S7E11 – B2B SaaS Growth Strategy 2026: Scaling with AI Agents & Growth Loops With Mark Appel

Recorded live at the SaaS Summit in Amsterdam, this episode of the Grow Your B2B SaaS Podcast dives into a focused conversation with Mark Appel, Chief Marketing Officer at Sendcloud. As one of Europe’s fastest-growing B2B SaaS platforms, Sendcloud operates across eight European markets, generating close to 60 million in annual recurring revenue with a team of about 450. In this discussion, Mark reveals how Sendcloud approaches international scaling, builds cross-functional go-to-market alignment, identifies and prioritizes compounding growth loops, and integrates AI agents across marketing and GTM operations. He also reflects on what he would do differently if he could rebuild a SaaS go-to-market motion from scratch, what early-stage founders should focus on to reach their first 10K MRR, and how to evolve from feature-led messaging to a brand-led narrative on the path to 10 million ARR.

Meet the Guest and the Company

Mark Appel joined Sendcloud around 18 months ago, bringing experience from leadership roles at Backbase, CM.com, and Exact Software. Sendcloud, founded about 12 years ago, has grown to a team of approximately 450 employees and connects around 30,000 web shops to its e-commerce shipping platform. With major investors including SoftBank, the company operates in eight European markets and continues to expand its network of merchants, carriers, and integration partners. Mark describes Sendcloud as a platform with significant untapped potential. The next phase of growth, he explains, lies not in rapid expansion but in deepening penetration across current markets and amplifying the network effects within its ecosystem.

Cross-Functional GTM: The Foundation for Sustainable Scale

For Mark, sustainable go-to-market success depends on true collaboration across teams. Marketing cannot drive growth in isolation. Sales, Customer Success, Support, and even Finance must align on shared initiatives and outcomes. This cross-functional alignment helps prevent breakdowns and ensures that every team understands the unique value each discipline contributes. When task forces unite around specific initiatives, execution improves and outcomes accelerate. Mark emphasizes that this internal collaboration is the essential foundation for any GTM motion, especially as companies adapt to the evolving SaaS landscape of 2026.

Growth Loops: Identifying, Prioritizing, and Scaling What Compounds

A central theme in Sendcloud’s growth strategy is identifying and prioritizing growth loops that deliver exponential, compounding value. While traditional loops still matter—marketing generates leads, sales closes deals, and revenue funds further marketing—Sendcloud’s platform creates deeper, more interconnected loops. Operating within a multi-actor ecosystem of merchants, carriers, and integration partners, every new participant adds value for all others. This network effect means that each additional merchant or carrier enhances the platform’s utility, creating self-reinforcing momentum. An often-overlooked viral loop exists within Sendcloud’s product itself. Shipment tracking emails sent to consumers carry the Sendcloud brand, reaching millions of inboxes each month. These consumers, while not direct customers, become aware of the brand through operational touchpoints. Mark sees this as an untapped avenue for expanding awareness and influence organically. For the coming years, his focus is on doubling down in Sendcloud’s existing eight markets to maximize the potential of these compounding loops rather than pursuing premature geographic expansion.

AI in the Go-To-Market Stack: Agents, Automation, and Learning Fast

Sendcloud began integrating AI across its GTM operations roughly six months before the conversation was recorded. According to Mark, two areas have shown the most immediate impact: content production and automated audience outreach. The company has already activated an AI SDR and developed multiple AI agents for marketing. A visuals agent produces creative assets, a long-copy agent generates written content, and a product marketing agent serves as the intelligence layer connecting all other agents. This central agent understands Sendcloud’s market, segments, and product capabilities, feeding contextual insights across the AI ecosystem to ensure alignment and relevance. These AI systems are live today, and Sendcloud continues to refine and expand them as learning compounds.

AI Implementation: Challenges and Why to Start Now

While Mark advocates for early AI adoption, he is transparent about the challenges. Building effective agents takes time, effort, and a clear focus on measurable business value. He warns against building AI for the sake of novelty. The early stages are demanding, but the learning gained during implementation compounds over time. Mark believes that within a year, companies that began experimenting early will have a significant advantage in applied understanding and execution.

Where GTM Will Change Most by 2026: Retention, Expansion, and PLG

Looking ahead to 2026, Mark foresees the biggest transformations in retention and expansion strategies. Sendcloud is leveraging AI to reduce human intervention in these areas, allowing Customer Success teams to focus on strategic relationships while automation handles routine engagement. At the same time, product-led growth mechanisms are being embedded directly into the platform. This enables customers to discover and adopt new capabilities organically without requiring sales or customer success involvement. Together, these shifts signal a broader transition from acquisition-focused models toward maximizing lifetime value through seamless product experiences.

Rebuilding GTM from Scratch: Multidisciplinary, Segment-Focused Teams

When asked how he would redesign a go-to-market motion from the ground up, Mark envisions a structure built around customer segments rather than functions. Each segment, ranging from startups to enterprise web shops, would be served by a dedicated multidisciplinary team that includes Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, Support, and Product. This model ensures that every team wakes up focused on making life easier and more successful for its specific customer group. It compresses feedback loops, strengthens accountability, and unites all roles around shared goals and outcomes.

Product Marketing as the Core of an AI-Driven System

Within Sendcloud’s AI stack, the product marketing agent serves as the connective tissue that ensures coherence and context across all automated functions. It understands market segments, jobs to be done, and pain points, and it translates this understanding into the right messaging and tone for each AI agent. This demonstrates how, in an AI-augmented GTM environment, product marketing evolves from a supporting function to a strategic orchestrator that bridges market insight with automated execution.

Virality Through Operational Touchpoints

Sendcloud’s product naturally touches end consumers through shipment tracking notifications. These messages carry the Sendcloud brand into millions of inboxes, creating organic visibility at scale. Mark sees this as a unique form of virality embedded directly into operations, where functional product communication also drives brand awareness. By involving these end consumers more deeply in the ecosystem, Sendcloud can expand its “playing field” beyond direct customers and unlock new forms of growth.

Focusing on Depth Before Expansion

Although Sendcloud operates in eight markets, Mark emphasizes a disciplined approach to scaling. The company’s priority is to deepen its presence and extract more value from existing markets before expanding into new regions. This focus on depth rather than breadth allows Sendcloud to harness the full potential of its network effects, ensuring that every additional merchant, carrier, and partner compounds the platform’s overall value.

Early-Stage Advice: Getting from 0 to 10K MRR

For early-stage founders, Mark’s advice is refreshingly straightforward. Start by targeting in-market audiences who already show intent. Run search campaigns to capture active demand, collect data, and refine your messaging based on real buyer behavior. By focusing first on high-intent buyers at the bottom of the funnel, founders can validate their proposition efficiently and build early momentum.

Scaling from 10K MRR to 10 Million ARR

As a company grows, its communication strategy must mature alongside it. Mark recommends evolving from product feature-driven messaging to a more brand-oriented narrative that connects emotionally with the market. This shift reflects the journey from explaining what a product does to articulating what the brand stands for, climbing the value chain of communication as the business scales.

Practical AI: What’s Live at Sendcloud Today

At Sendcloud, AI is not a future vision; it is already operational. The company currently runs an AI SDR for automated outreach, a visuals agent for creative production, and a long-copy agent for written content creation. The product marketing agent continues to serve as the contextual backbone that connects all other systems. The roadmap ahead includes refining these agents, expanding their capabilities, and ensuring every implementation delivers tangible business outcomes.

Why Collaboration Still Wins in 2026

Even in an era defined by AI, Mark insists that human collaboration remains the cornerstone of go-to-market success. Cross-functional alignment continues to be the force that transforms strategy into execution. Teams that respect and leverage each other’s expertise—Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Support, and Finance—achieve stronger outcomes. Segment-focused structures further enhance this alignment, enabling faster learning and more cohesive delivery across the customer journey.

The Sendcloud Ecosystem: Actors and Effects

Sendcloud’s growth model thrives on the interplay between its three primary actor groups: web shops, carriers, and integration partners. With around 30,000 merchants connected, every new participant enhances the value of the entire ecosystem. This interconnected network naturally fosters compounding growth. The more robust each node becomes, the more valuable the platform grows as a whole.

Looking Ahead to 2026

From Sendcloud’s perspective, the SaaS landscape in 2026 will be shaped by several clear trends. Retention and expansion will take precedence over pure acquisition. AI will continue to reduce the need for human touch in customer engagement. Product-led growth will drive organic feature adoption, and cross-functional collaboration will become even more critical as AI agents take on tactical execution. These shifts are not distant possibilities; they are already taking form at Sendcloud today.

Learning Velocity as the Real Competitive Edge

Mark closes with a powerful reminder: learning velocity is the ultimate advantage. The companies that adopt AI early and iterate quickly will outpace competitors. Building effective AI systems is resource-intensive, but the insights gained through experimentation compound rapidly. The goal is to remain pragmatic, focus on outcomes, measure what matters, and evolve continuously as understanding deepens.

How to Reach Mark Appel

To connect with Mark, you can find him on LinkedIn or reach him directly at [email protected].

Final Thoughts

This conversation with Sendcloud’s CMO, Mark Appel, offers a clear and grounded view of how to scale a B2B SaaS platform in 2026. The lessons are both strategic and actionable: build cross-functional alignment, focus on the growth loops that truly compound, adopt AI early with purpose, and transition from acquisition-centric to retention-driven strategies. For early-stage founders, the message is simple—capture in-market demand first and learn quickly. For scaling teams, the path forward is to evolve from talking about features to building an inspiring brand that customers connect with deeply. Sendcloud’s story demonstrates that meaningful growth in the modern SaaS era is not just about speed; it is about structure, focus, and continuous learning in a world increasingly shaped by intelligent systems.

Key Timecodes

(00:00) – Intro: Scaling B2B SaaS, Growth Loops & AI GTM 2026
(01:10) – Guest Intro: Mark Appel, CMO of Sendcloud
(01:39) – Company Snapshot: €60M ARR, 450 Employees, 8 Markets
(02:20) – 2026 Focus: International SaaS Scaling Strategy
(02:36) – Cross-Functional GTM: Marketing, Sales & CS Alignment
(03:26) – GTM Motion: Hybrid PLG + SLG in B2B SaaS
(03:39) – Finding Growth Loops Across 8 Countries
(04:34) – Working Growth Loops: Demand to Revenue Flywheel
(05:15) – Platform Network Effects: Merchants, Carriers & Partners
(06:13) – Built-in Virality: Tracking Emails as Growth Channel
(06:51) – Ad Break: Reditus Affiliate & Referral Growth
(07:35) – AI for GTM 2026: AI SDRs & Marketing Agents
(08:50) – AI Implementation: Challenges & Early Adoption
(09:55) – Biggest GTM Shift: Retention, Expansion & Automation
(10:22) – PLG in Product: Driving Adoption via In-App Prompts
(11:40) – Rebuilding GTM: Cross-Functional Pods by Segment
(12:41) – Segmentation: Startup to Enterprise Strategy
(13:21) – Future Growth Loops: Consumer Visibility for SaaS
(14:41) – 0 to 10K MRR: In-Market Demand & Search Campaigns
(15:34) – 10K MRR to €10M ARR: Brand-Led SaaS Growth
(16:03) – Connect with Mark Appel: LinkedIn & Email
(16:18) – Outro & CTA: Subscribe, Sponsor & Learn via Reditus

Transcription

– Joran

Welcome back to the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast. My guest today is Mark Apple, Chief Marketing Officer at Sendcloud, one of Europe’s fastest growing B2B SaaS platforms, generating close to 60 million in ARR across eight European markets. This episode is a little bit different as the podcast was recorded live without video at the SaaS Summit in Amsterdam. So you notice it’s shorter, audio only. With Mark, I dive into how to scale a SaaS business internationally, build cross-functional go-to-market themes and identify growth loops that drive sustainable expansion. Mark shares how Santa Claus is already using AI agents and how AI will reshape go-to-market strategies in 2026. He would also explain what he would do differently if he could rebuild a SaaS go-to-market motion from scratch, what early-states founders should prioritize to reach their first 10K MR, and how to evolve from feature-based messaging to brand-led growth as you scale towards 10 million AR. So without further ado, let’s dive in. Welcome to the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast. Can you quickly introduce yourself, your title, and what do you currently do?

– Mark

Yeah. Thank you for having me today. My name is Mark Appel. I’m the Chief Marketing Officer of Sendcloud. And Sendcloud is an e-commerce shipping platform. I’m with that company now for about 18 months. And before Sendcloud, I was working for Backbase, cm. Com, and Exact Software, also many other companies, but these were the last ones.

– Joran

Can you give us some range where Sendcloud is in ARR employee-wise?

– Mark

The company now exists. It was founded about 12 years ago. Today, we are with about 450 people. We are very close to 60 million of ARR. Four years ago, we had a Series 60 funding round with big investors like SoftBank and a couple of other ones. Right now, we are operating in about eight countries in Europe. There’s so There’s so much potential in the market. So for us, it’s really about scaling up, scaling up.

– Joran

Yeah, nice. We are going to talk about scaling. We are going to talk about go-to-market because you’re only, as you mentioned now, in eight countries. I’m really curious to see, I guess, how you’re going to expand. We’re going to look at 2026. How do you see the go-to-market changing in 2026?

– Mark

Yeah, well, for me, it is really about making sure that all the different disciplines within SendCloud are collaborating with each other, are collaborating with each other in the best possible way, because that’s where you see things are going wrong. We as marketing, we cannot solve it by ourselves. We need sales, we need customer success. We need customer support. And it’s all about making sure that people start to actively engage with each other and also start to understand, Okay, this is the value that this sales person or this financial person or this customer success person can bring to the team, to this task force, to this initiative. And that’s also where you see things succeed once people are really collaborating with each other.

– Joran

Yeah, and I guess that’s internal, right? And when we go So external, we have a lot of podcasts about product-led growth or sales-led. I think nowadays you see a lot of hybrid motions. How do you have it within your company?

– Mark

Yeah, so within Sendcloud, we have many, many growth loops. Right now, we are identifying them. And of course, we also try to select those who will bring us this exponential growth. And once you selected those, then you also start to identify, Okay, these are the people, these are the teams that should work on it. And that’s where we stand today, looking at 2026. So for us, it is really about doubling down on the eight countries that we are currently active in and making sure that we start to really benefit from the growth loops which are in our business. And we have many, so it’s really about making sure we select the right ones.

– Joran

I guess everybody now wants to know Which one are you going to focus on? Which ones are actually working for you?

– Mark

Yeah, well, there are a couple of… Well, first of all, you never know. So it’s always about identifying them. And there are a couple of them which are currently working. So we invest in marketing. We reach out to the market. We identify interest. We identify buy intent. In the end, we generate leads as a marketing department, and sales is following up and closing those deals, those merchants. Right now, we have about 30,000 web shops connected to our platform. And with the revenue that they generate, we start to invest again. But this is a pretty traditional growth loop. So now we are looking in, Okay, how can we really benefit from the networking effect which is in there? And we have different actors on our platform. We have web shops, we have the carriers, but we also have integration partners. There are some potential growth loops that can really help us to accelerate because every carrier that we add to the platform, but also every merchant and every partner that we add to the platform, brings additional value. There also sits the potential to spread the word, even via the shipments that our merchants or the products that they ship towards their customers, to their consumers.

– Mark

So there are many potential.

– Joran

So I guess the product itself already has a viral component. The more people use it, the more people see SendCloud.

– Mark

Yeah. And to give you an example, so if a merchant ships a product, it starts to also update, starts to send update messages to consumers about, Hey, this is where your package is. And well, if you Google yourself or Google Send Cloud in your Gmail or in your email, most likely you will find Send Cloud with a tracking mail. There’s a lot of potential virality in there.

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– Joran

We’re going to look into 2026. Ai, hot topic, of course. How do you think it’s going to help companies, SaaS companies, go to market? Are you already leveraging it right now? Yeah, sure.

– Mark

We started, I think, about six months ago with seriously adopting AI. Right now, I see the biggest benefits in producing content and also in reaching out to audiences in an automated way. And that is something we call it internally our AI SDR. And this one is currently active. And within marketing, we have a couple of agents. So we have an agent creating visuals. We have an agent creating long copy, but we also have a product marketing agent. And this product marketing agent, it is also feeding the other agents with the right context because the product marketing agent knows everything about the market, our product, the jobs to be done, the pain points, the different segments that we serve, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So we will doubling. So these are the agents which are already live and active, and we will start to further develop and improve them.

– Joran

I think this goes really well to my next question, because it’s nice that you have all these agents, but what do you think is going to be the biggest challenge while implementing AI in 2026 with your go-to-market, keeping things efficient as possible?

– Mark

I think with all these new things, I think, in my view, you need to start to adopt them as soon as possible because then you start to learn. And what we also learn is that it takes a lot of time and effort to create an agent, to really understand where it can help you, to keep yourself also focused on Yeah, something to gain. We are not building AI agents just for the sake of having AI agents. In 2026, we’ll still be about that. Learning, adopting, rolling out. And for sure, if we see the next year, we will have a different view on AI because right now we are so much at the beginning. We are just scratching the surface, all of us.

– Joran

Yeah. And in this episode, we’re going to look forward. So it’s nice to see, I guess, end of next year, to to see how much predictions came out. When you look at go-to-market 2026, where do you think are the biggest changes going to happen? Because you mentioned all the departments have to work together. Where do you think it’s going to be the biggest changes Is it acquisition with the AI SDR, or is it maybe even at customer success, retaining and growing the current clients?

– Mark

So looking at Sendcloud, for us, it is really about retention, expansion. So really starting to understand this playing field. And I think we understand, but it’s also about making AI work also in this domain. So there is less human intervention, human touch needed to keep our merchants on the platform. That is a big thing for us. Also, combined with that, It’s product-led growth. So ingesting mechanisms, dynamics in the platform that encourage people to start using different capabilities in the platform without the necessity for a customer success agent or even a sales to contact our customers.

– Joran

Yeah. I’m going to ask a fun question. It’s early, but if you could rebuild a go-to-market motion completely from scratch, because you guys are 60 billion AR, so you can’t drop everything you have right now. But if you could completely build it from scratch, what would you do? What would you recommend people to do now?

– Mark

I would build… Because right now, within marketing, we have multidisciplinary teams. If we could start over again tomorrow, I would build multidisciplinary team across the entire company. We are serving different segments of type of merchants, and I would build multidisciplinary multidisciplinary teams from marketing sales to customer support, customer success, even product as one team, focusing only on that specific segment, so that every person in that whole multidisciplinary team wakes up every morning by thinking, Okay, how am I going to make life of my customer more easy, more smooth, more happy, et cetera?

– Joran

Yeah, because is it then that they all have the same goal? Because you mentioned jobs to be done framework, because probably you’re going to work towards a North Star metric. Is it then that they all have the combined goal of making the client successful?

– Mark

Yeah. If you look at the way how we segment is based on the size of that web shop. We call them startups, small-medium businesses, mid-markets, and enterprise. Across all those eight countries, and then looking at those segments, yeah, that’s more or less… They have more or less the same jobs that needs to be done or the same pain points that we need to solve.

– Joran

You mentioned it before already, growth loops. When we look As you said, 2026. What do you think is going to be a really powerful growth loop for SaaS companies?

– Mark

In general? Yeah, that is difficult to say, but I think Of course, you are looking to that type of growth look that really brings in, how to say it, volume. What I found very interesting and challenging on the Sendcloud side is, although the consumers are not our customers, they are the customers of our customers, but how to involve them in our playing field. Because we are visible because they are receiving those tracking mails. There are interesting mechanisms that we can start to apply to also include these consumers in our playing field. That’s really exponential because with 30,000 merchants that we serve, how many customers do they have? Millions.

– Joran

Yeah, it’s a nice potential. We’re going to start wrapping things up. These are going to be more revenue related questions, and you’re 60 billion AR, so you have to go all the way back. What advice would you give a founder who’s just starting out and growing from zero to 10K monthly recurring revenue?

– Mark

Although We are not talking about funnels anymore, so I need to think about another way to define it, but I always tell people, if they start, they’ll flip the funnel. So start at the bottom of the funnel. So mainly focus on those audiences which are in market. To make it very practical talking about the type of campaigns that you need to run, it is really search campaigns because these are the people who show intent. Then you can start to collect data, gather data, and have some real-life examples of how people respond to your campaigns, to your proposition, et cetera.

– Joran

Then if we assume we hit the 10K MRR and we’re going to make a huge step towards 10 million ARR, you can jump it up, you can do however you want, but what advice would you give a SaaS founder here?

– Mark

I would really start to build from very feature and benefit messaging towards more inspirational or more brand messaging. Climbing in that value chain in terms of communications. Nice.

– Joran

That’s it.

– Mark

Okay. Welcome. You’re welcome.

– Joran

I guess I’m not sure how we’re going to add it. But if people want to get in contact with you, Mark, how can they do so?

– Mark

Yeah, so they can find me on LinkedIn. So just connect with me or just send me an email, Mark. Appell@ gmail. Com.

– Joran

Thank you for coming on, Mark.

– Mark

Okay, you’re welcome.

– Joran

Cheers. Thank you for watching this show of the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast. You made it till the end, so I think we can assume you like this content. If you did, give us a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel. If you like this content, feel free to reach out if you want to sponsor the show. If you have a specific guest in mind, if you have a specific topic you want us to cover, reach out to me on LinkedIn. More than happy to take a look at it. If you want to know more about Reditus, feel free to reach out as well. But for now, have a great day and good luck growing your B2B SaaS.