Welcome to Season 3 of 10/10 GTM: The Podcast for Revenue Leaders!
Our guest for Episode 81 is Eric Agnew, CRO, Ignitium. Over the past seven years, Eric has played a pivotal role in the company's growth, serving in key leadership positions including CRO, VP of Customer Success, and VP of Account-Based Marketing. With 10+ years of experience in sales and marketing, Eric brings a wealth of insight to the conversation.
In this episode, Ross and Eric discuss why your clients' success directly drives your own, how authenticity builds trust and long-term value in business relationships, and why the race to find and engage buyers first determines who wins in the market.
Listen to the episode here, and get the key takeaways from our conversation below.
Client Success Drives Business Success
Long-term growth is built on the sustained success of your clients. It can be 5 to 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one, so investing in client relationships is essential.
“If we churn one of our clients, then we have to start that whole process over. It’s super time-consuming,” says Eric. “It’s a heavy lift on the team, plus we’re back to square one in the sales cycle, which in enterprise can be three to six months long.”
That’s why Eric and his team intentionally over-invest in the early stages of a client relationship, often committing two to three times the scoped hours in the first quarter. “The first year is sort of a loss leader,” he explains. “But if we do it right, we’ve got a client for five, six, seven years, and that’s where the real value is.”
That level of commitment also means your team has to become an extension of the client’s business. This approach doesn’t just deliver better results, it also reduces churn, grows accounts organically, and builds long-term partnerships. “In the early years of Igniteium, we grew incrementally by providing a ton of value to our clients and then expanding through them,” Eric shares. “That way, we didn’t have to focus so much on new logo acquisition — we just helped our clients win and grew with them.”
The main takeaway? If you help your customers hit their goals, you’ll hit yours too.
Authenticity Creates Lasting Success
Enterprise buyers are sharp, well-researched, and come to the table with high expectations. They’re trained to evaluate risk, and many have a highly tuned sense for what’s real and what’s not. “I think people have an innate radar for BS,” says Eric. “When you're interacting with people, there's like a spidey sense that goes off . . . they just know there's something off there.”
That’s why authenticity can’t be faked — it has to be real. It’s not just about what you're selling, but how you're showing up and interacting with them.
Eric takes a consultative approach to sales. “Somebody has a problem. They're seeking an answer to the problem. It's my job to help them. And if I'm going to try to establish a relationship that we want to last five plus years, they have to see the same me every time they talk to me. There has to be consistency.”
Consistency builds confidence — and confidence drives referrals.
In enterprise B2B tech and SaaS, word travels fast. “I always assumed the enterprise B2B market would be this gigantic universe,” Eric says. “It’s actually a fairly tight community. A good portion of our best leads and demo requests come from referrals.” When clients trust you, they share their experience at conferences, in workshops, or casual conversations with peers. That kind of reputation is built not just on delivering results, but on being genuine and dependable.
Whoever Finds the Buyers First Wins
Up to 80% of the B2B buying journey happens anonymously, which means that by the time someone fills out a form or requests a demo, they’re not looking for an entry-level overview of your solution, they’re looking for validation, specifics, and confidence that your product can solve their exact problem.
If you want to win, you have to find those buyers early — before they raise their hand.
“The buying committees are getting larger. The deal sizes are getting bigger. There’s increasing scrutiny from IT security and from procurement,” says Eric. “And as all of these deals get bigger and more complex, the people who are leading the efforts are having to do a lot of due diligence, and they’re doing it much, much sooner than you know that they’re doing it.”
That said, finding the buyer is only half the battle. Once identified, the buying process must be as smooth and frictionless as possible. That means ungating content, removing unnecessary steps, and enabling buyers to educate themselves easily because in a world where information is everywhere, adding friction just pushes buyers toward competitors who make it easier.
In the end, speed and simplicity win. “If you are the first person to engage with them,” Eric says, “you give yourself a huge, huge, huge first-mover advantage. You’re significantly more likely to win the deal if you’re the first one they interact with.
About Eric
Before joining Ignition over seven years ago, Eric spent a decade at Itron as a Senior Service Business Manager and also shared his expertise as a Marketing Professor at Gonzaga University.
He’s passionate about helping B2B companies succeed through Account-Based Marketing. To connect with Eric or follow his journey, find him on LinkedIn.
