next Phase Is Actually About
With the motion running, Guy’s focus for 2026 is something that doesn’t appear on a pipeline report.
“Our number one priority is customer love and focusing on the customer love and adoption of the product,” he said. “We have early signs of getting into this kind of flywheel of adoption.”
Referrals are already emerging as a channel. The thesis is straightforward: CFOs who have transformed their finance operations with Nominal take pride in it, and they tell people. That word-of-mouth becomes a GTM channel that no amount of outbound spend can replicate — because it carries the credibility of a peer recommending something they actually use.
For a company that started trying to sell to startups and now sits inside Fortune 50 finance teams, the next growth channel might be the simplest one to describe and the hardest one to manufacture: customers who can’t stop talking about it.
Guy Leibovitz is the Co-Founder and CEO of Nominal. Listen to the full episode on BUILDERS.
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