Most companies think they have a sales problem. Matt Lattanzio sees something else. “They’ve proven people want the product,” he said. “They just can’t repeat it.” That distinction is where most restaurant tech companies get stuck.
Lattanzio has spent his career inside that gap. As President of Supply & Demand Consulting, and from helping scale 7shifts from early traction to tens of millions in revenue, to now working as a fractional CRO for restaurant tech brands, his focus is not on finding the first few customers. It is on building the system that gets the next fifty.
Long Term Winning
Because early wins can be misleading.
A few customers love the product. A trade show goes well. A handful of deals close quickly. It feels like momentum. But when companies try to repeat that success, the results fall apart. The same playbook does not work twice. The pipeline dries up. Growth stalls.
That is when reality sets in. “Go-to-market is hard,” Lattanzio said. “It’s a lot of grunt work.”
The challenge is not the product. Many of the companies he works with have strong product market fit. The challenge is building a repeatable motion. Prospecting. Messaging. Sales process. Channel strategy. All working together, consistently.
And most companies underestimate how much work that actually takes. The biggest mistake is assuming that what worked once will work again.
Trade Show Strategy
One trade show produces leads, so the next three should too. A single outbound campaign hits, so it becomes the default strategy. But without understanding why something worked, it cannot be repeated. And without repeatability, there is no real growth.
What Lattanzio builds is not just a pipeline. It is structure.
That starts with focus. One of the first things he looks for is whether a company actually knows who it is trying to sell to. Not broadly. Specifically.
“You’d be shocked how many companies don’t have a target account list,” he said.
The concept is simple, but powerful. A clearly defined group of accounts that perfectly match the product. Not everyone. The right ones. When sales and marketing align around that list, everything changes. Outreach becomes intentional. Messaging sharpens. Accountability becomes clear.
If a deal comes from that list, there are no excuses. It should close. That level of clarity is rare. But it is what separates noise from progress. Where things get even more complicated is when companies try to serve multiple markets at once.
Selling to small independent operators is not the same as selling to a 300-location brand. The expectations are different. The economics are different. The entire go-to-market motion is different.
Product Led Growth
For SMB, efficiency is everything. You cannot afford a heavy sales process on a low-cost product. The math does not work. The best companies build product-led growth. Free trials. Fast onboarding. Minimal friction. Let the product do the selling.
For mid-market, it flips.
Now it is about trust. Relationships. Experience. A VP of Operations is not clicking through a free trial. They want to talk to someone who understands their world. Someone who has seen their problems before.
“You need a completely different motion,” Lattanzio said. And trying to blend the two is where many companies lose momentum. But even with the right structure, there is another shift happening that is changing everything.
Inbound is not what it used to be. For years, companies could rely on a single channel. SEO. Paid search. Content. Build the funnel, capture demand, convert. That model worked.
Today, it is fractured. “It’s harder and more expensive than it’s ever been,” Lattanzio said.
Buyers are not discovering products in one place anymore. They are everywhere. Podcasts. LinkedIn. Events. Peer recommendations. AI-driven search. The website is no longer the center of gravity. It is just one touchpoint.
Multi-channel Awareness
Which means the strategy has to change. Instead of relying on one channel, companies need a distributed approach. Multiple entry points. Multiple ways to build awareness and capture demand. Not just driving leads, but creating presence. That shift is especially clear at trade shows.
For many companies, trade shows still feel like a gamble. Set up a booth and hope the right people walk by. Sometimes it works. Often it does not.
But the companies that win treat trade shows differently. They start before the show.
They know exactly who they want to meet. They reach out in advance. They use the event to accelerate conversations already in motion. And most importantly, they lock in follow-ups before the event ends.
Because once operators go back to their restaurants, the window closes fast. “It’s not about what happens at the booth,” Lattanzio said. “It’s everything around it.” That same principle applies across the entire go-to-market strategy.
Nothing happens by accident. The companies that grow are not just building great products. They are building systems. Systems that create consistency. Systems that turn effort into results. Systems that allow them to scale what works.
Because at the end of the day, growth is not about winning once. It is about winning the same way, over and over again.
And that is where most companies need the most help.
