Selling to Private Equity is Now a GTM Motion

At our 2025 VSaaS Collective Live, Dave Yuan made explicit what had been implicit across much of the day: private equity is no longer a side influence in Vertical SaaS, but a primary customer shaping how products spread and markets consolidate. His session treated PE like any other strategic segment — with defined personas, a distinct buying motion, and clear incentives. The focus wasn’t on theory, but on how founders should actually sell into that reality.

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‍Private equity isn’t a background influence in Vertical SaaS anymore; it’s a full-fledged customer segment with its own incentives, buying behaviors, and internal politics. Dave Yuan’s session made the case that founders should approach PE firms the same way they approach any strategic segment — with targeted sales, clear messaging, and a product story that reflects how these firms actually work. He argued that once PE starts consolidating a vertical, the buyer landscape shifts, and companies that treat PE as a real segment consistently outperform those that treat it as happenstance.

Dave broke the PE universe into three personas, each with its own agenda.

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Deal partners care about underwriting and winning. Their language is price, upside, and risk. Their version of value creation sounds like: “Add this product and you get 5 bps of revenue, 10 bps of EBITDA.” They’re not looking for a product tour; they’re looking for evidence that moves a model.

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Operating partners are the domain specialists. When you equip them with benchmarks, case studies, or simple tools that help them show up sharp in front of deal teams and CEOs, they become champions across the entire portfolio.

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Portfolio company CEOs are still the day-to-day buyers. In some rollups they hold real authority; in others, decisions are pushed from the PE firm. Either way, you have to sell at both levels.

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On go-to-market, Dave warned against the instinct to “spray PE” across a broad sales organization. A better path is to start with your most enterprise-ready rep. If traction builds, consider adding someone fluent in the language — a former banker or PE associate who can translate product value into bips, MOIC, and the levers that matter during underwriting. In parallel, put your investor network to work: map the firms, identify the right partners, and use warm introductions deliberately. Precision matters; scattershot outreach gets ignored, while deal-literate outreach gets meetings.

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The larger strategic opportunity is in product and data. Most Vertical SaaS companies already own the cleanest operational picture of their industries — revenue signatures, cohort benchmarks, workflow patterns. PE firms are, as Dave put it, “data-ingestion machines.” That’s the currency they trade in. He pointed to examples like SiteMinder, which used historical booking data to help real-estate investors underwrite hotels during COVID, and Carbon, which built a marketplace for accounting-firm M&A. The typical progression: start with benchmarking, mature into deal-sourcing intelligence, and, if you earn trust, become the system of record a PE firm uses to track performance across its entire portfolio.

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Dave also didn’t gloss over the tradeoffs. PE firms will push hard on pricing. His guidance: don’t discount without getting something meaningful in return such as portfolio-wide adoption, guaranteed volume, or a mandate to roll out your product. And while Product A may take a pricing hit, protect your ability to expand into Products B, C, and D. 

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He closed with a simple point: you don’t need PE on your cap table, but you can’t ignore them in your market map. Treat PE as a real segment with defined personas and incentives, and you gain a structural edge as consolidation reshapes your vertical.

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To dive deeper into the strategies Dave covered at Collective LIve and more on how to approach the private equity channel, request access to the Private Equity Engagement Playbook for Vertical SaaS Companies here.