Business Growth - Nilanjay Ghura

Venture Capital & Startups, Business Growth

Why Paid Ads Agencies Aren’t Always the Right Fit for B2B Enterprise Startups

May 1, 2026 No Comments

Let me start with a confession. I once spent months working with a paid ads agency, paying them a monthly and at the end of it we had a dashboard showing hundreds of “leads” and almost zero real pipeline.

That experience taught me something I wish someone had told me earlier. The standard paid ads playbook, the one that built half the D2C brands you scroll past on Instagram, doesn’t translate to B2B startups selling into the enterprise segment.

This isn’t an anti-agency rant. There are good paid ads agencies out there. The problem is structural. The way most agencies are set up to work, the metrics they optimize for, the way they price themselves. None of it is built for the reality of B2B enterprise selling.

Let me walk through why.

Your Audience Isn’t Searching for You

Most paid ads strategies start with a simple assumption. There’s a pool of people out there who already want what you’re selling, and your job is to find them.

That works beautifully for B2C. Someone wants new sneakers. They’ve Googled it. They’ve liked sneaker pages on Instagram. Meta knows. Google knows. You buy ads, you show up at the right moment, you make the sale.

In B2B enterprise, that assumption falls apart almost completely.

Take a startup like Nymiz. They’re building an AI privacy segment, helping companies protect sensitive information from leaking into LLMs and AI tools. How many enterprise buyers are typing “AI privacy tool to stop sensitive data going to LLMs” into Google every day? Almost none. Because the category itself is still being built. The buyer doesn’t know the solution exists. In many cases, they don’t even know they have the problem yet.

Most B2B startups I’ve worked with are in this same boat. They’re not competing for existing demand. They’re creating a new category. And you can’t keyword-target a category that doesn’t exist in the buyer’s vocabulary.

Interest-Based Targeting Doesn’t Really Work Either

Okay, fine, what about Meta? You can target by interest, right?

Sort of. For B2C, you can layer interests like “running” plus “Nike” plus “marathon training” and find people who probably want your shoe.

For B2B enterprise, what’s the interest? “CISO of a 500-person company who’s worried about AI compliance”? That’s not an interest checkbox. LinkedIn lets you target by job title and company size, which is closer, but even there, the person isn’t actively scrolling to find solutions. They’re between meetings, glancing at their feed, looking at a friend’s promotion post.

You can put your ad in front of exactly the right person, and they still won’t engage. Because they aren’t in buying mode.

Enterprise Buyers Don’t Convert in a Click

This is the part that breaks the entire paid ads model.

An enterprise sale isn’t an impulse purchase. It involves multiple stakeholders, security reviews, procurement, legal, a pilot, an internal champion, budget approvals, and usually leadership signoff.

In my experience, the best case sales cycle for a B2B enterprise deal is around 6 months. And that’s when there’s already a small market segment forming. If you’re truly creating a new category, double that.

Now ask yourself. What does an ad campaign that runs for one month actually tell you about whether your strategy is working? Almost nothing. The results take quarters to materialize, sometimes a full year. By the time you have meaningful data, you’ve already spent a lot of money.

The Lead Definition Mismatch

Here’s where it really starts to hurt your wallet.

For a B2B startup, a lead is someone who’s BANT qualified. They have Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline. At minimum, they’ve sat through a discovery call with your sales rep and there’s something real on the table.

For a paid ads agency, a lead is someone who filled out a form. Or clicked the ad. Or downloaded the whitepaper. None of which has any reliable correlation with whether that person will ever speak to your sales team, let alone buy from you.

You’ll get monthly reports celebrating 200 leads. Your sales team will tell you 8 of them picked up the phone, 1 booked a meeting, and that one was a student doing research for a college project.

That gap between the agency’s definition of a lead and your definition of a lead is where most of your money quietly disappears.

The Pricing Model Is Built for Someone Else

Most paid ads agencies charge a fixed monthly retainer plus a percentage on top of your ad spend. Usually somewhere between 10 to 20 percent.

This model works fine for B2C. You can see if campaigns are converting within weeks. If something’s broken, you fix it fast, and the percentage you’re paying the agency is justified by the revenue coming through.

For B2B enterprise startups, this model is brutal.

You’re paying a retainer plus a percentage of spend for months while you wait for actual SQLs to materialize. The agency has zero financial incentive to optimize for the metric that matters to you, because they get paid the same whether your sales team converts those leads or not.

Burning cash on a model where the agency’s compensation is completely decoupled from your actual revenue outcomes is one of the fastest ways to drain your runway and walk into a liquidity crunch.

The Time I Tried to Fix This

I once tried to renegotiate with an agency we were working with.

My proposal was simple. Keep the fixed monthly retainer, drop the percentage on ad spend, and instead pay a bonus on every SQL their campaigns generated. Real skin in the game. Reward them for outcomes, not just activity.

The agency wasn’t happy. They didn’t want their compensation tied to anything beyond running the campaigns themselves. We parted ways shortly after.

That conversation told me everything I needed to know. If an agency isn’t willing to have any portion of their fee tied to your real outcome, it’s because they don’t believe in their ability to influence that outcome. Which is a problem, because that’s exactly what you’re hiring them for.

So Should You Avoid Agencies Entirely?

No. That’s the wrong takeaway.

Paid ads agencies can deliver results for B2B startups. But there is a catch!

You have to reframe what you’re hiring them for.

They’re not your demand generation team. They’re not your strategists. They’re not the people who are going to figure out your ICP, your messaging, your category positioning, or your funnel design.

They’re operators. People who are good at running campaigns, optimizing creative, managing bids, and handling the platform-level work. That’s it.

The strategy, the targeting hypotheses, the messaging, the analysis of what’s actually converting into pipeline, the optimization decisions. All of that has to live with you. Or with someone in-house who owns the revenue number.

Outsource the execution. Keep the thinking.

If you do that, an agency can be a useful extension of your team. If you hand them the steering wheel and expect them to deliver SQLs while you focus on product, you’ll wake up six months later with a depleted bank balance and a polished slide deck explaining why none of the leads converted.

Closing Thought

Treat the agency as an operator, not a strategist or a co-founder committed to closing revenue. You own the strategy and optimization layer. Their job is to execute against it. Guide them accordingly, and the relationship works. Hand them the wheel, and it won’t.

Business Growth, Life Lessons

Sales Is Hard. Staying Positive Is Harder. Here’s What I Learned

March 28, 2026 No Comments

There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from two bad quarters in a row.

It’s not just tiredness. It’s the weight of knowing your team is working hard, you’re working hard, and the results just aren’t showing up. Deals are getting stuck in procurement. Deals are going to lost. The pipeline looks okay on paper but nothing is closing. You’re doing stand-ups, reviewing calls, adjusting messaging and still, nothing moves.

I have recently experienced it. And what I learned during that period had less to do with sales tactics and more to do with something far more basic: the mood I chose to walk into every single day.

Two Quarters of “Why Isn’t This Working?”

It started with one missed quarter. That’s not unusual in sales, targets are ambitious by design, and one miss is something most teams can absorb. But when the next quarter started heading the same direction, the pressure shifted into something different.

From the outside, it looked like a pipeline problem. From the inside, it felt like everything was slightly broken at once. Deals that should have closed were stuck in review. Deals that had good momentum went silent. Some got marked lost without a clear reason. Every week felt like treading water.

What made it harder was that this pressure wasn’t just internal. As someone in a leadership role, I was also facing my boses and investors. And facing them when the numbers aren’t moving is genuinely one of the most uncomfortable places to be in. They ask tough questions. They want real answers. And the honest answer sometimes is: we don’t fully know yet, but we’re working on it.

That’s a hard thing to say. And it’s even harder to say it and then walk back into the office and lead a team that needs energy from you.

Negativity Doesn’t Announce Itself

Here’s the thing about negativity in a sales environment: it rarely shows up as someone throwing a chair across the room. It’s much quieter than that.

It shows up as a team that stops bringing problems forward because they expect to be blamed. It shows up as deals sitting stale in the CRM because no one wants to flag that they’re stuck. It shows up as a gradual drop in the quality of conversations, fewer ideas, fewer questions, fewer people willing to take a risk on a creative approach.

I noticed this and asked myself a simple question: where is this starting from?

The uncomfortable answer was that it was partly starting from me. Not intentionally, but when leadership is visibly stressed, visibly frustrated, asking “why didn’t this work?” more than “how do we fix this?”, it spreads. People pick up on that energy faster than any company memo.

Sales teams are made up of people who deal with rejection every single day. Their resilience is not unlimited. If the environment they come back to after a tough call is also negative, you’ve taken away the one place where they can reset and try again.

The Question That Changed How I Led

Somewhere in those two quarters, I made a deliberate shift in how I showed up to deal reviews and team conversations.

I stopped asking “why are we losing this?” and started asking “how can I help unblock this?”

It sounds small. It isn’t.

The first question puts a person on the defensive. They come to the meeting ready to explain themselves, not ready to problem-solve. The second question signals that we’re on the same side, that my job is to help them succeed, not to audit their failures.

Practically, this looked like: when a deal went stuck, instead of reviewing what went wrong, we’d spend the first ten minutes asking what we could still do. Could we bring in a different stakeholder? Could we offer a pilot? Was there a case study we hadn’t shared yet? Was there something the prospect hadn’t told us directly that we could read between the lines?

Sometimes there was nothing more to do. But often, there was at least one thing we hadn’t tried. And that one thing was only visible when the person who owned the deal felt safe enough to think creatively rather than defensively.

Positivity, in a sales context, is not about pretending things are fine. It’s about refusing to let the bad results become the ceiling for what your team believes is possible.

You Can’t Outsource Your Mood

The other thing I had to get honest with myself about was this: no one was going to manage my mindset for me.

When you’re facing your bosses and investors with bad news, when deals aren’t closing, when you’re two quarters in and you’re tired, it’s tempting to let that exhaustion set the tone for the day. I’ve felt it.

But in sales, and especially in a leadership role, your energy is contagious in both directions. If you show up flat, your team feels it. If you show up with a clear head and a “let’s figure this out” approach, they feel that too.

My routine during those two quarters became very deliberate. I’d start the morning without immediately jumping into pipeline reviews or Slack. I’d give myself twenty minutes to think, plan, and get into the right headspace before engaging with the team. Not because I was avoiding reality but because I knew that how I engaged with reality was something I could actually control.

There’s a version of positivity that is naive, the kind that ignores warning signs and pretends everything is great when it isn’t. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the kind of positivity that acknowledges “this is hard” and then asks “what are we doing about it?” rather than sitting in the hard part.

Preparing For The Next Quarter

Two bad quarters are behind us. Next one is about to begin. I don’t know how it will go, no one does. There are no guarantees in sales, and I’ve stopped pretending otherwise.

What I do know is this: we’re showing up.

Not with blind optimism. Not pretending the last six months didn’t happen. But with a clear head, a team that still believes something can be done, and the discipline to take the next right action even when the mood isn’t perfect.

That’s really what staying positive in sales comes down to. It’s not a feeling. It’s a decision you make every morning, to do the work anyway. To make the call anyway. To follow up on the stuck deal anyway. Small actions, done consistently, even when the results aren’t showing up yet.

A bad result from a full day’s work is always better than no result from a day spent paralysed by the bad quarter behind you.

If you’re in a rough patch right now, missing targets, losing deals you thought were solid, facing pressure from above and below, I won’t promise that staying positive will fix your pipeline. It won’t, not directly.

But it will keep you in the game long enough to let the work start paying off. And you can’t win a quarter you’ve already mentally checked out of.

Show up. Do the small things. The scoreboard will catch up.

Business Growth

Founder vs Sales Rep-Led Sales: My Experience

June 7, 2025 No Comments

A colleague recently said something that stuck with me: “We can’t compare this year’s numbers to last year’s because the founders were leading sales back then.” That single comment opened a floodgate of reflection. In 2025, we shifted from founder-led to sales rep-led selling, and the differences have been striking. It goes beyond numbers—this change influences, the velocity of deals, and how consistently you can close them.

The Magic of Founder-Led Sales

Deep Product Knowledge = Shorter Sales Cycles

When founders sell, it’s not just about pitching a product—it’s about sharing something they’ve built brick by brick. They understand every use case, every feature limitation, and every hidden superpower of the product. So when clients throw curveball questions during technical demos, founders rarely need to “get back to you.” They answer right there, reducing turnaround time drastically. The client walks away with confidence, not a list of unanswered questions.

Instant Decisions During Negotiation

Founders also own the numbers. They know the margins. When a negotiation hits a pricing hurdle, they can instantly make calls—whether it’s a strategic discount or a custom deal structure—without needing approvals. This agility in decision-making helps maintain momentum and avoid stalls.

The Reality of Sales Rep-Led Sales

Onboarding Takes Time—And That Costs You

Now flip the script. Your rep is new. They’ve gone through onboarding, sat through internal demos, maybe even shadowed a few calls. But let’s be honest: it takes at least 3 months before a sales rep is fully ramped. During that ramp-up period, you’re essentially training them while hoping they’ll bring in revenue.

And even after ramp-up, they might still stumble on complex technical questions. That starts a game of ping-pong between sales and tech, and every delay adds friction to the buyer’s journey.

The Negotiation Bottleneck

Then comes the dreaded pricing talk. Rarely—especially in enterprise SaaS—do clients say “yes” to the original price. If you sell annual-licenses, with upfront-payments, the resistance is even stronger. Sales reps must now navigate internal pricing approvals, which adds layers of delay and undermines their ability to close with confidence.

The Underestimated Complexity of the Sales Funnel

And here’s the kicker: these are just the obvious problems.

When you’re looking at your sales pipeline on paper, everything seems neat—Meeting > Demo > Tech Evaluation > Negotiation > Close. But in practice, each stage hides its own chaos.

For instance, your rep-led team has an amazing “Meeting Qualified to Demo Done” conversion rate. But when it comes to “Demo to Technical Evaluation,” they hit a wall. Why? Because of issues like API incompatibility with the client’s infrastructure or product accuracy, etc. No CRM dashboard will tell you that—you need to dig deep to uncover it.

Fixing the Leaks Before Q4

Right now, I am trying to diagnose and fix these issues in the pipeline. We’ve removed founders from direct sales in 2025, and yes, the pipeline has taken a hit. But this shift also forced us to treat sales as a system—a process that must work without founder heroics.

The only way to fix it? Identify where exactly the conversions drop, why they drop, and build internal knowledge systems, pricing tools, and enablement content to bridge those gaps. Integration issues? Build an FAQ and demo kit. Accuracy concerns? Add clarity to the onboarding material. It’s time consuming but every small fix compounds!

Final Thoughts: Founder-Led Sales Aren’t Scalable

Founder-led sales might seem like a cheat code—but they’re not sustainable. They mask flaws in your product, processes, and pricing strategy. When founders sell, they’re plugging those gaps manually. When sales reps sell, those gaps become obvious—and painful.

But that’s a good thing. Because now, you can fix them.

I’m currently in this transition and will share how Q4 unfolds in a follow-up article. In the meantime, if you’re moving from founder-led to rep-led sales, think of each sales rep as a lens. The obstacles they face often reveal the hidden weaknesses in your overall sales process.