Growing Carabiner Group from 0 - $6M (and through an exit)

he is again incredibly insightful across

startups so definitely the person to listen to around anything um scaling growth and recently went through an exit welcome Cliff thanks cool so have the really good forun to uh getting involved really early on uh first exec hire Mark was talking about how important it is to have a first sales hire be someone that can build do architect uh I've gotten to do all of that over the last three and a half years at care it's been a lot of fun um but what we're going to talk

about today is focusing on the customer uh Community Le growth and the results of what that can look like I think at least for me I've got a fairly different perspective when it comes to go to market all of us are consumers we all want to buy the ways we do in our consumer lives so why aren't we doing that from a B2B perspective why aren't we meeting our customers in the places that they are today and the the journeys that they want to be taken on now for us we went on this awesome

Revenue growth um I came in the door we increased prices by 50% like day one and our ACV just kept increasing year-over-year so that first year ACV was 124 time to close was 26 days uh year 2 ACV was 178 time to close went up to 35 days so 33 36% increase in both uh time to close and ACD which is awesome um and in between Q3 of 21 and Q4 of 21

is when I went and actually started hiring out my sales team uh but yeah going back to the focus on the customer so we're all living in this consumer world even preco what I was really passionate about and trying to figure out was how the hell do you actually get in front of your buyers and how do you start leveraging thought leadership in the areas that they would go to get their help pre-co it was showing up to coner or concert showing up to conferences showing up to the restaurants and the bars around the conferences if my company wouldn't buy

me a ticket and head hunting people's faces off of LinkedIn and having those conversations now that's really switched to online communities that's switched to places like Pavilion revops Co-op sales hacker you know GTM fund among many others and we all seem to be looking for that connection how do you continue to learn how do you continue to find ways to get the information that you need to keep leveling

up and that led to a really fun uh really fun growth Arc um under the commun oh sorry going back here to the community lead piece uh we also wanted to remove friction from the buying process know 26 days is really really fast but most of my competitors go out to Market and say we're going to put together a very strict s so these are the things that we're going to go out and accomplish for you we got rid of all of that we said we'll do all of that

as a service for you so we went out and actually uh trademarked revops as a service and did that in early 21 and it again removed all the friction from that buying process we told the customer that we'd meet them where they were knowing that it's really really difficult to go out and hire an entire revops team you can't do it at series a or series B you just can't afford it but we would give them the right pieces along the way and that made their lives a lot easier and because of that they were willing to take a bet on us that we could help them solve their

problems and it led to really good renewals too which is awesome uh the difficulty with this is that most sales people most Founders are not patient enough to go and walk along the journey it's not something that happens overnight and we'll talk about that as we get into the community lead piece here um the cornerstones are the be present be helpful all those fun stuff uh but we're all humans you you got to treat people right you you get one chance to make a first impression you get one

chance to build a reputation and that can take years to do but then you can destroy in a second so always being intentional showing up within the community being present being helpful we all live in this Western world where people want to be able to get instant gratification so when people are asking a question in a slack community and you're responding within minutes and being able to get to

them and provide that value teach them something help leverage some of your insights for them that leads to a ton of impact and the way that I went about that was using keyword notifications in slack I'd get a notification while I was still on a call I was booking 83 meetings a month on average doing this uh which led to a really awesome Word of Mouth effect because in the B at the BC space word of mouth and referral is the number one way people do business so how can you build that halo effect around

your brand around your sellers around your company to create this entire ecosystem of people who are out there in the marketplace talking about you when you're not even in the room and that time to Value piece is really key right you're helping people get there faster than they could ever get there on your own um when it comes to the thought leadership be empathetic listen to people I think a lot of sellers go out there and they just want to Hawk their Wares they hear

that one value prop that the customer hits on they're like I can sell on that you don't need to do that actually have a conversation find out what's driving them the best sellers that I know are the ones that have incredible business Acumen and they take the time to ask the questions that matter what does LTV look like what does CAC look like what does your board care about what are your seite uh individuals within the team pressuring you on and what what are the plans that they're solving for if you can talk to them about their business you stop being a vendor and you start

becoming a trusted adviser and someone that they can go to for help time and time again and lastly don't be a pest no one wants to be sold to be friendly about it you on those those 83 monthly meetings that I was booking it's 25 minutes of me giving them advice you know I've been in go to market for almost two decades now across a myriad of businesses mostly Enterprise and mid-market and I just L lean in and give them some you know some free advice and at the end of the call

it was never oh I want you to bring me into your company to do this no like if you could if anyone you know ever could use help with revops give a call just remember my name that's it super super low lift but the KnockOn compounding effect of that um was super super incredible so on average once we got invested into a community it would take us three and a half months to see the first opportunity uh rev genius it was three months revops Co-op was

four months Pavilion was eight uh but in each of those sit uh situations once we got the first ones the next ones came and came and came and with pavilion uh show you in a minute I'm the case study on the website right um we invested a not insignificant amount of money for what was a company that is just doing a million in ARR after that first year we put down about 10% of our ARR as our marketing budget with them but we got a 50x return over

the next two years because of the work that we were doing there and it was ongoing right what was one deal a month turned into two turned into three turned into seven and at that ACV it adds up really quickly and that's why we have that jump from 0 to six in such a short period time oh it's next slide yeah so we have heavily invested there um Pavilion alone was about 30% of our pipeline the other communities made up another

55% but those deals closed faster and we we had deals that were closing in in two weeks because we were meeting the buyers in their Journey when they were in a moment of need they already understood their buying situation they already stood the pain the executive team was usually already aligned so me again meeting people in the places that they are and then having that be driven through Word of Mouth the other way that that was working tremendously is people would be asking questions or hey does anyone know someone that can do this

work and all of a sudden I'm waking up in the morning I've got you know five or six slack messages on my phone where people pinged me and you need to talk to Cliff about this problem or you need to talk to Amelia or you need to talk to Matt or you need to talk to Sheamus who you know whoever on my team was Manning those particular channels it was incredible we had a network of people going out there selling our services for us because we had done right by them crazy concept treat people well I know we're all taught it as kids

right the results were really incredible so ACV increased by over 30% uh over the last three and a half years 80% of all of our Revenue was attributed to either Community word of mouth or referral and that was one of the keys to us actually exiting um the really low CAC to high LTV ratios that we were seeing was something that made us incredibly attractive from an

acquisition perspective uh and then you had the brand on top of that uh led to a successful exit which was fantastic we got purchased by a strategic management consulting firm where we've had a 90% overlap with all of their customers over the last two years you know traditionally we've service the sub hundred million market now we get to service customers in the 100 million to billion dollar PE back space and publicly traded companies so the way I talk about it now is we serve companies from 2 million to 222 billion uh which

is a really wide swath but it's funny the problems at the bottom are the same ones at the top just add on like 20 times more change management and this is sort of the sales Cycles I was talking about um really really fast sales Cycles outside of that post svb world where everyone was sort of freaking out and just not buying anything but Community Le really helped drive that uh for a reference point most of my competitors see sales Cycles in

the 90 to 120 day Mark so it it was markedly different and here's the actual data so 80% of all our client Acquisitions that first year was 53% 92% in year 2 88% in year three again CAC way way down because we could do it with a much smaller team than a lot of other folks did and we weren't burning cycle time I know everyone seems to be having problems with email emails email deliverability am I saying the right

thing not to H on the Pocus guys or Mark or anybody else but we do no Outreach everything is Word of Mouth Community Le or it's folks that are coming inbound based off of some of the marketing collateral that we put out we do no paid advertising no SEO um all of the marketing that we do is typically through Partnerships where other folks are putting us on their webinars or their podcasts uh we do probably two or three of those a month but it's incredible what you can do by being kind

I I know Sam Jacobs has his book you know kind people Finish First definitely believe a lot of that right if you can show up and be a real person it it actually does work and then that drives amazing things like customer satisfaction you know we've got folks who have bought from us two three four times our longest engaged client now is going to hit nine years on their LTV when they get through with the existing contract we've been around for four years it's crazy to me that people are signing 5-year contracts

but it's happening and they love the team it's because we're showing up consistently and when you set that motion from the top it breeds down to everybody else you Mark was talking before about setting the culture the culture matters because that's how you show up day in and day out for your customers and then uh yeah crazy we got acquired I still can't believe that it's been four months so really quick it hasn't been 20 minutes it's been about 14 but uh we can

adapting customer Behavior we talked about Community Le growth some of those cornerstones creating some thought leadership and the impacts that can have in your business short and sweet get you guys to the happy hour thank you