Work-Bench

Another great day for NYC enterprise software in the books! 🚀🌆 Our Work-Bench NYC Pre-Seed GTM Summit brought together 80+ early-stage SaaS / Infra founders to dive into the proven playbooks for early enterprise GTM: 🤕 A Need Is Not the Pain Dig into the prospect’s acute pain. Why does this problem matter right now? If they do nothing, what’s the cost? Enterprise buyers only act when the pain of not acting > the pain of change. 🔬 Prep for Sales Calls Founders often underestimate how much research / prep is necessary. Create a doc before every call, ensuring you use the precious time effectively: What do we know about the company? Do we have similar customers or prospects? Who are our likely competitors for the sale? Etc. 📞 Your First Call Does Not Need a Demo Use the time to dive deeper into the problem. Demos tend to take up too much time showcasing logistics of the product vs. demoing the power of its solution resolution. If and when you demo, make sure that you customize it! 📧 Cold Emails Whenever possible, start with warm intros and referrals. But for cold emails, be sure to add some sort of VALUE! (something useful for the prospect like a benchmark report, an analysis, etc.). Do not just ask for a demo. It's ok to ask to get on the phone simply for product feedback (not even tied to a sale). 🙊 A Sales Meeting Is Only as Good as What You Ask, Not Say Founders go into sales meetings often ready to pitch. But the key to a great meeting is knowing what to ask - and listening carefully to what your prospects say. They may reveal a lot! 🤝 Be Authentic Sales doesn’t have to feel like “sales.” When you’re solving a real problem, you don’t feel like you're pestering prospects, you feel like you're building relationships with people you're trying to help. 🚀 “Stealth Mode is BS” Be active online from Day 1. Build your audience before you even have a final product. This will help you build trust in the community & industry experts…but most importantly gain cred when you don’t yet have customers/case studies to lean on in sales pitches. If you’re interested in getting the 28-page workbook we walked through during the sessions, drop your info: forms.gle/sE6JJPPzt1aqc8257

We’re thrilled to announce that Work-Bench led @zippedscript $2.6M Seed round! 🏫 Problem: Many of us have undergone a background check while applying for a new job, but don’t realize how complex the process can be for education verification - it's outdated and manual requiring emails, phone calls, and in-person visits. And this process is even more complex for international candidates. 🛠️ Solution: ZippedScript created a database of 20M+ pre-verified candidate degrees across multiple continents allowing them to validate a candidate’s education credentials with better speed, accuracy, affordability, and global coverage than traditional methods. They’re already working with leading background check companies worldwide 💪 More 'em out our blog! work-bench.com/post/announci…

1 week left until our NYC Pre-Seed GTM Summit! We have a few spots open, so if you're building in SaaS or Infra, apply to join: lu.ma/gtmsummit This is probably our most tactical event yet 🤓 we'll have tactics, templates & case studies on how to get your early GTM moving: ✔️ Finding your ICP ✔️ Testing channels & messaging that resonates ✔️ Nailing discovery & demo calls (most founders get this wrong) ✔️ Nurturing champions & closing customers ✔️ Scaling (hiring, automation...all that good stuff)

Join our next NY Enterprise Tech Meetup on 3/18 with 2 of NYC's top fintech eng leaders from @tryramp & @socureme 🔥 Our panelists: ​- @koblovinamerica Head of Eng at Ramp ​- Arun Kumar, CTO of Socure ​- @kelleymak GP Partner at Work-Bench How did Ramp and Socure build eng platforms to serve massive customers? We'll get into: 🛠️ Building a hypergrowth eng machine 🤓 Unconventional strategies to attract top talent 🤖 Examples of AI delivering ROI vs. hype 🎂 Baking security / compliance into product velocity 💰 Tactics for translating technical complexity into business outcomes lu.ma/March2025NYETM

Excited to announce the 3rd speaker joining our NYC Pre-Seed GTM Summit lineup: 🔥 @lorenc_dan Founder & CEO @chainguard_dev 🔥 ➡️ About Dan: Dan has been at the forefront of software supply chain security, building Chainguard into a category-defining company helping enterprises secure their software from source to production. Before that, he was an SWE at Google for close to a decade, where he worked on dev infrastructure, tooling, and OSS — helping start and maintain many popular open source projects like Minikube, Skaffold, Distroless, Tekton, Sigstore, and SLSA. ➡️ His Talk: ​Dan will share the real talk and lessons learned as a technical founder on all things GTM, scaling Chainguard from 0 to Series C -- from scaling a developer-first motion to what it takes to bring products to market to navigating enterprise adoption, and more. If you’re building in enterprise SaaS or Infra, don't miss this summit! 🗓️ Wed, March 12th 📍 IRL in NYC 🔗 lu.ma/gtmsummit

Enterprise sales is brutal when you’re just starting out. No brand recognition, no case studies...just you, cold emails, and an early product. 🤔💡But what if you had the exact outbound templates, discovery call questions, sales deck secrets, ​and B2B marketing channels priorities that actually work? Join our NYC Pre-Seed GTM Summit on March 12th! No fluff. No theory. Just battle-tested tactics. Spots are limited—apply now: lu.ma/gtmsummit

📣 Calling all Pre-Seed Enterprise, SaaS, & Infra Founders! Struggling to get your early GTM in motion? Join our half-day summit to hear the sales & marketing playbooks you need to land customers & scale fast: 🤝 Sales led by @knarsu Cut through the noise and turn outreach into rev. We'll break down: ▪️Outbound messages that get replies ▪️Discovery call Qs that uncover real pain points ▪️Sales deck secrets that get enterprise buyers 🎯 Marketing by led by @Rippling's @ryannarod How do you get to prospects with limited brand awareness & budget? Walk away knowing: ▪️Automated GTM play do & don'ts ▪️4 essential B2B marketing channels ▪️Must knows to bringing on a BDR 🚀 Why This Summit Is Different ✔ No fluff. No theory. Just battle-tested tactics. ✔ A room of Pre-Seed enterprise founders. ✔ Sessions led by operators who’ve been in your shoes. lu.ma/gtmsummit

Huge congrats to our portfolio company @prequel_dev & founders @asklyndon @snowboardvstree on their launch & $3.3M Seed round led by Work-Bench 🥳 The problem 🤕 Modern apps are becoming more complex for DevOps/SRE teams who are running into: - expertise limitations / bottlenecks - siloed teams - alert, data + dashboard overload - incident-driven problem detection - manual instrumentation Their solution ⚒️ A problem detection & management platform that harnesses precision identification & resolution to DevOps & SRE teams Read more about what they're building in @TechCrunch:

It's that time of year where we get to uncover (read: judge) our teammates Spotify Wrapped 2024 playlist 🤣 🌟We’ll send a @Work_Bench tee shirt to the 1st person who can guess @fendien #1 artist this year (#iykyk)👇

Thank you to everyone who joined our #Womenterprise event! We had a stellar panel on lessons selling AI products with GTM leaders @OpenAI @hebbia @runwayml ✨ It’s inspiring to have a packed house of women in 1 room connecting, collaborating & supporting one another. Some of the awesome feedback 🙏 ▪ While a lot is new with AI, sales fundamentals are still required ▪ Not everyone has AI totally figured out yet ▪ Women in tech events are rare, but so needed

Every founder needs a consistent, always-on top-of-funnel engine to maintain a steady stream of prospects To tackle this challenge, we hosted an Enterprise Masterclass with Robin Izsak-Tseng, growth marketing leader from @BetterCloud & @G2dotcom covering 👇 5 battle-tested campaign examples: 1⃣The Big Idea: Creative, High-Impact Collab 2⃣The Scrappy: Small Budget, Big Results 3⃣The Recycle: Repurposing Content 4⃣The Scale: Automated Engagement at Scale 5⃣The Whale: Long-Term ABM for High-Value Targets To get into the campaigns & for more context – see the full masterclass slides / recording: work-bench.com/playbooks/how…

Level up your customer retention game 💪🚀 For our next Enterprise Masterclass this Wednesday, our Sales advisor @knarsu will walk through his framework for building a rock-solid post-sales model ​Whether you're a founder going at it alone or a scaled-out sales team, RSVP👇 lu.ma/PostSales

First time enterprise founder setting out to fundraise? This podcast episode is for you. Our GP @fendien digs into the various VC models out there investing at the seed stage & what each can offer. 👇

On today's webinar on generating a consistent top of funnel: "If no one knows who you are, its going to make your lead gen and demand gen efforts that much more painful...brand is the wind beneath the demand gen wings" 💸

Last chance to snag a spot! If you're free today at 1PM ET, join us as we walk through 5 battle-tested (& inexpensive) campaigns to build a sustainable & predictable top-of-funnel engine🌪️💪 lu.ma/GrowthMarketing

💡If you could ask Geoff Charles (VP of Product @tryramp) & Mihika Kapoor (Product Lead @figma) anything about their product strategy…what would it be? 🤔 Next week, we’re hosting a live podcast recording with these 2 incredible product leaders & we want to know your burning questions!⬇️

Many teams focus on moving prospects down the funnel that, when they finally come up for air, their top-of-funnel pipeline has dried up. 🧠Join our next Masterclass to learn how to build a consistent, always-on, always delivering top-of-funnel engine ensures that you avoid these gaps and maintain a steady stream of prospects. lu.ma/GrowthMarketing

Come join a very special NY Enterprise Tech Meetup w/ the product leaders behind 2 of the fastest growing & widely adopted products in their space: 🔥 @geoffintech, VP of Product at @tryramp He played a pivotal role in the development of 60+ products & features in 2023 alone. 🔥 @mihikapoor, Product Lead at @figma She was voted the #1 PM to work with by @lennysan's product community & is known as Figma’s go-to leading 0-to-1 products. 🔥 Moderator = @jerseejess, GP at Work-Bench lu.ma/NYETMOctober24

Check out what our associate @psomrah has been up to at #RaySummit this week! ⬇️⬇️⬇️