How Pigment Scaled Outbound to $300M Annual Pipeline

Pigment (Series D) is in the top 5% of all SaaS companies in revenue growth - Here’s their secret sauce.

Read time: 15 min

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Welcome to a new 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my weekly newsletter of Outbound Kitchen. Each week I dive into reader questions about scaling outbound and making it your #1 growth engine. For more: Live Outbound Classes | Podcast

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This is my 3rd deep dive on outbound teams that actually know what they’re doing.

Today, let’s talk about Pigment’s outbound secret sauce.

Before we dive in, I’ve already broken down Rippling and Snowflake, 2 outbound Michelin-star machines.

I first heard about Pigment in 2022, when I met Alexis Valentin (ex-Head of BDR, now Global Head of Growth) at a B2B conference in Montpellier, France. He told me about the in-house outbound stack they were building, and I’ll be honest. I was impressed. Most companies just stack random tools and hope for the best. Pigment built their own.

There’s no public data on their outbound performance, but let’s do some quick math:

• 50 BDRs

• 5 Stage 2 opportunities per rep per month

• $100K average deal size

• That’s $25M in sourced qualified pipeline per month, or $300M per year.

Even at a 10-20% close rate, that’s $2.5M to $5M in revenue per month, from outbound alone.

Now you see why they’re scaling fast.

What’s on the Menu:

• Part 1: How Pigment Scaled from 0 to Nearly $1B valuation

  • Day 1 – The big problem

  • Figuring out what works

  • Where they are now in 2025

• Part 2: Pigment’s Outbound Secret Sauce

  • How they think about messaging

  • Their in-house outbound stack

  • Why they store all their GTM data in a data warehouse

  • How they structure their BDR team

  • How they leverage partnerships to scale outbound

Let's get cooking!

Part 1: How Pigment Scaled from 0 to a Near-Billion-Dollar Valuation

Day 1 – The Big Problem

Pigment was built to fix something that sucks: business planning is a disaster.

Back in 2019, Eléonore Crespo (ex-Google, ex-Index Ventures) and Romain Niccoli (ex-Criteo CTO) looked around and thought:

“Why the hell are companies still planning their future in clunky Excel sheets?”

The problem was obvious:

• Business leaders were drowning in data but had no clue what actually mattered.

• They had to make big decisions using outdated, static reports.

• Planning tools were stuck in the past, and nobody liked using them.

So they built Pigment, a platform designed to make planning not suck.

Instead of just another boring finance tool, they launched something modern in a space packed with 236 outdated tools on G2.

Figuring Out What Works

Instead of building another Excel replacement, they focused on four things that actually matter:

1. Make it easy to use. Nobody wants to waste hours figuring out clunky software. Pigment made it visually simple, something finance teams could actually enjoy (or at least, not hate).

2. Ditch the old-school forecasts. Most tools make you set a plan and pray it holds up. Pigment built continuous forecasting, so businesses could adjust in real-time instead of reacting too late.

3. Integrate with what companies already use. Nobody wants to rip out their entire tech stack. Pigment made sure it worked with Workday, Netsuite, Salesforce, all the tools finance teams already rely on.

4. Go after companies that can’t afford to fail. Instead of chasing every business out there, they targeted fast-growing startups, companies that needed better planning before things fell apart.

By late 2020, investors noticed. A €24.1M Series A proved Pigment was onto something big.

Where They Are Now (2025 Update)

💰 $396.4M raised (because investors love anything that makes Excel look ancient)

📈 $145M Series D with Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, IVP, Meritech, Greenoaks, Felix Capital

📊 $850M valuation by May 2023

🚀 Tripled revenue, doubled customer base

The Growth Stats That Matter

• Top 5% of all SaaS companies in revenue growth (according to their investors at IVP)

• Massive clients: Unilever, Merck, Datadog, KAYAK, 6sense

• 50% of their customers are in the U.S.

• 90%+ of clients use Pigment across multiple teams (not just finance)

• Launched Pigment AI + 150+ new features in 2023

• Expanded beyond finance to serve HR, sales, and supply chain teams

What Their Sales Team Looks Like in 2025

• Current ACV: $100K

• Target personas: finance, sales, HR, supply chain teams

• GTM team: 100+ people

• BDR team: 50+ reps

• Growth team: 10 people

Sales team

The Bottom Line

Pigment solved a real problem that no one else dared to fix.

• Nobody wakes up excited to use Excel for forecasting.

• They built for the right customers, fast-growing companies that needed planning to scale.

• They kept innovating, instead of just selling the same product with a different UI.

That’s how you go from another SaaS startup to a near-billion-dollar machine.

Part 2: Pigment Outbound Secret Sauce

Now let's talk about the 5 reasons why Pigment is successful with outbound:

1. Their outbound messaging mindset

2. Their in-house outbound stack

3. Why they store GTM data in a data warehouse

4. Their BDR org

5. Their partner motion

1 - Their outbound messaging mindset

Alexis Valentin used to work for Facebook (Meta) and said:

“Selling for Facebook, Microsoft, or Google is easy. Slap that email domain on a message, and CMOs will actually want to talk to you.”

But what if you’re at a startup no one’s heard of?

What if you’re like Pigment 5 years ago, where no one was waiting for your email, no one expected your call, and you have zero brand advantage?

Now, you have to play a different game.

Your email needs to be the one email a CFO, CMO, or Chief Sales Officer actually responds to today.

To make that happen, you need:

• Deep intel: Know their business better than they do.

• Strong signals: Use data to time your outreach right.

• A real point of view: Not “Hey, checking in,” but something that makes them think.

That’s Pigment’s outbound mindset. They don’t just send emails. They build armor around every BDR, like Iron Man.

Why?

Because it’s twice as hard for a Pigment BDR to land a meeting with a Fortune 500 CFO than it is for a legacy competitor that’s been around for 40 years and already has contracts in place.

But here’s the thing: Pigment knows their product is better.

They know they’ll win. It just takes time and effort.

So they don’t spam.

They don’t spray and pray.

Instead, every email, every call, every invite has real intent behind it.

And sure, they still get ignored, hung up on, and told to stop spamming. That’s the job.

But then, 6 months later, when that same CFO buys Pigment and emails back thanking the BDR for opening their eyes?

That’s the mission.

That’s why they play the long game.

2 - Their In-house Outbound stack

Pigment built an in-house tech stack to support their outbound, and BDR efficiency, including tools for capturing market intelligence and automating processes.

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🔒 Wait! Want to see the Pigment outbound secret sauce?

Here’s a quick taste:

• Their in-house Outbound stack, 1 cold email that actually works, 2 buying signals in action

• Why they store all their GTM data in a data warehouse (instead of dumping everything in their CRM)

• Their BDR org

• How partnerships fuel their outbound strategy, and growth engine

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