A Panaya Story: The second growth engine question

At a glance

The SAP business was working. That was almost the problem.

Panaya had real traction in the SAP ecosystem. The product was proving itself, deals were closing, and the team knew the market well. From the outside, things looked solid.

But inside the company, a harder question was starting to surface. How far could the SAP motion really scale? And was there a second engine sitting in the Salesforce ecosystem that nobody had properly tested yet?

It’s a question a lot of successful B2B companies avoid asking, because the answer might require uncomfortable investment or an uncomfortable pass. Panaya decided to find out.

Conviction built on gut isn’t a strategy

The temptation, when a new market looks attractive, is to move. Write the messaging, build some content, send the sales team in and see what sticks. It’s fast. It’s also how companies waste twelve months chasing a market that was never going to convert.

Forabilis took a different approach. Before building anything for the Salesforce opportunity, the work started with 20+ structured market interviews. Real conversations with real buyers and operators in the Salesforce ecosystem, designed to stress-test whether the opportunity was genuine, what the right entry point looked like, and whether Panaya’s existing strengths would actually translate.

That kind of validation doesn’t feel like marketing work. It is, though. It’s the work that makes every downstream investment sharper.

The right answer was worth more than a fast answer

What came back from the interviews wasn’t just a green light or a red one. It was a map. Where the real demand sat. How buyers in the Salesforce ecosystem thought about the problem. What messaging would land and what would miss. Which entry points made sense given Panaya’s position and which were longer plays.

From that foundation, Forabilis built the strategic go-to-market plan. Messaging developed specifically for the Salesforce opportunity. A market entry approach grounded in what the research actually showed.

Panaya went into the Salesforce market knowing what it was walking into. That’s a different starting position than most companies manage.

Knowing before spending is its own kind of result

There’s no nine-figure exit attached to this story. The impact here is strategic clarity, which is harder to put on a slide but often more valuable than a campaign that ran without it.

Twenty-plus interviews. A validated market thesis. A go-to-market plan that reflected reality. For a company weighing a serious new investment, that’s the foundation that makes everything else work.

The best growth decisions aren’t the boldest ones. They’re the ones made with the clearest picture of what’s actually there.

Expanding into a new market is easier to do badly than to do well. If you’re weighing a new segment, a new ecosystem, or a new buyer, and you want to validate before you build, let’s talk.