Building Go-To-Market for GovTech with Ellen Lina Schmitt

The public sector looks too slow and too bureaucratic for most B2B sales teams. So how do you actually build a go-to-market motion that works there? Ellen Lina Schmitt, CRO at Ayunis, a GovTech company, and former builder of Personio's public sector, nonprofit, and education arm, joins Michael Jäger to break down how she scaled that arm from zero into a 35 person team that helped Personio reach 1.6 million managed employees. In this episode: ✌️ Win #1: Narrowing the ICP to Germany's municipal level, where local self-government lets each city procure software on its own and cuts the sales cycle. ✌️ Win #2: Building a shared mission, "enabling better public organizations," to get top AEs excited about selling into an unglamorous industry. 🌱 Fail: Chasing government tenders like a consultant instead of picking up the phone, and winning nothing until the team switched motions. Whether you're eyeing the public sector or scaling GTM into any hard to sell vertical, this episode gives you a concrete playbook for getting the ICP and the team right. Connect with Ellen: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ellenlinaschmitt/ 🎙️ Beyond Revenue is hosted by Michael Jäger, Managing Partner at Cremanski & Company. New episodes every Friday. 🕦 Episode's timestamps 0:00 Intro and background 04:27 What the Silk Road taught her about public sector risk 09:44 The first shock of consulting to software sales 11:32 Win #1: Narrowing the ICP to municipal government 15:34 Win #2: Building a shared mission 18:23 The fail: chasing tenders instead of the phone 20:08 Recap and key takeaways 23:40 Where to find Ellen