7 GTM Lessons from Selling to Grid Operators: What 5.5 Years to First Revenue Teaches About Enterprise Infrastructure Sales

Your startup has product-market fit. Customers love the demo. But nobody will buy because your technology could theoretically cause a blackout affecting millions of people. What do you do?

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Marc Borrett, CEO and co-founder of Reactive Technologies, shared how his grid measurement platform navigated this exact challenge. The company spent five and a half years before generating meaningful revenue, raised over 80 million dollars, and created an entirely new measurement category in one of the world’s most conservative industries. Their go-to-market journey offers crucial lessons for any founder selling into critical infrastructure or highly regulated markets.

Lesson 1: Technical Barriers Create Moats If You Can Cross Them

The first conversations Reactive Technologies had with potential customers weren’t about ROI or implementation timelines. They were about existential risk.

“The first kind of conversations we had in the very early days were all about, are you sure you’re not going to black out the power grid if we allow you to do this, we don’t want to have any problems,” Marc recalls. “So how can you prove to us if we allow you to do this measurement, you’re not going to upset damage temporarily or permanently destroy the power system?”

For a startup, this level of scrutiny feels punishing. Marc admits: “It did take a high degree of technical persuasion, justification, explanation just to be able to get a first small scale pilot started for obviously the right reasons. But as a startup, that’s very challenging.”

The insight: these barriers protect you once you’re through them. “As long as you’ve got enough gas in the tank to ride that through and come out on the other end and you’ve got a genuinely helpful, positive technology, it does mean that there’s another, those same barriers apply to anyone else. So even if you’re the first one encountering those barriers, as long as you can get over them, that means those barriers are still going to be there for others.”

Lesson 2: Trust Is the Only Currency in Conservative Markets

Traditional B2B sales focuses on demonstrating value, overcoming objections, and creating urgency. But when selling to risk-averse infrastructure operators, none of that matters until you establish technical credibility.

“When you’re selling into a relatively conservative set of customers, as we said rightly risk averse, trust is the thing you have to build,” Marc emphasizes. “And the only way that we, I think we’re able to do it is really from having a very credible technical team.”

This isn’t about sales polish or marketing materials. It’s about substance. “You know, we have a very, I would say, high calibre engineering capability and at some point that quality starts to become evident because, you know, you’re able to back it up, you’re able to share data, you’re able to show the physics of what you’re trying to do.”

The practical implication: in conservative industries, your engineering team is your GTM team. Invest in technical talent that can communicate complex concepts to skeptical experts, not just build great products.

Lesson 3: Align Your Timeline with Problem Growth, Not Runway

Most startups race against their runway. Reactive Technologies took a different approach: they bet on the problem getting bigger while they built trust.

When they started with their first customer, the problem cost roughly 16 million pounds annually. Marc explains what happened next: “Over the next five years, as we were working with them and we were going from a small scale pilot to a bigger scale to then a national scale, that problem grew fivefold. So 16 million turned into 32 million and eventually got to somewhere north of 250 million in that time period.”

This problem growth created natural momentum. “You’ve got to also be addressing a problem and that problem has got to be getting bigger. And when we first started, the scale of the problem before our first customer was about 16 million pounds they were spending each year, call it 20 something million dollars. So that felt like a good enough sum.”

The lesson: when choosing markets, evaluate not just current problem size but trajectory. A problem growing 15x over five years can carry you through technical validation cycles that would kill most startups.

Lesson 4: Create Categories Through Standards, Not Marketing

Reactive Technologies had to create an entirely new budget category for grid measurement. Marc describes their approach: “Basically, we are having to create, in some cases, an entirely new category. So when we talk about measuring the grid, actually, we’re talking about measuring a particular phenomena that has never been measured before.”

Instead of positioning themselves as innovative disruptors, they focused on becoming the technical standard. “General approach for us is really to achieve sort of the best practice solution,” Marc explains. “We need to make sure that the solutions we offer, you know, if you imagine a risk dial for a customer, we need to move that dial from. We’re not the risky innovative solution that might cost your job. If you go with us with a proven technology solution that delivers the measurements that you need to run your grid.”

Their marketing strategy reflects this: “Marketing focus is to be part of that and to make sure that we explain very clearly why our solution works and why there is not, in our view, a better way to do it.”

This means engaging with standards bodies and technical organizations, not running demand generation campaigns. In conservative industries, you create categories by defining technical standards, not by clever positioning.

Lesson 5: Build Cap Tables for Multi-Year Sales Cycles

Raising over 80 million dollars while spending five and a half years to first revenue requires a specific approach to fundraising and investor selection.

Marc credits his previous success for opening doors: “I think what we’ve seen is, yeah, I would say again, we’ve seen more of an evolution in the VC community rather than in the more institutional investors. But that is also changing.”

But track record alone isn’t enough. He emphasizes the importance of strategic cap table construction: “You need to have always, I think, a little bit of a balance between having some strategic investors who can help you with that go to market, maybe in countries or regions that you don’t then necessarily need to staff for yourself. But you need to counterbalance those with strong financial investors who will want to ensure that if you have a strategic or strategics on board, that they’re kept honest.”

On fundraising timeline expectations, Marc is blunt: “The old adages, only raise money when you don’t need it. It’s got to be that. And also expect that it will take you twice as long. When I speak to other startups and they say, you know, we’ve added 30, 40, 50% to, I think you’ve got to be more conservative, you’ve got to go early and have enough in the tank where you don’t believe you will actually have to go to.”

Lesson 6: Maintain Conviction Through Years of Incremental Progress

Perhaps the hardest lesson from Reactive Technologies’ journey is psychological: how to maintain belief through years without meaningful revenue.

Marc is candid about the difficulty: “It is tough and it is bleak and it is lonely. You know, I’m not going to start crying but it is genuinely difficult. But you have to believe and as long as you know you’ve got the right solution to the right problem then that is the fire that you’ve got to keep alight and that’s the fire that you got to stoke.”

His prescription for maintaining conviction requires deep operational involvement: “If you’re close enough to every part of your business, if you’re close enough to the product side, you’re close enough to the sales side, you’re close enough to the marketing side, the customer side, the team side, you are the one that actually has got the best view of what it takes to actually get to the next milestone or get the funding closed or get the next customer over the line.”

This isn’t about blind optimism. It’s about information advantage. When you’re closer to the details than anyone else—including your investors—you can maintain conviction when others doubt because you see signals they miss.

Lesson 7: Leverage Adjacent Industry Expertise for Fresh Perspectives

One of Reactive Technologies’ key advantages came from applying telecom sector thinking to energy infrastructure. Marc describes the parallel they saw: “The energy sector was going from big power stations, pumping power down the wires into homes and businesses to now power being generated in homes and businesses and flowing the other way.”

This cross-industry perspective led to their breakthrough. “When we set up the company, the engineering team that we built were all from the telecom sector. So when you have a group of engineers and you put them from the telecom sector and you put them into the energy sector, they want to do things like, can we use the power grid as a communications channel?”

This experiment led to their accidental discovery of how to measure grid stability in real time—something energy sector insiders might never have attempted.

The broader lesson: conservative industries often need outside perspectives to unlock innovation. But that outside perspective must be coupled with deep technical credibility and willingness to learn industry-specific constraints.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Infrastructure GTM

Reactive Technologies’ journey won’t inspire founders seeking quick wins or viral growth loops. But it reveals an uncomfortable truth about selling into critical infrastructure: the timelines that seem impossibly long from the outside are actually necessary for building defensible businesses.

Five and a half years to first revenue isn’t a bug in their GTM strategy—it’s a feature. Those years created technical credibility, established new standards, and built barriers that protect them from competition. The same conservative customers who made sales difficult become loyal advocates once they commit.

For founders considering infrastructure or regulated markets, the question isn’t whether you can accelerate these timelines. It’s whether you can build a business model, cap table, and personal psychology that can sustain belief through years of incremental progress while a massive problem grows around you.