Hi Reader, did I ever tell you about the time a National Geographic director showed up in my inbox as an inbound lead?

I'd supported National Geographic at SXSW a few years earlier, and he referenced that work (he'd seen it on my website) before hiring me for a sizable strategy project. Here's what stuck with me. That director sat completely outside my reach. To find him, score him, or time my outreach to the week he was ready to buy all sat beyond me. A relevant reference point did the reaching for me, and it worked once, by luck.

So when I met a founder who turned that lucky inbound into a repeatable system across four countries, you bet that I wanted the mechanics.

As a fractional CMO who treats go-to-market as an engineering discipline, the repeatable system is exactly what I listen for.

Stefan Iggo is the co-founder and CEO of LOIS Leasing. For roughly a decade his product lived inside a larger finance company in New Zealand. In October 2025 he spun it out, and within six months he was activating buyers in South Africa, Ireland, the UK, and Dubai, arriving as an unknown brand in most of those markets with a lean team.

​Read the full interview here>>​

WHAT WE DISCUSSED

• Why spinning the product out of its parent finance company was a positioning fix first, since buyers searched for the product and landed on an entity that read as a finance company rather than a specialist SaaS company.
• How LOIS enters a market where its brand arrives as a stranger, using partner credibility on the ground, intent-fed outbound, and founder-led content working together.
• The exact signal sequence Stefan uses to tell a buyer is in-market: a LinkedIn connection, content engagement, site scoring, and company-level triggers like a capital raise or an audit.
• Where AI raises the team's reach and where the trust-based enterprise sale still hands off to a human.
• How the suite expansion created a second buyer persona inside existing accounts, and why selling the full platform to brand-new clients proved cleaner than selling back into the book.
• Why relevant reference logos beat impressive ones, and how a brand the world meets for the first time becomes credible elsewhere by pointing to recognizable names.

WHERE TO FIND STEFAN IGGO

• ​Stefan Iggo, Co-founder and CEO at LOIS Leasing
• ​LOIS Leasing

MY BIGGEST TAKEAWAYS

The thing that stuck with me most is how Stefan frames who's in-market. Many early-stage startups still guess at it.

He treats it as a data question with a clear answer, layering content engagement, site scoring, and company-level events so a human reaches out at the exact moment a buyer owns the problem. For a compliance product, a capital raise or an audit is the buying trigger, and that timing is most of the battle.

The spin-out lesson is relevant to any data or AI founder. A confusing corporate structure taxes every deal in longer cycles and lost trust, and you rarely see the invoice on that tax. And if buyers struggle to tell in five seconds who you are and what you sell, fix that before you scale spend.

His read on AI matched what I see across my own client work. The volume of outreach and the research that used to eat a salesperson's day collapsed to a click. The enterprise sale that runs on trust still hands off to a human, and people extend that trust to a person long before they extend it to AI outreach on its own. So the play is to get a volume of credible material in front of buyers, then let a human take the relationship from there.

The advice he'd give a founder entering a cold market surprised me with how analog it was. Go there in person first. Build real, on-the-ground contacts before you wire up the automation. You can research a geography and decide it looks like a good fit, and for an enterprise sale, the credibility still gets earned in the room. AI compresses the work, but the trust still gets earned in person.

The logo insight reframed something I'd wrestled with for years. A reference point only does the reaching when it maps to the specific buyer who’s sitting in front of you. My National Geographic director set aside every other name on my site and cared only about the one that was relevant to him. A small, unknown company becomes credible elsewhere by pointing to brands that are recognizable to the buyer it's courting.

If you're building toward a market or an audience that sits beyond your physical reach, this conversation will help.

All the best,

Lillian Pierson

Fractional CMO & GTM Engineer

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