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This podcast will help you grow your B2B company quarter after quarter—with confidence, clarity, and data-backed decisions.
In each episode, you’ll learn proven strategies, practical frameworks, and first-hand insights from GTM leaders, RevOps pros, and seasoned B2B executives. They’ll walk you through how they use data to set smart targets, forecast accurately, overcome growth plateaus, and build high-performing sales and marketing engines.
You’ll hear stories of real challenges, real results, and the data-driven moves that made all the difference.
The best B2B companies don’t just look at metrics—they use them to take action. Move The Needle will help you do the same.
Jeremiah Rizzo (00:00.065)
LinkedIn and YouTube. we enable that option to see if anyone like chats in or whatever. Yeah, yeah, totally.
Dougie Loan (00:01.746)
Nice.
Dougie Loan (00:05.373)
That's cool. That's cool. Something different,
Love it. Love it.
Jeremiah Rizzo (00:11.507)
All right, just gonna let people start trickling in here a little bit.
Dougie Loan (00:14.781)
Sounds good. I should have asked you, Jeremiah, where are you based?
Jeremiah Rizzo (00:18.657)
I'd say Philadelphia. We're like an hour and a half north, in a small, a very small like rural farm town, but I say Philadelphia for ease. So yeah. Yeah.
Dougie Loan (00:26.893)
Excellent. Yeah, much easier for me to pick that one up. I know the major cities, right? Like we obviously work in the States, so places like Boston and Miami and such like. So yeah, I'd definitely get Philadelphia. I'm not sure I'd get the rural farm town.
Jeremiah Rizzo (00:40.353)
Yeah, 100%. Where are you traveling to right now? You travel like all the time. I feel like your LinkedIn is just full of like you traveling of things.
Dougie Loan (00:49.393)
Yeah, absolutely. I'm actually, I'm travelling home. Travelling home. So I'm at the airport. So home for me is Glasgow in Scotland and our main office is in London. So I fly down here typically on a Wednesday morning and then fly back. So fly down really early Wednesday morning and then kind fly back around like dinner time on a Thursday. Sometimes obviously I'll come down for events, et cetera, but then spend some time in the US maybe like once a quarter with our US business. But they're a remote workforce.
So we have some central hubs but everyone's kind of spread out across the state so it's not always easy to get everyone to one location as you can imagine.
Jeremiah Rizzo (01:26.529)
Yeah, yeah, no, 100%. Cool, all right, we, I'm give it like one more minute for people to trickle in, trickle in live. All right, if you're new here, so we're using Riverside. In the past, we've used Zoom, which lets me see how many people are viewing live. This doesn't let me see how many people are viewing live. So if you're new here, I don't think I'll actually get to see you. You can't come on camera or anything, because of Riverside's limitations.
We are streaming on LinkedIn and YouTube. And so we're gonna take listener questions at the end. If this is your first time, you can drop them in the chat at any time. And our wonderful producer, content leader at Data Box, Maria, will dump them in the interview doc so Dougie and I can cover them at the end. Mostly Dougie, and I may chime in if I have anything valuable to add. So we're looking forward to hearing your questions. You can drop them in the chat at any time during this interview.
Dougie Loan (02:19.302)
I hope.
Jeremiah Rizzo (02:20.576)
Cool cool.
Jeremiah Rizzo (02:24.988)
Okay. All right, let's go ahead. Let me just check. And for anyone also who's just tuning in now, Dougie is recording this live episode at an airport because he's a legend and got travel plans that came up but didn't wanna move the interview. That's how committed he was to it. So we're super grateful for that.
Dougie Loan (02:47.684)
So, thank you, thank you. Yeah, you were good enough to have me on, you didn't want to shift things around. So it's good to be here. I'm excited for this one.
Jeremiah Rizzo (02:56.051)
Love it. Okay. let's go ahead and get started, Dougie. So, again, for everyone tuning in today, we're going to be talking about how to create extremely accurate sales plans. this is something a lot of you are likely interested in and Dougie is well qualified to talk about this. He's chief revenue officer at Source Whale, the business development and sourcing platform for recruiters. and led as CRO at, am I pronouncing this? I know I've read the company name a million times, but Odro.
Dougie Loan (03:24.952)
Yeah, of course, audio, audio, yeah. That's good.
Jeremiah Rizzo (03:26.707)
Okay, prior to this, so extremely talented and he's going to be talking about the other thing I love about this angle is he's going to be sharing. It's not, it's a helpful formula to create an accurate sales plan, but the formula is also simple. So let's start here sort of at the beginning of the interview, we're going to talk a little bit about this formula that you use simple, but powerful formula to craft accurate sales plans. And then in the latter half of the interview, we'll sort of talk about there's some additional things you all do.
to analyze top customers characteristics so that you get more refined targeting of your ideal customer, which leads to more profitable acquisition of customers moving forward. So we'll tackle that at the end, but let's start with this accurate sales plan formula. So can you explain, you mentioned when we booked that there's like three metrics you use, opportunity volume, close rate, and average deal value. How do you think about crafting those to come together for that?
Dougie Loan (04:09.628)
Yeah, course.
Dougie Loan (04:26.673)
Yeah, it's a really interesting one. So if I take it back and explain how I ended up landing on that formula in the first place is, as CRO, I was finding oftentimes that at board level, we were deciding on sales plans for the coming year. And a lot of that was being based on what the business was looking at in terms of annualized growth rate. So what was our ambitions in terms of annualized growth rate? Where's our ERR at now? What do we want to achieve by December the following year?
and what are our limitations in terms of, know, gross retention, et cetera, that we want to achieve in the metrics around that. And what I often found was a lot of those plans were really headcount driven. So, you know, okay, so how many more account executives do we need? How many more SDRs do we need? How many more customer success managers, et cetera, do we need to be able to go and hit this plan? And then over time, I quickly started to realize, and I think more people are looking at this now, is that just simply adding more people to the plan doesn't necessarily mean that it just goes up and to the right.
So really wanted to start understanding what were the key levers and drivers, particularly within the motion that we had created both at Odro at the time and now within Sourcewell, that were actually having an impact on the work that we do. And what we settled on and what we realized was that actually the opportunity volume, rather than the number of people that we have in the organization or within a certain team, was the number one key driver to the work and to the financial results that we were generating at the end.
I can go down a rabbit hole on this if you like, because I think there's some nuance to that. Like it's easy to see opportunity volume. Are you cool for me to maybe take us there?
Jeremiah Rizzo (05:55.327)
Yeah.
I was just going to say, yeah, can you break that down for us a little bit?
Dougie Loan (06:01.555)
Absolutely. I think opportunity volume for us, it used to be very much early doors, was a meeting booked in the diary with one of our account executives. So we say, hey, whether that comes through an outbound motion or coming from an inbound motion, do we have the opportunity booked into the calendar? And again, what we quickly realized was over time, that only tells one part of the story because an opportunity booked in the calendar isn't necessarily qualified yet.
an opportunity booked in the calendar doesn't necessarily mean that that person's going to show up either. So again, if we're building a model based on having a certain number of opportunities, converting those opportunities at a certain percentage, and maintaining an average deal value of X, that formula and that equation completely breaks down if the number we think we've got at the top is really actually only 60 or 70 % lower in reality.
Jeremiah Rizzo (06:32.842)
Right, yeah, yeah.
Dougie Loan (06:54.673)
We changed that terminology from opportunity booked to what we now call qualified held meetings. So of the opportunities that are booked in the calendar, what percentage of them show up and then what percentage of them meet our qualification criteria. And the qualification criteria is something that's super objective, it's not subjective because again, you then have this challenge between the individual on the call and the person who's been responsible for creating that in the first place. So the criteria that we typically look at is does the person I'm speaking with
use a CRM system that we integrate with? Do they have more than three employees in their organization? Again, our three potential users, we talk about staffing and recruiting there. And as a person that we're speaking to in a position, you know, and either an influencer within the organization or are they a decision maker within the organization? And if they meet that three criteria and they've shown up, then they're qualified and they become a qualified help meeting.
There are obviously subsequent parts of that that you can do around needs and pains and these types of things but that very initial part, that's a key part to building the formula.
Jeremiah Rizzo (07:59.883)
So then with the qualified held meeting, when you look to refine that, I'm curious how closely, like obviously I wanna keep going around maybe an example of how the formula comes into play for you now with annual targeting, but the qualified part, how sort of, I would imagine you would have optionality to make that like as sort of a stringent or as like general as you wanted. How much does it align with like your targeting around an ICP? So like, we're gonna talk about that a little bit later, but like I would imagine your ICP targeting is like,
Dougie Loan (08:10.812)
course.
Jeremiah Rizzo (08:29.023)
maybe has more firmographics or quantitative like filters applied. Is this a bit broader than that and softer than that or do they align quite closely?
Dougie Loan (08:38.141)
Yeah, it's a good question. They align really, really closely, to be honest. again, there is quite a lot of detail that we go into from an ICP perspective, particularly when we start to look at things like Cactail TV and segments that have the most success for us. But transparently, we were able to identify from looking at the customers that we retained versus the customers that we lost that there was a quite a very strong correlation between ones that had a CRM that we integrated with and used an integrated solution that we offered versus those that used it standalone.
So that became a really key part. mean, the data was overwhelming. So it just simply became such a key part. Second part was around the size of the organization. Typically, we know that a business who has three or more users on the platform, because the nature of the platform allows you to share learnings within it. Typically, having three people allowed them to amplify their learnings much, much quicker. And as a result of that, get much quicker returns and be much more likely to have ongoing success. And then obviously, we need them to be a staffing recruiting business, particularly on our website.
we seem to still pick up organisations who hear about our tool and think, hey, this would be really cool for this use case that I've got. it's like, and that's great, and we appreciate that. the reality is we shouldn't be spending sales and marketing dollars to acquire people who are not a staff in a recruiting business and meeting those criteria.
Jeremiah Rizzo (09:54.561)
Okay, so basically this metric, the qualified held meetings replace the sales opportunity or the opportunity volume. Can you like give us a quick breakdown of like how exactly are you calculating this formula? So like this formula with other metrics, how is it playing into your sales formula?
Dougie Loan (10:00.551)
Yes.
Dougie Loan (10:11.123)
Absolutely. Let's just use easy numbers to look at. So we have 100 qualified held meetings. We know that our average close rate, which we can talk about just now over, say, a 30 -day period, is 30%. So we can then look at that and say, hey, that's great. If we have 100 opportunities and we close 30 % of those, we then have 30 new close deals that are coming into the business. The final part of that is then if our sales plan is $300 ,000, then
Jeremiah Rizzo (10:14.185)
Okay.
Dougie Loan (10:39.763)
we need to maintain an average deal value for each of those deals around $10 ,000. Now, that means that some of those deals will be $15 ,000, some of those deals will be $5 ,000, some may be 20, and so on and so forth. But that becomes the kind of main metrics. And we use them and we take them from what we look at at board level and we bleed them right down through our go -to -market motion, right down into our individual contributors. So our account executives, for example, in our organization, don't just receive a revenue leaderboard on a weekly basis, they also receive a close rate leaderboard on a weekly basis as well.
So they're able to see like, hey, this is great that I'm closing this revenue, but in terms of where I am as a baseline as part of the model, I'm above or below that line. And we have a large focus on our coaching within the organization to make sure that the account executives are continuing to improve on a day -to -day and a week -to -week basis. Because we know that if we're taking these qualified held meetings, which are extremely valuable, and giving them to reps within the organization that are not closing at that, let's just say the number's 30 % rate, we're breaking the model, right? We're not going to get
Jeremiah Rizzo (11:38.688)
Mm
Dougie Loan (11:39.485)
we're not going to get what we need at the end of it, particularly if their average deal value is also lower as well. So what do we do? Well, we can either improve that individual, or we can take those qualified held meetings and give them to the individuals who are closing at the right rate and who do have the right average deal value as part of it.
Jeremiah Rizzo (11:56.417)
Okay, makes a lot of sense. Let's go back to annual planning. So when we started, you said, you know, the old way of planning was sort of how much revenue do we wanna grow this year? Like we're here right now, by December or January next year, we wanna be here. And then you would sort of take steps to try, I'm guessing like reverse or like reverse waterfall, whatever to say like, okay, what do we have to do to get there? How does this change your annual planning once you introduce this model?
Do you still start with like an overall revenue goal or instead do you leverage this to maybe more accurately forecast what you think is possible?
Dougie Loan (12:28.883)
Yes, it's the latter. So for example, coming into 2024, what we did was we looked at the results. We took an average for, and we break it down by region as well. So we have the European region and the US region. So we said, okay, across Europe, typically how many qualified held meetings are we generating on a monthly basis? And then breaking that down a little bit further by inbound, outbound, just at a very basic level. Then we're looking at what's the average close rate over that period? What is the...
the average deal value as well and we did that obviously in both regions and then what we're to do is then fix that into what we would call the initial kind of lever formula so we say okay this is a formula and this is what we're looking at now based upon these numbers we can project that we're going to generate you know x amount of revenue let's say a million dollars a month you know each month going forward if we want to change that and we want to get it to 1 .5 or we want to get it to 2 the question then becomes which lever
are we going to focus on within that model? Are we going to spend our budget on increasing qualified health meetings? Are we going to spend our budget on improving the close rate that we have? are we going to spend our budget on improving the average deal value? And again, this isn't just necessarily a sales budget. This is our whole business budget. So we're starting to look at, for example, if you want to increase our average deal value, should we be spending money on R &D to allow us to increase the functionality or give us additional product lines that we can sell to our customers at point of sale?
And obviously there's a number of other things around that as well that we could go into. And then at that point we're looking to pick what levers that we think we can influence. And we think we can influence one lever, two levers, three levers, and then we create a of a three -stage model at the end of it. So if we're able to influence qualified held meetings and improve it by, you know, let's say 20%, because that's what we were able to increase it from between 2022 and 2023. If we did the same again from 2023 to 2024, this is what the outcome would be.
If we were to do that plus improve our close rate on the same difference that we made from 22 to 23, then this would be the outcome. And then if we were to do both of those plus the average deal value, then this would be the outcome. And at that point, there's then a discussion around which do we think is a likely model and where do we actually have a proper plan to affect and impact those metrics because it's super easy to look at the data on a spreadsheet and say, yeah, sure, just got to qualified hell meetings up by 40%. Let's just do that.
Jeremiah Rizzo (14:52.0)
Right, yeah.
Dougie Loan (14:54.759)
Where's the plan? Where's the plan to actually come and do that? like, yeah, let's just spend a little bit more money and do it, where are we going to spend that money?
Jeremiah Rizzo (15:02.462)
Now you're sitting in the revenue seat, right? So you're not like in the sales marketing, like sort of, you know, false divide, like you're gathering the team around revenue. So I would imagine qualified held meetings, is that something that like marketing is closely looking at as well, like for the inbound motion?
Dougie Loan (15:17.139)
Yeah, completely. So our VP of Marketing, Madison, she's great. She owns that element of it from an inbound perspective. We do have SDR leaders who own the outbound portion of that number as well. One thing that we are doing at the minute is we're more closely aligning them from a financial incentive perspective. Whereas right now they have their individual numbers that they must achieve, we're actually starting to, we have done over the last few months, started to what we would call double comp.
a certain opportunity. if marketing are able to secure leads from things like an event and they're passed to an SDR team who then follow up and book that, the credit goes to both of them. Whereas historically that hasn't been the case and we've seen, I wouldn't say friction, but less alignment probably than what we would have wanted.
Jeremiah Rizzo (16:01.109)
Yeah, yeah, okay. And then when it comes down to figuring out, creating the actual strategy to get there between these three metrics, qualified held meetings, average deal value and close rate, average deal value then would come into things. So the qualified held meetings would be things like, what is your BDR team? What does your marketing team think that they're able to get? So I would imagine they're sitting in on this meeting and then the average deal value, is that more like?
sales enablement, what products, like what features or products we can add that people have been asking for that we think we could upsell or raise our pricing on.
Dougie Loan (16:32.445)
Yeah, absolutely. So product is big part of it. The second element of it is the segment of the market that we're targeting as well. So naturally, the enterprise, for example, is going to carry larger average deal values than what we would see in the kind of SMB side of the market. There's other reasons and motivations why we might target that enterprise segment as well based on Cactail TV. We know that they have a...
Jeremiah Rizzo (16:40.393)
Okay.
Dougie Loan (16:56.327)
stronger retention rate for example, they're more likely to buy additional products from us, buy additional seats etc as well. So there's more motivation not just around the initial sales planning but around the whole go -to -market motion as well. So yeah, those would typically be the two major things that we'd focus on. But we also do start to look at our commercial model. So product, what segment are we targeting, and our pricing structure. Is our pricing structure and commercial model supportive of encouraging people to take...
more licenses at point of sale for example, or are we following a land and expand strategy where actually this year we're saying, this is not true, but this year we might be saying hey, we're actually projecting and predicting that our average deal value at point of sale is going go down by 30 % because we're going to follow more of a land and expand strategy. But if we look at our upsell line and not our new business line on these projections, actually our upsell line is going to increase by 40 -50 % as a result. So there's a lot of movement. I think these three pieces of the formula very much focus on the sales aspect of it.
But when we're building out that budget, we're also taking into account retention, how much revenue are we going to retain and also how much revenue are we able to achieve from our existing customer base as well.
Jeremiah Rizzo (18:04.192)
Okay, cool. And after you set the annual goal and you create this strategy to get there, these three metrics, how often are you looking at them? You said something earlier that made me think maybe you're looking at them like weekly, monthly. You said something about like a scorecard or a report card getting sent to the team that you're looking at and you're making adjustments as you go. So what is the monitoring portion of this look like for you?
Dougie Loan (18:26.899)
Yeah, from a budget perspective, we review it on a quarterly basis. So we just check, our assumptions still true? You know, for what we've achieved this quarter and our averages and what we project that we'll achieve in following quarters. But from like an operational perspective, we look at it on a weekly basis. So our individual reps will get a notification around their close rates. And based upon their deals that they've closed in the last 30 days. So all the deals that you've...
reached an outcome within the last 30 days, what percentage of them did you win versus which percentage did you lose. And then as a VP group, so we have four VPs within our go -to -market motions, two sales, one customer success, one marketing. We then have a weekly metrics dashboard, which we review. And again, that looks at all of our key metrics. These are just three of around 20 over a rolling kind of 30 -day period. So again, that's something that we're just, you know.
keeping a pulse on every Monday morning before we go into the week and saying like hey, is this trending in the right direction is the key part. It's the trend that we're looking for on the weekly basis versus any sort of knee jerk reaction and change.
Jeremiah Rizzo (19:34.441)
Okay, awesome. All right, let's get into, so I feel like we've covered most of these questions on crafting the accurate sales plan with this formula. You've mentioned a couple times here, CAC to LTV, and one of the things I wanna talk to you about before we run out of time here is what you're doing to drive a better CAC to LTV ratio. You've talked about analyzing top customer characteristics to refine your targeting so that you're targeting more profitable customers.
let's start here for those who aren't familiar. Can you like give the short answer of like what CAC to LTV ratio is, why it's so important and what is your goal for it? Like, is it one to three, one to four? How do you all think about that?
Dougie Loan (20:18.055)
Yeah, sure. So CAG is customer acquisition costs. So all of the dollars that we spend on sales and marketing, And how much we get in return, what's the lifetime value of the customers that we're bringing on as a result of that. So for example, you mentioned what's the ratio and what do we aim for. So one to three, essentially, for every dollar that we spend on sales and marketing, we get three in return. And I think that is the industry standard that people work towards, isn't it? One to three is pretty golden.
Jeremiah Rizzo (20:42.847)
Yeah.
Dougie Loan (20:46.771)
1 to 4 is even better. If it's 1 to 5, you should probably be spending a little bit more on your sales and marketing costs and anything below that's maybe problematic. Goal -wise, it's something that we focus on. To be honest though, we are focused on experimentation within our sales motion. We're not one of those organizations that's fully optimizing every opportunity for efficiency right now. We are aware of the fact that we're continuing to penetrate new markets. We appreciate that it's going to drop.
really we're keeping an eye on that to make sure that we're not going wild, we wouldn't, particularly from an acquisition cost perspective, prevent ourselves from trying something new just in case that ratio got worse. Does that make sense? Like, we're keen to get the balance.
Jeremiah Rizzo (21:28.095)
Right, you would give it time to iron out and optimize and see what maybe like, you're not gonna, at first sign that it's a one to two or a one to one, you're not gonna cut the program off. You're gonna give it time and test new things.
Dougie Loan (21:38.033)
Yeah, totally. And I think as well, I'm sure you'll speak to people who are much better versed than I am in market attribution. I think there's also that challenge as well, isn't it? It's like attributing. Because when we look at Cattail TV, some of the times we're trying to break it down by segment. So we're saying, OK, if we're doing these particular campaigns in these particular areas, how effective and how efficient is that in comparison to the overall and the average and then other segments as well. But that can be problematic because market attribution is never.
It's never simple, or we've not necessarily cracked it, I would say, in our organisation yet.
Jeremiah Rizzo (22:09.375)
Yeah, yeah, no. You and every other company out there. Okay, great. So how are you using churn renewal upsell metrics to improve CAC to LTV? So at a high level, I know you gave like a quick overview of this, but how did you get to the ICP that you did or like choose the, you were gonna refine targeting with and kind of thinking about listeners who are tuning in and they're like, all right, we just sort of take everyone who comes to the website. Like how do we begin thinking about
who might be our most profitable segment and the ones that we really should be going hard at.
Dougie Loan (22:41.555)
sure we've got a great finance director, a guy called Mikey and he's awesome at this kind of stuff. essentially, he said you've got to start somewhere right. So we said let's look at all of the customers that have churned within the last 12 months and let's just start listing out characteristics that they might have in common. Let's start profiling them essentially. So how they came to us, what was the sales process like, what was the onboarding process like and then
So that's kind of first layer, like what did we do in terms of what interactions did we have with them? Secondly, or underneath that is like profiling them as an organization. So size of company, sector, who they, because we deal with staff and firms, what type of recruitment they do, what types of markets that they work in. So who's our customer's customer? Because it has an impact obviously on the way much they engage with our platform as well. And we ended up with a crazy list.
And then Mikey went and his magic. And essentially what he did was he profiled the customers across all of that and was able to determine. So we started with the churn customers and we looked for trends. And then we went over and we compared that to customers who had signed with us and had passed that first renewal event and ones who had been with us for a long time. And that basically allowed us to identify what some of those commonalities were. And once we identified them, it was like, okay, those that are staying with us for a long time.
how much we normally spend and based on a process to acquire them, is that effective and if it is, let's go after it. Because one thing that we did identify was that we do have some customers at the very, very bottom end of the market who do tend to stay with us past at least one renewal event. But the amount of money that we were spending to sell to that customer and service that customer was extremely, extremely high, which meant that actually they weren't profitable. Now we won't refuse to sell to them, but we do have some certain stipulations around how they pay us to make sure that they are
Jeremiah Rizzo (24:24.672)
Hmm.
Dougie Loan (24:32.531)
covering costs when they come on board.
Jeremiah Rizzo (24:36.328)
It makes a ton of sense, okay. And then what advice would you give to marketing and sales leaders that want to do the same? Like, is there anything you learned in that process that you feel like you would advise companies going forward the first time that feel like they do need to get a better handle on who are the more profitable customers to go after?
Dougie Loan (24:54.758)
Yeah, I think just starting is honestly half the battle. We kind of sat a little bit in a little bit of paralysis with it. Like, it seems like such a big project. It seems like a lot of work and who's going do it and who's going to own it and all that kind of stuff. So we of ended up in this big planning phase when the reality was, eventually Mike, our FD, was like, I'm passionate. I don't mind. I'll get stuck into this and let's see where we end up.
So yeah, think getting started is probably the number one tip. I think the second one is trying to list out all those characteristics as many as you possibly can to begin with. We found some really unique trends in terms of, like I said, going back to our sales process, in terms of how many demos they had. So for example, we figured out that when we were bringing someone on board, if the decision maker had seen the product, but also the potential users of the product had seen it during the sales process versus just seeing it for the first time as part of the initial training.
things like adoption was higher and as a result of adoption being higher we saw stronger retention rates as well. So there's little nuance things in there that you might end up attaching yourself to which could help.
Jeremiah Rizzo (25:57.888)
Okay, awesome. I do wanna leave before we're gonna try and wrap in a couple minutes here, take any questions that people have. And I do wanna talk about, you mentioned using adoption scoring to drive CS activity. Can you talk a little bit more about what that looks like for you and how you're doing that?
Dougie Loan (26:14.931)
Yeah, sure. I'll avoid the big massive backstory on how we got to it. Essentially, we look at what percentage of our customers are using the product daily over a 30 -day period. Sorry, what percentage of the users within a customer are using the product daily over a 30 -day period. And we typically target that at least 50 % is like our green. And that, again, was based on those customers that are renewing, what was their average score.
So that's a big focus. So we focus on adoption as the first pillar. So can we get them over half the people in the business using it daily? And the second part is outcomes. Are they then generating outcomes from their use of the product? Are they booking more new business meetings with their clients? Are they saving time, et cetera? And then the third one is experience. look at things like CSAT. So are they using the product? Are they getting results when they use the product? And do they have positive things to say about the experience when they use a product or engage with their team? And those three pillars are.
are a massive indicator of success in renewal and upsell as well.
Jeremiah Rizzo (27:13.214)
And how does that impact the actual like CS teams work? Are they like playing a part in this trial? They have certain targets that they're trying to get them to do, or is this just something that like they're tracking along with this?
Dougie Loan (27:23.645)
No, no, we pay bonus to our customer success managers based upon the adoption score of their portfolio. So we actually focus on those kind of earlier indicators of success versus the financial metrics at the end. So again, that's the part that they have most influence over, is the engagement of the user base, their understanding and why they would want to use it. So yeah, and product plays a part in that as well. When we're developing a new product, we always say to ourselves, or a new part of the product, we'll say like,
Jeremiah Rizzo (27:28.083)
Okay?
Dougie Loan (27:49.98)
you know, the intention of this to improve the adoption of the existing customer base? Is it to improve the outcomes that they get? Or is it to improve the experience? And we can try and bucket it like that as well. And that plays quite a big part for us.
Jeremiah Rizzo (27:59.954)
Awesome, okay. All right, I know you gotta run here in a little bit. Thank you for being gracious, doing the interview from the airport. If anyone's got questions, feel free to dump them in the chat. If not, we'll end the interview a little bit early. I have a question for you at a high level, which is, where do you think most companies go wrong? Or what have you learned from past mistakes when it comes to setting more accurate sales?
Dougie Loan (28:03.89)
Yeah, I suck at it.
Jeremiah Rizzo (28:26.449)
sales plans and like sales forecasting, where do companies like make mistakes with this? Like I know annual planning always just feels like this big thing. I think I referenced this on the, on the last episode with Adam Goyette, but like, I, and I refer the team is sick of hearing me talk about it, but, I've referenced this like adage that Jason Fried, the founder of base camp gives, which is like, you set these targets and if you blow past them, you're like, we didn't aim high enough. You know, we, we weren't as aggressive as we should have been.
Dougie Loan (28:41.489)
Yeah
Jeremiah Rizzo (28:54.494)
And then if you miss the target, even though like, you you gave it your best effort, everyone's like, it feels kind of deflated and whatever. So, I love the simplicity of this. I'm curious, what advice would you have for companies that are starting this for the first time and really trying to create a sales plan that they think can hit their goals?
Dougie Loan (29:11.891)
Totally. I think one, use the formula. Don't believe that headcount equals growth. It's the biggest mistake that I see all the time and it's common. Founders of an organisation, they'll have one or two salespeople that are doing well and then they'll just say, well, if we just keep doing that and we have 100 salespeople, then life's great, right? We're golden, that's how we'll the sales plan. But most importantly, that part around being deflated on either outcome.
You need it to be realistic. You need to be able to motivate every individual within your go -to -market organization. If your second goals are unattainable, then you're just going to have deflated people that leave. So many organizations are like, our quota attainment is only 50%. We save money on commission and all that. It's a terrible culture to have. I want 100 % quota attainment. I want to be paying out 100 % of our reps 100 % of the time, because it means that the sales plan that we've put in place is motivating them to do what they do. And we have things like Overage, et cetera, to encourage them to go and outperform.
Yeah, I would say, you know, don't focus on headcount. Make sure that it's realistic. And if you've agreed the sales plan at the start of the year and you're able to hit it, then fantastic. Like you should celebrate that. But we do recalibrate sometimes on a quarterly basis. Like when there was a bit of a, you know, a macro shock, like we did have to look at it and say, we based this on assumptions that, you know, and the world was different six, 12 months ago. Let's sometimes readjust. So we are still flexible, I would say, with it. I as we go through it.
Jeremiah Rizzo (30:31.125)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So one listener asked, can you reiterate how you measure meetings booked? And I'll expand that to say, are there any other metrics that you're looking at and tracking closely or really monitoring around booking meetings or is it just the qualified held meeting? So can you define qualified held meeting again? And then are there any other metrics that you look at when it comes to booking calls?
Dougie Loan (30:52.71)
Yeah, of course. So we've got one above it, which we call outreach to demo ratio. of the people that we're reaching out to, what percentage of them are booking a demo with us? Because that's looking at the effectiveness of our outbound motion, for example. Then we have demo booked. And then from there, what percentage of them show up? And then of those that show up, what percentage of them are qualified? And the qualification criteria that we look at is, they a staff member in a recruiting business? Do they have at least three potential users in the organization? Are they using a CRM that we integrate with?
and are they a potential influencer or decision maker within the organization as well? I don't know if that answers the question or not.
Jeremiah Rizzo (31:28.799)
I think so. that did not answer the question, go ahead and drop in chat here, follow up and we'll keep asking. Okay. Is there any other questions anyone has?
Dougie Loan (31:35.1)
Perfect.
Jeremiah Rizzo (31:41.512)
Is there a tool the BDRs use specifically?
Dougie Loan (31:45.2)
Yeah, so we use our own platform. use Sourcewheel. So Sourcewheel is an outbound business development and headhunting platform. Although it is built for the recruiting industry, we do use it for our own outbound methods. And we've also just found it as a really good educational tool. A lot of our SDRs and BDRs go on to account executives or customer success managers or account managers within our go -to -market motion. So they're pretty well versed on the tool by the time they get there.
Jeremiah Rizzo (32:13.418)
Love it, okay. Good questions, any other questions?
Jeremiah Rizzo (32:21.825)
Okay, I don't see any other questions. think we covered it all. Dougie, thank you again for coming on. Thank you, yeah, thank you for being willing to join last minute like this. If you, where can people find you if they sort of want to follow along? I know you're really active on LinkedIn. If they want to learn from you or follow up with any questions.
Dougie Loan (32:26.93)
Thank you for having me.
Dougie Loan (32:40.336)
Yeah, absolutely. LinkedIn, drop me a note, drop me a connection request on LinkedIn, more than happy to chat there. And yeah, always willing to chat metrics with anyone that wants to.
Jeremiah Rizzo (32:49.544)
Awesome. Thank you so much, Dougie.
Dougie Loan (32:51.73)
Appreciate it. Thanks, Jermae.