Events, Positioning and Partnerships: How Introw Builds Its Growth Engine

Andreas Geamanu, co-founder and CEO of Introw, explains how the Ghent-based AI partner portal company wins customers in the US: events with strong preparation and follow-up, a clear category instead of a unique label, partners chosen by what motivates them, and call transcripts that feed product and sales.

Introw helps companies that sell through partners with an AI partner portal. Andreas Geamanu is its co-founder and CEO and leads the commercial side: marketing, sales and part of operations and finance. The company is based in Ghent but sells mostly to software and hardware companies in the United States, where it has built its name through events, content and a lot of paid LinkedIn activity.

In this conversation he walks through the acquisition channels behind that growth, why he measures channels on return and not on cost, how the team prepares for an event, what makes a partner programme work, why Introw decided to call itself a PRM after all, and how call transcripts now feed product and sales decisions.

This episode is spoken in Dutch. The summary and quotes below are our own English version of what was said.

Key lessons

Launch many ads fast, and let sales point to the accounts that matter

Introw ran more than 450 LinkedIn ads in 30 days. Sales and marketing work closely, so sales can flag accounts that are warm or need extra budget, and the team puts a set of ads over many audiences. Ads are made and launched quickly, and the team looks at which category performs best before it goes deeper. Memes did well with partnership managers in technology and hardware companies, and thought leadership posts, including a video posted by someone from HubSpot and boosted with Introw budget, work very well too.

Judge channels on return, not on cost

Geamanu says he has never looked at the cost of a channel, only at its return, and that the team keeps looking for ways to spend more in a channel that performs. For Introw, LinkedIn gets the biggest budget because the audience of partnership managers sits there. Only about three or four months ago did the team start to know the exact acquisition cost per channel, and a lot of LinkedIn spend is awareness, which makes attribution harder. Introw uses Fibbler with HubSpot to see how often an account has seen its ads, and closed accounts usually turn out to have had many online touchpoints already.

Website and content come first, paid second, marketplaces on top

The website is the largest channel, fed by content and SEO, with ads second. Marketplaces of the platforms Introw integrates with add traffic, and a quarterly review push lets customer success ask customers for reviews. They only ask, never for five stars, and not from customers who have just signed, because a good review takes five to ten minutes.

Hard-qualify on integrations so sales only sees leads that fit

A lead has to say which systems it works with. If Introw has no integration, the deal goes to closed lost automatically and the lead gets an email explaining that Introw cannot serve them well yet, so sales no longer reply by hand. Smaller companies with fewer than ten partners are pushed into automated HubSpot sequences to try the product themselves. The free trial is now gated, to avoid support costs for people the product would not suit.

Events pay off through preparation and follow-up

The first step is knowing who will be there, the second is to scrape and enrich that audience, using Clay and Lemlist for short LinkedIn messages such as "are you going to this event?". The aim is two or three meetings planned per day before arriving, so the return can be calculated in advance. At every US event Introw also organises a side event, such as a morning run with around 45 people or a ping-pong evening, since the extra cost is small once the team is already there.

Events work for positioning, learning and net-new accounts

Early on, events help a company understand who it wants to sell to and where it fits. They also train the sales pitch, almost like speed dating with prospects. Competitors are present at the events where a partner portal decision is made, so not being there means not being in the deal. Simple messaging on the booth also brings in accounts nobody had identified in advance.

Partners come in two types, and the incentive differs

Transactional partners, such as resellers, are motivated by commission or discount. Implementation and service partners earn from the services they sell around a product, so a long Salesforce project matters more to them than the commission. This creates tension with a product that is quick to implement. Geamanu advises to start with product-market fit through other channels, then check for a joint value proposition, and to ask your first 10 to 20 customers which partners they already work with, which gives you a case study to open the conversation.

Choose a category people already search for

Introw first said it was not a PRM, and then lost deals because prospects were looking for one and online search sends people to categories. The team decided to say "we are also a PRM, but we do it differently". That created a flywheel of people finding, using and recommending the product. Geamanu advises staying close to an existing category, since inventing a new one requires very different budgets, and he made the decision when the site was still one landing page, before building much content.

Hand over founder-led sales within about six months

Handover is hard when there is no history of calls and transcripts. A new salesperson now has 30 to 50 recorded calls to learn from, and in the first months the founders stayed on calls to shadow. After about six months most sales had moved from the founders to the team. The sales playbook is a living document, adapted every two to three months, and grew from one page into a Notion with battle cards and onboarding videos.

Grow into enterprise gradually, and answer trust questions up front

Introw started with small customers, even at 1,000 or 2,000 euros, and moved up step by step, so the team grew with the segment and stakeholder management and frameworks such as MEDDIC came in gradually. Enterprise buyers still ask whether a Ghent company of 30 people will exist in three years. The playbook contains standard answers, and naming customers in the same region and industry, or arranging a reference call, usually takes the trust issue away.

Lost deals usually mean arriving late

The deals Introw loses are often ones it joined too late, when vendors were already chosen and the request for proposal was shaped around other companies. His conclusion is to always assume nobody knows you, and to invest more in online presence and awareness. Product gaps are the second cause, and the team waits until several existing customers ask for a feature before building it.

Call transcripts feed product, pricing and competitor insight

Every call has a transcript, which gives continuous insight into the product wishlist and how competitors and pricing are discussed. Done by hand, much information was lost. Today Claude is connected through MCP to HubSpot, the call recorder and the product roadmap tool, and Geamanu says the team would be blind without those insights. One trend they spotted is that CEOs now say whatever they buy has to include AI.

Distribution is the hard part now

His three underrated go-to-market trends are going international early, events, and partnerships and distribution. Building a product is easy today, he says, and distribution is getting harder, so partners that give presence in different markets and more stickiness help you move faster.

In his words

Short quotes, translated from Dutch. Times are approximate.

“We should always assume that nobody knows us.”

“If you are not in a category, people will not find you.”

“It is very easy to build products today, but distribution is getting harder and harder.”

Chapters

• 0:20 Who Andreas is and what Introw does
• 1:30 What commercial excellence means: a flywheel
• 1:50 The strategy behind 450 LinkedIn ads
• 2:40 Which numbers decide if a campaign scales or stops
• 3:30 Meme ads and thought leadership campaigns
• 5:30 All acquisition channels, and why outbound is restarting
• 8:10 Marketplaces and the review strategy
• 10:00 Ad budget and why LinkedIn is worth it
• 11:40 Acquisition cost per channel and ad touchpoints
• 12:40 The sales team and the handover to customer success
• 13:20 Hard qualification and self-service for small companies
• 15:10 Events: trial and error and what a good event needs
• 18:20 Side events, net-new accounts and a team split over two coasts
• 21:20 Setting up a partner channel: product fit, value and incentives
• 25:20 Time to value and the ideal customer
• 27:20 How to start a partner programme
• 28:20 Positioning: why Introw said yes to PRM
• 32:30 Selling in the US without a local office
• 34:20 From founder-led sales to a sales team
• 36:40 Sales playbook and battle cards
• 37:30 Feeding market feedback back into the product
• 39:40 Lost deals and arriving late
• 41:30 Moving from small deals to enterprise
• 45:40 The AI tools Introw would keep
• 47:50 Three underrated go-to-market trends

Read more

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• Which sales and marketing metrics should you track, and why metrics get gamed
• Why a lesser-known competitor outranks you in AI answers
• How to expand into a new country: lessons from two scale-up leaders
• When should a growing company hire its first salespeople?