I had a golden opportunity to work with QuantWare – a quantum hardware company founded by a top researcher at QuTech in TU Delft. The researcher and his team had an initial breakthrough and their superconducting chip found initial customers in the academia – professors and PHD students that needed chips to do their own research.

QuantWare did not have any real sales people, sales process or sales strategy in place. They couldn’t base theirs on a typical SaaS model – they are a hardware company. They had to rely on external help to get things going for them beyond the early adopters. That’s where a custom playbook geared specifically for QuantWare had to be crafted.

Alessandro Bruno

CTO and Founder at QuantWare

“For a deep tech company like QuantWare, we are predominantly researchers, scientists & engineers. As our product got initial traction, we needed someone to come in and setup our go to market function. Kejal was the right choice – he setup the team, the processes and got the revenue flowing in. This eventually helped us raise Series-A.”

The QuantWare Playbook included sales strategy keeping in mind the early nature of the industry itself, the evolving target audience and ongoing deep product research and development. A very clear ICP beyond the initial takers was needed to create the rest of the playbook elements. This required talking to the existing customers and partners and forming a view of where the industry was headed and who the ICP should be and could be.

Once the ICP was defined, then it was time to put the 3 main things in place – the people, the process and the sales tech-stack. Hiring was a key challenge due to the niche nature of the product. This is where a network of existing recruitment partners helps. The tool selection was key as well – we picked Hubspot as the CRM – however for account & contact research we did not find success with the usual suspects of ZoomInfo, Lusha et al. We got creative and relied on The Quantum Insider and Google Scholar and ResearchGate to help find the target accounts & contacts. This was pivotal for our success and a bold move not to rely on the usual tools. We knew our ICP was different and it guided us in the tool selection.

Setting up the sales process was fun too – since this is a quantum hardware company, most of the devices we shipped were made-to-order. This meant collaborating with the production team and finance team to come up with an entire Lead-to-Cash process – cutting across marketing (for lead gen), sales (for booking orders), production (order fulfillment) and finance (revenue recognition).

Once we had these basic elements in place, then was the time to execute. With the right people in place, you can always tweak your process and always optimize the tool usage. The execution resulted in generating revenue for FY24 and setting up a solid order book for FY25. This was impressive enough for the CEO & CTO to raise Series-A worth $20mn.

This is what a good playbook can do!

Matthijs Rijlarsdam

CEO & Co-Founder, QuantWare

“As we started thinking about the next phase of growth at QuantWare, we knew we needed our own custom playbook, something very different from the typical SaaS playbook. And we needed the right person to create this. With his past experiences, Kejal came in, setup the playbook and helped us create a solid foundation for the next stage of growth.”