Why Higharc Spent $0 on BDRs: The Enterprise Sales Playbook for Traditional Industries

Why Higharc Spent $0 on BDRs: The Enterprise Sales Playbook for Traditional Industries

Every enterprise SaaS playbook starts the same way: hire BDRs to fill the pipeline, then bring in AEs to close deals. Sales development creates predictable pipeline. Account executives harvest it.

Higharc ignored all of it. The company sells $300,000 ACV software to homebuilders with zero BDRs and zero cold outbound sequences. Their entire sales motion runs on strategic account executives and a three-person marketing team.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Marc Minor, CEO and Co-Founder of Higharc, explained why the standard enterprise sales playbook breaks when selling to industries that don’t behave like tech companies.

The Buyer Reality That Breaks Standard Playbooks

Homebuilders don’t act like software buyers. They don’t browse G2 reviews or respond to cold LinkedIn messages. “We still encounter a lot of customers who have Earthlink web addresses,” Marc notes. “They’re very boots on the ground type people, type companies,” he explains.

This creates a fundamental mismatch with standard SaaS sales motions. BDRs work when buyers engage through digital channels. Cold email works when prospects check email regularly. LinkedIn ads work when decision-makers spend time on LinkedIn.

None of those assumptions hold in traditional industries. Higharc tried them all. “Cold outbound sequences don’t really work for us at all,” Marc says. LinkedIn ads generated no results. The entire top-of-funnel machine that powers most enterprise SaaS simply didn’t function.

What Actually Works: Strategic AEs Over Volume

Instead of building a pipeline machine, Higharc invested differently. “We’ve definitely invested primarily in extremely strong and strategic AE’s. We don’t have any BDRs,” Marc explains.

BDRs optimize for volume—more calls, more emails, more meetings. Strategic AEs optimize for relationship depth and industry knowledge. Many come from the industry itself. “Often they come from customers of ours, which is interesting, or prospects of ours. They have a history there,” Marc notes.

In traditional industries, credibility comes from industry knowledge, not sales technique. A BDR reading a script about CAD software doesn’t build confidence with a 20-year homebuilding veteran. An AE who worked in homebuilding and understands their operational challenges does.

Marketing as Sales Enablement

When you eliminate BDRs, marketing’s role transforms. It’s no longer about generating MQLs or filling a funnel. “Marketing team’s job then is really to enable them and to give customer prospects a reason to spend some time with us because they’re just so busy,” Marc explains.

The challenge isn’t awareness. Homebuilders know they have problems with disconnected systems. The challenge is earning the right to a conversation. “The challenge is typically getting in the room,” Marc says.

Physical video mailers with built-in screens playing case studies worked exceptionally well. At $30-50 per unit, sending 50 mailers that generate one $300K deal is worth it. They generated multiple deals.

The principle: match your tactics to how your buyers actually discover and evaluate solutions.

The Trust Network Distribution Model

In homebuilding, everyone knows everyone. It’s not a market—it’s a network. “Home building is quite local. Everyone kind of knows each other,” Marc explains. “If you think of home building in the US as a kind of network graph and there are these nodes of trust, you know, we want to tap those nodes of trust and then leverage success with those nodes to reach the other parts of the market.”

This fundamentally changes the sales strategy. In typical SaaS, you optimize for pipeline velocity. In trust networks, you optimize for reference quality—how successful your existing customers are and how willing they are to vouch for you.

“Whenever you are a kind of system of record, you know, or like a mission critical type tool, the path is always going to be through successful customers,” Marc says. “And so we’ve invested pretty heavily in implementation, onboarding, and support.”

It’s slower than standard sales development but more efficient long-term because successful customers become your distribution engine.

The ABM Approach That Matches the Model

Without BDRs generating volume, Higharc needed a different way to engage target accounts. They identify 15-25 ideal prospects, pull floor plans from their websites, import them into Higharc, and create personalized landing pages showing prospects their own homes in 3D.

“We’re going to go to their website, grab a bunch of their plans that from their website and we’re going to actually like set up, we’re going to set up an account in Higharc with their plans,” Marc explains. The landing pages are persona-specific, showing different value propositions to designers versus salespeople.

This solves the “getting in the room” problem by showing prospects their actual business already in the platform.

The Underlying Principle

The deeper lesson isn’t about BDRs specifically. It’s about matching your go-to-market motion to your buyer’s reality instead of forcing buyers to match your preferred motion.

Most SaaS companies optimize for what works in tech because that’s what case studies document. But conventional wisdom assumes buyers who live online, engage with content marketing, and evaluate tools through software lenses.

When those assumptions break, the playbook breaks too. The solution isn’t tweaking tactics—it’s rebuilding the motion around how your actual buyers discover solutions, build confidence, and make decisions. For Higharc, that meant no BDRs, strategic AEs, trust network distribution, and marketing as sales enablement.

Your industry might require something different. But the principle holds: study your buyers, not other SaaS companies.