Nara Patel spent the first two years of Fieldstack building a sales team she would eventually have to rebuild. The outbound engine worked — it just kept filling the funnel with the wrong customers.
The churn that forced the decision
By mid-2024, Fieldstack was growing 15% month-over-month and churning 28% annually. The math was unsustainable and Patel knew it. What she did not know yet was that the churn was not a product problem. It was an ICP problem that the outbound motion had created.
"We were selling to anyone who would buy," she said. "The product was good for a specific kind of field service company. Our sales team was selling it to every field service company."
The rebuild
- Cut the SDR team from 6 to 2 over 90 days.
- Built a free tier designed exclusively for the ICP they had identified from their lowest-churn cohort.
- Restructured AE compensation around 12-month retention, not closed ARR.
Eighteen months later
Fieldstack is at $6.4M ARR with 94% annual retention. The free tier converts at 18%. Patel describes the transition not as a pivot but as a correction.
We did not change what we built. We changed who we let in the door and how we let them experience it.