When volume won't cut it

There's a phase shift that happens to any b2b SaaS company. The shift away from volume to efficiency.

When is it time to shift, and how do you go about it? That's what we discuss.

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (01:56) - Is volume still the thing?
• (07:04) - Shifting Focus away
• (13:00) - The Process
• (16:40) - Budget Reallocation Strategies
• (17:11) - Conversion Rate Optimization Techniques
• (19:52) - Improving Demo Request Conversion
• (21:11) - The Tools
• (25:29) - The Skills

***

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🔔 LinkedIn: Toni / Mikkel

✉️ Newsletter: revenueletter.substack.com 

📺 Watch: https://www.youtube.com/@growblocks
💬 Contact: [e-mail]

*** 

This episode is brought to you by Growblocks. Finding and fixing problems in your GTM shouldn't take weeks. It should happen instantly.

That's why Growblocks built the first RevOps platform that shows you your entire funnel, split by motions, segments and more - so you can find problems, the root-cause and identify solutions fast, all in the same platform.

Creators & Guests

Host

Mikkel Plaehn

Head of Demand at Growblocks

Host

Toni Hohlbein

CEO & Co-founder at Growblocks

What is The Revenue Formula?

This podcast is about scaling tech startups.

Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Mikkel Plaehn, together they look at the full funnel.

With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.

If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.

[00:00:00] Toni: Hey everyone, this is Toni Hohlbein from Growblocks. You're listening to the Revenue Formula with Mikkel and Toni. In today's episode, we discuss the shift from volume to optimizing throughput, when you need to shift and how. Enjoy!
[00:00:20] So
[00:00:20] I was a bit under the weather this weekend.
[00:00:23] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:00:24] Toni: And you know, my, my oldest, he was at a, like a kid's birthday party. Right. And you know how this goes kind of it's, he's still at the age where mom needs to join or dad needs to join.
[00:00:36] So dad didn't join. But mom obviously did. And um, he's picking up that I'm sick and like not feeling so great. So they were at this event and, and as it turns out, basically all moms, it's, it's just moms, like it usually is. Right. So, and then in front of the whole audience, You know, my Theo is like, he's a very caring little boy and from the audience, it's like why, why is why is dad not feeling so good?
[00:01:05] And then uh, he goes, well, because he's um, he's a little bit sick. He doesn't, you know, it's, it's not so good. Everyone listening right in the middle of the room, everyone is listening. And then he looks at my mom and like, super scared. It's like, does he? Does he have the man flu? And the, all the women, all the women on the, you know, in the, in the room, just on the floor laughing. It's like, yeah, that's it. That's exactly what he's having. You know?
[00:01:37] Mikkel: he's having. Oh, he got you good.
[00:01:39] Toni: Yeah.
[00:01:40] Mikkel: Such a smart, clever boy. Oh my God. How do we, how do we bounce, how do we,
[00:01:46] Toni: how does that
[00:01:46] Mikkel: how do we bounce back from that, man? And the thing is, I had a, I had an intro about volume and now it's gone, but it's all good.
[00:01:54] It's all good.
[00:01:56] No the thing is, we're going to talk about why when volume won't cut it. And sometimes, you know, even the Manflu won't cut it. You still have to show for those
[00:02:04] Toni: know, I
[00:02:04] Mikkel: right? And I
[00:02:05] Toni: And I mean, I, I pushed through. I always kind of managed the other boy. So, you know, I was, I was, I was
[00:02:11] Mikkel: say manage, I'm just seeing you lying down on the couch and playing.
[00:02:15] Toni: PAW patrol
[00:02:16] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:02:16] Toni: PAW Patrol, watch, watch PAW Patrol.
[00:02:19] Mikkel: can I
[00:02:20] have
[00:02:20] can I have something to drink? Yeah. Go out. There's tap water out
[00:02:23] Toni: water. Yeah,
[00:02:23] Mikkel: Oh man. Yeah. We've all been there. We've all been there. We've all been there. No. So, we're going to talk a bit about when volume won't cut it because this is like I've told you a couple of times when I've talked with founders in the past, it's like, yeah, we need marketing to come in and we just need more volume.
[00:02:37] Just, we just need more volume. That's what we need. But here's the thing. There's a point in time where that's actually not really the case anymore. And there is that phase shift, which, which we want to talk a bit about
[00:02:49] today.
[00:02:50] Toni: No, exactly. I think the I think More is always better. You know, let's, let's just take efficiency and cost aside.
[00:03:00] you want to have 500 demo requests or do you want to have 550 demo requests? It's like, I'll take 550. Thank you very much. I mean, there's, there's no, there's no reason to have less, right? In that case. And I think as, as you mature as a business, And actually, if you really unfold this a little bit, as you mature as a, as a motion, as a market, and it's like the S curve basically
[00:03:24] There,
[00:03:24] there is, there's a phase where volume is the right thing to push.
[00:03:28] And then there's a phase where volume just, you can push as much as you want. It's not, it's not going to happen. Right. And I think this is number one, that to kind of. see that coming, that's really difficult actually. Right. and when we were prepping this episode, we were basically kind of also talking about how
[00:03:45] how,
[00:03:46] what we're going to talk about today can seem like an excuse for, for VP
[00:03:52] Mikkel: Well, that's why, well, that's why we're not making, you know, we can't do it. It's we're at this point in the S curve.
[00:03:57] Toni: But, but you know what I mean,
[00:03:58] Mikkel: No, I know it.
[00:03:58] Toni: If, if you as a VP marketing, and we're talking 10, 20, 30, 50 million or something, if you as a VP marketing come back, it's like, well, there's just you know, we're just done.
[00:04:06] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:04:07] Toni: I think there will be, ah, okay, cool. Let's let's get a new VP marketing.
[00:04:11] Mikkel: Marketing. But to be fair, we've also seen it. With some of the customers we've worked with, I remember vividly a case where it's like, you know what? Yeah, it's kind of tapped out. There's not more. And I think if you've listened to previous episodes, we've talked about there is that point in time, everyone will follow an S curve, period.
[00:04:28] But once you start noticing what we're going to get into today, that actually you can't get month over month more volume, then you probably want to think about, is there another S curve we can now go and build.
[00:04:38] Toni: Yes. They're kind of two different approaches, right? Kind of try and build a new S curve and then what we're going to talk about today.
[00:04:44] But I also think. You know, when, whenever I chat with people and and then this like, Hey, this is tapering off, Hey, this is a TAM problem, right? And, and it never is a TAM problem, obviously. Let's just, just be honest. It never is, but there is something that's connected, which is, well, you've only been talking to the part of the TAM that goes on Google search and looks for an actual solution to their problem.
[00:05:12] And this is probably 3 percent of the market. Right. So that TAM you probably have exhausted.
[00:05:17] Mikkel: Yeah
[00:05:18] Toni: You're not going to get more out of that. I don't know. TAM is probably the wrong way to, out of that potential audience. You're, you're, you're just not right. And then people go into, well, okay, then let's engage people that are maybe considering and kind of aren't aware yet or make them aware, kind of, you try and kind of go up in that way.
[00:05:36] Other ways are, try and go on other channels and so forth. Right. So I think there will still be people around that might need your solution. Don't get me wrong. But, but really should be thinking about them as, as little pockets actually. Right. And for example, in our phase as Growblocks, kind of, we're not looking at the entire market of you know, B2B in general as, as our, you know, TAM right now, kind of, that would be ridiculous.
[00:06:01] We're actually looking much smaller. We, yes, you know, preferably SaaS but actually also people that are, you know, in this And there's crossing the Chessm over via kind of pre, pre Chessm, kind of not, not the early majority, but they're a little bit more risk taking. I mean, it's a, it's a new company kind of, this is what we actually kind of looking for, right?
[00:06:20] Kind of people that are taking a bit of a, Well, exactly. Right. So, and once this is exhausted, we will be like, Oh, you know, where's, where's our market? Are we good? Did we exhaust TAM? No, there's like the, the real game is still the starting, but the, you know, early and late majority. Right. And you need to kind of look at your business and realize that you're, you're somewhere here, you're somewhere constrained.
[00:06:42] It doesn't make sense for you to go to the CEO and say like, we, we don't have TAM left. It That's ridiculous. But probably for, you know, whom you're talking to right now and, you know, might be a specific market, might be through a specific channel. Yeah. You're probably tapping out there. There's probably a solid argument to be had that you at the wrong end of the S curve.
[00:07:02] And the big question is now what?
[00:07:04] Mikkel: Yeah I think the the first thing is how do you know? You Where you are like when when do you know it's hey, we're about to move away from this volume increase constantly Because you you got to know before we get into the solution basically, right?
[00:07:19] Toni: So the, the thing is that, and, and again, I would not recommend to do this for your overall funnel.
[00:07:28] I would recommend to do this in a bit more unblended way where you're basically seeing growth rates starting to decline. And you need to be a bit smart about this. It can be that you do it market by market. It can be that you do it you know, search. You know, other paid channels, organic. It could be that you're doing it inbound versus outbound and so forth.
[00:07:50] But basically what you will see over time is that for some of those channels, they won't keep growing month over month or quarter over quarter. They will start tapering off, basically being flat. And whenever, whenever you encounter one of those to be flat, you obviously want to have, and you don't need to zoom out a little bit, maybe a year or two to kind of see this.
[00:08:09] But when you see they're flat, you basically want to have a conversation with. people managing this like, well, what could we do? You know, can we, can we push this up? Can we increase it? What, what's going on here? And very, very likely the answer will be no. There's, you know, we probably can't do anything here.
[00:08:26] I tried this myself, like crazy with you know, adding all kinds of budget to Google to really squeeze out the last thing, but it, it didn't really change much. We kind of put more into Facebook. It didn't, it didn't, it didn't really change much. Right. So for the market, and this was like DK UK and Germany we were kind of tapped out at least for the channels that we kind of knew off right at that point in time and that was a problem because in my, in my pre GrowBlogs revenue model.
[00:08:53] I wanted to see those MQLs tick up in order to hit actually the, the numbers that we need to kind of hit. I kind of, that was, that was a clear thing that needed to happen for us to hit the, the overall revenue stuff. And since we couldn't actually find more MQLs or more volume, we are starting to get a little bit effed,
[00:09:11] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:09:11] Toni: like for real.
[00:09:12] Right. And I think this, this will be a thing that you probably see in pockets across your business as well. And and this is, this is where you're seeing like, okay, For that area, for that motion, for this part, I might be switching from a more volume mindset and You know, the way of operating to a different one, right?
[00:09:34] And and I think executing that switch, we can make it uber complicated and just say like, Oh, you know, all of these different tactics, but ultimately as you mature, all of your tactics will hit that ceiling. You know, you could, you could be hitting the ceiling with half of your tactic and some of them are still growing and you're looking at this in an unblended way and you're like, well, you know, we're still growing a little bit.
[00:09:54] But really what happened below the fold is somewhere you already hit it. And you just luckily had some additional S curves you're building up, right? It's kind of, and at some point all of them will taper off and you didn't need to realize, okay we now need to switch mindsets a little bit.
[00:10:08] Mikkel: Yeah, no, I mean, also just to make it super real, I ran conferences at one point. There are only so many conferences you can go to. So once you've booked your place at every single one, it's like, yeah, now we are done growing.
[00:10:20] It's like, can you get a bigger booth? And it's like, yeah, but there's not gonna be much more foot traffic. So, so it's just a super common thing. So if we assume now that some of the listeners out there And they're obviously super intelligent. We know this, but they realize,
[00:10:35] Toni: they have listened to us for a
[00:10:36] Mikkel: yeah. And also read a bunch of stuff and, you know, they realize, Oh, wait a second.
[00:10:42] We might be in this point in time where actually we're not going to be able to significantly increase our volume anymore. And it's not going to help us in reaching the targets. What should they do?
[00:10:53] Toni: So,
[00:10:54] and this is so stupid and so simple. It's, it's really, I mean, this is generally speaking, kind of, we call it the revenue formula. But ultimately you write this out, right? So it's opportunities times conversion rate times ACV times time.
[00:11:11] So sales cycles equals revenue. And. What you've previously been thinking you're doing, or what you have been doing is, you basically kind of struck out a conversion rate ACV and sales cycles. You're always like, you know what, that's fixed. Can't do anything about it. And just what it is. So how can I improve, you know, the right hand side of the formula in terms of revenue?
[00:11:32] How can I get that up? More opportunities, more MQLs, more leads, more SDRs. I kind of, that's how you get this up. And as you see that, you know, more of this stuff isn't working anymore, You need to shift your focus now to another part of this equation which might be many people obviously run into ACVs, but we actually want to talk about you know, conversion rates, Simply you as a business need to realize, If we want to grow, we have two, two place to, to execute. Overall one is to focus on improving our throughput or number two try and do a wild swing, new massive market, new product, new something to try and kickstart everything again, but really those are the two choices you have.
[00:12:20] Mikkel: All the customer side.
[00:12:22] Toni: Sure. Yes. I mean, this is, yes. You can always kind of go into the, to the right hand side of the bowtie. I just, you know, for, for the, the sales and marketing side, you can't really do
[00:12:31] Mikkel: No, no, and now we're going to focus on mainly the new biz side, so it makes sense. It makes sense.
[00:12:35] Toni: So on really, right. So you need to shift from a volume approach and honestly, you need to have the kind of the buying also from the team.
[00:12:41] And you also need to kind of realize that some of this might work or not work, but guess what? That's the same exact thing with you trying to get more inbounds in, right. Kind of on the volume side. Right. And today we want to talk through basic kind of three steps. How to start improving that, you know, tomorrow.
[00:12:59] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:13:00] And I believe the first step in this process is Process. Yes.
[00:13:09] Toni: process is the first one. And really the, It's so boring and I'm sorry, I'm sorry, everyone, I'm sorry all the VP sales folks like, okay, skip next one, please. It's the first thing is actually process, right? And those can be, the reason why you start, you know, start with that.
[00:13:29] You might just be doing the wrong thing all to begin with, right? So before you try and, you know, fix other stuff with automations or upscaling or whatever the first thing is kind of looking, are you even doing the right thing in
[00:13:42] Mikkel: the first place,
[00:13:43] Toni: right? And this process could be a thing that has to do with your sales process.
[00:13:49] Obviously, right. Going from opportunity to close. That's a, that's a sales process thing. And the, the first thing you're going to, you know, encounter here is people will be like, hesitant to even assume that you can improve those conversion rates. Right. That will be the first thing they do. But actually the, the way I would actually start changing my mind around this is a little bit like the following.
[00:14:08] So we basically jumped into, okay, we need to you know, at this former company I was working, we basically jumped into PLG. Right. It was sales led first and then we added some PLG to it. It wasn't the right ACV. It was the right thing. It was overdue to do it. Now the company's, I think, mostly only doing this anymore.
[00:14:24] Right. And we started out with having a full funnel conversion, right. From someone visiting the, or kind of completing the trial form to actually kind of checking out of like 1%. Benchmark should be around three or 4 percent or
[00:14:36] Mikkel: or something,
[00:14:37] Toni: doesn't matter. And then, you know, we were like, hmm.
[00:14:39] where they're stuck. And we look at this, ah, they're stuck over here. Let's build something. Oh, they're stuck over here. Let's do something else. Oh, you know, here we get a lot of questions. Maybe here we inject a human to kind of, you know, take care of those questions. And over time, we got it up from 1 percent to 3%,
[00:14:55] or whatever it was.
[00:14:56] I forgot, right? And this is, Wow. This is a crazy 300 percent improvement. That's insane, actually. But really what did we introduce here? We introduced thinking about, are we doing the process in the right way? Right. And yes, humans are different. Sales reps are different, but if this is true for something like PLG, you know, it also is true for you as a sales team.
[00:15:22] If, if you could. Like, let's just imagine you could, if you could make sure that your whole sales team is doing the sales process exactly as your best reps or, you know, as, as you, what you define being best practice, do you believe that you would be able to improve your conversion rates? If the answer is yes, then you also have to believe at the same time that there is something you can do in order to, you know, push this up.
[00:15:50] And I. would urge you to reject this whole, well, there's some magic people and they're just doing it better. You, you know what, if you're selling a hundred K, 250 K dollar deals, you know what, grant it, do that. But for all the rest of us, I just don't, I just don't think so. Right. So the first thing is really thinking about, you know, what's the process, what's the best practice, making sure that this is adopted widely pushing for this.
[00:16:15] So this is, this is the whole like, Oh, this sounds really difficult, Toni. For the sales side and an absolutely yes. This can improve your conversion rates for that part of the
[00:16:24] Mikkel: file.
[00:16:25] Toni: since we're not just looking at, you know, conversion from opportunity to opportunity one you can, you can look at any place in the
[00:16:32] Mikkel: think it's also, if you're, if you're prioritizing, looking at the throughput, another thing you will notice all of a sudden is the efficiency of the different things you're doing, right?
[00:16:40] So you might be, to your point, have, have jacked up the budget on whatever paid channels you have and realize that actually. We can decrease this budget by 30%. It's not going to change materially anything. And what can we do with that 30 percent budget? Well, we can hire a consultant to finally fix these things on the website that were broken, that we don't have time for, or hire a conversion rate optimization specialist for the marketing side.
[00:17:03] So
[00:17:03] Toni: this is literally what we did, by the way.
[00:17:06] We. So this was a growth at all cost times. We didn't cut any
[00:17:09] Mikkel: No, no. You increased it. Yeah.
[00:17:11] Toni: But what we basically did there was we invested in the website and did a conversion rate optimization, like a lot, right? Because whoever then landed with us. We wanted to make sure that we captured the most of that further down.
[00:17:24] Right. And we then looked at those conversion rates from, you know, landing page to sign up from someone hitting the trial form to completing the trial form. We did A B split tests and we found out that you know, we had a trial form that was seven or eight different fields, including your phone number, because it really was.
[00:17:42] A way for sales to work, but once you, once you don't have the sales team in them, once it's PLG, you can look at this differently. So super simple stuff that we, and this was SMB high volume, so don't get me wrong, but what we did is we we actually found out that we had to keep most of those fields.
[00:17:58] We kind of realized we actually had to for whatever fricking reason, but we had to, so what we did is actually, we we created three forms. So the first form was your name, your last name, your, you know, whatever, your, your email address. And you're like, Oh, this was easy, submit. Next
[00:18:16] one. And, and there's no, but there's, there's psychology behind it that, oh, fuck, now I'm committed.
[00:18:21] Okay. Those three fields I can do. Then you get the third one. It's like, okay, now I have six out of nine. I mean, sunk cost fallacy. No, I mean, now I can do these three things as well. If you had seen those you know, six or seven upfront, you would be, you know, fuck this, you know, I'm not going to do it. So this is what we found out.
[00:18:37] We found out that. We actually could exclude the phone number. There was some issues with the product. So we had we had to send a phony phone number, phony phone number. Can you, does that, is that a thing you can say? We had to send it in the API to the product for this thing to spin up, but we actually didn't require anyone to put in a phone number actually,
[00:18:56] Mikkel: number. Yeah. So
[00:18:57] Toni: So we kind of figured all of those things up and see there suddenly our you know, people that landed on the trial page to actually completing it went up. We use things like, you know, more. Trust pieces around why you should do it. Yada, yada, yada, yada,
[00:19:11] Mikkel: But I also think this is where, again, this is a process thing, right? So when I've at least done this we used uh, High Tempo Testing Framework, you use AEs, so Impact, Confidence, and Ease to rank ideas against an objective you have.
[00:19:22] There's a lot of actually mechanics here, no matter where you're working. It's the same for sales, we've discussed this, there's Medics, Spies, whatever, right? But you gotta look at those processes and say, hey, do, have we actually instrumented the right processes for where we are today? Because it's about the throughput.
[00:19:38] Toni: The next thing I did and I'm not sure if this actually worked out or not, but the idea was basically we did still get some, I
[00:19:45] think it was the same company. We still got some demo requests inbounds. They were great. They were usually a bit bigger. Wonderful.
[00:19:52] And I basically saw a fairly large drop off from someone inbounding to someone actually being booked on a demo.
[00:19:57] So what did we do? We wanted to cut down the, you know, speed to lead basically. In that case I made one of the SDRs be an inbound SDRs, only working on that stuff, immediately when it comes in, booking it what happened, our conversion rate from lead to opportunity went up, right? And, and, and all of those small things, right?
[00:20:14] And, and the cool thing obviously is, as the educated listener knows, All of these things compound over time, right? What was it? If you find seven places in your funnel and improve them by 10 percent each, you will actually double the throughput of the whole funnel, right? And you know, all of those small tweaks.
[00:20:33] They added up to actually kind of delivering then us some growth and, you know, ultimately this is how you need to start thinking about this. You need to kind of look at every single conversion rate that you have and ask yourself, like, what could we do to kind of improve this? And that thinking is fundamentally different from the, let's get more stuff in.
[00:20:52] And I think this is, you know, executing that jump. I think it's difficult. I think it's really difficult.
[00:20:58] Mikkel: So that's process. What's up next?
[00:21:02] Toni: Yeah. So the reason why you start with process is you want to understand if you're even doing the right things, right? Before you automate something you know, you want to understand that first, right?
[00:21:11] The next step is actually tools. So, yeah. So think about, and people might be like, wait a minute. You know, tools comes after that, you know, blah, blah, blah. How does that work? And actually the, the worst thing is, you know, Skills and people comes in the end. Isn't that, isn't that weird? Shouldn't be there.
[00:21:27] So think about the following way. Let's just say the process says you need to you need to dig a hole in the ground, that's the
[00:21:33] the process, and then you have someone standing there that needs to do that.
[00:21:38] Mikkel: Yeah. And it's going to be top down, right?
[00:21:39] Toni: that's, yes, exactly. You know, what kind of person do you actually need to hire to do it?
[00:21:45] If the tool is a shovel. Or if it's one of those,
[00:21:49] Mikkel: mini diggers
[00:21:51] Toni: or if it's an actual, like, I don't know how they're called.
[00:21:54] Mikkel: dynamite. Yeah,
[00:21:58] Toni: right. So, you know, the, the the skill of the person needing to do the job differs from the tools that they have to use in order to do that, right? It's a bit mixed up and weird and the other way around.
[00:22:10] But you need to just keep this in mind. So this is where I now go for finding different ways to improve this. Right. And, and sometimes it might actually be okay that, you know, that whatever tool you're choosing, all of the folks that you're working with there, they're skilled enough to kind of operate this obviously.
[00:22:26] But that's really kind of the idea behind it. Right. And what is happening here? Well, In the past, it was kind of those types, you know, types of like a Chili Piper, they can route those leads, you know, more efficiently. It might be, you know, all kinds of other things that you have in the stack that are helping you improve, right?
[00:22:42] I mean, optimizing for A B testing, kind of that helped you to figure out what to go for. Thousands of other things, right?
[00:22:49] So this is, this is really AI comes in and, you know, might actually. create this new frontier thinking about this, right? Because previously, when you think about a tool like outreach, for example, right? It, it enabled you to send more of those outbound things and, and enabled you to send them faster, like per rep, right?
[00:23:08] You're busy on those two dimensions. This was better. Great. Let's buy it. But real disruption happens if you're not only doing it faster and more often, but also a higher quality, right? Right. This is, this is where kind of, you know, things break basically. And, you know, TBD, but this is where AI can actually take us, right.
[00:23:27] And kind of actually kind of sending those emails. You know, without typos, we have achieved that a while ago. But you know, really situational fitting for that person that sits there, that is receiving that stuff. So kind of using those three things in combination that might actually create a, a vastly different output for you,
[00:23:44] right?
[00:23:45] And then the next thing is here, and I've seen this all over LinkedIn now. It's the, and it's even kind of for us here at Growblocks, it's even the same thing. It's like, yes, we have two SDRs at this point, but we have actually someone else that is kind of a mix between SDR and like a RevOps person. In order to operate this machinery, which is like all kinds of different things stitched together.
[00:24:05] Just taking that person that previously has been like a kind of a real estate realtor basically, or has been doing some other, you know, sales related, like a recruiter sales related tasks out of fresh out of college and put them in this job and trying to operate this machinery. Right now you can forget about that.
[00:24:22] Right now this actually requires much more of a tooling process, RevOps mindset. Yes, coupled with some of the skill you know, sales skills in order to operate something like this, right? And here it really comes in that you're probably one of the tools before you decide on who actually needs to jump into this, right?
[00:24:39] And, and again, kind of, you know, figuring out those tools, each of, each tool can basically kind of help you kind of get a little bit better. in your, in your throughput approach here. And, you know, finally, and lastly, I would actually end with I think if you, if you're honest, I think this is where a lot of value of Growblocks actually sits, kind of helping people figure out the throughput between those different steps.
[00:25:02] So this is really, if you're thinking,
[00:25:05] I just have to,
[00:25:05] just have to, so this is kind of the tool here in our case, basically kind of helping on the, on the throughput side, kind of determining whether you're falling off a cliff, where can you improve. You know, what to maybe do about this. This is, I think, where, where Growblocks as a tool comes in.
[00:25:18] But that's it, right? Kind of figure out what the process is. Are you doing the right thing? And then, you know, implementing tools in order to, you know, improve each of these steps over time.
[00:25:27] Mikkel: Yeah. Good.
[00:25:29] Let's go into skills then, because that's the last, the last piece. You actually have folks doing this work and you teased a bit in uh, in the last two points about, you know, who is someone who can handle dynamite or shovel.
[00:25:40] Yeah. So let's get into kind of that side.
[00:25:42] Toni: there's obviously that, right, kind of who can operate which tool and so forth.
[00:25:47] Yeah. But then ultimately, I think, You know, and this is usually easy to take off. I mean, come on, let's, you know, it's, oh, it should be sales with a HubSpot. Oh, sorry. You need to hire a completely different team. I mean, that's not the case, right? There, there are some edge cases that we kind of try and pick to, to illustrate the case, but usually kind of the team kind of can figure this out.
[00:26:05] Right. But ultimately now that, you know, that you're probably doing the right process, that you're utilizing all the tools that can help you to, you know, improve this, now it's really at the point where you want to make sure that everyone is skilled and that you're kind of teaching them to be skilled in order to execute this stuff flawlessly, right?
[00:26:23] And I think the, you know, we, we had some great speakers on the, on the show already that were thinking about this in terms of what great looks like, so figuring out what that is and then trying to implement that and so forth, thinking about the four Ds from, from Kevin Dorsey in terms of, you know, I forgot.
[00:26:41] Like, I don't, I, you know, demonstrate,
[00:26:43] Mikkel: document, demonstrate.
[00:26:45] Toni: And, and those are really, those are hands on ways of how you can take something that another rep does. Extremely successful using the process, using the tools. And, but still apparently that person is sprinkling something on top that not everyone in your team fully gets.
[00:27:05] Distilling that and then teaching that to everyone else. And then, you know, making sure that they're actually executing that. That is really what this last step is about. I kind of really, really making sure that incrementally you get better. And this is, you know, we started talking about this a little bit in terms of process But I think this is where 80, if not 90 percent of sales teams fall flat on their faces.
[00:27:26] Like you have a couple of people that are extremely skilled and so forth. But really mastering this process piece and creating this repeatable engine and so forth, this is where they're kind of failing, right. At least for the sales team, because it's like a, it's also a different mindset for you as a leader, honestly, kind of, if you're like the VP of sales on the first year to 10 million.
[00:27:48] You're like, yeah, yeah, whatever, you know, practice and you just, you just bring in this deal and so forth. But as you grow, as you go from 10 to 20 to 50 to a hundred these, these differences matter a lot and they matter a lot because you don't have more volume. You know, volume is fixed, that's done.
[00:28:06] So now your team actually needs to over time improve how much they're pushing through. Right. And I had like an interesting LinkedIn conversation with Collin Cadmus that we also going to have on the pod tomorrow, like not when you're listening, but just in
[00:28:20] Mikkel: going to record him
[00:28:22] Toni: Yes. And he was kind of doing a LinkedIn post on you should actually be paying your sales reps by conversion. you know, their conversion rate should be determining how much you pay them. And, you know, there's some wrinkles in that, in that theory for sure. But really this is actually starting to be the mindset you need to be thinking about, right? Because again, volume is fixed. You cannot have more volume.
[00:28:46] So really what you now need to focus on is like the reps that are getting this fixed amount, you actually want to pay the ones that are converting the most. You want to pay them the most. Not who's. You know, hitting whatever target it's really about the conversion, the throughput that you want to ideally incentivize them against.
[00:29:04] Right. And that kind of thinking, it doesn't happen in the first 10 million, it just doesn't, right. It, it's just, it just out of, out of that kind of world and also focus. But as you kind of, you know, realize that this one other part is fixed and, you know, to kind of change, I think that what needs to happen.
[00:29:21] And, and what frankly also then sometimes needs to happen is that the, Mindset of the leadership team needs to change or the leadership team needs to change, right? Kind of, those are the only options to kind of go through this thing because otherwise you're going to run into the wall.
[00:29:35] Mikkel: Yeah. I think that's a good place to end it. I think that's a good place to end it. So I, I feel like we've covered now the, this, you know, when do you know whether it's time to shift focus?
[00:29:45] And then we basically look at how do you improve your throughput through process, tools, and skills.
[00:29:51] Toni: That's it.
[00:29:52] Mikkel: And so if you liked it, which I'm hoping you do, You will obviously write a lengthy review or short one or just hit subscribe and support us
[00:30:01] Toni: it's easiest to do it through the phone, right?
[00:30:04] Mikkel: Yeah probably on the phone because that's also where you're listening so no need to get your laptop out of the
[00:30:08] Toni: your I
[00:30:10] Mikkel: yeah the process
[00:30:12] Toni: on, on the desktop, you can't write a review on Spotify. That's what I'm trying
[00:30:16] Mikkel: ah no you're right you can't it's a kind of weird You're kind of weird.
[00:30:19] Toni: so the best way to do it's actually through the phone because some of the desktop apps don't, don't support a review, which is super weird with depending on where you're listening. But otherwise yeah, please do that. Help us spread the word, you know, fulfill the mission here.
[00:30:32] And thank you so much for listening, everyone.
[00:30:34] Mikkel: Bye.