What I Did to Grow $20M Revenue as Founder of 3 B2B SaaS companies

I'm going to talk about essentially building out of founder lead sales um particularly um at the 1 million range ARR but going through and there's some principles that I've applied across three of my companies um that have stood me in pretty good stead when it comes to scaling out of foundered sales and there are some problems with it inherent problems I see a lot of companies make that I've made firstly um I'm just back from burning man who's been to burning

man it was my first burn and I can tell you it profoundly affected me and one of the things that affected me the most were the connections that I made it it's literally incredible and Bernie man have some values and there's 10 values and these are five of them and it just got me thinking that as a founder and as a sales leader these values should be adopted because radical inclusion radical

self-reliance Community effort these are things that we need when we go to market and we sell but immediacy was one that really struck me and I I I thought a lot about immediacy because everybody wants things immediately sales people are very very um immediate they want results right now sales leaders want results we want the buyer to hurry up and we want to speed up their process the buyer actually doesn't want things immediately they want to take their time and they they want to kind of evaluate any

purchase they make well and so there's a disconnect straight away and so when I looked at um what I could learn from my last week in the desert um apart from how profound the connections you make are there are some some some similarities here I think we can we can take it the other thing that I learned and um is that founder Le sales is pretty unscalable and I knew this already but this taught me it because I closed a customer in in one of my camps

this this is Dave he runs a a construction company and he's now a he's now a client which is great but the problem is he's nowhere close to being in our ICP and we he's paid twice as much as he was hoping to pay now I know what's going to happen we're going to churn him we are I'm pretty sure of it right because he's not in our ICP we not we don't know how to make him successful he's paying more than he wants to pay at some point his team are going to get

involved they're going to use our platform and they're actually not going to use it very well and so they're not going to get value from it they're going to evaluate it in 12 months and they're going to think we didn't really get much value out of this and they're going to churn so I came away from berning man thinking you know founder Le sales is great because that's how you have to build your business but moving out of founder Le sales is so important and and the the way to do it um and doing it in the right way is really important so I'm

going to talk about that this was I'm I'm I'm I'm a sell's guy right so my background is software sale so um I firmly believe there isn't anyone better in my company to sell my product than I than me I can I conceptualized it I've lived it I've sat in the seat of our buyer for many years I know the product really well and I can sell I think so for me doing founder Le sales is pretty easy but if you're a technical founder if you're a product Le founder if you're a sales found founder you are the you

are the best sales person in your company and I see so many Founders that aren't commercially focused not sell because they're not comfortable with it but I can assure you that you're the best person in your company to sell your product you always will be and and and you know it's it's finding the right as you grow out it's finding the right way in which you can help and support your sales motion as that founder an example is that if I reach out to somebody on

LinkedIn and I say hey um you know would love to talk to you about how we can support your sales motion as a Founder to a Founder I'm going to get a much better response than if one of my sales guys was doing it right um I can move the needle so if somebody says to me oh you know we love this but we really need that feature you don't have it I can either say well we can build it and we can get it done or we won't my my sales team can't say that they've got to say oh let me go back to the table and speak to people in in the company and you've

lost momentum so as a Founder you you you have the ability to be the best sales person in your company so this was my trajectory when I was running sales um for my company we got it to about half a million AR just me and there's a point usually um about here about half a million 400k AR maybe even earlier in a lot of companies where Founders decide to hire salespeople and they think oh we've got momentum here but at 43k Mr

you depending on what your ACV is you're running between 20 and 30 customers normally maybe 50 that's not product Market fit so what you're doing here is you've generated a pipeline you've generated Mr you've got customers they're seeing value but you haven't got product Market fit and I would guess that if certainly in my experience doing this three times now in three different companies it's unscalable because I haven't actually

readed the business to bring sales people in to take this over right and so what happens is this so this was and an SDR that 500k we hit 500k and we hired ahead of sales we hired two sdrs we hired two account Executives and we hired two a marketers what happened over the next 15 months that so from me doing this myself

building out a half a million um Mr business we tanked we we dipped and dropped 50% of our Revenue worse we turned 190k it now that's a big problem right because I've now invested in eight people to from my go to marketing because I could have afforded that afforded them at the 18 months ago I can't afford those people now so I've

got to fire them who problem is that is that my fault or is it their fault it's definitely my fault because those people I hired them because they were good in their previous roles and I'll talk to you about that because that's a very important um point in my my opinion um in a sec so figure out when the right time to hire your first sales people and I'll I'll give you um some kind of a synopsis of what happened to

me so it was largely concluded by found a relationships um I was given discounts and pricing concessions a lot um it was kind of off-road map products you know we want this you know oh we you don't have that we want this okay yeah we'll build it you know who cares um nobody else can do that apart from me that's not scalable um I was we were spending and I was spending so much time with our customers and it's great I love I'm I'm great friends with a bunch of my early

customers then three of them are here this week I'm like we go out we drink we we go on holiday together in fact I was at Burning Man with one of my customers right um and so I'm I'm very much about that but it's not scalable and then the biggest problem is that when you look at your customer set they're different they're different in size they're different in their use cases they're different in the value

they're getting out of it everything's different so if you've got this and then you start hiring people what are they going to do right how how on Earth can can they go out and and and scale Revenue because you don't actually or they don't know and nobody knows what works and there's no nothing repeatable for them to go out and so no product Market fit no defined ICP zero consistency with use cases and value no playbooks processes structure

no repeatability so what I would suggest and this is probably teaching you to suck eggs but if you're a Founder doing founder Le sales before you hire your first sales person make sure every single one of that list is ticked off and if it's not don't hire anybody keep doing it yourself because you will come unstuck they will come unstuck the challenge you're going to have is that it will take six months to a year before you realize they've come unstar and so now you've invested in these people or

this person let's just say it's one person let's just say it's 80k a year you've invested 80k in that person they haven't delivered you now have to fire them or and start again so you've lost a year and 8K and you've got to go for this again it's a bad process right so tick this off before you move out of founder lead sales and and I think it's really important so my learning from burningman was you know I shouldn't be doing sales anymore because my sales are predicated through relationships mainly

and actually when you think about it you shouldn't be selling via relationship you should be selling via value if you sell on value you'll keep a customer you'll make sure you choose the right Customer because you you'll dive in and make sure that you know what their pain is and you'll understand if you can solve it and you'll um really try to understand where that value sits for them and deliberate for them if you s on relationship you're going to do deals but they they're not going to be scalable for somebody else and you're probably going to churn them at some point because you're not driving value

so this is something that I think a lot about and I think it's really important um and this is the stages of growth that you go through so every company is going to go through different stages of growth and this might be different for different companies but typically in my experience um and I've also invested in about 30 um early stage companies and it's it's pretty much the same for them you have five distinct tiers zero to a million a million to three 3 to six 6 to

10 and 10 to 30 the hardest phase in my opinion is the six to 10 it's a very difficult phase you can be really Scrappy at n to one you can do the founder lead sales bit you can get lucky you can you know you you can just do deals you can get to not to one one to three you've got to start growing up and um you've got to think about having those processes in place making sure that you've got everything you need to be able to hire people because as a

Founder you're probably not going to be able to get to 3 million on your own you need to hire sales people so you need to make sure at this phase that the not to one phase you are ready to hire people to help you get to three and typically at 3 million you become more sales Le you think about Integrations more um and you start to think about how you can invest in success at 3 to six million you actually don't in my from what I've seen in my experience you don't really need to innovate product very much by

the time you get to 3 million you've got an ICP you know exactly what it is and as long as your Tam your a total addressable market and your serviceable Market is big enough you can just go after the same types of companies so what I would always look to do is by the time I come out of here but definitely by the time I'm in here I want to know that all of our customers when I say all at least 85% of them look like each other same size same use cases same value points because now I I I say well you know we've got a

100 customers it's got us to 3 million but this Market's got 5,000 customers in it let's go after those other 4,900 customers or 3,900 customers whatever it is um it's a big enough market to get us to 6 million so I don't think about product as much when I when I hit that that that kind of 3 million Mark I just look at making sure that we've got our ICP absolutely nailed our customers are successful we know what they're successful in our product and we go out

and we replicate it really important at 6 million you're now thinking about going up market so you're thinking about how do I grow out of here because ultimately I see a lot of companies get stuck at 3 to six and I think the reason they get stuck is because they they want to go up Market but they don't prepare very well for it alliances are one of the biggest ways you can go you can move up Market once once you're at this stage um start to think about evaluating your

ICP and it's a difficult decision I was speaking to some bu ear I'm not sure who it was but um they were saying that they they had to literally make a decision to lose 50% of their customers because they now didn't fit the new ICP they were moving into that's a difficult decision because the customers that you you win when you're at zero to one particularly might not be the customers that are going to get you to 30 million and and so you've got revenue to protect but you've got growth to to drive and so you've now got this um kind

of otomy which is driving to say well do we you know forget our first early customers that aren't in our ICP anymore the answer is no you don't but you start to build out tears of your customer base you segment your customer base more and so you'll say here's our tier DS we're not going to we're not going to give them the support we've given them over the last three years um but we we're still going to make sure that they're successful and now we're really going to focus and double down on our tier one and twos which is our new ICP and this is what they look like and now when you

start to scope that out product Innovation starts to happen and you start to say well for us to go out and win in this market you know we need to make sure we're integrated into sap we need to make sure we've got a sales force integration we need to make sure you know we've we've just got this we're connected into into the right ecosystems for and the workflows that this new type of customer is going to want from US security and compliance might be an issue you know we didn't think about security compliance at all when you got

Market or you move Industries like into Finance security and compliance are the first thing you're going to get asked um so you really have to start to think about adopting your strategy for scale but across all of this the most important thing I think that I've learned is hiring through these stages and it's complicated but it's also very very simple and that's an oxymoron but let me explain it

because when I'm here I need people that are Scrappy they need to be resourceful they need to be um radically self-reliant we haven't got the resources we haven't got the infrastructure we haven't got a name that's going to open a door we haven't got customers that we can refer to as references we've probably got a really product so I need people that can just go out and make it happen if I hired that person over here they'd fail massively right so what I

want to do is when I get to a million and I want to go to one to three I want to hire people that have been on that very Journey so I want to find somebody that's in a company that's doing three to five million but joined it when it was at half a million to a million and I want to be really really intentional about that what what I won't do is I won't hire somebody that is at a 3 to five million company but joined them a year ago when they were 2 million because they haven't seen what we're going to go through to get there and you

just have to think like that every time you go through the process of hiring you you need to hire people that have been through the Journey that you're about to go on and have lived it and they know what's ahead of them because if they can't see the hurdles that are ahead of them they're going to they're going to trip up and it's it's really easy to get to particular the one to three Mark to say you know we haven't got huge budgets we can't afford to pay top of the market here so we're just going to hire what we think are great people but if they

haven't been through that Journey they're going to struggle it doesn't matter who they are they'll struggle so really think about hiring people that have been through that Journey the next challenge you've got is I've just hired somebody has been through that one to five million Jour or one to three million journey and now we've hit 3 million and I'm now trying to find people that have been through the 3 to six million journey or 3 to 10 million journey and we haven't got them in the business but what do I do with the existing people I've hired 18 months ago to get us to that point so I've now got

a team of people in my company that have got me to this point but can't see forward can't see any of the pitfalls ahead of us what do I do so what I've seen work well for me and for others is you hire people that have been at that that Journey three to six and you hire more senior people and you get them to coach the people you've already got right you get them to level the people up that you've already got now what you'll find is the people you've already got will either leave because they are struggling or because they want

they wanted to be that leader they wanted to step up and you haven't you haven't allowed them to so they'll they'll go or they'll embrace it and they'll take on the challenge and they'll level up and they'll skill up and those people typically then become your VPS at your 10 6 to 10 million level and that's how I normally think about it I would try to I I see people hiring SE Suite when they when they've got like 200k AR like I it's nuts like I don't

understand it because you're hiring SE when you can't afford it you're you you're not paying market rate for seite so a seite market rate is going to be 300K plus plus plus twice again on bonus and if you're hiring a seite at 200k AR you're probably paying them 60 70k so you're not getting C you was giving them a title for it and now you've got a you've got somebody in in a c Ro when you get to 3 million that's got no idea how to run an organization at 3 million are you going to replace them are you

going to fire them I mean like you've got problems so I would always caution on when you're hiring for VPS and for seite because you know a you're not going to get the right people to help you do it and B you're going to cause yourself a massive headache down the line I've done it and it it's painful um so I would I would say that the best way to hire VPS is to bring them in here and here then bring in your senior people to help coach and upskill them and then at some

point these people that have been with you for the journey you hire into VP roles and and um and and you're you're then almost um mitigating a lot of the risk that you've got as you hire through these stages so that's big I I added this this was our goto Market stack um we we basically um backfilled our goto Market stack um very early these These are cheap tools you can you know I think

we're were paying like $500 a month for all of these tools and then as we grew we didn't actually add much more we we we went a bit more up market so we went to we I think we replaced intercom with user or user guiding and then and actually as we went up to three we replaced user guiding with Pender and and so these are just a little bit more sophisticated um tools they're much more expensive we move from HubSpot to Salesforce for example um and so you know you you you you upgrade but we

didn't actually bring in a huge amount of software to help us grow so three principles of growth is now your hiring strategy at each stage of growth I would say that's the most important thing you guys can go away and think about um it's really really important self value not relationships um you know I've got so many antidotal stories about that one is I I was in a deal for about 18 months with a customer we had access

to everybody apart from the CEO we'd been going we've been through this evaluation with them um for for a year and a half it was a big deal for us and then our competit biggest competitors CEO jumped in with the CEO of the company who then squashed everything we'd worked on for 18 months because of that relationship and you know we we'd built 12 relationships in the background what we didn't do very well was demonstrate the value they were going to get because had we done that they would have

communicated that with the CEO and the CEO then wouldn't have made the decision that they made so focus on value not relationships and I'll talk a bit about that in a minute and for me this is the biggest lever to scale that you can think about and whoever's seen me talk before would have definitely heard me talk about this um what is your customer buying nailing that nailing that question will help you scale more than

anything else you can do I promise you and let me give you an example so I um I was the chief Revenue officer of a um of a company average um ACV was it quite low about 19k and when I went in the founder said to me um we've got some great customers um have a look at our our customer list and there was one in in our D category paying about 6K a year and I said oh that's a really good customer he said

it's paying six grand I said but they're five billion Revenue so there was a company with five billion Revenue paying 6K a year that's not a good deal to me but they were in their de TD so they weren't actually getting any any customer support so we prioritized it and I said to the the VPS El said what are they buying and we were selling accessibility tools and they said oh um they're buying

um the ability for more people to access their website and they've got um a team in um Mexico that right now have a really Antiquated website and so they're using it there that's what they're buying I said that's not what they're buying at all what are they buying and she looked at me like a deer in their headlights I said go away and just figure out you know what they're buying and she came back to me within an hour and you said you know what I've looked at this and looked at their company reports and they are on the hook for

Millions like tens of millions in fines if they're not globally compliant from an accessibility perspective within the next three years so we spent six months going through the organization getting access to people that actually mattered so you know see SE Suite people not not people in Mexico seite didn't even so the the real problem here was that you had an organ a $5 billion organization that were on the hook for millions of fines if they weren't accessibility

compliant they were already paying us an accessibility compliance software provider and they knew nothing about it they were scratching their heads to understand how they could become compliant and yet they were already working with us but the team that had sold that to them sold so it in a very local um you know a local team and and the large organization didn't even realize it so we went in and we understood what they were buying they they they were buying the ability to not

have millions of millions of dollars in fines in the next three years that's what they were buying they weren't buying accessibility software they weren't buying you know the things that we thought they were they were buying the ability not to be F tens of millions over the next few years we took that cont contct from 6,000 to about 9 million in the next 18 months we guaranteed that we'd get them compliant it was obviously the biggest deal the company had ever done I think we doubled

it ARR with it with one deal because we had taken the time to understand what they were buying we' taken the time to make sure that we it was a companywide problem not a small team problem and just by doing things like that is it's a lever that's going to help you grow and so when I look at um my company dpad I break this down into what I see as a fairly weak value statement so our customers buying software that helps

sellers align with their buyers pretty weak an average would be buyer insights that improve sales efficiency and increase win rates so we're starting to week out some value in that statement but I think a better way of doing this of what what are our customers buying doesn't involve anything to do with our product our customers are buying the ability to move individual salese to

quot attainment and get to revenue scale three times faster that's what they're buying at the point we go in and we talk about that they don't care what we do or how we do it if I sit in front of every single one of you and I say we will get your sales reps individually to to quota to 90% of quota and you think well hang on because if you're like every other sales team three in every 10 are probably hitting quota and the rest are just

tanking it and those three are making up your 85 90 annual percent of annual quota if I could get your sales reps every one of them to 90% of quota you're not going to ask me how much it costs you probably ask me how I do it and I'll tell you how I do it and then you'll say great let's do this you we don't even talk about price whereas if I went to you and I said oh we'll give you buyer insights that improve your sales efficiency that

doesn't you know what's that going to do like every other every other vendor that will come into this Market will tell you the same thing so think about what your customers are buying and when you go to market when your marketing team build out the story and they messaging that's what they go to market with it will change it for you and then just fine I wanted to leave you on this one sellers don't close deals buyers close deals when you think about that and it's

simple but when you think about that it will also change how you go to market right how many of how many of your sales team give you their weekly monthly quarterly forecasts based on intuition and optimism oh I think it's going to close on this date we're going to put this close date on it but this the the buyer has no idea what that close date is and then it slips and everyone scratches their head and wonders why that deal hasn't closed on time well it's because

the seller doesn't close those deals the buyer does and so what we do at deal pad and whether you use deal pad or not um I urge you just to think about how you can align yourself with your buyer's process how you can get into to the the kind of the embed yourself in that buyers process understand what it is and go at their path Pace but at a pace that now suits you as well and so you're fully aligned on it because otherwise you're going to

find that your all of your forecasts no matter how many forast and tools you use are going to fall out because ultimately it's the buyer that will decide when that deal closes not the sales team so that's my um my talk we have about five minutes if you any questions I'd love to answer some questions oh we don't have time oh we don't have time well I'm going to be around so if you have any questions I'm super passionate about all of these things I've just spoken about so I would love to um share any any any time with you thanks guys

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