The Science of Buyability: How Monday.com has gone from dating to marriage to win over the enterprise market

But that success brought a new challenge. “The sales team that’s working to build bigger relationships with customers has to sort through a lot of leads that come from the platform – people that are project managers, marketers, retailers – and they’re not necessarily looking to sign a contract. They’re looking to use the product.”

Komack’s task was to change that equation. “What I had to do was very quickly come in and show a different type of lead, a different type of prospect for the salesperson – people who are the decision-makers, who have budgets, who are the ones at bigger companies making those choices.”

From product-led growth to partnership-led growth

To explain the cultural shift inside the business, Komack reaches for an analogy. “We used to be dating our customers,” he says. “Now we’re asking them to marry us.”

That distinction captures a deeper truth about how Monday.com’s marketing is evolving. “Before, thousands and thousands of people would come on the platform. They’d stay, they’d pay, they’d leave, they’d come back. The next day, there’d be thousands more. Now we’re going to companies, asking them to spend a lot of money with us, asking them to spend years in a relationship. We’re asking them to put their name on the dotted line and say, ‘We’re the ones signing up and we’re going to be responsible for it.’ That’s a totally different type of sale.”

The strategy was introduced shortly after Komack joined. “Less than 5% of platform users are actually the people who become corporate contracts,” he notes. “So if you want to grow – we were able to grow over a billion before – but if you want to go to 10 billion, you have to go find the people who make those multi-million-dollar decisions for their companies.”

The science of buyability

Komack says that’s where The Science of Buyability comes in – the framework developed by Bain and LinkedIn’s B2B Institute to help marketers understand the rational and emotional factors behind business purchasing decisions.

“I saw the work that the B2B Council was doing on buyability and it really resonated with me,” he says. “It’s about understanding the partnership between sales and marketing – building a targeted account list so you’re both going after the same people. There’s no such thing as having marketing metrics that are green and sales metrics that are red. That means marketing isn’t measuring the right things.”

Instead, Komack wants his teams to act in unison. “You have to identify the target account lists, understand who are the five, 10, 12 people within a company that you’re targeting – the decision-makers, the technical people, the business owners, sometimes the silent decision-makers behind them. You have to know it’s not going to take one campaign or one event or one interaction to close the deal. It’s going to take multiple activities targeting multiple audiences to build the trust and relationship you need.”

‘Do I want to work with you?’

For Komack, the biggest mistake B2B marketers make is obsessing over product differentiation. “There’s a study that says 80% of enterprise decision-making comes down to two questions. One, ‘Does the product work?’ And notice I’m not saying, ‘Is it the most innovative or the fastest?’ It’s, ‘Does it do what I need it to do so I won’t get fired?’

“The second question is even more important. ‘Is this a company I want to work with? Does their vision align with mine? Will they be there for me? Will they provide value? Would I have fun working with them?’ All of those aspects are underrated or underestimated in B2B marketing.”

He believes that brand building happens as much through relationships as through awareness. “You build brand through how you interact with your prospects and customers. If we have a prospect, we’re constantly thinking about how much value we can provide – can we send them case studies in their business? Frameworks that other customers have used? If you’re a car manufacturer, can we show how other companies launched successfully? Over time, that value builds trust. When it’s time to think about products that work, Monday.com works, because they’ve shown me examples of how others have used it. And when it’s time to ask, ‘Are they a good partner?’ Well, look at how much value they’ve provided – and I don’t even pay them yet.”

Redefining success metrics

Komack is also rethinking how success is measured. “If you develop a target account list with the sales team and you say we’re going after these 1,000 accounts, I want to be measured on: did we bring in 30%? Over the course of the year, if I tell my management we’re going after these 1,000 accounts, they should expect 300 of them to become customers.”

The message for his colleagues is clear. “Don’t ask me what the ROI was on that event. Don’t ask me the ARR on that digital campaign. The question you should ask is, ‘Did all of that activity over the course of the year close 300 of the businesses we’re targeting?’”

At its heart, Komack says, this is about trust – and the move from short-term performance to long-term partnership. “You really have to get rid of the marketing jargon,” he says. “You have to get rid of the metrics that don’t really drive business at the end of the day. You have to explain it in a way that people feel ownership of it.”

And as The Drum’s The Science of Buyability series explores, that shift – from awareness to affinity, from clicks to commitment – is the new frontier for B2B marketers everywhere.

“We’re not just dating our customers any more,” Komack says with a smile. “We’re marrying them – and their whole family.”