Growth in a company that runs on ERP: quarters, not sprints

Most growth advice is written for a company where a buyer can swipe a card on Tuesday. You run a two-week sprint. A test goes live, the result comes back, you go again. The loop is the product.

Now put that loop inside a company that sells ERP. The buyer cannot say yes alone. The budget moves on a quarterly rhythm nobody in marketing controls. IT has an opinion about your lead form, and it is not a small one. Run the startup loop here and you will produce a lot of motion and very little pipeline.

I ran growth and the website at Symfonia, a Polish ERP and business software vendor, as Head of Growth & Web Development. The first thing I had to unlearn was cadence.

The cycle is not slow because people are slow

It is slow because it is a sequence of approvals that each have their own calendar. Finance opens a window. Security asks for a review. IT checks what the thing touches. Procurement wants a second vendor for comparison. None of those steps is unreasonable and none of them can be skipped by writing a better email.

The practical consequence is that a lead created in March is not a failure in April. It is on schedule. If your reporting says otherwise, the reporting is wrong before the campaign is.

How the same lead reads

On a SaaS clock

Thirty day attribution window. No opportunity after four weeks, so the campaign gets cut and the budget moves to whatever fires fastest.

Reports your best work as a loss

On an enterprise clock

Window set to a real cycle length. Assisted conversions scored. The March lead is tracked as live through committee, not written off.

Reports what actually happened

IT sits on the buying committee

This is the part most marketers get backwards. In an ERP business IT is not the department that says no to your tag manager. It has a seat where the decision is made, and its question is never “is this a nice product”. It is “what does this touch, who owns it after we sign, and what breaks in our stack”.

That changes what you publish. A feature page written for a marketing director is invisible to the person who will actually decide. The material that moves an enterprise deal answers integration, data residency, migration effort and support model, in the vocabulary of the person who has to live with the consequences.

It also changes your own site. When I rebuilt the Symfonia site, the migration ran with CMS integration and monitoring and went live without disruption, because IT was in the plan from the start rather than consulted at cutover. That is the same discipline applied inward.

The operating model that works

Six things, and only one of them is a campaign.

1. Set the clock to the real cycle. Measure a full cycle end to end before you judge anything. Then set the attribution window to that length and score assisted conversions. Everything downstream depends on this number being honest.

2. Run parallel, not fast. You cannot compress one deal. What you can raise is the number of deals in flight at any one time. That costs no extra headcount, and it is where enterprise growth actually comes from.

3. Segment the pages, not just the list. One page per industry and per role beats a general page with a dropdown. At Symfonia the segmented landing pages plus CRO testing plus CRM routing lifted lead generation 30%.

4. Route on the segment, immediately. A lead that waits two days for someone to assign it has already lost the only speed advantage available to you. Routing rules in the CRM, tied to the segment the page belongs to.

5. Write for the committee, not the champion. Your champion needs ammunition to sell internally when you are not in the room. Give them the integration answer, the security answer and the migration answer as material they can forward.

6. Publish on the governance calendar. Content operations in a large organisation means approvals, legal review and brand rules. Build the calendar around them instead of treating them as friction. SEO automation and content governance are what keep organic compounding while the approvals happen.

Do

• Measure a full buying cycle before setting any attribution window
• Increase the number of deals in flight instead of trying to shorten one
• Write integration, security and migration answers as first-class pages
• Route leads on segment the moment they arrive
• Treat legal and brand approval as a fixed input to the publishing calendar

Don't

• Judge a campaign on a thirty day window
• Send committee buyers to a page written for a marketing director
• Let IT meet your plan for the first time at launch
• Optimise for form fills that no salesperson picks up the same week
• Assume a redesign moves pipeline on its own

What to watch

The dashboard is different from the SaaS one, and smaller.

None of this is exotic. It is the same growth work on a different clock. Operators rarely bring the wrong tactics into enterprise. They bring a two-week clock into a business that runs on a three-month one, then decide the tactics failed.

If you are running growth somewhere with a long cycle and a committee, start by measuring one full cycle end to end. Most of what looks broken turns out to be on schedule.