For Israeli startups building vertical-defining software products, expanding to the U.S. market is not just a growth lever, it’s a strategic imperative. As one of the largest, most competitive, and innovation-driven markets in the world, the U.S. is the target market for most of these companies. Starting your journey in the States can be challenging, which is why we work closely with our portfolio companies to ensure they navigate this transition with confidence, focus, and the right support infrastructure.
Why the U.S.?
1. Market Size and Buying Power
The U.S. remains the largest global market for enterprise software, with trillions of dollars in annual IT and SaaS spending. Whether you’re selling to SMBs or Fortune 500s, the customer base is vast, mature, and increasingly receptive to innovation. From cybersecurity to fintech, dev tools to vertical SaaS, the purchasing power and deal velocity in the U.S. are unmatched.
2. Customer Sophistication
U.S. customers are often early adopters. They demand clarity on ROI, integration capabilities, and scalability, and are willing to pay for quality. Winning early U.S. customers not only brings revenue but helps you refine your value proposition faster through higher feedback density.
3. Global Signaling
A foothold in the U.S. enhances your company’s global credibility. American logos on your homepage boost perception in Europe, LATAM, and APAC. In many cases, success in the U.S. becomes the bridge to global expansion.
Our Approach: Born International
Strategic GTM Guidance
From day one, we do everything we can to help founders build a tailored go-to-market strategy for the U.S., based on their stage, product, and ICP. From sales motion planning to pricing strategy, hiring your first U.S. boots-on-the-ground to selecting the right legal and operational structure, we’re in the trenches with you.
The Mentor Edge
We have a network of expert operators – VPs of Sales, CROs, GTM leaders, and founders who’ve scaled Israeli startups in the U.S. and connect our founders with hands-on support at every critical moment. These mentors are funded directly by Horizon Capital and are selected for their relevance to your specific vertical and stage.
U.S. Investor Connectivity
When it’s time for Series A, Israeli startups often need the right exposure to U.S. funds for growth rounds. We proactively connect our portfolio to top-tier American VCs, helping shape narratives, pitch decks, and market positioning to ensure a strong fit.
Community and Peer Learning
Our portfolio founders benefit from closed sessions and roundtables with others at the same expansion stage. We believe in collective learning. Often, the fastest answers come not from Google, but from another founder who just did it two quarters ago.
Conclusion
U.S. expansion isn’t a one-off event; it’s a process that should begin early in a startup’s journey. As investors, we become part of your company and stay engaged across every phase: market validation, GTM setup, scaling sales, post-Series A growth, and even post-exit. We’re not in the business of passive capital, we’re committed to being a value-adding partner through every milestone.
Have more questions about how we support our portfolio? Visit our FAQ page.
The rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs), Generative AI (GenAI), and Agentic AI is reshaping how SaaS companies approach customer acquisition, onboarding, and expansion. These AI-driven technologies are impacting both Product-Led Growth (PLG) and Sales-Led Growth (SLG) by optimizing user engagement, reducing sales friction, and increasing operational efficiency.
As startups evaluate their growth strategies, understanding how AI influences self-serve PLG models and high-touch SLG approaches is crucial for building a scalable and competitive SaaS business.
AI’s Impact on Product-Led Growth (PLG)
1. AI-Driven Self-Serve Onboarding
One of the key advantages of PLG is that users can explore and adopt a product without human intervention. AI significantly enhances this process by:
Automating onboarding workflows through interactive chatbots and AI-driven guides.
Providing real-time support using LLM-powered virtual assistants that instantly answer questions and resolve issues.
Adapting the user experience dynamically, offering personalized tutorials based on behavioral data.
For example, Notion AI improves self-serve adoption by auto-generating documentation and personalized onboarding flows, helping users get immediate value from the product.
2. AI-Enhanced Customer Support and Retention
A core challenge of PLG is retaining users who may abandon the product due to onboarding difficulties or lack of engagement. AI-powered support systems address this by:
Using GenAI chatbots to handle common customer inquiries, reducing reliance on human support teams.
Predicting churn risks based on user behavior and proactively engaging at-risk customers.
Providing AI-generated knowledge bases that dynamically update with relevant answers based on common user questions.
For instance, Intercom’s AI-driven support system automates 60 to 80 percent of customer interactions, allowing companies to scale customer success without increasing headcount.
3. AI-Powered Growth and Expansion
PLG companies rely on usage-based expansion, where users gradually adopt more features or move to higher-tier plans. AI optimizes this process by:
Identifying high-intent users and nudging them toward premium features with predictive analytics.
Personalizing in-app recommendations based on user activity.
Automating upsell and cross-sell campaigns through AI-driven email sequences and push notifications.
Figma leverages AI to analyze user behavior and suggest design enhancements, encouraging users to engage more deeply with the product and upgrade their plans.
4. Agentic AI Automating Growth at Scale
Agentic AI enables fully autonomous AI workflows that operate without human intervention. In a PLG model, these AI-driven agents can:
Automate content creation for marketing, reducing the cost of customer acquisition.
Optimize product onboarding in real-time, adjusting UI elements dynamically to improve conversion rates.
Conduct A/B testing autonomously, fine-tuning pricing and feature rollouts without manual input.
Zapier’s AI agents allow businesses to automate complex workflows, reducing friction in the onboarding process and improving user retention.
AI’s Impact on Sales-Led Growth (SLG)
1. AI-Driven Lead Scoring and Prospecting
Sales-led organizations depend on identifying high-quality leads and converting them through direct engagement. AI enhances this process by:
Predicting lead conversion likelihood based on historical data and engagement patterns.
Automating lead nurturing through AI-generated personalized emails and LinkedIn outreach.
Extracting insights from unstructured data, such as analyzing website visits, email responses, and social media activity, to prioritize leads.
Gong.io, for example, leverages AI to analyze sales calls and identify conversation patterns that correlate with successful deal closures.
2. AI-Enhanced Sales Engagement
AI improves sales conversations by providing real-time insights and automating manual tasks. AI-powered sales tools now:
Generate personalized email sequences tailored to each lead.
Offer real-time conversation coaching during calls, suggesting responses and handling objections.
Analyze customer sentiment to adjust sales strategies dynamically.
Salesforce’s Einstein AI assists sales teams by drafting follow-up emails, summarizing key meeting insights, and providing data-driven recommendations for deal progression.
3. AI for Account Expansion and Customer Success
In a sales-led model, long-term revenue growth comes from expanding existing accounts. AI optimizes account management by:
Predicting upsell and renewal opportunities based on product usage patterns.
Automating customer success workflows, ensuring proactive engagement with key accounts.
Identifying potential churn risks and triggering AI-driven interventions.
HubSpot AI helps customer success teams track account health scores and recommend upsell opportunities, ensuring a data-driven approach to account expansion.
4. Agentic AI Automating Sales Workflows
Agentic AI is now capable of automating entire sales processes, allowing sales teams to focus on high-value interactions. AI-driven sales agents can:
Auto-schedule meetings and follow-ups with minimal human intervention.
Generate and negotiate contracts using AI-powered legal tools.
Analyze competitor pricing and suggest optimal deal structures.
Regie.ai automates outbound sales prospecting by generating highly targeted email and LinkedIn messages, significantly improving response rates.
The Future: A Hybrid PLG + SLG AI Strategy
Many successful SaaS companies are adopting a hybrid growth model that combines the strengths of PLG and SLG while leveraging AI to enhance efficiency.
PLG to acquire and onboard SMBs automatically with AI-driven self-serve experiences.
SLG for high-value enterprise deals, supported by AI-powered sales tools.
Agentic AI to automate expansion, managing both self-serve upgrades and enterprise-level sales interactions.
For example, Zoom initially grew through PLG, offering a free-tier product that gained viral adoption. As the company scaled, it introduced AI-powered enterprise sales teams to close large contracts. Dropbox followed a similar path, using freemium PLG for SMBs while employing an AI-driven sales strategy for enterprise accounts.
Key Takeaways
LLMs and GenAI are transforming PLG by automating onboarding, reducing friction, and driving self-serve conversions.
AI-driven sales automation is making SLG more efficient, lowering customer acquisition costs, and improving deal conversion rates.
Agentic AI enables hybrid PLG + SLG models, allowing SaaS companies to scale self-serve adoption while closing high-value deals.
SaaS startups should leverage AI to reduce manual effort and build a scalable, efficient growth engine.
PLG and SLG are no longer competing models. The most successful SaaS companies will be those that leverage AI-driven automation to enhance both strategies, creating an efficient and adaptable go-to-market engine.
I once had a conversation with a frustrated SaaS B2B founder. Despite all the effort they put into outreach and marketing, their product just wasn’t gaining traction. The issue wasn’t the product; it was that they didn’t have a clear idea of who they were selling to. They were trying to market to anyone and everyone who could use their solution. The truth? That kind of broad targeting rarely works.
So, what’s the solution? It’s simple – you need to build a Buyer Persona.
Before we dive in, let’s clarify the difference between a Buyer Persona and anIdeal Customer Profile (ICP), two terms that often get mixed up.
ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is about identifying the type ofcompany that would benefit most from your product or service. It’s focused on characteristics like company size, industry, location, revenue, etc. In other words, the ICP helps you define the who in a more general sense, which types of organizations should you be targeting.
Buyer Persona, on the other hand, is much more personal. It’s a detailed description of the individual within that company who will make the buying decision. A Buyer Persona includes things like their role, motivations, challenges, decision-making process, and personal preferences. It’s about understanding the human being on the other side of the transaction – what are they feeling, what are their pain points, and what will drive them to make a purchase?
For example, your ICP might say you’re targeting “mid-sized tech companies in North America,” but your Buyer Persona might be “Sarah, the VP of Marketing at a tech company, who’s dealing with tight deadlines and high expectations for ROI on marketing campaigns.”
So, why does this matter for your marketing strategy? Here’s the key: even in a B2B context, the decision to buy is ultimately made by an individual. The person who’s in charge of selecting and purchasing your product has specific pain points, desires, and motivations that are different from the company as a whole. Understanding Sarah’s challenges and goals (in this case, increasing marketing efficiency while managing a tight budget) will help you craft messaging that resonates with her directly.
Now, let’s talk about how this shapes your marketing strategy.
How a Buyer Persona Shapes Your Marketing Approach
When you define your Buyer Persona, you can tailor your marketing strategy to speak directly to that individual, using language, content, and platforms that appeal to them. The days of one-size-fits-all marketing are over. Instead of broad campaigns that target companies or vague segments, you can create personalized, targeted content that speaks to the specific needs and interests of your persona.
Content Marketing and Messaging
Once you have your Buyer Persona, your content strategy becomes much clearer. You can now produce content that speaks directly to their pain points and goals. For example:
Blog Posts and Articles: Write articles that tackle the exact problems your Buyer Persona faces. If Sarah’s main challenge is increasing marketing ROI, you could write blog posts like, “How to Drive 3x ROI on Marketing Campaigns with Limited Resources.
E-books and Whitepapers: Offer more in-depth content that provides actionable insights, such as “The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Automation for Tech Companies.”
Case Studies: Share stories of companies similar to your persona’s that have successfully used your product to solve similar challenges.
Email Campaigns: Personalize email sequences based on the persona’s interests, challenges, and stage in the buyer’s journey.
Social Media and Ad Campaigns
When you know exactly who your Buyer Persona is, you can more effectively choose where to promote your content and what messaging to use. For instance:
LinkedIn: If your Buyer Persona is a senior decision-maker at a B2B company, LinkedIn is likely the platform where you’ll find them. Share insightful articles, industry news, and customer success stories that show your product’s value in their specific context.
Facebook and Twitter: These platforms can be great for targeting a broader audience, but you can still refine your content based on the persona’s interests. For example, if your persona is tech-savvy, content that discusses industry trends and new technologies will resonate more.
Reddit & Niche Communities: If your persona is highly technical or deeply engaged in a specific industry, platforms like Reddit, Discord, or industry-specific forums can be goldmines. Engaging in relevant subreddits (e.g., r/SaaS, r/marketing, r/DevOps) with authentic, valuable insights (not just sales pitches), can help establish trust and credibility.
Paid Ads: Use targeted ads that focus on the persona’s job title, industry, and interests. Your ad copy should speak directly to their challenges, such as “Struggling with marketing efficiency? Our software can help you optimize your workflow and improve ROI.
Where to Find Your Buyer Persona
Knowing where to reach your Buyer Persona is just as important as knowing what content to create. If your persona spends their time reading industry blogs, engaging on LinkedIn, and attending specific webinars, those are the places where you should invest your marketing efforts.
By understanding the behaviors, habits, and platforms your persona uses, you can create a much more effective strategy for both organic and paid campaigns.
Buyer Persona = Personalized Marketing!
At the end of the day, the success of your marketing strategy depends on how well you understand the people behind the businesses. Even in a B2B setting, your product is being bought by humans who have specific needs, fears, and motivations. When you take the time to create and refine your Buyer Persona, you’re able to craft messages, content, and campaigns that speak to those individuals in a way that resonates.
So, if you’re ready to get started and want a framework to build your own Buyer Persona,download our free template now and get to know your buyers better! It will be your first step toward better targeting, more effective messaging, and ultimately, more sales.
Good Luck!
The Mutual Action Plan (MAP) is a powerful tool for sales teams to align with their buyers, build trust, and create a clear roadmap to a successful deal. By collaboratively outlining key milestones, stakeholders, and timelines, a MAP ensures that both the seller and the buyer stay on track, minimizing surprises and accelerating the path to a closed deal.
Why Use a MAP?
Creates Alignment – Establishes clear expectations and next steps for both parties.
Builds Buy-In – Helps your champion drive internal approvals by outlining key stakeholders and deliverables.
Reduces Risk – Identifies potential roadblocks early and ensures deal progression.
Accelerates Sales Cycles – Keeps momentum by maintaining accountability on both sides.
When to Introduce a MAP?
The best time to introduce a MAP is as soon as a deal moves into a serious evaluation stage, typically after initial discovery and once there is mutual interest in moving forward. It should be framed as a collaborative planning tool to help the buyer navigate their own internal buying process efficiently.
How to Present a MAP?
Position it as a Value-Add – Explain that the MAP is designed to help the buyer, not just the seller.
Collaborate, Don’t Dictate – Build the plan together with your champion and key stakeholders.
Keep it Dynamic – A MAP should be a living document, continuously updated as the deal progresses.
Use Clear Milestones – Break down the buying process into tangible steps with owners and deadlines.
Check out the MAP Template on our Forge Ahead page to streamline your sales process and close deals with greater predictability.
Simply copy/paste it into your own spreadsheet or Google Sheet, adapt it to your requirements, and start sharing it with prospects.
You’ll also find other tools to help you Master Uncertainty, take a look!
Building a high-performing sales team starts with the right incentives.
For early-stage startups, a well-structured Enterprise Account Executive (AE) commission plan can make the difference between chaotic, unpredictable revenue and a scalable, motivated sales engine.
The Challenge
Many startups struggle with compensation structures that either demotivate AEs (by being too rigid) or hurt the company’s bottom line (by overpaying without aligning with long-term growth). Without a clear and well-balanced plan, sales teams may prioritize the wrong deals, delay renewals, or even churn out of frustration.
That’s why we created this Enterprise AE Commission Plan Template – a straightforward, effective structure that:
Rewards AEs for every dollar of new ARR closed (no cliffs, no unnecessary complexity)
Includes accelerators to push top performers beyond their quota
Aligns sales efforts with company goals, ensuring predictable revenue growth
This template helps startups avoid common pitfalls such as: ✔ Overcomplicating commission structures that confuse AEs and slow deals ✔ Setting arbitrary thresholds that discourage continuous effort ✔ Neglecting accelerators, which can drive elite sales performance
Get the Template
Ready to implement a commission plan that actually works? Download the template now and set your startup’s sales team up for success.
Go to the Forge Ahead page to download the “Enterprise Account Executive Commission Plan” template.
You’ll also find other tools to help you Master Uncertainty, check them out!
