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How’d You Get That Number?! is the show that asks B2B SaaS leaders one simple question: where did that goal actually come from?
Hosted by Daren Ladua and brought to you by Outset, each episode unpacks how career-defining KPIs, revenue targets, and growth goals were set in the first place and what happened next.
If you're building go-to-market teams or chasing big numbers, this is the real story behind the metrics.
[00:00:00] Joe Moriarty: No one's ever gonna remember what you tell them, but they will remember how you made them feel. And as a salesperson, you know, that's like critical in, in many ways. It's like, we're gonna sell our product, we're gonna do our thing. Most people won't remember any of that, but they will remember. They'll say like, I really like Daren.
[00:00:17] Joe Moriarty: Daren asked some good questions. Daren seemed like he cared. If you do that well and your competitors don't. You'll be remembered as the one I think that someone wants to do business with.
[00:00:29] Daren Lauda: You are listening to. How'd You Get That Number brought to you by Outset. This is the show where B2B SaaS leaders break down the real stories behind the goals, KPIs and revenue targets that shaped their careers, and how those numbers were set in the first place.
[00:00:44] Daren Lauda: I'm your host, Daren Lauda.
[00:00:49] Daren Lauda: Welcome everyone. I'm really excited today. Another great episode of How'd You Get That Number? And I'm joined today by Joe Moriarty. Did I say that right, Joe? I wanna make sure I got it right. Sounds perfect. Fantastic. Joe's got a really fantastic background. I'm gonna ask him to give us more about that in just a second.
[00:01:05] Daren Lauda: But yeah, when I met Joe, I saw wow, EVP, uh, and CRO or sales and marketing leader, I guess at LeadCheck, co-founder of Raven360, which became Renovo, if I'm not mistaken. You were A CRO and the CEO there as well. Currently doing fractional leadership in addition to being the chief customer officer at Codio. I don't know, I'm just touching the, the very most recent components of your background. You've been doing great things for a long time. Tell
[00:01:28] Joe Moriarty: us more about yourself. Thanks, Daren. Great to meet you, uh, on the podcast here. When I came outta college, I actually, I'll go all the way back. Uh, I came outta college with an economics degree.
[00:01:40] Joe Moriarty: And didn't know what to do. And, uh, ended up in Boston, Massachusetts and joined a startup software company luckily, and, uh, started doing quality assurance. So I was actually a, a, a tester of software for a couple of years, but I learned engineering and I learned, you know, architecture and how software gets built and all that.
[00:01:59] Joe Moriarty: And so it was a great, great experience, but I kinda knew that I was more wired for sales and I was more wired for the go to market. Side of the house. And so I got that shot a couple years into my career and I never looked back. So I've been just kind of sales guy number one ever since then. Um, growing companies and, you know, so I've had a variety of roles all the way from those days all the way through to running sales and, and ultimately founding my own company and, uh, running as CEOI love that.
[00:02:27] Joe Moriarty: I
[00:02:28] Daren Lauda: love the way careers start from QA to seller to CEO. That's super cool. Um, I tell this story sometimes, and this is your story, not mine. But when I got outta the Army, I said, I will never go into sales. I do not want to be a seller. And I got my first temporary job in a marketing department, and there were these guys on the other side of the floor who came and went when they wanted to.
[00:02:48] Daren Lauda: They'd disappear for two or three days. They'd come back evenings, dinners. I said, well, who are those folks? I want that kind of freedom. And they said, those are the sellers. Yeah. The rest was history. I made the cutover to sales and didn't look back.
[00:03:00] Joe Moriarty: Yeah, I, I mean, early on in my career, I also noticed that it was sales that had access to the CEO.
[00:03:07] Joe Moriarty: It was sales that had access to the highest levels of leadership because it was always at the end of the quarter or the end of the month. And there was just this energy and this like fervor and the sales, the sales team that CEO was there talking to him, trying to figure out how to get deals done. So I, I said, that's fun.
[00:03:23] Joe Moriarty: That's where I wanted to be in the action always. So that's where, that's where the action is
[00:03:28] Daren Lauda: Exactly. Um, I'm so glad you made the move with an economics degree for all econ folks out there. My dad used to always say to me, you know what an economist does. Yeah, they spend their time trying to prove that what works in practice works in theory.
[00:03:41] Daren Lauda: So that's kind of my view of economics. I shouldn't say that, but like I'm, I'm really glad you're on the show today. Um, talking about great, fun sales stuff. I always like to start the show, um, asking a question or diving into a crazy number you were assigned. Or a giant bodacious target. And when you got that target, what did you do?
[00:04:02] Daren Lauda: Did you say No way in heck and run away? Did you fight for it? Did you chase it? Sure. How did things go? I'd love to hear about your big audacious
[00:04:09] Joe Moriarty: goal. Sure. The biggest one that we pro that I probably had to tackle was when we started Raven360. We had a number of early customers that we just went out and we, you know, bootstrapped to the company.
[00:04:21] Joe Moriarty: We had a product of kind of a minimum viable product, but we closed a couple enterprise customers. We closed a big customer, our EMC, which is now part of Dell Technologies up in the Boston area. And you know, so we were generating about. In the first year, about a million and a half in revenue, a RR in revenue.
[00:04:38] Joe Moriarty: And we went out and raised some money. So we went out and raised some, some new capital, some vent, some VC kind of seed round capital. And our new board came in and said, okay Joe, that's great. We actually need you to triple revenue from this year to next year.
[00:04:55] Daren Lauda: And that was a
[00:04:55] Joe Moriarty: vc. Were they looking for the triple, triple, double, double, double, yeah.
[00:04:58] Joe Moriarty: Was that kind of the playbook? Okay. Yeah, it was the triple, triple double playbook. We kind of knew it was coming, but you know, you get that number and then it says, oh my goodness, how are we gonna do this? And we only had, I was basically the only salesperson at that time. I was kind of founder led, founder sales, so we just, we said, all right.
[00:05:14] Joe Moriarty: Let's put our plan together. Let's go talk to everyone we possibly can and we hustled as hard as we possibly can. And I hate to say we didn't triple, but we did double. And we were able to double the company with a very small staff. And it was just, you know, honestly it was creativity. It was a little bit, it was a lot of hard work.
[00:05:32] Joe Moriarty: It was a lot of trying to figure out, listening to your customers, trying to figure out the ideal customer profile and just. You know, trying to find the pain. We just kept trying to find the pain of our customers and address it and make it work in the product and, you know, so that's how we, that's how we grew.
[00:05:49] Daren Lauda: That's super cool. I'm like, it's funny, we're apologizing for not tripling. We only doubled, which is so funny to hear sometimes. I love hearing that you doubled. Were you the co, obviously you were a co-founder in, in a C-level role. Were you also the account executive in chief? Were you the only seller?
[00:06:06] Joe Moriarty: Yeah,
[00:06:06] Daren Lauda: at
[00:06:07] Joe Moriarty: that time? Yes. Now, throughout the year I hired, so like, you know, I, I, I brought in a couple of account executives and we used like an outsourced BDR team at that time. So during the year, I, I grew, grew the sales kind of, for the first time, kind of hired some salespeople and ramped them up and got them selling and that's part of the fun.
[00:06:26] Joe Moriarty: I love doing that. That's, it's a great time
[00:06:28] Daren Lauda: being
[00:06:29] Joe Moriarty: able to
[00:06:29] Daren Lauda: do
[00:06:29] Joe Moriarty: that,
[00:06:30] Daren Lauda: that those growth cycles are a joy. I completely agree with you. I love doing that. I wanna double click on the two areas. I'd love to. You've got some money in. You've got a big challenge when you hired your first sellers. I'd love to know kind of what you looked for in the profile and how you found them.
[00:06:44] Daren Lauda: Were they just from your network or were they net net new, um, to you And then I'd love to double click into your kind of outsourced BDR framework because people have real hit or miss kind of Yeah. Models with those. Some people love 'em, some don't. So I'd love to talk about both.
[00:06:56] Joe Moriarty: Sure, sure. I did kind of go, I did go to my network, but it wasn't people that had, I had worked with.
[00:07:01] Joe Moriarty: It was just referrals. Some, some references. And it was, you know, I hired younger sales folks, folks, you know, the couple like year or two outta college. So I really looked for, when we were interviewing, I really looked for curiosity, kind of number one. Was it a, was it someone who actually had a genuine curiosity?
[00:07:19] Joe Moriarty: Because I feel like in sales we have to be asking questions nonstop all the time. Trying to understand what someone needs, what their pain is, how do they operate. So someone that is genuinely curious was a, was a good one that I always looked for. Coachability, big one. Can someone take direction? Can they take feedback?
[00:07:36] Joe Moriarty: Can they take, I've never been a, you know, someone to, I, I don't think it's too difficult in terms of negative feedback, but you have to give good feedback and you have to be able to take it and, and change. So always look for coachability. And then it was just kind of work, work ethic. Could I drill in and find out that somebody actually wanted to do the hard work?
[00:07:55] Joe Moriarty: 'cause when you're at a startup, it takes a ton of grit. It was one of my, one of our core values that I actually promoted to everyone. I said, look, this is hard. You gotta have some grit. You gotta be able to sustain. You gotta be able to persevere. So you think you can do that? Are you ready to do that? Do you want to do that?
[00:08:12] Joe Moriarty: Some people don't. So that's kinda what I look for. And just some core attributes early on. That's the first part of the question,
[00:08:19] Daren Lauda: right? Yeah. Well, let's, let's go there and then we'll come back to the BDRs in a second. So, double clicking, just one step further. It was just you selling, you've grown the business, you've got it through a million and a half, you're on the way to this, uh, doubling event.
[00:08:32] Daren Lauda: You've got these two new sellers. How do you evaluate, or how did you evaluate, and sorry, I know this is, uh, some time ago. But how did you evaluate their success in that first year before you had a revenue engine defined and knew how everything flowed through the funnel and those sorts of things. Did you have a set of leading indicators that you evaluated for these two new hires?
[00:08:51] Daren Lauda: Was it just we were in the field together? So direct observation. How did you evaluate them?
[00:08:55] Joe Moriarty: If anybody, you ever talked to anybody that's ever workeded for me, I, I love this saying where, as a salesperson or as a person in general, the only, you can really only control two things. You control your attitude and you can control your effort.
[00:09:08] Joe Moriarty: Those are the two things. If you, that you as a human being and as a seller, you have control over everything else is, you don't have a whole lot of control. So when I would measure someone, I would always look at, do they have a positive attitude? Are they continuing to, to show up? Are they working, you know, they're working hard.
[00:09:28] Joe Moriarty: And you can tell that through. Some of that's just observation and what we're looking at. And then effort was activities. Like, we really look at activity like, what are you doing? Like, how many calls are you making, how many emails are you sending? Like let, let's measure the kp, like let's measure that. And then are, you know, what are the conversion rates?
[00:09:45] Joe Moriarty: Are you getting somebody into a first meeting? Are you getting 'em qualified? Are you getting 'em into the demo? And so we would just, those are the measurable things that we could do with, with, you know, metrics. So that was really it. It was like, how's our attitude? And then what are our metrics looking like?
[00:10:01] Joe Moriarty: And then if, if they're not hitting their metrics, it could be for a variety of reasons. Maybe they don't understand the product. Maybe we need to give 'em more training. Maybe we need to, but it gives you a, that framework to me was the one that we just continued to use. I love that you started
[00:10:13] Daren Lauda: with curiosity and attitude.
[00:10:15] Daren Lauda: You know where you people will give you playbooks. You can buy all sorts of formulas and those sorts of things, but looking at the individual and you bring them in that early, especially when they're earlier in their career like you did, curiosity, attitude, and willingness to do the hard work are so important, and I think sometimes, be honest with you today.
[00:10:32] Daren Lauda: Think gets oddly overlooked. People wanna put them into a formula, you're gonna make this many calls. That's the starting point. And I think people miss some of those critical gates. I don't know if you'd agree, um, but I'm, I love hearing that's where you started. That's certainly how I would recruit right now.
[00:10:44] Daren Lauda: If I was going to recruit more sellers for. My current organization. Mm-hmm. Um, I'd be looking at curiosity first. Willing to work hard, willing to learn and be coachable. Those are things you, you, you can't teach. You come in with that or you don't have it, and it's really binary.
[00:11:00] Joe Moriarty: Yeah. And there's one more I would add that we, we kinda use as a core value too, which was empathy.
[00:11:06] Joe Moriarty: Because when you're selling to someone, ultimately. There's a, I think it was Teddy Roosevelt actually said, you know, no one's ever gonna remember, ever remember what you tell them, but they will remember how you made them feel. And as a salesperson, you know, that's like critical in, in many ways. It's like, we're gonna talk, we're gonna pit, you know, we're listen, we're gonna qualify.
[00:11:27] Joe Moriarty: We're gonna sell our product, we're gonna do our thing. Most people won't remember any of that, but they will remember, they'll say like, I really like Daren. Daren asked some good questions. Daren seemed like he cared. Daren seemed like he asked some really, like, thoughtful questions about our business that would help us.
[00:11:44] Joe Moriarty: That's empathy, right? Because you're trying to un putt yourself in that person's shoes and try to understand what makes their, makes 'em tick, makes their business successful, solves their pain. So that's just a, I I feel like that's a huge one too. And it, it can be a big differentiator in a sales cycle if you do that well and your competitors don't.
[00:12:05] Joe Moriarty: You'll be remembered as the one I think that someone wants to do business with.
[00:12:09] Daren Lauda: Yeah. I'm glad you called that one out too. That is just, that's excellent Empathy. You said empathy, you said listen and understand. Those were three words that really jumped out at me across there. One of the things that I like to tell my team is try to understand before you try to be understood.
[00:12:24] Daren Lauda: Mm-hmm. Um, and that also tells the customer like, I'm here for you. I wanna learn from you. I wanna understand your challenge and your pain, so hopefully I can help make things better. And quite frankly, if I can't, if I'm not the right person, I can recommend someone to you who might be able to solve your pain or problem.
[00:12:42] Daren Lauda: That's one of my other favorite things, and it shows empathy. I'm not your person, provider, or vendor, but I know someone who might be, let me make you that interaction. I love seeing that too.
[00:12:50] Joe Moriarty: Yeah, 100%. And people remember that. They'll remember that you, you know, again, is, it's more like. You actually care.
[00:12:57] Joe Moriarty: You care as a human being. It's not, this isn't a, like a transactional thing. It can be, we're actually a human to human interaction here. Like, and a lot of that I feel like is, is has gone away to some extent. And, and you know, gosh, I mean we could go down the rabbit hole of AI a little bit about this, but I think that that human interaction, being able to connect with someone, being able to understand their, where they.
[00:13:21] Joe Moriarty: Live and breathe and what their issues are is like really differentiating and important.
[00:13:27] Daren Lauda: Yep. I don't wanna go too far into the AI rabbit hole, but I think there's gonna be a premium placed on empathy, listening, caring, those sorts of things. 'cause I don't know about you, but people prospect me every day now and I can tell that they're all using the same or similar templates that are AI generated.
[00:13:44] Daren Lauda: It's a bunch of garbage. Yeah. Hey Daren, I'm impressed by your work ad. It's all this stuff that just keeps coming. It's sent by a domain that if I try to click through to it, there's nothing there. It's parked on the button or it goes to a dead page. Right. So I know there's just AI-based spam and people seem to think that at scale and volume is the way to meet people and get leads these days.
[00:14:05] Daren Lauda: Mm-hmm. And I think. Look, I am not a young AI innovator. I'm more of a salty dog, I guess you could say. I've got some, got some, some tenure, but I can already tell what's AI and what's bs, and that's not empathy, and that's not curiosity, and that's not listening. And I mark those spam and delete 'em all the time.
[00:14:22] Daren Lauda: Mm-hmm. So I do think there's gonna be somewhat of a rebellion at some point. I saw. This week that SalesLoft, and I haven't gone to check the source, so I wanna be careful here, but the implication was that SalesLoft is getting rid of all its SDRs at some point in the future. Mm-hmm. Which is just shocking 'cause that's what they kind of started doing was building sequences and cadences for SDRs.
[00:14:40] Daren Lauda: I think we're still gonna need a human in the loop, and I hope that holds true, but I guess we'll see as things evolve over the next few years.
[00:14:47] Joe Moriarty: Yeah, I think there's, I agree with you and I, but I also think that there, there probably is a place for some of this tooling. In this, in the modern sales process and maybe it's research, maybe it's just I, you know, helping identify like customers, ideal customer profile.
[00:15:06] Joe Moriarty: Like I think that can be really valuable because that's just, boy, that used to be hard research that we used to do. Just a lot of like digging and research that took time. So I think that like AI tooling can, can really speed that up and I think will be beneficial. I really. Yeah, I question these, the, these AI agents, BDR agents, SDR agents, there's a number of companies that are coming out with 'em, and they're very realistic and they're very, they look like a real human being and they're not.
[00:15:37] Joe Moriarty: And I think that that's pretty obvious and that'll come through. And, and I don't, I don't know that anybody wants, really wants to interact with a, an AI agent. That's, that's so we will, we will see. But I agree with you. I think that. People are gonna, in my opinion, people are going to want to, to kinda like have human ar more and more human interaction that's real.
[00:15:59] Joe Moriarty: And that, you know, isn't a AI and that, you know, isn't fake. So I, I think we'll see that. I also think just in over time, that's why people gravitate towards, you know, like live music concerts or dance recitals or live anything like that. Because it's real, it's real inter it's real humans producing art that's like beautiful, you know?
[00:16:18] Joe Moriarty: So I think that. Over time, it's like that's what people will gravitate towards.
[00:16:23] Daren Lauda: I agree. And I should say, just in fairness to all, I have retained automated AI bound, AI based automated outbound type resources before. Mm-hmm. And I've had really good success. When the time went into understanding the ICP, the roles, who we were trying to get to, and the goal was to quickly get them to speak with a human, not to a bot, right?
[00:16:43] Daren Lauda: So like, I think it can be done well. I just see so much that's done poorly right now that I'm gonna keep saying. I think the human in the loop needs to be there for a long time to come. Agree. Yep. Totally agree with you. Today's episode is sponsored by HLX, the go-to-market advisory firm that helps high growth B2B companies scale smarter.
[00:17:01] Daren Lauda: HLX blends strategic consulting with roll up your sleeves execution. Whether you need fractional leadership, Salesforce expertise, or cross functional support across sales, marketing, and rev ops, HLX builds alongside you. If your next number demands more than advice, talk to HLX. Visit teamHLX to learn more, teamhlx.com.
[00:17:27] Daren Lauda: So coming back full circle, you mentioned going back to your journey, you're at a million and a half, you're going for a triple. Got close hired, your first sellers. You also said you used outsourced BDR uh, type support. Mm-hmm. And I've seen people say it never works, which I think never is too strong a word.
[00:17:44] Daren Lauda: I, I've seen people say it only works if you have a ton of great research history and information, so you can train them quickly. But you probably didn't have that yet. So you're, so you're still kinda learning. So I'm curious to know how your outsource VR experience went.
[00:17:56] Joe Moriarty: Okay, so part of our goal of the of that team was we were trying to do a lot of testing as well.
[00:18:02] Joe Moriarty: So for us at that phase, again, we had minimum viable product, but I don't, I wouldn't say we actually had product market fit. We were trying to figure that out and we were trying to figure out scale and, and so messaging, what was resonating, what wasn't resonating, what were people wanting to take pho uh, meetings for?
[00:18:20] Joe Moriarty: So the BDR team was actually really useful for that because I probably drove them crazy because I would, we would meet weekly and I would say, let's tweak the message. Let's try this one. Let's try that one. Let's see if we can iterate. You know, so I was trying to iterate on messaging. And just to get conversions to people taking a call and taking a meeting.
[00:18:40] Joe Moriarty: And so they, so they had a lot of failure, I would say, in doing that because we were still figuring it out. But they did help us. Hone in the message and I didn't have to hire anybody. So from that standpoint, I think it was a positive. You know, you don't, you're not paying a fully, you know, a full-time, you know, FTE plus benefits and all that stuff.
[00:19:02] Joe Moriarty: You can just say like, I'm just gonna do a monthly thing. And the other thing that I was able to do with the company I worked with was if I really liked the person, they would let me hire 'em. So, so that was beneficial too. And I did that. So over, you know, I actually ended up bringing one of the BDRs in-house over time who I thought was gonna be, uh, the best performer and who also had aspirations to become an ae.
[00:19:25] Joe Moriarty: So from that standpoint, I think it was actually successful. I think that, you know, we got our message tested, we got our, we got, uh, our own in-house BDR through the process who was well trained. So it was, I think that that actually worked well for us.
[00:19:42] Daren Lauda: Your approach is unique, and I really like it as well.
[00:19:44] Daren Lauda: I learned something here most of the time, is that I hear people talk about trying to acquire outsource BDR support. It's how many meetings can you set? That's the starting point, right? Mm-hmm. Are they qualified? Are the right meetings is kind of the next measure. What you're saying here is you saw an opportunity to use this outsource third party to scale messaging testing.
[00:20:04] Daren Lauda: Mm-hmm. And you were willing to roll up your sleeves, make the time to iterate weekly to find what worked. I hadn't thought of doing that. That's actually a really good idea. Um, I learned something very useful here. And the, the firm that you worked with. They were open to that. They didn't want to be forced towards like a, a, a script that wouldn't change, that sort of thing.
[00:20:24] Joe Moriarty: Yeah. They were open to it. They were great to work with. I don't mind telling who they were, if it's if the audience or you would care. It's, it was a group in Boston called demandDrive, who I continue to say close with and who, who were just a great partner, honestly. And they were, they were super flexible.
[00:20:40] Joe Moriarty: They've done really well for themselves too. They ended up doing, you know, have grown really big and they're, you know, so they, great team, great founding team. And when I started working with 'em, they were pretty small and kind of startup ish too. So we were just kind of a good fit. We were both scrappy, we were both wanting to be successful as best.
[00:20:58] Joe Moriarty: We wanted to help each other. So it was it that, that worked out well. And then in other more mature companies, I've also done it. And that becomes more of the second exercise, which you said, which is how many meetings are getting booked? Are they the right meetings, is it the right, is it a decision maker?
[00:21:16] Joe Moriarty: Is it, but that's when you're more established and you can do that stuff. 'cause you probably have product market fit, you know, pain, you know, the mess, the right messaging. We didn't know that. So we had to figure it out.
[00:21:27] Daren Lauda: Well, thank you for giving them a name. I think you said it's demandDrive in Boston.
[00:21:30] Daren Lauda: demandDrive. Is that right? Yep. Fantastic. I get a lot of people ask about these firms all the time and a trusted recommendation. We're not sponsored folks, so this is just a trusted recommendation from Joe. So check 'em out if you're in that spot. Um, I always love hearing about people who worked with go-to-market vendors and had good success and getting the word out, so that's fantastic.
[00:21:48] Daren Lauda: I had another thing that I wanted to drill into now, which is kind of a subject change. We didn't talked about it beforehand, but it looks like now you're doing some fractional CRO work as well today. Is that right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep. So I'm curious. I've done a fractional CRO work as well, and one of the things that I find nerve wracking, I almost said off-putting, but that's not the right way to, I say nerve wracking, is, you know, you come into this company, you're probably there because they either haven't had a CRO or the last one left suddenly.
[00:22:14] Daren Lauda: You're there because something doesn't exist or something's not working. Mm-hmm. And you have a founder or a CEO who says, in the first two weeks, I need a forecast. Mm-hmm. How do you get from here to there when you dunno the history, the quality of the pipeline, all those sorts of things. That's always like the nervous inflection point for me.
[00:22:30] Joe Moriarty: Yeah. That's hard forecast is when someone asks for that, it's like, oh boy, we're gonna have, let's, we're gonna have to do a very serious pipeline review exercise and we're gonna have to look at some historical successes and failures. You really have to drill in and understand like what's, what's working?
[00:22:47] Joe Moriarty: Like what are some deals that have gotten done that we feel good about? What are some ones that we've lost? Then we have to look at the actual everything that's in the pipeline that we think, and most of the time it's like we're probably gonna get rid of like. 50% of, of what's in there or more. So it can be a painful exercise for the founder.
[00:23:08] Joe Moriarty: And I try to tee it up like that. I say, look, we're gonna go into this and I, you know, I, I use medic and I use a pretty strict qualification methodology and sometimes we have to teach and train that. But I wanna know, do you have the metrics? Do you have the economic buyer? Do you know the pain? Do you have the decision criteria?
[00:23:25] Joe Moriarty: Do you know all like, we're gonna go through every single deal and really. Diagnose it every single one, and it becomes pretty clear. Ones that are real and ones that aren't.
[00:23:36] Daren Lauda: Yeah, you have to go deep. I agree. I was talking to one entity not so long ago, the one I looked at, the pipeline history. There were deals going back five years there were open five years ago, four years ago, three years ago, two years ago, a year ago.
[00:23:50] Daren Lauda: There were like 90 of these deals that had never been closed, never had any activity. But suddenly we're all marked closed, lost the day before I got there. Yeah. Okay. What do I do with this? Can I learn anything here? So it's always hard to, yeah, you learn they have terrible pipeline hygiene. Exactly. And you learn, I have no math to work with.
[00:24:09] Daren Lauda: I can't go back and look and see any kind of real conversion rate, sales cycle, duration, nothing. So you have to smart, start small, interrogate and learn. And for me, I do lots of fast experiments. Okay. Seller number one. 30 accounts, identify them, outbound them. I wanna see how far you can get in four weeks marketing.
[00:24:26] Daren Lauda: We're gonna launch a new, uh, outbound email campaign. Um, we're gonna give you a really, really high quality list. Let's see what we can get. And I do these rapid experiments to try to find some level of math right that will help me go forward, in addition to interrogating each and every deal. And trying to get that forecast, because the second I can get this quarter forecasted in a way that I feel somewhat comfortable with, or at least as comfortable as I can be, next quarter, what's that gonna be?
[00:24:55] Daren Lauda: Right? So right then I'm reaching further and then the quarter after that, and then a CFO's gonna come in and say, give me a 12 month. And I'm like, man, I've been here three weeks and I can't trust what I see yet. So there's this, there's this need to deliver numbers rapidly that I'm always trying to figure out how to crack the code for.
[00:25:09] Joe Moriarty: Yeah, same. It's it exactly. I love what you just said about fast experiments though, and I really liked what you said about, let's take the top 30 deals, let's see how far we can get. You got four weeks go. I haven't framed it in that way, but I think that that's smart. I think that that's really good and because, 'cause I don't think that's overwhelming either.
[00:25:28] Joe Moriarty: I think that that's something that's, you know, feels like doable. And I think I've made that mistake honestly in the past where, you know. I trying to be a little too aggressive, trying to give a little bit too much, uh, for people to do that is become overwhelming. And so I think there's a balance there.
[00:25:44] Joe Moriarty: You wanna push it, you wanna push right to the edge, that we wanna push the edge of it, but we don't wanna, we don't want to cause somebody to be paralyzed 'cause they don't feel like they are ever gonna be successful. So I think that that's, that's always a challenge too. And, and, and you face some of that, like you're gonna, like as when you come into an org, sometimes there's a bit of fear.
[00:26:04] Joe Moriarty: Like, oh my gosh, who is this person? What are, are they like, am I gonna lose my job? Is the like, so you have to, you have to overcome a little bit of that too.
[00:26:11] Daren Lauda: Yep. I like to tell folks when I come in and I stole this from somebody, I wish I could credit the original, uh, original quota. Wrong way to say it, but you get what I'm going for here.
[00:26:21] Daren Lauda: I come in and I say, listen, I'm gonna tell you right now, I'm going to stretch this organization. We have to change. I'm gonna stretch you. You have to tell me when I'm creating strain. There's a point where I'll push too far and say, okay, Daren, this is the point of strain, and if we're open and work together and you're willing to stretch, I can help make this thing better.
[00:26:40] Daren Lauda: Keep me honest with it, strain, and we'll figure it out together. That tends to work pretty well. Layering in discrete type experience fast. Oh guys, this worked. Look at the open rates on this first campaign. We can do something with this. And ensuring a small quick win in a positive way. I try to do that, but it's always a little different and, and it's always a challenge.
[00:26:57] Joe Moriarty: Yeah. It's the, uh, the elastic band, right? It's like we're gonna stretch that elastic band. We don't wanna snap it, but we're gonna stretch it as far as it can go.
[00:27:05] Daren Lauda: Exactly. Cool. Well, hey, we're, we're coming up on time here. We're getting close to the end of the half hour. One question that I always like to ask, if you had to think about, there's one thing in go to market tech that we're not spending enough time talking about right now that we should spend more time talking about and trying to figure out.
[00:27:22] Daren Lauda: I know AI is always a big talk topic, but is there something you think that we should talk about more in go to market tech or go to market in general that we're missing?
[00:27:30] Joe Moriarty: Yeah, that's a good question. I think I would lean back into what I said prior, which is the thing that we used to spend so much time on and trying to figure out was these not only ideal customer profile, but like-minded problems and like-minded customers.
[00:27:49] Joe Moriarty: And doing that at scale I do think is something that tech is, AI tech actually is, can be really helpful with. I've been experimenting with it. Pretty recently and started to see some like really good results. You know, an example would be like you can take, take your ideal customer profile by URL, by literally URL, plug it in and say, here's another list of companies that are exactly like this company that may have some of the same challenges because of market conditions or other factors, and this is who you should be prospecting into.
[00:28:26] Joe Moriarty: And it was in like instant. And so to me that was, that's super eyeopening as a seller because as a, I would've, uh, you know, killed for that 10 years ago, I would've been like, oh my gosh, are you kidding me? Gimme the phone. Like, I'll just start dialing right? As soon as I gimme that list, I'm just gonna start dialing because I know that there're like customer or like company.
[00:28:50] Joe Moriarty: So I think that that's something that sellers can lean into, go to market teams, can lean into marketing, can outbound to. You know, all that stuff. And then one more down, and I don't know if we have enough time, but I have just one other thought. One of the things I, we found was super successful, or I think, and I don't know that people do it enough, you get the whole idea of content and they get the idea of like you wanna put stuff out.
[00:29:12] Joe Moriarty: But truly putting out helpful content that educates a market, I think establishes companies as a true, helpful thought leader and. I don't, I still don't think companies do that enough because when you, if you find a company, you say, gosh, I'm searching. I have a problem. I have pain. I'm search, you know, I wanna understand this thing.
[00:29:36] Joe Moriarty: If someone's writing about that and they're explaining it and they're giving like just some like really valuable stuff, you automatically gravitate to wanting to work with that company. And the, the problem, and the reason I say that is because ai, it's so easy with LLMs to produce content. A lot of it's garbage, but if you put thought into it, that is actually valuable content for people.
[00:29:58] Joe Moriarty: I think that that is gonna be a differentiator, and I think that that's something that we have to like continuously.
[00:30:03] Daren Lauda: Think about, I think those are two great use cases for ai. Ai, the replication, the creating better content. Um, you also said another one earlier in the conversation, which was kind of research, preparing the seller to have a better call.
[00:30:16] Daren Lauda: I think those are all great use cases. And while the world's racing towards automating sequences with generic content. Doing the research, feeding the sellers the right information and helping them find the right people to call. I think that's where the power is right now. Mm-hmm. And I think the human in the loop kind of concept that makes those calls.
[00:30:37] Daren Lauda: Those are gonna be the winners, the ones that keep marking a spam every day. 'cause they just keep hitting me with the same crap. Those are the ones that are gonna fall away. So I think you hit onto something, uh, really great there and I'll give one tip to the audience that I always use. I got into the habit of gonna the ChatGPT or something and saying, write something for me about this.
[00:30:55] Daren Lauda: What I do now is I go write something that I want to write about. I actually write the words first, 2, 3, 4 paragraphs, and then I give that the chat g pt, and say, you see where I'm going here? Make this better. How? How? Mm-hmm. Help me make this thought better. It's still my original thought made better as opposed to getting some other boilerplate from ChatGPT.
[00:31:14] Daren Lauda: So I love creating content that way. It's super helpful for me. Yeah, very smart. I think that's the right way to do it. Awesome. Hey Joe, I really enjoyed the conversation. I love your town, Boston. Oh, you're in Charleston, South Carolina, though. You used to live in Boston. I love both your towns. I still go back quite a lot.
[00:31:29] Daren Lauda: I still go back quite a lot. I'm kind of up, up and down the coast. Yep. I've got a sister in Boston and she says I never come out there, which is kind of true, but I love the city. I have to get out there more often. And Charleston, South Carolina, my wife and I went there. Last summer, spent a week. Just a beautiful place.
[00:31:43] Daren Lauda: Yeah, it's a great place. Cool. Well, hey, thanks for your time today. Thanks for sharing your experience, uh, with everybody who listens to the podcast. If people wanna find you, Joe, how do they, how do they reach out?
[00:31:53] Joe Moriarty: Yeah, I mean, LinkedIn is easiest. Um, if you just search Joe Moriarty, you'll find me, Joe Moriarty Codio or Joe Moriarty.
[00:31:59] Joe Moriarty: Even HLX now is kind of up there, so LinkedIn's probably the easiest or yeah, that would
[00:32:05] Daren Lauda: be it. Awesome. Joe, thank you so much. I appreciate your time and hope to have you back on the show. Joe, thanks so much. I really appreciate your time and I hope we can get you back on the show sometime soon. Thanks, Daren, appreciate it.
[00:32:18] Daren Lauda: That's it for this episode of How'd You Get That Number. Make sure to follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and if you want to keep the conversation going, connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm Daren Lauda. Thanks for listening. See you next time.