9 mistakes sales reps make when the only remaining activity is to sign the contract

I want to introduce Mauricio giguela from Doc sales we'll be talking about how revops doubled his mrr in three months thank you guys good morning so thanks for being here so I had a problem this morning because my the title of my presentation was wrong and the previous speaker was not here and the room was empty and I thought oh my God what the hell is going on with my speak

my speech so I'm from Brazil and I'm very happy to to be here here too great and I'm very happy to be here so it's a big challenge for me to to talk to this such qualified audience especially in English that's my first time uh that I speak in English give a speech in English so I'm kind of terrified but that's okay I'm gonna do my best and I hope you enjoy so

where'd my control okay so let me give you uh first a context about doc sales so we are a contract and proposal automation platform so what we do we help sales reps to prepare sales documents and close deals with designing processing the payment and the payment and so on so we add the kind of automation layer on the top of the CRM so the sales reps just need to

drag the opportunity card from one face to another phase and the magic happens in the background so we started this business in Brazil two years ago the idea was to be International first but then we were caught by the covet pandemic actually we and everybody else right and we had to change our plans and then we focused for the first two years in the Brazilian Market so we had to adapt product and everything

because we we had to focus on Brazil and since May we are focusing on the U.S market so over the next 20 minutes I'm gonna discuss a problem that we face it on Doc sales about a year ago so basically what happened was I thought my business was not scalable we were growing actually we were selling but we are not growing our growth rate was flat during

like six months in a row and I thought oh my God what's going on if you are selling well if everything looks well what happened what's going on with the company so at the time we were at the 26 or 30 000 dollars in mrr this is all mrr now you can see that from June on we started growing faster so we were able to solve the problem

look at this uh in a year we double our pool we triple the number of paying customers our churn rate was at a very reasonable rate so for the stage of Doc sales was really good and in October 2021 we prepared this report to our investors and we show the problem so if you take a look on this

graph you're gonna see that the growth rate was flat for several months and at the time we listed a lot of actions that we would take to solve the problem in terms of lead scoring customer support lead qualifying or lead generation and so on so we thought we knew the problem we thought we knew how to fix it but in

fact we had no idea about what was going on for several months I am I am on my fourth company two exits and when I faced this problem I thought oh my God what what can I do can I go why what I'm doing wrong you know so what's going on with the company uh because we're facing this kind of problem so the first conclusion was uh even small companies have a very high

complexity and I made them some mistakes on the beginning of the company and that caused like a high a higher complexity than than I could have first of all uh we should start selling to one Persona on one ICP and I wasn't at this purchase sale so I was selling to whoever wanted to buy dog sales and that caused a big problem because when I had to analyze our customers our

the behavior of our customers I was analyzing in average and for the average was really good when when it we took a deeper look at the cohorts of the customers we found very serious problems second thing we should generate kpis since the first day I know that it it seems very early to generate kpis when we are starting the company when we don't reach we haven't reached the product Market fit yet

but that information will be very valuable in the future not at the moment that we are selling but after that we could analyze we would be able to analyze it in a different way the third thing is of course don't do spreadsheets to to generate kpis so uh actually don't don't use spreadsheets to generate to make controls over departments because they don't generate kpis automatically and and that will

make your your life harder after that and you should take care about what people think about the company so people care usually about their goals about their objectives if they are making money or not but they don't are as soon as you have like a very aligned culture in the company people would care just about themselves and not about the others or other departments so when we take a deeper look on all

departments we were in 12 guys only so 12 guys is like a small family you know so we figured out that there was a Chasm between the apartments so everybody was taking care of their own department and they were not worried about what was happened to the company and in general so we started a deep analysis and we came out with the idea of the the revenue operations so just to have an alignment

do you know what retino Revenue operations is nope no one okay so nobody implemented and it didn't help Revenue operations in fact the revenue operations is a kind of mindset I know that we need to do a lot of things to implement it but Revenue operations is when you take

a dynamic look of all your company and you have all departments aligned and that's not easy to do so you can imagine when I talk about processes we use talk about our internal processes how we do things how we sell to customers how we upgrade customers how we can sell customers so how can we charge customers and and so on but imagine you become a

customer-centric company and now we are talking about their processes their Journeys we can call Journeys but in Nando in the end of the day we're talking about processes so what happened to a customer when they want to buy from you when they want you churn they want to cancel the subscription when they need to upgrade or they they need to save money and you you need to offer something cheaper to them like a downgrade or or maybe a coupon or so on

so first of all we have goals for departments so the marketing department has has a go to generate uh X number of leads sales has a goal to bring a x number of mrr ARR or whatever metric when we Implement driven operations we are not talking exactly about each department but we are talking about the company so if we bring to the company Global goals

how is the growth rate and who is responsible for the growth rate probably all departments are responsible for that instead of each one of those of those departments so if you can have monthly real time a dynamic vision of your whole company probably you're gonna identify and fix all problems much easier and and quicker what we did on our assessment was first

take a deeper look into our customers as I told you before we're selling to everyone now I separated here only accountants so when we sell to accountant offices we have a LTV of one thousand and four hundred dollars the payback of cost of acquisition is like four months only four months our LTV per our points 45

times which means 45 months we spend the first four months to pay the acquisition and then 40 months to make money with that which is really good and the churn in average 1.4 percent per month but when we take a deeper look now we separated all the accountants by group of users all their content with one or two users have just

30 months it's not bad but if you take a look on this one it's the triple you know look at the churn 5.3 percent per month so if we if we tell the marketing department that that are generating leads not to generate this kind of company so not qualify this kind of company probably our metrics will be much better and you know the problem we have we had

at that time much more accountant with one and two than the other ones and what happens when you had this situation customer support was struggling with a lot of tickets the product Department was receiving a lot of requests for features that fits only small companies so you change the the whole company and probably in the future your pro product will not fit for

those other better customers and also you need to to be careful with that so we we cannot take a look on the average so if if you put your your head on the oven and they're fit on the fridge probably the average temperature good and what I'm showing you that you don't need to take the kpis for average as serious as we used to take and if you if

you go to this regular uh dashboards and kpi software such as chart Magoo profit while and so on we use profitable and we like them but they don't they don't show this kind of reality to us they show the average only so overall churn is not the most important kpi we need to take a a deeper look into the customer there are many ways for us to predict

customers or predict um what they will do their behavior based on engagement based on the behavior based on the number of tickets based on how they add or remove users to the platform how they interact to the plan so if we can put some kpis on this Behavior we can identify track and put some some Triggers on this Behavior we can predict

problems like months before and then we can take actions and this is is going to save us a lot of money in the future so the tip here is don't look at churn look at what we call Revenue leakage Revenue leakage is everything that make us lose money we can reduce sales we can lose money for instance if I'm I'm trying to charge a credit card after five days we suspend the customer

after 30 days we cancel the subscription it's a churn so that's a financial problem we're not talking about marketing we're not talking about sales and then we need to go to the financial department and set a goal for them probably they need to change the payment processor or to add new payment methods or whatever so we were selling Brazil Brazil accepts accepts different uh payment methods if we don't accept picks or or Bank sleep for instance probably

we're not going to able to sell to all of B2B companies in the US it's a little bit different but for for larger accounts we need ACH if I'm just doing credit card probably I'm gonna lose those custom those customers you know so and to solve the problem what we did was to first map all the processes all the journeys of our customer

and after we map all of them we had to understand if there is a standard procedure but we can change that word procedure to behavior is there a standard behavior of our customers that we can identify what Journey he is and what can we do with every Journey so can we control this journey or this Trigger or this kpi can we set triggers to it who is involved to solve this

problem or who's watching it because the guys from marketing are are concerned about generating leads the sales guys are concerned about selling who is taking care of our customer base no one is customer support is struggling with a lot of tickets so they don't have time should take a look on this and we are not big enough to have like a customer success Department a support department

and and someone living the department so we are in 12 Guys 1 000 customers 12 guys only so it's it are you automate this or you are really a big big company and you establish like a department to take a look on on all these kpis the second thing you need to define a nice Tech stack since the beginning we used to start with the cheapest everything

and then we need to move and then we need to change and then we need to adapt export our email addresses from like the cheaper uh sending Mao platform and then import them to the automation software to the marketing automation we're gonna lose all the history we're gonna lose all the metrics we're going to start generating information from zero so if we can choose of course we don't need to choose HubSpot from the beginning it's a it's expensive

but we can use different platforms and we can generate information to a central platform we choose power bi to do that so regardless the information we are using or the platform we are using all of them generate information to power API so we don't lose the history historic information are there so we can generate kpis and compare doc sales now Doc sales six months ago a year ago two years ago and this is

really really important and the logos are our choice so it's our own Tech stack okay and the last thing it's about culture so we need to set Global goals and in order to set Global goals we need to have Global kpis and this is really important because we need to bridge the chasm and to bridge the cousin we have to put all departments and all

the team in the same page we need an alignment from them so here is our organizational structure we have a matrix organizational structure so every department has its own goals for for instance sales need to generate more than 5K in new mrr but we have Global goals the mrr growth rate should be more than 15 the churn rate should be less than two percent per month

so if sales department hit that there goes but the company doesn't hit other goals they don't get the bonus so everyone now is concerned about what's going on with the company I don't mind if they are selling more or less than 5K I'm concerned about the 15 of growth because it doesn't matter from where at the first moment it doesn't matter for from where is is is coming the money if

if we are reducing churn if we are selling to new customer if we are upgrading the customer base the important thing is we cannot stop growing every month and then of course we're gonna fix problems individually with it with each department and the last thing is uh what's the the right moment for you to think about the revenue operations there are a lot of articles in Internet and most of them

says that you should be a big company after the series a after two million dollars in ARR I don't agree with them I think as soon as Revenue operations is a culture thing it's a mindset we should think about it since the first day of the company but we have to implement it after we reach the product Market fit before product Market fit we don't have

company we don't know if there are customers to buy our product but after we reach it then we need to start implementing step by step and generating information from different departments and but in terms of mindset of code or corporate culture we need to think about it since the first day including the CTO the head of sales head of customer success they should be

very analytic they should think about this kind of metric and they should be worried about the whole company instead of only their own Department okay guys that's it thank you so much [Applause] [Music]