Nobody’s prepared to grow a billion-dollar business from square one. So we’re learning from revenue leaders who have already done it.
Join host Alex Kracov, former VP of Marketing at Lattice and now Founder and CEO of Dock, as he has candid conversations with successful revenue leaders about their business growth stories.
We’ll talk to sales, marketing, and customer success leaders about their growing pains. We’ll interview founders who have built companies from the ground-up. And we’ll talk to agencies and consulting firms who do the behind-the-scenes work for the fastest-growing companies in the world.
If you want the true, challenging stories of what it takes to grow revenue—not generic, high-level advice—then this show is for you.
(preview)
Todd Busler: I give both the founders a lot of credit. They were reading a lot that Jason Lumpkin's stuff saying hire two reps at once. We ended up hiring this woman named Becca, who was at Optimizely — a similar enough space. I was watching her. I was like, okay. Yeah, this is actually how we're doing it. And we slowly pushed each other. Yeah, I closed the biggest deal. Then she did. And we did. And it was this constant battle in a very friendly way. Her and I started really competing on, wait, how much value is really here? How much are people willing to pay for this thing? And in order to justify those bigger deals, that pushed us to also say, hey, what is the business value here? How can I actually get a CFO to care about this or some VP of finance, whatever that may be? I think that competition led to that. And it was kind of us driving deals size up and then being forced to figure out the business value, which isn't the right way to go about it. But that's kind of how it evolved.
(intro)
Alex Kracov: Being an early sales hire is a great test run for being a founder. For today's guest, Todd Busler, co-founder of Champify, he cut his teeth as the first sales hire at Heap.
Welcome to Grow & Tell, the show where revenue leaders tell their growth stories behind successful companies. I'm your host Alex Kracov.
Todd Busler started his career as a sales engineer at SAP before joining Square as one of their first 10 AEs. From there, he joined Heap — a product analytics platform — as their first AE and go-to-market hire. In his six years at Heap, Todd rose to the position of VP of sales where he helped the company grow from $300k to over $40 million in revenue. He also 10x their average contract from 5k to over 50k a year. After leaving Heap, Todd co-founded Champify, a tool that helps sales teams identify new opportunities by monitoring job changes.
In today's episode, Todd and I talked about how internal sales competition led to Heap's growth, how their competitive messaging matured over time, how the sales landscape has changed since his time at Heap, and the biggest differences between being an early sales hire versus a founder. I hope you enjoy today's chat.
(interview)
Alex Kracov: I'd love to start today's conversation with your time at Heap. You joined Heap as the sixth employee and the first go-to-market hire. At the time, Heap was around $300k in revenue. I'd love to know what made you joined Heap and who hired you.
Todd Busler: My entry into tech was as a sales engineer at a massive company, and then I went to Square. I was at Square for a year. Square, at the time, this going back like 2015-2014, was like farmers' markets type of selling. They're building that sales motion. I was part of the first class at Square that went from 8 of us to about 60. I started there really getting exposed to things like sales enablement, comp plans, territory models, rev ops, product specialist. All this stuff kind of opened up my eyes to the point where I was like, oh, I really want to go to a true startup, not an 800-person company just building out sales.
I started to put some feelers out there, and I got connected to the Heap folks. I really liked both the founders. On paper, it's like first-time founders, crowded space, a lot of reasons why not to jump in. But I kept digging more and more. I was like, all right. I'm by far the dumbest person who's going to be at this company. I'm going to learn a ton from all of these people, and I'm going to see a company grow in some fashion. I remember telling my dad like, hey, I'm going to go to these five, six-person company. He's like, what are you doing? Jack Dorsey, Square.
Basically, what I did, I called the 10 smartest engineers I knew. A lot of them were at Square at the time. I was like, what do you think about this tech? What do you think about the space? A lot of people were really impressed in the combination of that diligence and just liking the people. They liked that I had some sales engg background and could be a little bit more technical. It was just like, all right. I'm young. I'm single. Let's take a shot on this. It ended up being a great decision.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, there's a certain moment in your life in your 20s where you're definitely down to take those risks. I felt the same with Lattice. It was like, what's the worst that can happen? I'm going to go. I'm going to learn with a bunch of smart people. Worst case scenario, I'd go get a job back at Square or another big company, right? There's a certain moment in your life where it's totally worth it. And it definitely panned out for you, which we'll get into today.
Todd Busler: Yeah, and people are like, oh, how'd you know how to do the diligence? You don't. You're joining a company. You know it's risky. There's definitely some luck involved. I think you can check some boxes, but it's pretty low risk and a lot of upside. I think that people like you, I think, has proved benefits for it.
Alex Kracov: I'm curious. What was the state of sales like when you joined? I imagine there was a transition happening from just founder-led sales to more sales-led, and you being involved. Can you take us back to what it was like at the time?
Todd Busler: Yeah, so not only were the two founders first-time founders. One of them had never had a corporate job, and the other one had only worked at Facebook for a small amount of time. So this was really first time. When I came in, they had a really good job getting into the Hacker News YC crowd developer community and had some good inbound. They had some interests. Most of the deals at the time are self-serve, swipe your credit card, $300 a month type of thing. The founder had just done I think the first contract sales-led deal. It was really just like, hey, you're way outside the plan. How much are you willing to pay? I wouldn't call it sales. It was more accepting. What do we do here?
I remember them just being really open about, like, show me all the customers. Show me what you're hearing. Let me listen to some calls. Let me shadow you for a day before I joined. I was like, okay. They really don't know how to do sales, and the thing is working. So I was like, all right. There's a lot here. But the current state was like one customer on a contract, a lot of inbound, no Salesforce, no routing. Nothing in place at all. They were just like here, go. So yeah, I'm kind of thrown into it. Knowing what I know now, I still didn't do a lot of things. But at least, I had an idea of where do I spend time, how do I extract value where people are getting it?
Alex Kracov: Where did you spend time? Did you go buy Salesforce and set that up, or did you jump on customer calls? How did you think about those first, I guess, months you were at Heap?
Todd Busler: The first week was like, teach me how this works. I remember sitting down and, like, honestly, how does the Internet work? What is this web tracking thing? What is a JavaScript simply like? I had no idea. So it was a lot of YouTubing and getting my questions answered by these people who are really, really smart and knowledgeable in the space.
Most of my time right away was like, wait, we have a lot of inbound. Let me go spend the time with all of these people, talk to as many of them as possible, figure out why they're buying. I started to figure out really quickly who are the types of companies we should be spending time on. What are those signals that you can get pre-call or in a first call that understands where you should direct your resources? It became very quickly knowledgeable that there were some of these inbound customers that can be paying a lot more. The value is clearly there, and they weren't capturing nearly enough of it. So the first part was getting inbound. I spent my time with people that could pay money and understand why they were paying us. Then that allowed us to start to transition to like, okay, how do we go get some more of these bigger customers?
Alex Kracov: Why do you think there was such great inbound interest in Heap? I mean, beyond being able to use Bookface, and Hacker News, and all that, what do you think it was about the products and positioning itself that resonated with folks?
Todd Busler: I think there's two things. I think they did a good job with the Bookface YC, Hacker News community. I think a lot of people are really trying to figure it out today. I think it's way harder in today's world. I think the second thing was, they had a really acute pain that they solved. So if you flashback to this, it's like 2014, 2015. Mixpanel was raising tons of money. It was like this new hot thing on the block. People were starting to be like, hey, can we do something outside Google Analytics? Then there was just the way of people that have tried some of the 2.0 tools. If they've tried it, they've lived through this acute pain that keeps solved.
I remember you talked to 10 people, and 6 people would be like, "Why would I ever buy this thing?" There's two people that are like, "Yeah, I could see where this is going, but I don't need an app." But there was 2 out of every 10 that were like, "Wow. Yes, I get exactly the pain you're willing to solve for, and I'll pay for it." Then we just over time got smarter about spending time with those 2 out of 10. But it was really an acute pain they solved that was like a big differentiator in the market at the time.
Alex Kracov: Those 2 out of 10 where they really felt that acute problem, who were they? What was that ideal customer profile that you stumbled across?
Todd Busler: It's an interesting question. Because this category now has become known as product analytics, right? They sell to the VP of product. But if you remember that time, product was nowhere near as mature as it was now. So the people that were really latching on to this early on were engineers — engineers getting bothered by product or leadership teams to understand what was happening on their site. They were going to implement a lot of this tracking code, which was something no one wanted to do. It was looked at more as menial janitorial type of work. And 2 out of those 10 were spending a lot of time. They're like, "Wait. You can fix this for us in a pretty affordable way?" Because they know what their time's worth. Yes, let's go figure this thing out.
The product was super early as well. Did it work? Could it deliver on those sites? We always had these upper bounds of, can we sell to this company yet? Good learnings there as I think a lot of early-stage companies. But finding those two people, very clearly fixing an immediate pain, and people are willing to go spend money on it.
Alex Kracov: And so it sounds like you really anchored the pitch against engineer's time. It's like, "Hey, engineer. You could go build this yourself. That's going to cost X amount of time." Or, "Hey, we can do it for you. You just have to plug in a couple, add the script, add a couple tags, things like that. And we'll get it going for you."
Todd Busler: Definitely. I think like now selling against pure time saving is really challenging in this market. But at the time, when it was such an acute pain and what we're charging was so little compared to a couple engineers on, the math made a lot of sense. I think as we really started to figure out — because when I started, I understand people were saving some time and engineers didn't have to do XYZ. But it wasn't till 6, 9, 12 months in that we started to figure out like, okay, now that they're doing that, what does it mean for the business? That's when we started way more selling to the business product and marketing people, getting into what is the conversion rate increase mean to the business? What happens if you're able to save some retention? But in the beginning, it was definitely like tactical, fill the whole engg time savings.
Alex Kracov: Makes sense. Then I always think sub a million ARR is such an important unique stage in a company, right? You're trying to figure out product-market fit. You're doing anything you can to get to a million, where you can maybe go raise a Series A. In that time, from 300k to a million, was it just as engineer sale that you were doing and keep mining that vein, or did it start to evolve into that more product persona?
Todd Busler: I think the first six months was definitely that acute pain. I think what happened next is they were reading a lot that Jason Lumpkin's stuff saying, hire two reps at once. I give both the founders a lot of credit. First off, that was still one of the hardest interviews I've ever done. I'll never forget the CEO asked me to pitch the product in a mock demo. I got on it. I thought it went pretty well. I asked him how it went, and he gave me all this feedback. I was like, okay, that's good feedback. Yeah, I agree. It was like, we're doing it again on the spot. I remember we did that. And I now always do this, because I think it really shows if someone is coachable and can move on the fly.
The second thing I give them credit for is, I remember they were getting ready to hire a second rep before I had even started, before my first or second week. I said to them I like this individual. But I think their background is so similar to me, that I think you're better off hiring someone with a slightly different background to figure out what is this profile that's going to work. We ended up hiring this woman named Becca, who was at Optimizely, a similar enough space. That's when I think we really started to get out of the pure time saving just engg bandaid fix. Her and I started really competing on, wait, how much value is really here? How much are people willing to pay for this thing? And in order to justify those bigger deals, that pushed us to also say, hey, what is the business value here? How can I actually get a CFO to care about this or some VP of finance, whatever that may be? I think the competition led to that. It was us driving deals size up and then being forced to figure out the business value, which isn't the right way to go about it. But that's kind of how it evolved.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, it's really cool to hear how much that Jason Lumpkin advice, which I see all the time and I very much agree with too. I hear a real story about how it actually really helped Heap in the early days and forced you as a seller to actually get better and improve your own process. So it's really interesting to hear.
Todd Busler: Yeah, she was way better than me at the time, I remember. Because she had the most direct experience. Mine was very different. She had gone through a lot of that. I was watching her. I was like, okay, yeah, this is actually how we're doing it. We slowly pushed each other. I closed the biggest deal, and then she did. Then we did. And it was this constant battle in a very friendly way. That I think is the reason why people recommend that.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, and we're finally getting to that stage too even at Dock where we just have more revenue team collaboration, where we have a couple of sellers, marketer, customer success. It's so nice having ideas other than just the founder or the few small team.
Todd Busler: 100%.
Alex Kracov: It just makes everybody better. It forces a certain level of excellence. And so, I don't know. It's been very refreshing to have a little team around me now at Dock, which has been awesome.
Todd Busler: It's been the same thing for us. We have a pretty good sales background. I think you could attest to this now, versus the early days of Lattice, of how much needs to go in to win these deals or how much more competitive or hard to get people to spend. But we hired a new marketing leader a couple of months ago in the same thing, just the way they're thinking about business case, competitive differentiation and other kind of adjacent value props that we really weren't even talking to. It's just pushing everyone in the right direction. I 100% agree.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, it's crazy how much different it is today building a company than it felt back then, whether it's VC funding being flushed but also just where all these different businesses where at versus remote. It feels so, so different and definitely harder.
Todd Busler: 100%.
Alex Kracov: While you were at Heap, I think at around a million and a half in revenue, you eventually moved from, I guess, the first AE to being put in this interim leadership role. Can you talk a little bit about this part of the Heap story?
Todd Busler: For sure. So what happened was, we had myself and Becca. We hired our first SDR who's turned in to be a great sales leader. We were saying, okay, there's enough of us to go around on the inbound front. We got closed rates up. We got our deal sizes up. We need to start figuring out ourselves some of this outbound.
They'd hired the first — they actually hired a VP of sales when it was just a handful of us. Pretty traditional. We got to around a million. They've hired a VP of sales, raised the Series A. I think what we noticed about six months after that individual joined is, the caliber of people that he brought in and also the metrics both weren't heading in the right direction. And it was kind of like, hey, we didn't get — back to the Jason Lumpkin stuff. Like you should see this in a deal cycle that things are materially improving. That wasn't happening.
I remember we had a tough conversation back. The founders were like, "Hey, we thought we'd be getting more from this. We just want this thing to work. What's the situation here?" They were feeling the same way. They decided to part ways. They left this gap. When we had a team of four or five sales people, what do we do? They said, "We're going to make you this interim leader." I was thrown into that way early. Looking back, I had no idea what I was doing. I think I had good intuition and trust the team because I was in their shoes, and that had some results. I knew how to sell the product really well.
I gave the founders a lot of credit. They brought in a couple different sales consultants. First off, just interviewing them to do this role. There's people like Sam Blond and Jim Herbold, CRO at Vox. That's who we ended up working with. But just in those interviews, we're learning so much. I was like, wow. I had no idea of all this stuff: operating cadences, and comp plans, and best ways to forecast, how you're thinking about campaigns. I was just never exposed to it.
In doing that, you know, we partnered up with Jim Herbold who came in. That really taught us out, okay, this is how a sales organization is built. Here's how you go about it. You can be the smartest person in the world. But if you haven't seen some of this stuff while it's not rocket science, it's really hard to see around the corners. That was the person like, hey, I get your idea. Here's why it's a problem you're going to run into three months. So I partnered closely with him. He worked with us two days a week, and basically was able to level me up to get us to the next stage where they eventually hired a CRO.
Alex Kracov: Very cool. Then were you like a player coach at the beginning of that interim period, or were you just full sales management?
Todd Busler: In the beginning, I was. In the beginning, I was a player coach which I'm not a fan of long term. I think in these early-stage companies, there may be transition periods where it happens. Looking back, we probably did that a little too long. Then I was able to move into a pure management role. By that time, after another year or so growing really nicely, they brought a CRO. It was like, okay, you now run this sales team. I was super happy to have a boss at that point, too. Because I was running into, like, I'm not sure what to do territory or flying from the hip. But yeah, I moved out of that player coach role pretty quickly.
Alex Kracov: What was it like being — you were a peer of these other sales reps, and then you go to being the leader and effectively their boss. What was that like? That must have been a little awkward or hard to build trust. I don't know. Did it just feel more natural? How did it go down?
Todd Busler: It really was. I think that's something a lot of early-stage folks go through. You know how this is. You're working really close with these people. You hang out socially. You become friends. There are many of them who are great friends today. Then all of a sudden, imagine that I have hard feedback conversations. It's not easy. I remember being in the situation of like, you know what? I really shouldn't be at these happy hours. Or, I actually shouldn't be going out with this team at this stage. It is a little challenging. I think I had the respect because I just done that role well. And I can immediately help them be better at their jobs.
But yeah, it was definitely a tricky component going from friends to manager. I don't think that's easy for anyone. Realistically, it's a skill that you have to get good at. Because I think it happens to more people than some people might think.
Alex Kracov: I love the transition. Can you talk a little bit more about the sales motion and just the competitive landscape? Heap eventually operate in this very competitive market of product analytics. I think the big players were like Mixpanel and Amplitude. I don't know if that's right.
Todd Busler: Yeah, that's right.
Alex Kracov: Who did you usually sell against? Then how were you able to win?
Todd Busler: There's a lot of really interesting learnings here, too. After Heap, I spent a year in the venture world. I worked really closely with some early Amplitude folks and learned about that playbook in the sideline. But super early days, it was basically how do we get in the deals that Mixpanel is in? Then we had a really fundamental differentiator and could win a big chunk of them.
Amplitude came on the market really similar timing. I think Amplitude was really impressive from positioning and product marketing from day one. They very much were like, "We're going to be the tool for product managers. We're going to beat on that drum nonstop." Then from a positioning standpoint, Amplitude came in as a cheaper, faster version of Mixpanel. Then slowly, they've been able to move to the premium product in the market.
I think what was interesting about Heap is, again, going back to that differentiators. It was just very clear to say, philosophically, do you believe that event tracking should be automatic? If so, you would want to work with Heap. Now, there may be some features we weren't quite there on. But competitively, I was saying, hey, the last 20% of complex analytic features doesn't matter as much of getting this right. I think the people that have lived through any bit of that pain were willing to get on board with us.
There was another player in the space called Pendo which was getting off at the same time as well. That made things complicated because they were saying, "Hey, we might not have the most sophisticated analytics, but we're including all these other things in a suite that product people may care about." That was really tricky to sell against. I think what we did is, we had some partnership motions that were probably too late to get to. But that allowed us to compete on that front.
But it was definitely a competitive market. All those vendors getting a lot of money, all of us chasing for a pie that probably felt like was smaller than all of the VCs wanted it to be at the time. But I think a lot of really good reps have come out of all of those companies, because they're highly competitive deals. In the beginning, there wasn't tons of differentiation. You just had to build champions, build business case, figure out how you're going to do this, use references — all the things that I think have made people good sellers years later.
Alex Kracov: It's super interesting. It sounds like the whole market realized there's this whole space to build things for the product team and the product analytics, shifting it from engineers. Then there was just a bunch of companies who realized that and started to build in that direction.
You touched on it a little bit at the end of your answer. I'd love to go a little bit deeper. Was there anything in your approach of how you sold the product, not just like what you sold that made you different? Not just going through the different features and saying, hey, our features are better, XYZ. But in your salesmanship approach and how you went to market, was there anything that stood out from Heap?
Todd Busler: I think there's two things. The first thing, again, because we had that philosophical differentiator, you could understand if people are on board and leaning into that or not at the beginning. And if they weren't, we got good at not chasing those deals. I think the second thing is, we had a trial. We used that heavily to our advantage. We talked about how you can get up and running fast or how the chance of implementation is a lot higher. Then we were able to prove that.
We had some really good technical resources that said, "Hey, Alex dropped this JS snippet on your app or on your site. We're going to come back. And when we meet in five days, we're going to have all pre-built reports. We're going to actually do some analysis on your behalf." So our best conversations. I think there's a lot of similarities to this today at Champify. You really weren't talking about the product. You were talking about here's what I'm seeing in your app. Here's the types of decisions you can make. And in doing that, they're like, wait, this has already set up? We're 90% of the way there? I think that really started to say, like, okay, maybe I don't need some of these other things that some other vendors have. Looking back, that was a really big differentiator we had. I think we leaned into it pretty well.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, you're just able to get to value faster, accelerate the value as opposed to doing like, oh, here's your slide deck in theory how it's going to work. Here's how it's actually going to work.
Todd Busler: Exactly. I remember being in these demos. They weren't demos. They were really like trial setups, or let's go through an analysis. We had different versions of this over the years. Our preferred customer program, we're going to build this out. We'd say like, forget the product. Forget the analytics tool. What are the 10 things you guys care about right now? What are you thinking about as a business? And if we got installed properly and let a couple weeks of data get captured, we could come in there and be like, "Here's what we're seeing for your conversion rate. Here are some differences in what you're seeing on retention. Hey, you're building that feature. You just had three engineers spend a month on. No one's even using it. You have a discoverability issue." So you started to act as this consultant, which was a good thing on the sales process.
On the ramping sales side, like AE side, you really needed smart reps that could think like that and be able to say like, what did these people care about? How do they make money? How do I guide our technical resources? Or in the beginning, we were doing it on our own. How do you guide yourself or others to be able to build the right analysis that's going to get them to realize, okay, this is the right decision?
Alex Kracov: I know when you're at Heap, you grew the average contract size quite significantly. It went from 5k to over 50k. How were you able to do that? Was there a lot of this anchoring to the business outcomes? What were those levers you pulled? Did you just increase prices? How were you able to move up market there?
Todd Busler: I guess three or four things. Like many companies, I don't think we're charging enough in the beginning. So it's easy to be like, oh, the sales was so smart. But it was just like we could be charging a lot more for this. There's a lot more value for this. I think most founders are uncomfortable raising their prices. It's something everyone goes through. I think I put some good pressure to be like, listen, I know people will pay more for this. Let's slowly keep testing that and pushing it.
I think the second thing was the competition with Becca. It just spurred like, hey, you know what? I think I can get more here. I'm confident it's worth it. We can deliver. I think we're also seeing some more wins from our customers. That gave us more confidence. Like, wait. Working with the big insurance company, they increased their conversion rate by eight tenths of a percent. You know how much money that means for them? Hold on. There's something real here.
Then we started to add some other products as well. At the time, everyone was starting to want their data in the data warehouse. Amazon Redshift was the hottest thing. I remember the first time the CEO said, "Hey, we just built this. I want you to sell it as an add-on." I said okay. How much? What do you want me to do? He's like, "Go figure it out." I was like okay. Here we go. So I get on a call, pushed way too high. Understand that there's a range people are willing to pay. All three of those things helped us slowly inch it up.
Alex Kracov: Were there any memorable deal stories on the enterprise side from this time at Heap where you're like, oh, God. I can't believe we closed that one, or anything that stood out?
Todd Busler: Yeah, I remember there was a couple different use cases for the product. There was like this get on a site where people have high-value conversion, lending site, insurance companies, et cetera. Doing a lot of testing and optimization, constantly looking at that web page experience as a product. There was also an internal use case, an internal tooling use case — huge companies that might had hundreds of internal productivity apps and had a lot of engineers dedicated to that.
I remember with a big consulting company, we had started with a 2k swipe-your-credit-card deal. Eventually, we got them to like 25k. They wanted to go bigger. I'd never forget this. We prepped for it. Founders were on the other end, on the back of my monitor. We're going to be like, we're going to quote these people $600,000. In our head, we're like, well, there's these many engineers. Here's how much you could sell. We got laughed at, like purely laughed at. Like, whoa, what? I was expecting you to say $30,000. How did we get here? This is not happening. I felt dumb. But actually, I think there are some good learnings in that. Maybe it's having some of the courage to push the envelope and really figure out where that is. I think there's also some learnings of, hey, you better get really clear on how you're articulating that value.
I am proud to say that one of their biggest competitors actually ended up becoming a 750k deal three, four years later. So it was there. I think we were a little early on how we articulated that value or how other people have personally experienced that value. But I remember having all the confidence in the world going into this. Like, alright. We're going to do this, pumping myself up and literally getting laughed at. But actually, looking back, I don't think we're wrong. I think we're just a little early.
Alex Kracov: I love that story. I mean, all of us in the early stage has criminally underpriced our products. I've done it at Dock. We're increasing our prices in different things. So you just don't have the confidence in the product in the early days. You know everything that's wrong with it. But then, as you start to mature and it gets good, and you start to see the real impact on the business, and you start to build confidence, then you do got to increase your prices. Because you're having a real impact on the business. I'd give you credit. I don't have the balls to quote a 750k deal. But one day.
Todd Busler: I went in there guns blazing. Yeah, I'll never forget. It was like crickets. The guy is literally laughing at us. But again, I do think some of that is necessary. Maybe we went a little too crazy, but I don't think we're far off.
Alex Kracov: Switching gears a little bit. You eventually went to start the New York City office for Heap. Why did you make that move? Was that a personal move? Then what was that experience like building up a satellite office?
Todd Busler: So we had a CRO that was ramping. I think there's an interesting anecdote there as well for some early-stage employees or early-stage salespeople. We didn't have the best experience with that first VP of sales. I really liked the individual. I just don't think he was at the position in his career to get what we wanted from that. Then the CRO came in. I remember sitting down. I said, alright. I need to do everything in my power to make this individual successful. I remember saying: here's what matters. Here's the real problems. Whatever you're hearing from the founders, here's my view of the real problems. Here's the reasons why the first individual didn't work out. I basically gave him a playbook to say go make this thing work. He made a really good experience. We started growing really quickly.
I, at the time, was living in San Francisco for five years. I was ready to move back East. I'm from New Jersey. My parents were getting older, and we had a lot of customers there. So when I started to bring that idea up, they're like, hey, this makes a lot of sense. It was awesome, because you got to create a little bit of a subculture within a company. It was a lot more sales-driven than engg-driven. I think with two technical founders, we were very engg- driven company, that they respected and like sales. But it was nowhere near a sales-driven company where sales make a lot of the decisions and calls the shots.
That started to change a little bit. Because we hired some really good talent early on there that started to push the deal sizes even bigger, that got a team on the East Coast significantly higher. We were getting in front of way more customers. We were having events at our office. So I think it's just the takeaways where you can build a subculture if you have a really heavy engg culture at a company. You have a chance with a satellite branch or campus to create a different experience there. And it also created some awesome competition. Becca started moving up the ranks on the West Coast. I was on the East Coast. Now it was this similar competition but at a manager and team level, which, again, I think is very healthy.
Alex Kracov: You ended up running I think a team of 25 plus sales reps. I'm curious. How did your management style evolve? How did you even learn? Were you still using Jim as a coach? I don't know. How did you even figure out how to run such a big sales org?
Todd Busler: I was thrown into the fire. I think there was a couple key moments that I think you're learning as a manager comes in step functions. It's not linear. Jim Herbold was the first one. Well, the interviews for the consultant was the first one. Jim Herbold was the second one. Learning from our CRO was the third.
Then we actually went and invested in frontline sales management coaching. A guy named Matt Cameron, he runs this program called SaaSy. I went to that. I remember being mind-blown as well and just like, oh, operating rigor. Like, here's how you interview. Here's how you run one-on-ones. Here's what a good sales meeting should look like. Here's the frameworks. What do they need to learn? What do they need to feel? What do they need to do? Learning all of these things.
I think me, personally, was a smart person at Heap, had early good results. Then just I never was too confident to say I know everything. So I looked at every opportunity to just learn from good people and tried to make that into my own style. Again, I don't think any of the sales leadership stuff is rocket science for people with high EQ and good natural leadership abilities. But you have to learn it, right? It's hard to see it unless you've seen it done well.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, there's just a core playbook to sales on how do you run a sales org, sort of that cadence of driving revenue. That if you've never experienced sales, you just don't know what it means. You think it's just like pulling a fast food over a buyer. But there's so much more to that. It's such a numbers game, which I think is pretty mind blowing to people who are outside of the industry.
Todd Busler: And building a culture of accountability and winning and constant learning. I'm really proud of the culture that we build at sales at Heap. Because tactical things like, how do you get everyone to do pipe gen consistently? We were good at that from very early on, like a very pipe gen-focused sales culture. That when everyone else was saying, oh, only SDR's prospect, like everyone prospected. We built that. Having things like deals lost channels, we're always learning from deals that didn't happen. What could they have done different? What needed to happen on the product side? But yes, like I said, it's hard to think about how you set all that up until you've seen it done well.
Alex Kracov: All right. I want to talk about what you're up to today. So now you're the CEO and co-founder of a company called Champify. Can you talk a little bit about what was the original idea for Champify? How did you come up with it? Then how has that evolved on what it is today?
Todd Busler: Original idea was essentially, I mentioned Amplitude being really good at product marketing and positioning and thought leadership. I think Heap never figured that out, especially not in the early days. There was a lot of zigging and zagging on exactly what market should we target, who's the end buyer.
I think what we saw was two things. We started to see some of that outbound motion stalling out. I think it was driven by two different things happening in the market. The first thing was just there was a lot of funding going into the space. I don't know if the market was growing at the same rate. So just going to talk to new people is tricky. Where we got really good at hiring SDRs early days and making them productive, we're seeing that efficiency go down. I think we have captured a lot of early adopters as well. I think the second thing that has happened was you were seeing sales engagement platforms blow up. Whereas in the early days, we were really nerdy with Outreach and ZoomInfo and Clearbit. That was an advantage. You had some arbitrage there. Fast forward three, four years later, everyone was doing it.
So I think what we started to realize is, there was a rep on the West Coast that had come from Samsara, really sharp, ops-focused rep, that was blowing out his number consistently. I started spending more time with him. What I realized, he's like, "You guys are asking us to go after people that have never heard of us. The chance of that happening is really, really low. Yet, we can fill a U.S. football stadium with the amount of people using our product that have had great experiences." He was working extremely long hours doing a lot of this manually, but it was kind of wild, wild west. He could own a lot of accounts. The hungriest person was winning. He said these people are turning over at 2%-3% a month, many of which are going on creating accounts. I'm just spending all my time there.
The idea of Champify happened in that moment. We built a bad version of it. Then it became more clear in my head that we need to go after this when I went. And after Heap, I spent a year as an operator in residence. Basically, what that would be, Alex, is, let's say you're a nerdy engineer. You never started a company. We just led your round. I would partner with you. Me as the operator resident and then you as the founder. I would literally have an email at your company and be your right-hand man. What that meant is, for companies that are a little bit further along, that may be, hey, we're hiring our first rep or our first comp plan. But a lot of it was super early. How do we get design partners? How do we price our first deals? What is the value? Who do we go after?
When I started doing that with founders, I was like, wow. Doing this in 2021 versus 2015 is dramatically different and dramatically harder. I thought I could use the same tools that I did in the past. Maybe there's some new tech but same playbook. It just wasn't working. So a combination of me seeing that trend happen led me to believe like, okay, there's something here with Champify. So I went and had 30 conversations with people. I ended up partnering up with that smart rep. We said, hey, if we can get a good CTO, we should go after this. We started to show people. They're like, if you do this and you have this team, we'll put money in. Another signal being like, okay, there's something here.
Alex Kracov: You're a couple of years into the journey. Can you talk a little bit about the timeline and the company growth? Did you launch with a pilot beta program? Then when did you transition into actually selling the product? What were the last couple years looked like for you?
Todd Busler: So our co-founder, Steven, was working on this for about four or five months before I decided to join. He was trying to say, hey, we should do this for a while. Originally, I was going to invest in advice. I started not being able to sleep at night, being like, wait, I need to do this. We raised money in June of 2022. We launched in August of 2022. We opted for selling the product very early.
I had saw a lot of founders in the unusual venture’s portfolio build all of this product and then not really know if there was a market for it yet. So we opted for selling it really early. But we launched. We have either zero or one paying customer. Probably very similar to you. A lot of friendlies, people you know that were willing to try this out who weren't spending a ton of money — we just spent a ton of time with them. How should this work? What should the workflows look like? What's the value we're driving here?
Then now you fast forward from that August launch to November 2023, north of 55 customers. We have a sales team that's constantly getting into pipeline and closing deals that are repeatable clip. But it's hard. I think the getting in the pipeline early Heap days versus company's launching today is just a whole different ballgame. When you take away some of this scale, not that sophisticated outbound from the table, it's really hard to get into the level of deals you need to early on.
Alex Kracov: How did you approach founder-led sales? I imagine, as a former seller yourself, you're probably pretty good at this. How did you think about that problem and going back from, okay, being a VP back to the frontlines and actually working the deals yourself?
Todd Busler: I never got that far away from it at Heap. Maybe this was a good or bad thing. But I was still — I think just because of my tenure there, I was still in tons of deal reviews or brought into tons of meetings just because I had all the anecdotes and all the stories and all the relationships. So I don't think I was ever far away from the selling.
I think the bigger thing we realized is like, hey, if we can get into meetings and conversations, we can close deals. We know that this is a product that's powerful and pretty easy to articulate the value. I think where I spent more time was, how do we figure out how to get to meetings? I remember talking to you. I said, hey, how do we launch? How do we go and get people to want to sign up for this? What's the best way to go about this? Because I knew if we can get into meetings, we knew how to run a pretty good sales process. But I would say I spent more of the time trying to figure out how do we get awareness? How do we get people to know who we are? How do we get people to want even entertain chatting with us? Then the sales didn't change all that much.
Alex Kracov: Then you're selling a tool that helps with outbound sales. I imagine you're doing a lot of that. But I'm curious. What advice do you have for sales leaders who are dealing with outbound today? How does Champify help them supercharge that motion?
Todd Busler: For sure. It's really interesting. Because we're heavy power users of our own product, but we're not the ideal fit of our own product just yet. We normally don't start selling to companies until they're 100-150 employees, when you have a critical mass of users that it really starts make sense to operationalize. I think it depends on who I'm talking to. Early-stage companies, I think the biggest thing you need to figure out is, they look at this like, how do I get to a million dollars in ARR? I always say break this down in chunks. You have friendlies. You have people in your network that will try this out. If you can prove value, you can get people to pay for this. You know this. Once you get your first 5, 10, 20 customers, the next ones get a little bit easier. So I think it can look daunting. As early-stage founders say, how do I do this whole thing? These numbers look really big. But step by step, it gets easier.
I think the thing on the bigger companies’ standpoint is, the world is changing really quickly. You can't use the sales engagement platforms and just buy cold data lists and expect that thing is going to work. I think the companies that are doing it really well are like you guys, where you have tons of thought leadership. You have tons of people talking about different use cases they can use. You have tons of influencers talking about what you're doing. I think that stuff matters more than ever. Then for people that are more mature, if email, cold email is a huge part of your pipeline, a big source of pipeline today, there's big changes coming. I think bigger than a lot of things in the last couple years. The companies that can react really quickly to that, I think, are going to be a lot of the winners.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, it's super interesting what's happening in just the outbound world. I don't know. This week on LinkedIn, I don't know. This happened earlier. But it blew up. They sent that email about the 5,000-email limit or whatever. You can see all of LinkedIn freaking out. It seems a long time coming. We all get spammed with so many emails. It's like we got to optimize for healthy growth as an industry. Yeah, I don't know. It's super interesting. I always wonder like our SDR is going to be a function in a few years. I feel like they probably will be in some level, but definitely a much smaller team than it was in the past. It's sort of what I think.
Todd Busler: That's what I think as well. I think the skill set is changing dramatically. I think you're going to see smaller SDR teams that take one of two profiles for the next couple years. Profile one being very ops heavy, SDRs that are really good at tooling, email reputation, domain warm up, building lists, sending campaigns that way. I think there's going to be a window that is also going to close on the calling side. I think depending on who you sell to, there's a really good opportunity to get good at cold calling. There are some SDRs that are great at it. For instance, here at Champify, we do a lot of that. The key is like, how do you make it as easy for those individuals? It's just spend a lot of time doing that.
I think they're facing an uphill battle too. Because I think some of the things that Google and Yahoo said, I think a lot of the telecom companies are starting to do. You've seen this on the SMS regulation. I think the same thing is coming on robo-calling world. Then the role is going to really change.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, I think inbound marketing is going to become more and more and more important in the future. But even that is going to get harder too with SEO and what Google's doing, and AI is taking over.
Todd Busler: And AI stuff. Exactly.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, it's so interesting. This is what's fun about tech. Over 10 years ago, you got to evolve and figure it out. It definitely makes it harder. But yeah, we got to figure it out.
Todd Busler: Yeah, it's nothing new, right? Channels get old. People find arbitrage in other areas. I think that's what keeps what we do very interesting. Because you have to be constantly thinking. You have to be comfortable testing different things, knowing when to kill them, where to double down where you're seeing something. I think that's what keeps it fun.
Alex Kracov: So you have a product that's very focused on champions. Actually, Dock as well. I'm curious, how do you approach actually creating champions? How do you support a champion throughout the sales cycle?
Todd Busler: Great question. Again, if I think about the Heap experience, we weren't doing any of this. The way you have to sell in 2023 going into 2024 is just a lot different, to get people to engage and want to commit budget to new spend. The way we do it is figuring out what really matters at the company. I know this isn't novel advice. But there's usually something around, hey, there's SDR attainment, or we're trying to break into a new vertical. Or, actually, we're reducing the team and can't backfill, but our pipeline number is staying the same. Finding something big at the company level, and then finding the individual that has something to gain from that.
Then really, we think about sales here as like champion enablement. What are you doing for that individual using products like Dock to make it extremely easy so that they can go and have those conversations? Every salesperson wants to think they're the reason why people buy, and you're controlling. It's not true. You're finding someone that has something to gain in the organization, making it as easy as possible for them to articulate that story. I think we spend a lot of time not thinking about the ROI or the upside, but also thinking about what's the cost of inaction. Really helping them understand, hey, if no change is made, whether it's Champify or insert 10 other bets you can make on increasing pipeline, what's going to happen to the business? Then using a business case that we do during the sales process, that makes it really clear that, hey, this is a pretty sure fire bet if you can execute properly.
What we try to do is, with that champion, get on the same side of the table as them as quickly as possible saying, hey, based on what our other customers are seeing, these are the types of response rate, their ability to go from contact reached out to meeting, or here's what they're seeing on the velocity or win rate. Do we think these are realistic? Let's really talk about that. Because if you're giving someone some bullshit ROI story, and they don't believe it, they're not going to be able to articulate that. So we try to really just get on the same table, co-create it as much as possible, and think about sales as champion-enablement.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, we've had a huge difference in our sales process recently. I mean, this is not novel either. We probably shouldn't be doing this the whole time. But it's anchoring, closing the deal to their own timelines. It's like, hey, you want to launch. You have a bunch of AEs starting in mid-December. In order to support that, you're going to have to close this deal this week because of XY and Z reasons so that we can help you build it out. It's like immediately, they're like, oh, okay, that makes sense why I got to close the deal this week. As opposed to like, hey, we give you a 20% discount. Why you close this week? It's amazing how much just that simple framing change can have an impact on the sales motion.
Todd Busler: Yeah, we had a CRO VP of sales on it. Because look, your job is to help them make an educated decision. And if you help them reframe the way they're thinking about certain things, you've won. I think that's exactly right. I think the time-based urgency discounts are getting less and less popular knowing that, hey, this is really hard. Until you can get them to realize, like for you guys, hey, ramp time is going to be a problem if you don't get started by x date. Or, for us, hey, that pipeline gap isn't going to close itself. They have to feel it. It's really hard for the rep to be able to create that urgency if they don't believe it.
Alex Kracov: You've been a part of two different companies in the very early days, Heap and Champify, but in very different seats, right? And so I'm curious. What's the biggest difference for you being an early employee versus being a founder, CEO?
Todd Busler: Well, a couple of things. I think just the founder role, overall, it is a little lonely. I've heard people always say that. The problems are all in you. The buck stops with you. I think I've been trying to surround myself with people like you to learn from other folks and say, hey, what are you going through? How are you approaching this? I think what's tricky for early-stage founders is understanding where you should be spending your time. What are the handful of things that are really going to move the needle? I like to be liked. So it's easy to say, hey, I can help you. I can do this. But you really have to get good at focusing and prioritizing.
I think, also, I have a lot more empathy now for the founders, for the CEOs. I remember getting our leadership team at Heap tons of pressure around. Hey, we're not moving fast enough on the product? Or, what about the bigger vision? Or, how can I compete against this? It's really hard. Some of these are really hard decisions to make. I think now I'm, being in that role, realizing give a little more slack to these people. I think that, really just to recap, it's figuring out where to spend the time. Learn from some of the things that I think we did well or poorly in the previous experience, and try to avoid mistakes. I think a lot of this. So you can just avoid the big road bumps. You can stay a lot longer.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, I personally thought it'd be more similar. It definitely at Lattice's early experience has been so helpful. Because I do have a roadmap of what it should feel like. I think I would be going crazy if I didn't have that experience. But the existential mind games of being a founder, I find to be very different than early employee. Early employee, I was like, "Jack, you can make that decision." Or, "If that doesn't work out, I can go get another job." But at Dock, it's like no, this feels like my life. And every little decision weighs on me, whether it's financing or product, or whatever it is. I can't pass that ball to someone else.
Todd Busler: Hiring.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, hiring. Right. Like every mis-hiring. So it's so interesting just that sort of pressure on you from like a mental — I've learned to just be okay with that. But yeah, it's very different.
Todd Busler: It's a skill set to learn. If you see these super Zen CEOs, it's extremely impressive. Because you know they have thousands of decisions on their shoulders that they're thinking about nonstop, whether they want to or not. I think it's a skill set like anything else.
Alex Kracov: Yeah, the Bob Iger book. I forget the exact story in there. But I think he's really good. He talks about how he compartmentalizes things running Disney. It's like, oh, my God. He's giving presentations when there's all this horrible stuff going on. It's amazing how much you have to compartmentalize as a CEO.
I'd love to end today's conversation with you sharing some advice on what founders should do on hiring their first salesperson. I think I saw on LinkedIn, you described this role as like a revenue product manager. Can you talk a little bit about what you meant by this concept?
Todd Busler: I worked with someone named Liam who was at MongoDB for a long time. The unusual ventures, I heard him describe that. I was like, it's so true. You can get a rep who's really good at closing a handful of deals, but that doesn't really help you. It does short-term, but you're really trying to figure out how do I turn this thing into a machine?
So I think the first rep — I was the first rep at Heap. I'm not the best rep. If you drop me at a mature company right now, I'm not going to outperform everyone. I think what you're looking for is someone who is really comfortable with ambiguity, really comfortable with trying a bunch of different ideas where you know a high percentage of them aren't going to work, and someone that's really good at documentation, sharing their learnings, being good at clearly communicating in a non-emotional way to the product team and the leadership team. Just skill sets that are more systems thinker, more tinkerer, someone comfortable with experiments than it is that coin-operated rep. There's another stage where you need that rep, and they're amazing.
But the first one, I think a sales engineer has a great background for that. I think people that have even done some product could be a really good example for that. I think people that have been in the solutions type of world can be a good example. I think it's like courage, systems thinking, and super clear communication. Because you're on the front lines. You're hearing so much feedback that you need to make sure it's getting to the right people.
Alex Kracov: Well, thank you so much for a wonderful conversation, Todd. It was great to hear your story about Heap and creating Champify. If people want to follow up with you, if people want to check out Champify, where's the best place for them to find you on the Internet?
Todd Busler: LinkedIn is best. I'm just Todd Busler. Follow me or DM. I think we put out a lot of interesting stuff that'll hopefully change the way you're thinking a little bit. I think we're all trying to figure out what is sales going to look like. The more we can learn from each other, the better. Alex, I appreciate you having me on. I'm big fan of your product and what it's meant for us. I encourage folks to check it out.
Alex Kracov: Thanks, man. I appreciate it.
(outro)
That's a wrap on another episode of Grow & Tell. If you enjoyed the show, subscribe to us on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform, or find every episode at growandtellshow.com. I'm your host Alex Kracov. Thank you for listening.