Here is a controversial thing for me, a B2B software investor, to say: for some B2B software companies, the right go-to-market strategy has more to learn from politics than from Silicon Valley-standard playbooks.
And here is why:
In B2B software targeting less-digital segments, the friction is not in product value but in distribution. The buyers are local, fragmented, often offline. The question is not who needs it, but how do you reach them efficiently? And the answer does not come from Silicon Valley, but from grassroots politics.
If your target were to reach $100m ARR and your average annual contract value was $100, no tech world playbook would tell you to leverage an offline go-to-market strategy and try to speak to your potential customers one by one.
However, that’s exactly how Zohran Mamdani won the 2025 New York City mayoral election: every individual represented a single potential vote and he secured over one million of them with a massive door-knocking operation. His campaigns recruited tens of thousands of volunteers (field leads), used regional organising, and expanded the electorate by targeting relatively under‐mobilised demographics.
Although his team leveraged high-impact digital content (viral multilingual social media videos), conversion ultimately came from boots-on-the-ground organising in neighbourhoods. They translated online engagement into door-knocking, peer-to-peer outreach and real-world mobilisation.
The case for “local, fragmented, often offline” in B2B software
“Mom-and-pop” shops should not be underestimated in a world where only 15% of the global GDP is ‘digital’.
In the UK, SMEs contribute to more than 50% of the turnover, and 57% of the UK private sector business population is a sole proprietorship. In the US, the picture isn’t that different. Small businesses employ nearly half of the American workforce and represent 43.5% of America’s GDP.
The list of “local, fragmented, often offline” verticals is long and rich: construction, mining, utilities, agriculture, local services (trades, repair, personal services), healthcare (outside major systems), education (outside higher ed), manufacturing (especially SMEs), hospitality, transport and logistics (especially smaller operators) to name a few…
There is undeniable opportunity in targeting the long tail in these less digitised sectors; for both the software providers and the buyers, and even for the wider economy.
So what inspiration can B2B software management teams get from political campaigns?
1. Grassroots politics start with territories
Most software teams organise go-to-market around ideal customer profiles (ICPs). This makes sense when 1) you’re going after a few distinct ICPs with different optimal customer acquisition paths, 2) you’re experimenting with what your ICP can expand into.
However, B2B software companies selling to small, fragmented, less digital customers typically have a single, crystal clear ICP. The challenge is finding scalable and cost efficient ways to reach them.
This is where traditional B2B software playbooks fall short, and a grassroots politics strategy becomes useful. Grassroots organising starts with territories, where each region is mapped, owned, and measured.
The most successful B2B software companies I’ve seen in these markets operate exactly the same way. They build a territorialised GTM, define the smallest viable selling unit (e.g., a district or zip-code cluster), and assign ownership to one sales or activation rep. These reps call and/or visit their districts street by street and speak to business owners one by one. They treat each territory as a local ecosystem, not an account list.
This structure enables focus, repeatability and referenceability. When adoption happens within visible proximity, for example with one hair salon owner seeing another’s booking system, the referral dynamics quickly emerge.
2. Grassroots organisations scale by codifying actions
Grassroots organisations scale by codifying every action. Every interaction, starting from the very first approach, is predefined and easy to replicate.
Software teams can design playbooks with similar precision, detailing the lifecycle of a sales process from lead gen and mapping to first contact and demo scheduling to referral capture and local success story distribution.
These codified actions become the infrastructure for scale without central bloat. They enable you to onboard and ramp up new reps quickly and maintain consistent quality across dozens of territories while still giving reps autonomy within guardrails. Reps know whom to target, what to say in a first interaction or a second visit, exactly how long to wait between two interactions, how to capture data, how to handle common objections, when to escalate, and when to adjust messaging to local norms to name a few.
What such a detailed and clear playbook also enables is the ability to hire junior reps and empower them to go up the learning curve very quickly, feel confident and deliver results. For reps, feedback loops function at every step of the customer acquisition journey as actions and expected customer behaviour are clearly outlined. There is a high volume of feedback! This is a key component of the GTM strategy because only by acquiring and empowering high potential junior talent, businesses can make customer acquisition unit economics work at this scale.
3. Local network density as a profitability driver
In a territorial GTM, dense local customer networks lower acquisition cost, improve retention, and increase referral velocity. Once you reach a tipping point of adoption in a neighbourhood or vertical pocket, your brand becomes the default. Below that density, the unit economics simply may not work and each sale may require near-custom effort.
Treat local network density as a gating metric for investment in a specific region:
- Before expansion: measure active customers per region and average distance between them.
- During allocation: prioritise areas where existing customers are clustered.
- At review: exit or de-prioritise regions where density stays below the viability threshold.
4. A network of ‘precincts’ for national footprint
Territory-based selling is cyclical. Each local market begins nascent, goes through a period of rapid growth, matures, saturates, and eventually feeds into adjacent markets. The unit of GTM becomes the precinct per se, a self-sustaining micro-market run by a small team that knows its community.
Over time, a network of healthy precincts compounds into a national footprint with a bottom-up model, not a broadcast-down one.
So, what’s the takeaway?
If you’re a founder addressing the needs of small, distributed and less digitised businesses, I highly recommend studying a playbook borrowed from grassroots politics vs. the more “conventional” ones. After all, those playbooks have been designed to penetrate distributed, low-tech, high trust networks at scale. In B2B software as well, the winners tend to be those who can execute well on this territorialised go-to-market strategy.
