A Data-Driven GTM Machine for ERP Novum

At the end of 2020, ERP Novum GmbH, based in Liederbach am Taunus, Germany, approached us with a specific objective: build systematic outbound as a repeatable new-business channel.

The product made the challenge complex. ERP systems have long sales cycles. At the same time, the addressable market is limited, and a company that fits the ideal customer profile is not automatically a good lead at any given moment. Timing matters: the goal was to identify companies when their technology, organisation or processes were actually changing.

Our job was therefore not to produce the largest possible contact lists. We needed to determine which companies were relevant, which signals indicated potential buying need, and who within those organisations formed the buying center.

One of the central components was using job postings as a data source.

Recruiting activity reveals a surprising amount about a company's technology infrastructure. Required skills, systems and technologies allowed us to infer which solutions were already in use and how parts of the existing technology landscape were structured.

We used this information to further qualify the target market. Additional company and change signals included industry, corporate structure and relevant organisational changes.

A conventional target-account list therefore became a signal-based account model:

ICP → Company Data → Technology Signals → Trigger Events → Relevant Accounts

Instead of treating every theoretically suitable account equally, companies could be prioritised using observable signals.

The next step was identifying the relevant people within prioritised accounts.

Complex ERP decisions rarely involve a single decision-maker. We therefore looked beyond individual job titles and mapped the buying center.

For relevant accounts, the roles and contacts involved in the decision process were identified and connected with the context of the individual company.

This created the next layer of the system:

Account → Buying Signal → Buying Center → Contact → Relevant Messaging

Communication could therefore be tailored to both the situation of the company and the role of the recipient.

On this foundation, we built the acquisition infrastructure itself.

It connected:

Once the infrastructure had been built, the system moved into operational execution. It generated qualified interest as well as leads, MQLs and SQLs in a structured way and handed them over to ERP Novum's internal sales organisation.

That handoff marked the beginning of the next stage of the customer journey. Discovery, product and system evaluation, demos, proposals, negotiation, closing and ERP implementation were handled by ERP Novum and were outside our mandate.

Our contribution covered GTM structure, ICP, signal and trigger logic, data analysis, account qualification, buying-center and decision-maker identification, outreach and follow-up, and the generation and qualified handoff of leads, MQLs and SQLs.

The engagement ran from 2 December 2020 to 31 March 2022.

What started as the task of establishing a systematic outbound channel developed into a data-driven GTM infrastructure:

Hiring and company data → technology and need signals → account qualification → buying center → decision-makers → LinkedIn and email outreach → follow-up → qualified interest → handoff to ERP Novum

That is what makes the project relevant to our work today. The tools change. The underlying challenge remains the same: analysing commercial problems and building systems that connect data, processes, technology and people.

ERP Novum was acquired by the enventa Group in December 2024 and merged into enventa technical trade solutions GmbH in 2025.