Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The world's best conversations about B2B selling happen here. This exciting new podcast from Andy Paul, the creator and host of the Sales Enablement Podcast (with 1200+ episodes and millions of downloads) is focused on the mission of helping increase your win rates by winning a bigger percentage of the deals in your pipeline. In this unique round table format, Andy and his panel of guest experts share the critical sales insights, sales perspectives and selling skills that you can use to elevate your sales effectiveness and create the buying experiences that influence decision-makers to buy from you. Host Andy Paul is the expert on modern B2B selling and author of three best-selling, award-winning sales books, including his latest Sell Without Selling Out. Visit andypaul.com to subscribe to his newsletter for even more strategies and tips to accelerate your win rate!
Welcome to another episode of the win rate podcast. Gosh, another stellar all star cast of guests here to join me. Gave everybody just a few seconds to introduce himself. We'll start with you, Adam. I am Adam Robinson, founder and CEO of retention. com. Perfect. Short and sweet. I like that.
Craig.
You mean I can't do one of my 10 minute long intros of myself? I could,
we'll edit it out later, but go ahead. Yeah, exactly.
So I'm Craig Rosenberg and right now I am the chief platform officer at scale venture partners, which is the essentially the advisory group for the portfolio on all things go to market and was previously the founder of, topo and we were acquired by Gartner. So I am a person who spent two plus years as a Gartner analyst. If anybody ever wants to know about that as well in the sales part, you brought up, how was it? It was actually it was great. Honestly, like I think we, because of the power they have on technology companies, some people view it as the death star when in actuality, they're really good people and really good employers.
And like, so it was. Everyone, I think, wants me to say, not that you were, Andy, but everyone always wants
me to
say, everyone wants me to say something. They assume there's going to be a negative. Response from, you know, from me on that. And actually it's the opposite. It was they were good people.
And if you just want to study something your whole life it's amazing. It's a paid educational, you know, it's like a paid university thing, right? It's like it. And so it was cool, man. I just found something new that I wanted to do. That's all.
I've had a lot of good Gartner or ex Gartner people on the show.
And Brent Adamson obviously has been on many times. So yeah he's always a guest to have on as a guest. So,
Robert. Andy, thanks. I am a revenue and sales consultant. The bulk of my work today is as a go to market advisor for scale venture partners, working with companies. Craig over there. In my background is I've spent 25 years working in sales leadership, sales effectiveness and sales consulting.
Last couple of years I've gone back and forth between being an operator at you know, rocket ship growth companies like LinkedIn and compass to working as a consultant advisor, including being director of consulting at Topo, working with Craig and now doing a lot of work. With the scale portfolio companies as a go to market advisor for many things sales and marketing related and also working with a number of individual clients.
Gosh, everybody's working with scale VP. I have to put my application in. All right. So, Adam, I'll start with you. Cause yeah, what topic of this conversation we're talking about, you know, reinventing sales and aspects of sales and selling, and you'd posted something about, you know, changes are going to be coming to go to market.
And I want to sort of dig into that and it, you had sort of this, I meant to share intent as provocative statement up front, which was predictable revenue is dead. I was curious, does anybody disagree with that
On this call, Craig? Well, it depends. If I didn't know, I will say that I am aware of you, Adam, because of your LinkedIn work and, but I did not catch this one, which I should have beforehand, just so I can understand when we're talking about, are we saying predictable revenue as in the book that created a model?
Unpredictable. Or do you mean in general, we will not be predictable in our revenue going forward.
I kind of laid on words. Basically it was like the model's broken. And then I think the next thing I said in this particular post was like. Over the last four years, when was anyone's revenue predictable in software?
You know, it was way wrong in 2023 to the downside way wrong in 2022, the upside in 2021, probably in 2020, no one had any idea. So, you know, this kind of argument that I'm making. Which is, has been my experience in the post to get a ton of engagement. So I imagine that there are other people's experience also is I've just, and look, I think a lot of background, every situation's different.
My, my core business sells a 20 K ACV sales led product. That's like 60 or 70 percent inbound. And. You know, I created a spreadsheet and based upon the effectiveness of one BDR tried to scale up a team last year and it just did not work at all. And, you know, a lot of stuff happened last year. It was a very weird year.
There was some weird macro stuff that happened in April. I think that slowed down a lot of people us included.
My feeling is, I look at my inbox, I look at my LinkedIn, I just think it's hard to systematically scale out an army of BDRs. And the fundamental issue is, Whereas demand could be created by these BDRs, let's say 5, 7, 10 years ago through, you know, a multi touch strategy to like catch people's interest that's happening less.
So now just because the channels are ruined and demand is being created elsewhere. Like this forum that we are in now live events, you know, in my case, founder brand is certainly creating a ton of demand for this thing that I'm doing and a mistake that people like me made a lot that was actually working in prior years was.
You did this math that you could just sort of grow your sales team and it would grow your revenue. And it literally just didn't happen. And actually we chopped the team completely and it sped us up for a lot of reasons. It just improved the culture and the go to market organization so much. Everything got faster and it just.
It is, you know, we went from like 20 to five salespeople and literally our growth accelerated. It's the weirdest thing, you know? But yeah, that, that was kind of, that is the essence of the post that I continue to make, right? Which I'm going to
dig into a little bit here.
Yeah. Okay. I yeah, man. I. Now this was recent.
Cause I think I read a post, you know, I wrote a post from you like six months ago, that was like, so
there's a few different topics that I kind of write about in different ways over and over again to address these different audiences, I'm trying to cultivate for my next product, which is a person level identity product for B2B.
It's so super cool. You put it on your website. It identifies people on your website who don't fill out a form or anything. And then in real time pushes it to Slack and it's free. It's crazy. Most of the good thing I have on my phone. So I'm trying to cultivate these three different audiences. One are these salespeople who are really wound up by this topic.
Two are founders, which my building public stuff really resonates with. Yeah. Three are. You know, close, I write about closing the loop on ABM and demand base and six cents, and it's like a really high end marketer who that gets engagement with the best engagement that I get is when I just talk about my own personal experience with this.
Predictable revenue model, not working out for me in 2023, because I think that experience happened to so many people for a lot of different reasons last year. So you probably did see that post and then Andy's talking about a different version of it because, you know, it's kind of like different headline.
You know, here's one angle. Here's the other angle, you know, sum it all up or whatever. Yeah. So I'm curious
from perspective, you guys are advising VCs and your portfolio companies, VCs is sure predictable revenues model. Is it still a viable model that you're working with companies on?
Yeah. So I do have a response.
1 thing I will say 1st on Adam. So Adam was like my 1st indicator that if you write that the SDR model of previous is broken, you will get tons of activity. Otherwise, I wouldn't have known who Adam was a bunch of my friends are coming. I think it was cool because I think Brandon short, a buddy of mine wrote.
Hey, Adam, like, why do you care about this? And you're like. Well, I wrote about other stuff. The minute I wrote about this, I got everyone coming in. And why do I bring that up? Because, well, one is it is, you know, you talked about your LinkedIn activity and that has been fantastic, right? So we should talk about as like channels chain the mix of channels has changed and LinkedIn is absolutely crit, there's a founder playbook for using LinkedIn that's emerging that you're a a perfect example of, but.
So here's the thing. So the, it is true that the previous playbooks for driving demand, okay, are broken. The market did change. Okay. And so if you think about what we would roll out before a founder would, you know, see both predictable revenue, and there was the. Sort of quote, unquote volume mql movement.
Right, which was driven by content syndication and, you know, lead nurturing Google AdWords in these things. All of these things are not delivering what they used to. So, you know, what we have is a crisis and pipeline that comes from the fact that if someone comes in and says, oh, well, this is no. You know, no problem.
Here's my playbook. We will cut, you know, we will be able to come in and drive demand. They will fail, right? You have to change your approach and we can talk about what that is. But I'm just talking about generally what Adam's talking about, which is. The numbers are significantly worse. Like if you are trying to get into the enterprise, you will need an outbound motion.
It won't deliver like it did for the, you know, definitely won't deliver 2021 numbers. It definitely won't deliver 2018 numbers. It won't deliver 2013. So that's one of the issues is that everyone models their pipeline for their predictable revenue. What Adam said is true. What we used to do is we'd say, okay, marketing, you can deliver 40 percent of marketing led via, you know, you know, you roll out HubSpot Marketo and you're doing your thing you'll get to 40.
We will fill the rest with 20 something kids who will roll out and they will start to, you know, outbound into the market and we will fill. Our pipeline and now those numbers are diminished. And so like you're, you've got this big gap and now I will say this without knowing the full answer. We will figure it out again.
I think one of the things Adam talked to is really a marketing thing, in my opinion, which is there's a guy named Mike Niederberger and Portland, who talks about demand creation and demand generation. And. Like, LinkedIn and podcasts and these new differentiated content types are becoming key to creating a halo here.
And that's sort of 1 piece of it.
Robert keeps coming in and out. It's pretty, you know, yeah. He's reacting. He does like, or doesn't like what you're saying. One of the two, I can't go off on Craig. It's such an idiot. Why did I have him come?
I'm having technical difficulties.
Oh, okay. Well, yeah, not me.
Yeah, no problem. But like, you know, you know, like, I just talked to my Matt Amundsen, at at census. And he's like, I, we don't do content leads anymore. Everything is request a demo and I'm creating this halo of content to bring everyone to the site. And I've got one call to action is changed, maven, all these things, you get people in, they just don't do that anymore.
These are like the examples of the things that we're morphing into. Now. A demo request, for example, from a marketing perspective, will convert higher, so you will be able to do less numbers, right? Versus a thousand MQLs from a webinar that convert at a small amount. So, like, that's an example of changes to the demand playbook that we're all adjusting to and having a hard time in the meantime.
So I just gave you along with it with a couple examples. So, in my opinion, the entire demand pipeline creation playbook is. In flux and changing I do agree that the just standard rollout of the quote, unquote, predictable revenue outbound SDR model will not get you to where you need to go. It doesn't it's just not there anymore.
And that, but that also includes marketing, like, the sort of volume content based marketing is not working either. And so, like, that is the problem. So I would agree that is tough. Now, will we be able to create revenue that is predictable? Again, the answer is a is unfor, it's a prediction.
And the answer is yes, but the but in the meantime, we, in the meantime, we have to put everything back on the table and retest. Well, I'm not, I'm, yeah. I am in favor of SDR still, but in conjunction and in combination with marketing activity, I don't believe it works without significant air cover. And because it can't be them, they can't introduce you.
They can effectuate conversation and that means that. You know, like, 1 of the things on ABM that everyone didn't understand that the most simple concept wasn't happening, which was marketing was not working the same list as sales. So, like, just that combination alone is an example of things that will make you more effective.
So I, I do I, so I still believe in, I don't believe, especially with automation, you will need inbound. I just don't. I believe that is going by the way of automation. So anyway, I talked a lot. Sorry, you guys. I'm passionate about and I've read Adam's stuff on. I'm so glad that was the topic you were talking about because that was the big 1 I saw from this guy.
So I'm so excited. Sorry. So, yeah, hopefully, Robert, Adam,
tell us some of what you're doing.
Oh, Robert, go ahead.
So
yeah, I, I'd love to get a word in here. Yeah, get in. Now that you're back. Now that you're back, go ahead. Go. I keep waiting in between the long monologues to jump. I'm just gonna jump in.
I thought you used to that predictable revenue. Is not dead. The model's changing. That's what Craig's saying. And we got to do some experiment. I also say that predictable revenue better not be dead because otherwise we're going to have a lot of that seat time and seat for CMO for a CRO for VP of sales is can get even shorter and there's going to be more churn.
So we got to figure out a way To get back to a more predictable model where we can have two quarters in a row without changing too many of the inputs to really verify that we got the right product market fit, that we got the right price, that we got the right offering to solve a customer's problem.
I also think that some of the, you know, some of the posts about SDRs, you're dead, all those things are well. One of the biggest posts that I got a response to was assume all deals are dead. You know, the idea was assume all deals are dead until otherwise specified. And I think that's one, one thing that's changing, for instance, that will help us get towards more predictable revenue is start doing more to assume that all deals are dead until you find out otherwise, versus the old happy years approach of everything's coming in.
I'm working with a company right now that, you know, they're trying the old SDR model and they are pumping out, you know, averaging 150 touches, which may not be a lot per week and getting any way from a zero to 1 percent response rate. And they're mainly doing email, a little bit of LinkedIn. That model might've worked a couple of years ago.
It's not working now. Companies that. Are doing successful, we're doing things like working on how do we get our most impactful executives in front of customers? How do we execute on really high value offers? They're focusing on the right segments and having maniacal focus and so I'll stop there.
That's my take on predictable revenue.
Yeah, well, it seems like one of the artifacts in my experience and looking at all the data and talking to companies of predictable revenue over the years has always been that it's, was predictable and aggregate, but very unpredictable at the individual seller level.
So basically we were building this machine that could achieve revenue targets, but it was based on effectively really low effective selling, you know, low win rates. So poor selling fundamentally on the part of the individuals. And it seems like that. Especially we're seeing the weakness of that as we came into 2021 22 is, you know, people actually had to learn how to sell in this last, in this environment.
And it's been a real struggle for a lot of companies to be able to do that because they weren't set up for it because they're set as, yeah, we could be somewhat mediocre in how we actually sell as long as we kept healthy flow of opportunities through the funnel. Do you see that fundamentally changing going forward where there's more emphasis on actually winning the opportunities that you qualify into your pipeline?
Well, but I'm sorry. Go ahead. Robert.
I'll just jump in. I'd like to think there's going to be more emphasis on that. I'm. I'm not sure yet, you know, the tough economic headwinds have revealed a real lack of selling fundamentals. So I'm sure you can talk quite a bit about Andy as I look at some of these companies and the skills, the different sales teams you know, there's a lot of noise from what Craig and I call the military industrial enablement complex.
And I the companies that are really, I think nobody's changing that and, you know, focus more on win rates are the ones that are taken sort of the bill Belichick NFL approach. It's a little bit of put up the playbook and then it's practice, assess, coach and reinforce, and that's what they're doing.
Instead of. All these programs that are taking months to develop and lots of nice materials. The ones that are moving the needle is the VP of sales. I talked to the other day, Dave, and he's like, once a week, I have a meeting on Friday. We listen to a sales recording, we debrief it. And then we give them a mission.
I assess some of the recordings that week. And the next Friday we go and we review the videotape as it were. He said, I thought the team would really object to that. And they love it. I think that's the sort of initiative and effort that's going to start to get some mileage and make some progress on things like win rates.
Adam, what's our focus do you have on win rates and your selling efforts? So
I had a strange thing happen where our VP sales quit. And we were faced with the option of replacing the VP sales and keeping this large sales force. Or I wanted to do this thing where I wanted to borderline flood reps with leads, focus them almost entirely on super low in the funnel prospects.
So that almost all of their time was spent on people that were ready to buy. Andy, you might say there's not a lot of skill in that type of sale. Yeah. I would agree with you, but that's just what I wanted to do. That was my way of solving it. But it was this was the, it was an organizational decision.
You know, we're bootstrapped. Like we don't have anybody breathing down our neck about like what to do. And like, I just wanted the org to feel that way. You know, and unsurprisingly. You know, your close rates go through the roof and, you know, the sales cycle speeds up, but like the leads are, you know, the opportunities in the pipeline are substantially lower.
That was how I dealt with that.
Okay. Yeah. And by the way, Andy, I don't know I don't necessarily feel like the pipeline machine. Well, I do feel like, hold on, I'm going to say something really confusing. Then you can unwind me. So one is. People were buying software left and right, right? And like, particularly I'm in sass.
So like that was. If you got through enough demos, you could hit your number and mediocre reps were hitting their number. There was not a ton. There was a lot of lip service and a lot of ridiculous sales enablement creation, but not a lot of earnest like work to try to fix the reps to get them to convert better because you didn't need to.
That was a comp. That was a combination. Of interest rates being close to zero and like sass, you know, like if you take vertical sass, those guys were pulling people out of file cabinets and spreadsheets. That's like, there was a lot of opportunity there in general from a market demand perspective. The 2nd, 1 is, yeah, like you said, like, there, there was always throw that away and go get another 1.
But I do think it was actually more about. That you could sell SAS to us. You could sell 80 to 120 K deals to one person with one sign off in 60 days. And without much, without being really, you could do a demo. You could send a quote, right? And now that is gone, right? And that is that you do have to sell.
So you had this crazy thing that Robert always talks about, which is like, we have this, that everything's sort of crashing together at the same time. You're going to have less opportunities. The buyer is more hesitant requires more buy off and you have a complete lack of sales fundamentals because you didn't need them.
Like you didn't need to be that good at sales. Now there was always really good salespeople. Everyone gets all mad at me. I'm like, whoa, 30 percent of them were amazing and I will pay them a million dollars. I don't, I love them. They're my favorite. The issue was that we were killing it because the B's and the C pluses were hitting their number.
Now the B's and the C pluses are not right. It's a crap sheet. We have to get them better and we have to do in that. That is where like part of the win rate problem needs to be fixed. And that is, so that is, so I'm essentially agreeing you with, maybe I'm adding this extra element to it, which is We do like fixing win rates is fixing how we sell.
And like, if you take again, SAS, like, can you believe we were just demoing without discovery and we were winning deals? Yeah, it's easy. It's crazy. And we were able to close this six figure deal with the. A manager level or director minus level person who just went to his boss like hey, can I get this?
Yeah, it's cool All right, we're done. That's Like that now you got to do some you have to have some selling fundamentals in order to be successful here So I do think as we think about win rates now, I don't know if we heard robert, but he does have these Really good ideas for like, fast enablement versus, cause one of the other things on the enablement side, in my opinion, was it was fundamentally an academic exercise.
It was the creation of a lot of materials. There was a investment in a lot of automation and it really didn't do as much as just lots of practice and innovate, you know, and working working in practice, which is what Robert talks to break. Robert's a perfect microcosm, right? Like he was. Big programs, big playbooks.
Now he's like, no, let's stand this up and let's meet next week. And let's go listen to a call together and let's go do something about it. So anyway, we could talk more about that, but so I guess I just. Wanted to talk for a really long time on your podcast because I basically agreed with you, which you've done very successfully.
Oh, I'm really good at it. Robert. You can see Robert, he's like, keeps jumping off the call. So, yeah,
I know. Well, I think he's nodding his head against the keyboard or something. Yeah. Well, when you talk about that issue, that was, it seems that. Starts to highlight one of the real key issues, which again, I think really needs to change in some dramatic dimension is sales management, right?
We can talk about reps performing at a certain level, but I'm of the mind that you as a frontline sales manager, you hired them, you coach them, you manage them, you direct them. If there's performance issues that really. Initially primarily sits on them. So how do we change how we help sales managers do their job?
Cause there to me is the critical lever in all of this performance is about, you know, an effective middle management layer. And that's what really influences individual sellers. How do we ever get better at this?
I actually was really curious to ask Adam, not because I'm trying to avoid my monologues.
When you, so you did not hire a new VP of sales. Did you run sales yourself? And like a
woman who had. I have such a unique story. 18 months ago, I had six people. We hired 55 people in 45 days. I brought this guy, Santo Sean. He's built a bunch of companies. We went way too fast. And then this thing in April happened where the funds hike finally cut up to software and there was the matter of the buyer.
All of it came crashing down at once. Our, the person who was a sales leader in was she Very quickly transition to CRO. And then with this crisis, basically, they, we promoted, she was the acting VP sales, and then we promoted the best guy to be a player coach, which I'm not sure how I feel about that.
And I would love to hear your thoughts about how everybody feels about player coaches in the first place. I think he's doing a fine job, but again. If I look at my operation, I hope they're not watching this. No, they will. Come on, you know, like we're just serving people up who are literally like basically self selecting, you know, 70 percent of the time.
So, so yeah that was how we dealt with it. We kinda, you know. The squad got so small that it was like this guy and three people under him. You know, he was doing the big deals. He was kind of, he's kind of managing them for the smaller ones or whatever. Yeah.
But there's a lesson in scaling there though, that I wonder whether people are learning, which to me, one of the.
Issues I saw with SaaS companies is they scaled before they ever really learned how to sell the product. Right? When I was running many growing,
scaling for me last year, ,
we do the whole show. I intrigued. Yeah. So when I was growing sales of startups and leading teams, and oftentimes I was brought in and sort of helped turn things around, my goal was always, Hey, how do I double and triple revenue without adding a body?
. And we did that because fundamentally they didn't know how to sell what they had. Yeah. And once we found out what people are willing to pay us to do, and we could do that at a high win rate, you know, at least win 50 percent of our opportunities. That's like, sure, we'll add a body. Cause we know exactly what we're doing now, but it seems like in SAS, they got a few initial successes and that's like, well, let's go hire a ton of people and they didn't know fundamentally how to sell what they had.
That's why I definitely identified
that problem. Well, sorry.
Say, I think that's why the predictable revenue model is going to become more important because I think we need to get back to that philosophy just had an actual execution of we see 2 to 3 quarters without adding bodies without changing tons of resources.
And we prove out the model. Before we invest and go to the next level, before we decide that we need to move up to the enterprise, we prove out the model and we show some proof that we've got product market fit and we know how to sell it. And we're optimizing and capturing the value of our solution.
Yeah. I asked the question is, you know, if your win rates are 30%, can you argue that you have product market fit?
Anybody?
In the monastery, I'll say no. Here's the issue. And I love your mantra of, hey, if you have less than 50.1% win rate you've got room for improvement. You need to focus more on your win rates. A lot of companies, organizations I'm talking to, they don't know the win rate off the tip of their tongue, number one.
And number two, they measure win rates in different ways. They're not measuring win rates on both deals and amount of revenue. And then three, they don't necessarily have a benchmark for where they are. So I'll argue if 30 percent win rate in the monastery. No. And it also depends.
Well, one of the problems with companies is win rate, especially if they have more than one product is they don't understand when rates by product, they don't understand by segment, you know, seeing this with companies that we work with, that's like, you know, key examples, this one wasn't a company we were working with, but.
Somebody told the story about, you know, CRO or the CMO, I think was, it came to a QBR and trumpeting, you know, Hey, we're 55 percent win rate. Things are really great. But the thing is they were trying to sell a hundred K product and they were at an 80 percent win rate on their five K product and, you know, 20 percent win rate or 10 percent win rate on the product.
They really wanted to sell that was going to drive revenue. So, you know, your average win rates can be misleading unless you really break them down.
All I was going to say was Andy. You just, relived my horrible experience this year of set a different way, scaling before I had a repeatable sales model.
That was the core problem. You know, we thought that we had a repeatable sales model and we did not. And based on my LinkedIn response. , I don't think I'm the only one who did that this year.
Because
like the overarching theme is podcast was that was working basically until,
yeah, I don't know,
February, March, right.
For a lot of startups because of all of this stuff that we're talking about, right? Like, yeah, exactly.
Yeah. Well, I think the problem that exacerbated for a lot of SAS companies is that 50%, 50 percent plus of their customers were other SAS companies.
Yeah I, yeah I agree. So were you, Andy I missed the front of this conversation, which was, were you saying that if you don't have 50 percent win rate, you don't have product market fit?
No, I was asking the question, whether if you had 30 percent win rates, you could claim you did. I do believe that as a standard, a basic standard for individual seller should be that they win more than they lose. Full stop. Yeah. Back in the days when I was managing larger sales teams and not just me, of other people have come on the show, have talked about this.
If we had sellers at a 35 percent win rate, we coached them to another company. Yeah. And that was, you couldn't afford it. You know, I, my, my whole focus was, look, I've got sellers that basically, you know, if you'll get a salesperson, they're basically. They're a block of time, right? Not to make everybody a number, but you know, a salesperson is a bunch of time.
And as a sales leader and a sales manager, I want to say this. How can I make sure I generate the most revenue per unit of time that person sells? And the way you're going to see that works most times is going to be reflected in their win rate. We can go down another rabbit hole and this is, you know, the way I would manage teams, especially we were working largely more large deals, right?
Yes. Seven, eight, nine figure deal type things, but is we had sellers track their time. They had to charge their time to the, we put job numbers to qualified opportunities in the pipeline. So they charge their time to job numbers, just like consulting firms do. And so I knew, you know, to the fraction of an hour, how much time sellers are spending.
To bring a deal from, you know, initial point of contact to a close, not just them. I also knew the time the organization was spending on it as well, because, you know, if you want to really understand your capability as an organization, if you understand how much revenue per hour, a rep is able to generate.
You can do the math pretty simply. That's going to be what you're capable of achieving as an organization. It's not based on here's a quota, assigning 10 people and we're going to sign a fudge factor to it. And only X people are going to make it blah, blah, blah. That's nothing to do with your total productive capacity.
So yeah, win rate becomes really important when you start talking about the capacity of the organization to perform because it's based on how effective they are in each unit of time that they're in front of the customer.
And then. Are you're calculating win rate by opportunity created to close?
Yeah. There's lots of ways people are looking and generally we talk about here on the show, it's, yeah, it's, you know, total closed water, you know, one total one divided by closed one, right. Okay. Close one close loss. Sorry. But yeah, it's lots of, it'd be great if we could normalize one calculation throughout industry, but people have various ways of doing it.
Yeah. So my only issue on 50 percent is. Like I'm good with 30 and here's why number one. And by the way, when it's really high, I actually have the opposite reaction, which is I get a little worried, especially in this market. Because in this market, you actually need them to not disqualify opportunities.
You need them to take opportunities with warts and turn them into better deals. And Because you're not going to have enough,
we go into this is good. I'm glad you brought this up. So we come into 2023, let's just say, you know, in SAS in general, win rates hover somewhere in the twenties, right?
On average, well, SAS companies, the problem is not having enough opportunities. We got way too many opportunities. There's horrible selling the ones that exist.
Yeah, but that's not, well, first of all, we just talked about the pipeline problem. So you're, I think your perspective is coming from a past of like volume machines, pumping these guys with pipelines.
So that's one number two is especially if you go up market and you're, so if we want them to not sell to other SAS companies, They're going to have to take shots and like, and there's going to be warts on those deals that they might take extra time. You might lose,
but there's, but I've had this argument with somebody online last week is that yes, when you're going into, you have a learning curve and you go into a new market, there's a go to market learning curve, right?
There's a point we should come out of that learning curve where you've got an ICP and you're saying, look, these are the people that we're going to win. Cause we've had the experience and we can win them. And. If I have 80 percent win rates in that segment, that's fantastic. Right. But this person was saying to me, Oh, if win rates are too high, I get suspicious that because they're not having enough conversations and it's like, well, no, we're not talking about new market entry here.
We're talking about if you're an existing. ICP that you've been working in for a long time. You want all your sellers to have high win rates.
Well, yeah, we want them to have high win rates, but if the byproduct of that win rate is them saying, well, that's not a qualified opportunity. So I'm throwing it out and not working stuff.
That's what to me is what happens. I can live with losing the extra deals because I know if I know they're working at them and especially. Even in mature markets, right? A, it's a highly competitive scenario, particularly in the world. I live in and sure, especially now with the market being like, I think right now, if we're going to help companies, we got to lift from the lower, if not below 20 percent win rates, 10 points.
Like to me, yeah, you don't get 50 percent overnight. I got to meet these people that are doing 50 percent Andy on
the show. Yeah, I'll take example. A guy's been the show many times. Got a brand and flew Harding. Many people may recognize Brandon, you know, out on LinkedIn building his brand.
He was a live person. He writes about, you know. Earning seven figure incomes and through his, yeah, peek at live person. He was like a 72 percent win rate. So yeah, but they're not doing anything other people can't do. Right. You're right. There are B and C players. We have to lift up, but yeah. He's, he was way above that.
You know, other jump people on the show that were achieving similar things that we've talked about.
Well, you talked about like, I'll combine the player coach thing with what you're talking about. It's like Michael Jordan would be a terrible coach because you can't tell people to jump over three guys.
Right. Like there's only certain people that can do certain things. And like, how does Horace Grant and BJ Armstrong contribute? You know, consistently, I feel like that, you know, that's one of the Chicago bull fan there. Yeah. No, I'm four years, a million percent. But anyway, I, you know what, I'm talking too much, but I do enjoy this conversation.
I do think this is,
yeah, this is a fundamental issue. I think that I think has been a problem in my mind and I think minds of others is that we've accepted to level too low of a level of performance because we're able to get away with it because of what was flowing through the pipeline.
That I agree with and like, well, anyway, all right, I'm going to just back to the team.
Well,
one thing I wanted to ask Adam, cause you referred to it as well, Craig, in terms of the founder playbook, you know, whether Adam can share anything about that that you're working on. That's your playbook. So
I want to say, first of all, I'm working with your son on my founder, Brent, and he's unbelievable at helping me understand how to navigate this.
So that's a plug
For Alec. Yeah, that's a plug for Alec.
Look him up. Yeah. He's just been amazing. He doesn't ghost ride for me. He just like helps me understand what has been happening and what we should be doing and sort of navigating this whole thing. So. I don't think it will work for everybody in every market, but I think that if you're in a position where you have perspective that you're bringing and.
In my case, I'm willing to share an unbelievable amount of information about what's going on inside my business and the journey that I'm on. And I'm like, not worried about what everybody else is worried about. Like, like I'm, I'm doing crazy stuff. I'm making all of my internal zoom calls public so that like our competitors could come to our executive call every week if they wanted to, but I'm just I'm literally just like, so, so if you want to talk about, if you want to talk about throwing it all out.
The thing that I'm trying, what I'm trying to do with this B2B product. So one thing that Craig was saying that really resonated with me is we found out last year that For e commerce business. And we're large, we're selling to like big, small business and mid market e commerce stores. And like, we just found that the one thing that works among that in anything else was getting people to a smaller, medium sized event where we control the list.
And it's, I thought it was analogous to sales and marketing working the same ABM list. It's like, we got our sales people. Driving people to these events that our field marketing people are putting on. And it just works really well. And it's super focused and it's not this, you know, digital machine on that side of the business.
And that you could say that's just how people buy any commerce, which may be the case, but it resonated with me. It's this. Incredibly focused effort over there. That's making that work. Now here's the insanity that I'm going to try to get this B2B product off the ground. I literally think I have the most addictive app that I've ever had on my phone.
So for a business owner, like myself, it's a pixel that's on my site and I'm looking at LinkedIn profiles of people that are on there right now. So that is, and like, there's a debate about how much that would be worth if you were charging for it. So like, let's just make it free. In addition. To that part of it.
And it's like, you know, I basically want to do all sorts of viral strategies related to creating this wildly immersive business building experience that we'll, you know, connect with these three different types of people that we have. I made a reality show last year. I don't think it's going to be episodic this time, but I think it's like insane things like I'm talking about.
I'm going to try to assemble, which is marketing, not sales, a, an army of UGC creators, And basically give away a Tesla once a quarter to the most viral affiliate posts that goes out on LinkedIn. So like, I'm literally trying to create a hundred times the UGC of any other person does anything like us for a free app, which I think an important thing also is the reason I decided to go free was because I saw this LinkedIn megaphone developing for me in my company.
And I think a free product would benefit more for a company that had this type of LinkedIn megaphone than a company that did not. Does that make sense? If you have this incredible ability to just get, you know, 2 million impressions per week, it's amazing to have a free offer. And so what's that? What's the revenue model then?
So here's what I'm gonna try to do. If you want to operate within the Slack app, it's totally free forever. If you want to push it to outreach or sales loft or whatever, because like I find myself scrolling through and then like one out of 20 leads will be like a great golf shot and just keep me coming back for more, you know?
And it's like, I'm just going to put a push to outreach. We're going to ask people their sales tech on the way in push to outreach. And it's like 495 a month, like something that's. Way underpriced, but anyone who wants to save any time whatsoever, we'll just do without thinking about it, like a throwaway price and then try to get on a million websites and convert like 2 percent of them or something like that.
So basically, yeah, it's like, you know, I'm going to go to 95 for a file download for 95 for a push to a sales automation in nine 95 for like a marketing use case, that's like, you know, maybe in like a year and a half, I'll put them in market sales operation on or something like that, but it's like, you know, everything is oriented towards.
Doing as much of a viral push with as few people trying to take advantage of the way this machine is set up right now with the LinkedIn stuff as humanly possible. I'm not sure that I could do this if I had investors. My other business is going to generate 7 million in free cash this year. So in the event that it takes a lot of, you know, funding, the super long exponential play, that's how I'm able to do it.
And I, I understand that it's kind of all of it's a bit crazy, but I'm trying to be so insane with all of it, that people just have to talk about it. So that would be throwing it all out and doing something totally unlike, you know, a traditional sort of SAS, I think.
Yeah, that's for B2B play. I have to admit that's something, I don't know, Craig, you had anything you've seen like that before?
Well, No, I'm sitting here listening like you go, and this is great innovation. I well, there is something he mentioned before you like, how I'm talking about him, even though he's here that Adam said before, Hey, Adam is know, this, the marketing set, like, So I had Megan Eisenberg, who was like, she was like the queen of demand gen for years.
And like, she gets up at on the stage. Like, all a lot of the stuff I've been doing is broken. They're like, well, what's working? She's like, live event, you know, physical events, but not just a booth. You have to have sales and SDRs working together with marketing to get everyone to beforehand to something compelling.
If it's not just a meeting, it could be a dinner, whatever, and we're killing it. So, like, what you were saying is, like, you know, that is an old school thing, but like, but just by working in coordination together and preemptively engaging folks has been really effective. Just side note there that I've definitely seen that and I definitely highly recommend it.
Because I'm very excited to go to live events myself again, in terms of some of the radical stuff that Adam's doing. I'm, you know, we'll be watching him. I think it's great. I don't know. I don't know if it's going to work either. So, like, Robert can recommend it. So, like, you know, we're just, we're going to, let's see how this goes and regroup.
We'll follow you on LinkedIn. I guess we'll know everything along the way. But yeah, I think it's really great stuff. So, I don't know, Robert, what about you? It's pretty radical, huh?
I love the experimentation, and I think this is a time where creative people are going to experiment, come up with new ideas.
We'll find out some really interesting things that work and some things that are out of vogue will come back into vogue. For instance, I think the faced high value face to face meeting. That's not directly about the product. I see some companies making headway with that right now. I'll give another, so give us an example.
I got a company where the CEO is going out, talking about the future warehousing.
,
And going in front of clients. And that is the business development is not working. In terms of the classic email SDR campaign, but get the CEO or 1 of their top executives in front of a VP of operations warehousing at, you know, in their and it's money.
That's what's moving the needle. I'll give you a separate example of experimentation may not be experimentation, but just thinking differently at this time. Got a seller that I helped get to a company about 4 years ago, fortune 75 company that all of us are familiar with an order from and he just went into new emerging markets and I called him up and I said, hey, it sounds like it's a tough time.
Sounds like your company is raising quotas, forcing people out. How are you doing? It's got to be tough. And he's like. It is such an amazing time. There's never been such great opportunity. Said what? He took a deal from a competitor that was going to be a, they were about to sign with Microsoft in a week, 1 million for a year, and in three and a half weeks, he turned it into a win for them at five years, 5 million.
And what has he done? To net it out he realized in the economy, you know, with we keep talking about how CFOs are putting more and more scrutiny on it. He went to the financial people in his company and started interviewing and talking to him. He got on the phone with 10 CFOs at different prospects just.
Under the guise of information gathering did a little bit of study and then it's like, I just went out there and what we did is 2nd sales call had to be CFO. Get them in the sales process. And now they're talking to the CFO early in the process. Maybe not as bold as what you're doing, Adam and still, it was experimentation and doing something new and sometimes necessity is the mother of innovation.
So I'm interested to see what happens, Adam.
Well, and that's such a great example of, you know, getting the CFO early in the process, because then you get the commitment to, if you do it right and you get them involved and you make that sort of preliminary business case, then you have the commitment that they're actually going to make a decision.
The CFO is bought in early in the process. The likelihood of it actually turning into a deal is much higher.
It's brilliant. They've gotten the CFO to become an advocate for them and they're getting alert for deal sizes because they're making a financial case of, Hey, this is going to save on your capital expenditures here.
This. This is a, you know, a strategic long term financial investment that you're going to be making. So they're not only viewing the CFO as a stakeholder, but they're viewing them as a champion rather than a blocker or a sniper.
Well, you look at, you know, the, what's the 40 percent of the most recent figure I heard for percent of opportunities to turn into no decision.
What's happened in those deals is that the company, the customer itself has not made the decision to make a change, let alone pick a vendor. Right. And so why people are waiting to the end to do their business case when to your point? Yeah. Get the CFO involved early.
They don't know how to build the business cases.
And they also don't understand enough about the business and the customer, which get me into a whole rant that Craig doesn't want to hear again about onboarding.
Well, we can do a little bit of that. I think one of the things that, that needs to change is more specifically, and this is almost like a back to the future thing is reps need to specialize more.
Yeah. I see too many sellers. They're just generalists and trying to accommodate, you know, handle every opportunity instead of saying, look within our ICP you know, we've got manufacturers, I'm going to focus on manufacturers. I'm become an expert in manufacturers, understand manufacturing business and be able to talk to knowledgeably and help, you know, decision makers and stakeholders in a manufacturing business.
Instead of saying, look, I'll just take whatever comes across the desk. I
mean, isn't that a part of onboarding that needs to change is to actually help people learn about industry and customers.
Yeah, not only learn about answering customers, but do it in a different way. You know, Craig talks about Motorola wireless and how the guy came, that the new president came in and he put up posters first response.
There were back
shortly. I'm sure
my ego was just about to get stroked and then he got, you know, Now you're back. Robert, continue to compliment. I did it again. I'm talking about Motorola Wireless. You started to compliment me and you went off. It was brutal.
So, my point is, we need to, do we truly understand the business and there is nothing that is a better substitute than going and experiencing the business to understand the customer and what's happening.
It's harder in some industries than others, but Motorola wireless, tell the short version I'm stealing from Craig. New president comes in, post up posters of first responders all over and tells everybody in the division, no matter their role, they need to go out and work with the first responder in the field so that they understand how they use the product, the value of the products.
They live, eat, and breathe the customer. I was just with a heavy, 911 calls. Yeah. Yeah. They went on there. They understood. So they understood. Everybody in that organization from the bookkeepers to the sellers, the customer service people went out with a customer and understood the importance of this working, how it was used.
And that's invaluable when you start, I was just with a heavy equipment manufacturer and. 1 of the things that they do is they have everybody get on the machines. What they also need to do. I would argue as telling them on day 1 is they need to have an experiential business simulation where they understand what's involved in operating a construction site and then they wouldn't end up selling the specs on the, you know, the H.
M. 400 dozer. And how compares to the 36 inch blade on the competition. They'd be talking about how this is going to help you become more profitable. Because X, you know, high percentage construction companies aren't profitable within the 1st, 3 years, how, because these feature designs are going to help you move things more quickly, how they're going to save money, make money and stay out of jail.
I like to stay in on the jail bar. Yeah. So, yeah. Alright, well unfortunately we've run out of time. Well I'm gonna end it with that. I would ask everybody where they can, people can find you, but they can find you on LinkedIn and I presume anybody No, we know Adam for sure.
Yeah, well, Adam for sure.
Detention. Adam, LinkedIn. Actually, even if you don't look 'em up, you'll just get
when you wanna see him or not, you're gonna see him, so, right. You're gonna get peppered by it.
All right. Well, hey, appreciate y'all stopping by and look forward to having you come back and we'll continue the conversation.