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Everything has been cut and more will be cut. Cost is more expensive, we need to be super efficient but we still want growth.
Phew.. What are we to do? Less, that's what.
In this episode, we walk through what you can do less of, and how it'll help you grow (faster).
***
Phew.. What are we to do? Less, that's what.
In this episode, we walk through what you can do less of, and how it'll help you grow (faster).
- (00:00) - Introduction
- (02:37) - We're starting to do less
- (05:47) - More deals with less
- (08:18) - Reduce volume
- (15:59) - Priotitizing accounts
- (20:46) - Time & conversion rate
- (27:47) - WGLL
***
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.
***
Connect with us
✉️ Newsletter: revenueletter.substack.com
Creators & Guests
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 are listening to the Revenue Formula. In today's episode, Mikkel and I talk about how to get more deals by doing less work. Enjoy
[00:00:14] Mikkel: Perfect. Now, almost that saved the
[00:00:22] Toni: Wiggle! So, what are
[00:00:24] Mikkel: are we doing here today? What is
[00:00:27] Toni: I don't know. That's what I ask myself every single fucking day, Mikkel.
[00:00:31] Mikkel: So the thing is it's Monday again. We've had a
[00:00:34] Toni: We're in the cave.
[00:00:36] Mikkel: We're in the cave. We've had a crazy period with just like, recording a bazillion
[00:00:40] Toni: last week was insane.
[00:00:43] Mikkel: we recorded Manny Medina from Outreach. Jacco van der Kooij returned to the show. I'm forgetting, Harrison Rose from Paddle.
[00:00:52] Toni: We closed Aaron Ross from Predictable Revenue. The book, we set a date with Mark Roberge from Sales Acceleration Formula and HubSpot. Insane.
[00:01:03] Mikkel: And I mean, the thing is, I usually send you my updates and I was just looking, I was like, I think I just did podcast last week. It's kind of, it's, that was a crazy week. So
[00:01:13] Toni: I didn't notice.
[00:01:15] Mikkel: I'm happy we're back to recording Mondays, especially because we really had the Mondays of Mondays.
[00:01:21] So remember last time I told you, like, when you get a call from the wife, when you're on your way to work, it's never a good thing, never a good thing. This time, I mean, um, I hope I don't make her sound bad, but she was like, How many car keys do you have in your pocket? And I was like, I have one I have one car key.
[00:01:40] And she's like,
[00:01:40] Toni: And then she was
[00:01:41] Mikkel: the other one.
[00:01:42] Toni: check your other
[00:01:43] Mikkel: Yeah, no, I didn't have it legitimately. So I had to basically walk back and hand her the key and then return to the station again. It was just, you know, one of those Mondays. And I just wrote her like, Hey, I hope you made it, you know, through all right. And she's like, how can you just be totally not pissed at me over this situation?
[00:02:03] It's just like, I don't know. I
[00:02:05] Toni: because you're such a wonderful
[00:02:06] Mikkel: yeah, no, because she's such a wonderful wife. I think that's probably what it is, but also like, I just reflected. Yeah, there's so much shit all the time. Do I really want to now spend energy wasting it on just being pissed? It's like, nah, let's just, let's just go. Let's go.
[00:02:23] Toni: You know, maybe this is, this is the Zen attitude that helps you survive in this business. Also, you know, also with this boss that
[00:02:28] Mikkel: Yeah, exactly. Especially with the boss I have. That's like, and I mean, the thing is you, you
[00:02:34] Toni: Wifey is so much better than Toni anyway? So it's like, it's great.
[00:02:37] Mikkel: And I think lately we've also had those important conversations around Hey, we need to
[00:02:42] Toni: mean you and
[00:02:42] Mikkel: yeah, we need to do all of these things We need to do all all of this and then I think Bart he's just like collateral damage on the side from the show off Of Mikkel and Toni, but I think lately we've been really trying to take a step back and say hey Actually, we need to do a little bit less We need to do a little bit less and really know where, uh, where do we put our energy and our focus among others, this show, um, our rev letter.
[00:03:06] If you're not subscribed, check it out, revenueletter.substack.com
[00:03:08] We drop a lot of cases, a lot of knowledge around how to grow a SaaS business. And we really want to double down on those things. And the only way to do it is to do less.
[00:03:18] Toni: Yeah, well, so that's, that's one of the things we kind of came across, right? And maybe we talk a little bit more about how we kind of got to this point, right?
[00:03:25] I think there was, one was the, the interview with, Harrison Rose from Paddle, talking about the early days, how they were hyper focusing on almost just one single persona, which wasn't even that big. Common or anything like this. I think there were 3, 000 people of that type on the whole planet And that was their, that was their market in the
[00:03:45] Mikkel: that's how it happened.
[00:03:45] Toni: you know
[00:03:46] Mikkel: Investors were really happy.
[00:03:49] Toni: is it a beachhead?
[00:03:49] No, it's a TAM
[00:03:50] Mikkel: There's an investor, Tam, and then there's your Tam.
[00:03:53] Toni: Right. And, and, and it struck us when we were listening to him, it's like, wow, you know, he's just, you know, really just doing the small thing. And the thing is, right, everyone on LinkedIn and everyone's like, oh, you know, focus and everything. but at the end of the day, you don't kind of do it because like, ah, why limit myself?
[00:04:08] rather wanna have, you know, all this other stuff. So it was really refreshing talking to, um, to Harrison kind of about this. And then almost two hours later, we had Manny Medina. Yeah. Right?
[00:04:19] Mikkel: Two hours later. Yeah, that's
[00:04:20] Toni: and um, and he then talked to us how he basically did Outbound until 100 million.
[00:04:27] Mikkel: You didn't have like three motions at that point? What? No, no, it was one.
[00:04:30] Toni: and he was like, yeah, no, I mean, you know, we had, what is his accent actually?
[00:04:34] Is it, is it Greek or something like this?
[00:04:36] Mikkel: Greek. I actually don't want to offend him. I'm not sure. We can
[00:04:39] Toni: No, um, you know what made me to cut this? But, he, uh, he was like, well, you know, sure. I had like, you know, some marketing folks
[00:04:48] Mikkel: creating some
[00:04:49] Toni: doing some like, you know, product marketing, uh, but really the money was made with, with Outbound, right.
[00:04:54] And, for us that, then triggered, you know, a bunch of thinking on, Hey, we have only so many resources, there's only so much daylight in a given day. um, you know, no one ever has too few ideas. Everyone always has too many ideas of what to do, especially in marketing. Um,
[00:05:13] Same
[00:05:13] goes for product, by the way, but the product folks are kind of better with this, right?
[00:05:16] They're like, Hey, sorry, we're so many engineers, so many of this, so many of that, we only can do X. You need to choose, is it A or is it B? Marketing is always like, okay, yes,
[00:05:24] Mikkel: yes, boss.
[00:05:26] Toni: do more. Um, and ultimately that obviously doesn't work out, right? So then the, then the reverse is that, quality suffers or things are just not getting done and everyone feels kind of shit about it.
[00:05:37] Um, and that for us basically triggered the whole, like, um, let's, um, let, let's think very clearly what do we want to do and rather cut the other stuff out.
[00:05:47] Mikkel: And I think, so that's really what we're gonna get into to the episode today. We've specifically gonna talk about how you're gonna get more deals with less. And I think it's super important today because everything has essentially been cut.
[00:05:56] Mm-Hmm. Everything across the board in discriminated cutting. And I don't think actually we're done with cutting yet. Nope. Doesn't, um, I think SaaStr that they just dropped today, and maybe we're gonna talk about it in another episode that, well, you need to be two x more efficient. And it's just math now that that's that's what's required.
[00:06:12] And so there's a lot of pressure on every single team to do more and it's, you can really risk falling into this trap of just trying to push all the same things forward with fewer resources. And it's probably not going to work.
[00:06:23] Toni: And I think what we wanted to talk to you know, about today, we wanted to go through the, the, the basics if you want.
[00:06:29] So volume. and processing metrics, if you will, kind of those two things kind of uncover a couple of examples in there that you should just simply be thinking about as potential solutions to reducing stuff or cutting stuff away, right? And maybe we kind of, before we go into the tactical stuff, I think what we have actually done more on a strategic level in terms of Growblocks is actually really on a high level trying to figure out What is the things we want to focus on and what does that then mean to the stuff that we're doing already right now, right?
[00:07:05] and what's really important there is not to do this, and I've done this so many times, you do this OKRs or you do the V2MOM or you do whatever framework you're using. you kind of start with a, with a good, innocent idea of like, Hey, we should be doing this. And then the politing starts. Um, and then suddenly end up with a word cloud that it's like, Oh, it's just one word cloud.
[00:07:26] You know, we're only doing one thing,
[00:07:29] everyone in the room knows like, well, you know, that kind of 10 ideas in this one kind of thing. So what we did is actually, trying to be just honest to ourselves and be like, okay, yes, we can encompass all the things we're currently doing into five words, but it We haven't made any, any fucking decisions if we do that, right?
[00:07:47] Kind of, let's really distill it out. And, um, and I think that was a pretty healthy process, actually. And then, you know, from there, a lot of things become more clear. So you have the, the clarity stuff that, uh, Robin Daniels. Was talking about, um, he was,
[00:08:03] Mikkel: so many guests, you know, it gets foggy. Yeah. The good old days.
[00:08:08] Toni: And, um, and that's really what you want to achieve, especially with fewer resource, right? Kind of, that's what the fucking is. Um, so this was on the strategic side, right? But let's jump into more of the, uh, the operational
[00:08:18] Mikkel: So really, the thing is, um, when you look at growing the business, historically, the easiest path for people to say, Oh, we need to double. It's like, well, then we need to double the budget, double the salespeople, double the marketing budget, because then math, it's going to double in the end.
[00:08:32] I think we've talked at great length about the show is it's just not that simple. The SaaS business is probably the most sensitive business model out there to smaller changes throughout the funnel. We've talked about how there's compound in there. So what you really want to do is you want to look at the bowtie as a process to actually figure out, well, how can we get more deals with less money?
[00:08:51] Because it is achievable. And the first thing we're gonna look into is volume, because that's usually the go-to, and I think what's pretty counterintuitive here is you probably wanna cut the volume, uh, at least from a marketing perspective, try and look at the volume of leads and try and think, can we actually cut it in half with almost zero repurcussions
[00:09:10] Toni: So there is like get more stuff with less, right? Everyone wants that. But at the same time, the, the, the little also happy brother of, you know, get more deals with less, you know, inputs is get the same deals with less
[00:09:24] Mikkel: Yeah, exactly.
[00:09:25] Toni: That's also really good. And so that's, that's actually what's driving a CAC Payback up and so forth. So that's actually what you want to have. And once you have figured that out, you can always take the next step and kind of try and kind of move it, move it up the ladder. Right.
[00:09:37] Mikkel: And I think this is also what I, so not long ago, uh, I, you know, became a Linkfluencer because I wrote a post on LinkedIn and this was really around how revenue operations could help the business grow, specifically sales.
[00:09:48] And it was, well, help marketing. I think what we've talked a lot about is. There's a lot of different types of leads that marketing will go and create. There's been all the pressure for the last decade of growth at all costs. So people were doing, um, you know, paying news sites to generate leads. Uh, they were running webinars and eBooks.
[00:10:06] They were doing all these things that were not really the regular demo requests, right? So. You want to run an analysis of that funnel and split those types of leads and figure out, well, are there some that just aren't efficient, right? And I think I saw a specific company, I think on, on SaaS, I think it was Datadog or something crazy.
[00:10:24] They literally went in, did this analysis and cut the lead volume in half because they just didn't drive any revenue. It was a, it was a wasted effort effectively, right? So what they did is they just, you know, only surfaced the quality stuff that would turn into revenue. And I think what's so powerful here is there's quite a lot of upside in this exercise all of a sudden because you free up budget, you don't have to pay for content syndication or advertising an e book that doesn't create any revenue, but you also free up people.
[00:10:55] You free up people who are creating those ads, creating those e books, and now all of a sudden you can take that money and try and reinvest it and say, well, how are we going to get more of those high intent inbounds that we actually need as a business and what is realistic. And I think that's, you know, so yes, part of this exercise is unblending the funnel, but it is really also to free up resources to focus on what truly matters.
[00:11:19] Toni: matters. Yeah, I think there's some more in here as well. So I think number one is, I, and
[00:11:24] this, it goes really into the, you know, do, do more with less, um, idea, which is, um, in the past we have been expanding our ICP all the time, right?
[00:11:33] We have been basically kind of trying to play in all the battles that we know we're kind of not well positioned to win, you know, it's not our core battle that we want to win, you know, and, and, and you see this with, People that sell, you know, into one specific category, uh, suddenly popping up in all kinds of other, you know, G2 categories as well.
[00:11:53] It's like, well, you know, we're kind of shitty here. We're kind of. You know, still we can compete. There might be an inbound coming from this, and it might even be a demo request from G2, which is, that's what we love. We love those, right? Because they're obviously bottom funnel, they're about to suck. Well, no, not really.
[00:12:08] Because they're like in a super distant quadrant of a category that they don't even belong. That's where they're coming from, right? So kind of, you know, Cutting that stuff away, that's, that's, that's one step in the right direction. Um, will you then not get those leads? Yes, you will not get them, and you know, even if you converted some of them, you will also not convert those now, right?
[00:12:28] So this like, that's pretty clear. And then the other thing is, I think it's, it's a little bit this battle between, bottom funnel and top funnel to, to be honest, right? So some of the, the content syndication, you know, did it work? Did it not work? I don't know, different episode, but, basically saying, okay, this, all this super high top funnel stuff, maybe just going to cut it out, especially the stuff that's being paid.
[00:12:49] That's not organic that we kind of need to put a lot of, you know, even, um, you know, ads dollars behind it. Maybe just cut this whole thing out.
[00:12:56] Mikkel: I think what also isn't being talked about a lot is when you're, as a SaaS business, move along the S curve from, you know, product market fit, go to market fit, scale up, IPO, grown up, the balance also kind of has to shift between capturing demand and creating demand.
[00:13:11] And that's That's not really apparent in the conversation and that's actually pretty critical because you might be too heavy in one or the other, which can create some trouble for you, right? I think the other, you know, just to maybe tell a story, when we worked together last time, I was basically running the marketing team and was cut, I want to say in half.
[00:13:30] And actually what happened afterwards is, You know what? We still grew quite a lot and we actually exceeded the targets we set for for quite a few quarters. But we also decided what are the things we're going to stop. I literally had to go to our CEO and say, Hey, you know, Now we only have these resources.
[00:13:46] Here's how we're going to prioritize them. And it's going to be on what drives the business, all the other things, you know, naming meeting rooms, arranging whatever
[00:13:55] Toni: That was pretty important. Yeah,
[00:13:56] Mikkel: it was pretty important, but all that stuff that's done. And, and, you know, all of a sudden it meant, you know what, those small things we always knew weren't great.
[00:14:04] It was like, okay, no one knows how to navigate our website, but we're not really going to prioritize it because this is going to drive leads question mark, and it's a small thing. All those things we just started to tackle because we had now capacity because we had said we're not going to do these other pieces and all of a sudden all those elements they started compounding and helping us actually in achieving the goal.
[00:14:22] So all of a sudden you, you also, you get a different view of what really matters when you start doing less.
[00:14:29] Toni: Yeah, I wonder, I mean, it's, I think, and this translates so well also for product development, which is not the topic here today, but it's really the choosing between the big swings and the big shiny, uh, features versus the, the boring stuff, right? For example, here, Growblocks for the last five to six months, and my co founder is not going to like me saying that, but the five to, for the last half year.
[00:14:50] We've been focusing on small, shitty, boring stuff, which is gold for our users, actually. and you can see it in the usage stats. You can see this whole thing going up. It's really, it's really beautiful actually, but you know, every single feature that I saw that we kind of prioritized, I was basically against.
[00:15:05] I was like, no, boring. No one needs this. No, you know, who's using this? Well, a lot of people, Mr. CEO. So, and I think that's the same thing for marketing, right? It's kind of, it's the. Figuring out what to focus on. And once you have figured that out, um, then doing all the things behind it in order to achieve it and see there,
[00:15:23] Mikkel: you know,
[00:15:24] Toni: you know, good things will come out of it.
[00:15:26] Mikkel: So one of the other, so this is obviously the marketing level, but one of the other reflections I had is, outbound is also a pretty big motion for a lot of folks. It's, it's pretty common to start with outbound to be honest, because it's, you have an easy path forward. But I'm also pretty sure that as a business kind of grows, just like marketing, you're going to end up having to kind of expand your account pool, et cetera.
[00:15:48] Like, are there any elements there where you think, Hey, this is probably what you want to go and assess and do to see whether there's anything that you either reduce or actually put more capital resources into?
[00:15:59] Toni: So what I see a lot is, Yes, you have an account pool or like whatever you're going to call it, like a list of accounts or whatever.
[00:16:07] and that usually has been growing for half a decade or something like this. Right. And, uh, that, that's a good thing. That's an asset for the organization. Don't get me wrong, but you know, number one mistake I see is, people don't actually prioritize it. So they're basically saying, Hey, we have 10, 000 accounts.
[00:16:25] Let's call them.
[00:16:26] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:16:27] Toni: And they're not saying start with those ones. Right. and basically what, you know, when, when you kind of do the math, what you will find is that per SDR per year, you actually only need not so many accounts, um, depends a little bit on your motion, but the math basically is, um, you can, and you should, call.
[00:16:49] These accounts, not just once a year or once in their lifetime, but you can decide to call them three or four times a year. which has been a massive, massive input of opportunities for us and kind of winning those. but that really means you actually only as many SDRs as an, uh, as many accounts as an SDR can work through in three to four months.
[00:17:08] Right? Kind of. That's actually what it is. So really you're gonna end up with maybe. Depends on how you kind of cut the cake, but maybe
[00:17:17] five, 600 accounts per SDR or something like that. Um, and once they work through those, they're basically kind of restarting again and so forth. Right. So out of those 10, 000 accounts that you have, an SDR realistically can only go through, you know, 600 of them, you know, as, as you scale the SDRs.
[00:17:34] And what that then means is you should actually be just cutting the Cutting those accounts out kind of all the stuff that that you can't service Anyway, you should just kind of cut them away in order to do that. You need to rank the whole list
[00:17:47] Mikkel: So those dreamy ICPs where it's like, well, you know, two years ago in Q3, do you remember, we closed this vertical, so we should keep them in there. Is that kind of
[00:17:57] Toni: So basically, even if you have done your account scoring, just do it again. Simply because it might have changed, because the world has changed. and that basically then means, you know, reduce the list. I mean, you shouldn't delete them, but have fewer of that stuff that these SDRs can focus on.
[00:18:13] And this is one of the things that Harrison, again also mentioned, right? He believes it's less important what you say, and it's more important to whom you say it. We have seen this so many times, also here at Growblocks ourselves, but also with our clients and customers. It's really, very little time spent on, you know, doing this busy work of the list building.
[00:18:35] which in ABS, ABM, so Account Based Selling and Marketing, It's actually completely the other way around. It's like you need to spend a lot of time on the list and get clear on why you choose those accounts
[00:18:48] and then go and execute. Right. Um, and again, if you do this well, you actually might not need 10, 000 accounts. Maybe you only need 3000 accounts. Maybe this is enough for you to kind of hit your target and so forth.
[00:18:58] Mikkel: And so a couple of thoughts here as well is, well, if you, If you even slim down the ICP, if that's where you are, you can see that some of the segments you've been targeting, they don't work for whatever reason.
[00:19:10] And you've been reducing kind of the lead volume for marketing. So there's more resources and focusing the SDR effort. This is also a point where you can say, well, maybe marketing cannot deliver this growth that we desire, but they can deliver some of the additional accounts that we can then through means of SDR go and reach, right?
[00:19:26] Toni: So, and this is then where those two things actually should end up overlapping actually, right? You will always have some stuff that marketing just generates because, and then you will always have some stuff that sales generates because, but if you actually get really clear on, you know, whom you're after.
[00:19:41] and let's just say you're in the mid market ACV range, you can have a list of companies that you know, because of data or because of AI, like, you know, that those are good, you know, fit accounts. And then you basically have both of your sets of guns pointed at the same list, right? The ones that are using super highly customized emails and You know, email and call outreach, and then the same list is being targeted on LinkedIn with all kinds of stuff, right?
[00:20:11] So and again, right, then this, the focus narrows, um, it gets increasingly clear what marketing is trying to achieve. It gets extremely clear what sales is trying to achieve. And guess what? Those two teams can now talk to one another because they're doing the exact same thing just with slightly different tooling, right?
[00:20:28] And this is, you know, one of those things where. putting things together instead of having them apart, um, is, you know, less, but you probably will be more successful with it.
[00:20:38] Mikkel: that's really the volume part, and I think a huge part of this is not just, can you get the volume up, but actually looking at the composition, regardless of the source.
[00:20:46] Let's, let's look at the other dimensions when you consider the bowtie, because you have a ton of other pieces, such as the time between stages, you have conversion rates, you have, you have a bunch of other things that actually matters in progressing, you know, leads to opportunities to customers and so on.
[00:21:01] Toni: So let's kind of dive into time first here.
[00:21:04] And this is again, you know, think about the, Pablo Dominguez, uh, F1 racing pit stop analogy, right? So basically 80 years ago, whenever F1 started, I don't
[00:21:17] Mikkel: I don't know. This is
[00:21:19] Toni: after the war, during the war, I don't know. Um, Wow.
[00:21:24] Mikkel: We know a lot about sports.
[00:21:26] Toni: anyway, in the really early beginning, it took them over a minute to change the tires and gas up the car or something like this.
[00:21:33] Right. and now it's one and a half seconds. And if it's longer than Max Verstappen is really upset.
[00:21:43] And, um, so how did they get there? It's not that they're like, you know, one, one, one, one, one, one, it's like one and a half seconds. Uh, so it was over time. Right. and
[00:21:52] The same thing kind of applies here. So when you look at your, and it, you know, the, the Bowtie is a great framework. It doesn't encapsulate everything.
[00:22:00] Obviously there's so many things that are missing from that, but ultimately the Bowties I say, um, if you. If you distance yourself from this awareness, consideration, selection, kind of the, the, the bowtie for us, right, is way more than just those three buckets of steps, right? It's really, it's really the actual funnel.
[00:22:20] It's really the process of making money. And Jacco and the guys, you know, chose those words to make this applicable to everyone. Um, but for you individually, You know, your awareness will be your traffic on the website and the leads you sign up, or the ads you have, and then the consideration will be the MQL and SQL and so forth.
[00:22:39] But really, you know, write out the whole process for one motion, for one production line of your factory. Write it out, you know, what are the things that are needing to happen for this to go from A created to B close won. And then think about everything you can do to speed this the fuck up. Uh, because there are many, many, many, many things you can do.
[00:23:01] and, and the simplest ones are, um, uh, how quickly are you reaching out to that prospect, that inbounded, right? How quickly is that actually? Um, and yeah, it should ideally be below 10 minutes. You know, if you can get below 30 minutes on average, great.
[00:23:16] Most people out there, uh, like in the days.
[00:23:18] Mikkel: Yeah. And also just when you, by the way, when someone says, yes, I want to book a meeting, can you send me the calendly? And if you allow them to book, you know, a month out into the future.
[00:23:27] Toni: future. Yes. I mean
[00:23:28] Mikkel: there, there's a couple of small
[00:23:29] Toni: small No, there's so many small things. Um, then there is stuff like, um, and, uh, I forgot kind of who did the research, so you probably won't be able to put it in the description, but Um, basically speed of follow up in your sales process determines also how fast the sales process is going to go.
[00:23:48] So think about it like this. You had the, you had the meeting, went well, there's a follow up, there's a next step already planned. Uh, but the follow up happens 60 minutes after you hung up. Right. Um, and that then, you know, sends a very clear signal to the other side, like, okay. That's the pace. Gotcha. Uh, very different from next week, Friday, when this is not at all top of my head anymore.
[00:24:12] Anyway, I get the follow up email, uh, you know, talking about
[00:24:16] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:24:16] Toni: Um, and, uh, this is, this is, you know, one thing. And then you have the The typical stuff is the internal red tape with, you know, creating a proposal, getting the approvals, all of that jazz, et cetera, et cetera. There, there, there's whole many things in your funnel that you can drastically improve.
[00:24:33] Mikkel: And this is very specific, you know, closer to this, I would say the moment of creating a deal. Even think about the, at some point someone will sign up for a newsletter. It's going to take a while for someone to consume enough information about the space and who you are and how you can help for them to decide.
[00:24:50] You know what? Now I'm going to request a demo. And that's where I think historical marketing has been like, Hey, we have Chinese walls. We have our email list. And it's a big no no for you to touch it. But honestly, if, if there's an account that an SDR is working and you're sitting on a contact, then, you know, it should totally be there.
[00:25:06] And I think, I think there's a massive exercise in, in volume and time for someone in sales operations, in revenue operations and market operations to actually look at this and say, Hey, Where can we speed things up? Where can we trim some of the, the, you know, the volume that's just unhelpful and wasting sales
[00:25:25] Toni: Yeah.
[00:25:25] and so the thing is, you know, let's just say you do the whole exercise and you say, Oh, we can save a day here and a couple of hours. I think people will laugh at you when you come out with this thing.
[00:25:35] Mikkel: yeah, for sure. They're going to, Oh, we're saving a day. It's like,
[00:25:38] Toni: they don't fucking get it. Um, and then, you know, maybe you need to send them this recording here. But, over, overall, right? And this, you know, why we're talking about this now with less and do more? Because you're basically saving money. You're saving resources. Not only do you get cash in faster, That's great and high five and stuff.
[00:25:58] But you also, your reps are spending less time on processing these things. Think about it like, uh, uh, like a production line in a factory and suddenly it's not two kilometers long. Suddenly it's just one and a half kilometers long. It's like, is that going to be, is the, the factory going to be better now?
[00:26:15] Mikkel: Yeah,
[00:26:16] it's
[00:26:16] Toni: it's only much better right now. Um, and, uh, and you won't get from two kilometers to one kilometer and like one fell swoop. That's not how the F1 did it either. Yeah. It's gonna be boring little shitty improvements here and there that, uh, initially no one believes in, just like I didn't believe in.
[00:26:32] Oh, you know, this little button, which was yellow, we're gonna turn it red now, and suddenly everyone, oh, suddenly people click the fucking button,
[00:26:39] Mikkel: right? Yeah.
[00:26:40] Toni: it's like, that's how it works. There's incremental improvements over time that then compound.
[00:26:44] Mikkel: compound.
[00:26:44] Yeah, and I think, um, So the, the thing is also think about the SDRs that sit and work on these accounts. They can only, you said they only need 250 or 500 per year, whatever the number, right? But if half of them are garbage, they're wasting their time. So all of a sudden, can they start booking more meetings because they're more target?
[00:27:02] Maybe. And if those meetings progress faster, you're going to get more revenue? Maybe. And I think, you know, you have to realize the compound that will happen as a result of it.
[00:27:11] Toni: Yeah. And then lastly, the, um, and you know, the list goes on and on
[00:27:16] Mikkel: Yeah, we can keep
[00:27:17] Toni: So kind of, I had a great conversation with, um, um, really cool guy we hired recently. and he was talking about ACVs and talking about negotiation.
[00:27:26] Maybe we're going to have him on the show eventually. Yeah. Let's see about that. But he was basically like, Hey, Toni, uh, listen to some of your gong calls. You know, you guys need to watch out, you know, when you do the negotiation, those 10 minutes where you negotiate, those are your most expensive 10 minutes you can have.
[00:27:44] Mikkel: Oh, that's so true. Oh man. Yeah, he's right.
[00:27:47] Toni: And it's like, in those 10 minutes, you're like, Oh, 25 percent of us. Yeah. Okay, cool. Do we want to sign now? and instead, you know, not, not coming to the conclusion, but like focusing more on that stuff, making sure that that, you know, works out, That is, there's a lot of money sitting there, right?
[00:28:02] There's, there's a big difference between giving the discount or not, or going on a two year deal, or, you know, pushing something out, and discount hierarchy, all of that stuff, right? Which is people like, yeah, okay, yeah, sure. Let's have the discount hierarchy. But when you present it like that, guys, like, well, those are really expensive 10 minutes.
[00:28:17] You're like,
[00:28:19] Yeah,
[00:28:19] got it. I think we should improve on that, right? But, you know, different topic, different show, maybe. And then the last thing we wanted to talk about is like, again, right? So this is, um, this is KD, Kevin Dorsey here with, uh, you know, What Good Looks Like or Great Looks Like or something like that.
[00:28:36] Again, you know, we think it's pretty fantastic kind of this framework. And, um, the way he, basically is talking about it is scan your funnels, scan everything for stuff that is great.
[00:28:48] Mikkel: Yeah. So this is for account executives specifically. He's,
[00:28:51] Toni: Yeah. Yeah. But you can actually, you know, you can do it for everything. and, uh, I'm using it now on sales calls, like, Hey, you know, you saw this thing the other way around, you see all the things are going great. You should investigate why they're great. Uh, and then you should copy it across. Right. And that's the same thing here, actually, you should be looking across and trying to figure out what is going better than expected, what is going better than I would have expected.
[00:29:13] And then, you know, once you know. that is there, you need to figure out why is it there, right? And again, it's really important, because you can't have this rep that hits 150 percent and you're like, oh, wow, let's copy that guy. And it could be a terrible idea. Maybe you got double the amount of opportunities from everyone else.
[00:29:31] Maybe you only got inbounds, maybe we got all the big enterprise deals, whatever it was, there might be a thing that negates that good outcome. Um, so you have to find the actual real reason why it's there. Why that was so successful, right? And once you have figured that out, and you have kind of conviction that, hey, wait a minute, he or she did something differently, which turned out to, you know, be, uh, leading to great results.
[00:29:58] then you can start unpacking and understanding how you can copy that to everyone else, right? Yeah. Not, not before. and that is, that is something that will happen on a conversion rates on your ACVs, even on your sales cycles, on all of these different areas. Uh, you'll basically, um, you know, be able to reap those benefits and not only for AEs that will be across the whole
[00:30:18] Mikkel: Yeah, I think the example he used which was really powerful was this, uh, uh, woman who had a higher than normal ACV. And they did all this work to try and figure out why. And it was super simple. Instead of presenting list items and price, she presented a package and then a price for the package. That was, and that's a simple thing to go and teach people.
[00:30:37] I'm sure there's more to it than just
[00:30:39] Toni: I think the, I think the, the important thing is, um, that was the specific example there. If you as a listener go like, Oh,
[00:30:47] Mikkel: That's how I'm going to do
[00:30:47] Toni: how we're going to do it.
[00:30:48] Mikkel: going to do it
[00:30:49] Toni: that's, you know, you need to be careful for that either. So I had, I also had, you know, once the opposite request off because we always package it up.
[00:30:55] And someone wanted to have list item by item in order to maneuver a little bit more better, um, especially with procurement, especially with someone that wanted to kind of find things. so it, it might just not be the right solution for you, right? Kind of, that's what I'm saying. And the, the idea really needs to be, okay, you find something that works and then need to crack the code on why it works and then need to try and kind of disseminate that to as many people as possible.
[00:31:19] Right.
[00:31:19] Mikkel: That's it. So, I think this is just to say there's this whole magical framework. of the bowtie that really looks at a couple of facets that you can now go and analyze your business to say, Hey, if we were to do less, can we still actually then get more out of it?
[00:31:34] And part of it is redeploying resources, all that stuff, but there are also improvements that can be made. Um, especially because I think this engine we've built over the last 10 years was optimized for an era that's, that's just gone. Um, so, you know, there might be a lot of opportunities to improve.
[00:31:50] Toni: Yeah, I'm just thinking, I mean, and then there's like, I mean, this is a big topic and there's all kinds of CAC stuff you can shift
[00:31:56] Mikkel: didn't go to the CS side
[00:31:58] Toni: Exactly. So, I mean, the, the thing is, I think the thing is actually, when you see a voice coming to you and saying like, sorry, Mikkel, you will need to do more with less. That you don't, hand in your resignation and go and say like, go fuck yourself. That's not good. Yeah. There is a way.
[00:32:13] You know, people have this feeling of their hands are tied and they can't do anything about it. Well, you can. Um, and the, the reason why, It feels so impossible is because you're looking at the problem from the wrong angle. That's my, that's, that's how I see it. Once you look at the problem from a, Hey, this is whatever, you know, bow tie funnel, double funnel.
[00:32:36] I heard people don't call it the butterfly funnel. Um, I mean, it's like, it's like whatever, whatever it is, it doesn't matter. Kind of, you know, take a framework like this. Uh, break it out into as much detail as you possibly can that makes sense to you. And then once you have it in front of you, you will basically have a map.
[00:32:53] You have like a blueprint in front of you. And then you can find hundreds of things to improve. Hundreds of things. And, um, while, um, you know, for the last four years everyone was like I don't give a shit, what I need to manage is All the more people that I need to squeeze into this thing. You know, good news.
[00:33:09] You don't have that problem anymore. That problem is gone. You don't, you don't have that problem anymore. The problem now is like, okay, my team is pretty stable. How can I fucking tune this now? Um, and that's basically, you know, once you look at the whole thing, then you can kind of really execute that. And the, the other thing is also, I got to say, if you are not a CRO listening, if you're more like a RevOps person listening, it will be difficult.
[00:33:34] To make your CRO or CFO care and understand these things, it will be difficult to actually achieve that, right? So this is where I think our show helps, where like things from Jacco, the revenue architecture thing helps. There's so many other things. People need to wake up that this is how you can manage that stuff, right?
[00:33:52] Um, and, um, and once they do, I think the opportunities to improve. There's like a thousand.
[00:33:59] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:34:00] Toni: Mikkel, so, um, what did we talk about today? We talked about, do more with less or maybe do the same with
[00:34:08] Mikkel: Yeah. And do it faster.
[00:34:10] Toni: So that translated into, you know, basically focus your marketing, focus your outbound efforts, maybe focus them both on the same thing even. try and find ways to speed up the whole thing and then try and find things that are going great.
[00:34:25] Where you can copy and understand and tell everyone about it.
[00:34:28] Mikkel: And then, uh, if you're not subscribed already and you want to listen to Manny Medina, Jacco van der Kooij, Mark Roberge, if you don't want to miss any of the good stuff, hit the subscribe button, maybe leave a review. It would make us tremendously thankful. So thank you so much for listening. And thank you, Toni.
[00:34:45] Toni: the cause. Have a good one. Bye bye.