SDReady revenue, CEO Gino Donati, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is gino donati he is building a great company called seed2c.com and help they're helping sas team build their sales development teams you know you're ready to take the top i am all right let me know i'll go you know what got you into this man you were you a salesman for one of these companies and then said you know i'ma do it myself or what no it's actually a slightly cooler story than that i was uh living in new york and a buddy of mine cmo got married to a girl up in canada and asked me to head a team so long story short he's in canada now he had me take a startup into the us and because i brought a canadian company into the us and we were successfully able to raise like 80 million a danish company found me and said hey what company was that did you get yeah no no not at all it's called touch bistro ipad point of sale uh because we were able we had such success there a danish company found me and said hey can you do the same thing they're called falcon social um after doing the same thing for falcon a private equity firm said hey do you want to move down to argentina and build i can't say their name for privacy reasons but can you take on our struggling portfolio companies and build outsourced sales dev teams so i moved to argentina built an outsourced sales dev team of expats and then i said why don't i just do this for anyone instead of just this private equity firm can you build a successful sales team in argentina to sell the us clients pre-covered 100 but they were expats so it's ah they were living in argentina or i was i was hitting up a lot of college kids saying don't go into a cubicle come live abroad for a year or two so how does this work there's a sas company listing right now trying to hire their first three sdrs what would you tell them oh i would tell i'll try and keep it as tight-knit as possible uh i would tell them before they decide on three know your targeted addressable market know your ideal client profile and prepare don't throw bodies at problems properly prepare set up your sales ops set up your uh tech stack and then hire bodies last i can't tell you how many people hire bodies first and then hire me when they're behind the eight ball what's the best tech stack mvp like are you trying like hubspot crm like what's tell us the cheapest quickest tech stack for your first three sdr hires oh i'm gonna get in trouble because i use so many different ones but you said best and then you said cheapest i'm gonna give you two different answers if you're looking for the quickest out of the gate easiest adoption sdrs don't have a learning curve and they use it within three days and know what they're doing i would hands down say usher connect for uh social selling for like automation on linkedin apollo is great it has the data and the enablement packed into one and then crm i like free agent crm because their price point there's also you know salesforce hubspot all of the all the other ones uh that that would be the cheapest quickest easiest learning curve for an sdr if you had to say best and you are sophisticated like you physically aren't going to overpay for a ferrari that you can't take out of second gear i would boringly say uh you know sales loft outreach parlayed in with a couple other you know data inputters give you notifications zoom info etc not not not cheap uh outreach potentially ipo and soon henry obviously had a successful ipo and sales off kyle porter right there with them with an 80 million dollar war chest to go after it as well so interesting but that's what that needs to do so the next thing is the incentive structure right people i've seen founders just mess this up for years uh and they come on the show and they get so frustrated nathan i had three a's and 20 20. i had to let them all go the quota missed or we didn't have leads for them or whatever so like how should you set up the incentive structure for your first sdr hire yeah so i would say i try and give like rules that you can always stick to so i don't contradict myself because it does matter how much the product costs if it's enterprise versus smb et cetera but like a real example let's say it's a let's take a five thousand dollar your average price point some rules of thumb that scale up and down don't have have at least 50 percent of the base like don't go over i can't tell you how many people are like oh we pay our sdr 60k and then 10k in bonuses we don't know why they're not motivated to make more dials well yeah if they hit 200 a goal they're up 5k more but if you're a split with bass and ote they split and go up now they're you know up 30k more so i would always say rule of thumb sdr split half base half ot that's one uh this one might seem super obvious but really look in the mirror and see what results do you want to drive i can't tell you how many people are like oh i want as many calls with as many of the right title right company and then i look at their comp plan and they're paying sdrs if the deal closes well the sr doesn't control that so if you want as many calls the right person the right company don't pay for ops pay for sqls right title right company get as many people to take as many demos as possible and don't yell at the sdr if they don't close that's not their job so and and then let's say that it is incentivized on closed right so what should the quota target be for year one and year two etc yeah so i've seen people that are like well hey shouldn't i be making half of x if my ar targets 300k should i be making 150k it actually has nothing to do with the ar let's do the profit margins of the company so um on the outside looking in it's hard for me to make a quota but again rule of thumb if you're talking about everything about an inbound str or a blend are you talking about pure outbound you pick give me a real example okay if you're a startup company that has a little bit of money you want to take your you know put your toe in the pond to go to market and you're like what can i expect from an sdr 100 cold if you gave them targeted lists i would say you can expect eight to 12 cold sqls a month um if you gave them nothing you're probably only gonna see six to eight if you give them like the idea like hey go find founders go find ctos but you're not giving them a list you're kind of treating like a half one pet peeve of mine is people use bd and sd or bdr and sdr interchangeably it actually should not be that's gotten lost in time going 100 miles an hour at startups and sdr gets handed a curated list and told to bang the phones banging emails convert these people convert a biz dev gets handed an idea hey we've done really well with fintech companies but we want to try b2c companies which ones would you go find them they have to build the list find the title it's a very very different role so um sdr's can carry a larger quota if it's a curated list i would stick to my 8 to 12 hundred percent cold if it's you know you go mid market or down you can see as high as fifteen um but that's pretty much all you can expect out of a hundred percent cold sdr and what are most sdrs what are most sas founders paying their first couple sdr hires as a base yeah great question so i'll do some plugs here and i'll also tell you that what i think first what they are uh the most common package right now you'll see is probably a 60k base 65k base with another 10 to 15 sprinkled on that depending on how well funded they are etc uh going back to my original suggestion i highly advise people to hire the motivated hey i know it looks bad that your base is only 40 but when you're at 150 a goal i would tell you a recruiter or a hiring manager the lower your base the higher your ot the better if you're an overperformer if you're an underperformer the higher the base the lower the ote so that will filter out a lot of people that don't want to come in and bang the extra 10 dials a day to get the extra you know 10 so it really does filter out the wrong people if they're like oh i really want a high base do you really want to be an sdr do you really want to be an ae because like no offense to that's more like a ces role you want stability and guarantee with some little upside that you care about jump on the other side of the fence you're talking sdrs you know hey they're responsible for conversion right 50 50 in terms of on target earnings but what's the ae do yeah good question so if i had to draw uh the perfect plan first and foremost you'd hire an sdr before you hire an ae i said it literally ninety percent of people i talk to don't do that they start with an ae and then they work backward hire an sdr you founded this company if you can't sell it i would question its sellability and the market need and all of that so first and foremost get your sdr let them book you meetings let them focus on so you can focus on other aspects of the business the second you have enough meetings that you feel like someone else is justified then you hire an ae so that's step one sdr's in my humble opinion book sqls or meetings with the right person at the right company you can ask them but long is to get someone with the right title at the right company to take a call curious about your elevator pitch the use cases the value props the pains you uh overcome that is a lead ae's job is to take all leads not opportunities their job is not to close the door their job is to create curiosity create need create want take the right person the right company and the ae should actually be measured on how many right title right companies move to op how many ops move into pipeline we can call it we can call it forecasted and then last but not least arr in the bank and then csms right so should the ae come off the account after the sale and if they're passing off to a csm should the csm have a quota for net dollar expansion or retention yeah it's actually what i did at box a lot of people don't know that i actually came from that side of the fence i was in sdr struggling to move to ae no one gave me a chance box was hot like eight years ago i think i went there and they let me in at enterprise renewals and i was like i'm gonna take an sdr approach to renewals let's do this so my answer might be very different than your traditional vp of cs or you know vp of success but i'll tell you my opinion um if i am starting up and you have those flagship accounts i would say leave all accounts with an ae for the first year let them expand those they you know eat what you kill kind of thing if you're getting into a more sophisticated setup and you can hand off because the ae has so many discovery calls you should always have va's going after net new if you can make them hunters not farmers but a lot of startups i can't tell you how many aes i know i'm not calling them out twiddle their thumbs say they work a 30 hour 20 hour work week why would you not have them holding their most valued accounts and growing them they know the person they sold they know the use case thoroughly and now they can take it and talk to the other departments about that on the flip side if you do have an ae that has too many demos to manage their pipe a hundred percent have them handing it off to a cs you can do some sort of rev share in the first quarter or two whatever you want i've seen a lot of different things work what i will say is motivate people to do what you want if you want the cs to get the dollar amount raised compensate them on that at box i believe our as a renewals rep our we had our denominator and then it moved by five percent every year because they wanted us to slowly start cutting into the discount the ae gave these things we'll be specific on that right so if you're a csm at block when you're doing this or what you're seeing work now are you is a csm getting assigned a million dollar book of business and it needs to grow to you know a million five uh you know in 12 months yep and we could do that by adding more value selling more features selling more or adding more seats and what's the commission and what's the structure there is it same as the ae or the sdr 5050 ot or what no that's i'm trying to think it's been a long time it was definitely not 50 50 because i remember i left 50 50 and at the time i thought yeah but talk about what you're seeing now because that was eight years ago i mean a lot of people will say if you incentivize csm's too much on upsells and they're going to be too transactional and not actually helpful yeah i just don't want to give you the wrong answer i don't work that close with cs i build outsourced sales dev teams i work hand in hand with sdr's to head off to aes and i also work with aes that are acting as cs so i teach them best practices on how to grow the accounts um i i wouldn't be able to quote you like the industry standard today for like a cs 100 of the time yeah okay this is interesting so hey if people want to get going with you to help them do all this stuff you just talked about what's like the minimum cost per month uh good question so i i i get you an outsourced sdr we kind of build a totally different package just so you know so we build fractional sales debt teams so a lot of sdrs get hired and left in the corner with a founder that doesn't know what they're doing and wondering why they're not succeeding so every one of our our sdrs start at 5k a month that's full-time or 2500 a month for part-time 20 hours a week uh they come with a coach that does two one-on-ones a week you basically get an sdr plus a manager for out the door for 2500 or 5k a month um i highly recommend 500 a month more at least in ot ideally the double um you know you lost me so it's 5k a month for that to that for that str to work 20 hours a week with the coach no uh half that 2500 20 hours five case full time god okay got 25 okay perfect and then sorry say that second thing again yeah absolutely some people are building from scratch so they don't know how to make a quota so what i tell them is what would you be happy with for the first month results second row and i tell them make sure an sdr is making at least 500 at part time and a thousand at full time a lot of new founders don't like the idea of a 50 50 split because they have nothing they have they're it's not apples 500 what make 500 what additional like dollars in commission so if they want if they want five meetings for part time i tell them pay a hundred bucks an sql like that don't overthink it just and i apologize earning an extra 500 a month at part time or an extra thousand a month so a lot of times we'll run pilots that contradict what i just said i'll say hey we don't know what they're gonna be able to book and you're letting them take some inbounds too and you have them running their first ever outbound campaign so let's just work backward from the money how many meetings do you need a month to pay for this and some i'll give you some napkin math some people will say right now if i got an sql for 500 and opt for a thousand will be in the green and you have to bacon obviously the fact they have bases and stuff like that so they'll say if i'm paying them 5k a month out the door that includes their manager if they're booking 10 for me i can give an extra 100. so i'm getting 10 meetings for six grand that i'm severely in the green on our arr and our closing percentage and again it trickles down interesting okay now when if someone's listening right now i want to start paying you 2500 bucks a month to do this for them do they have to have the tech stack already set up or will you get that set up for them included in the 2500 bucks per month uh i'm a yes man the answer is yes okay so some people have their text next set up i come in with personnel other people have a blank slate they ask me for tech stacks uh i yeah i hate this i'm not a var but there are people that i've negotiated i won't name them i've negotiated some really good deals that are severely less than and i we also does that that's what i was asking let's say that they someone listening right now stops paying you in a year and a half do you pass the whole system to them or do you hold on to the system yeah yeah 100 i i hold nothing emails passwords logins leads everything in the system you brought up a great point we actually never had any of that we we work from your environment my sdrs are in your domain and your crm i'm not buying stuff i'm negotiating agreements for them so that's why i said i'm not really a bar but my the people we work with and recommend they have a set price that's really less than what you see list cost that's not even most important i have a lot of people that know what i do know i build programs and i've had clients now for continuing five years they actually let my clients start off with like month to month or 30 you know 30 day 90 day trials of enterprise software where they don't got it you have those deals yeah so just be clear that sales rep then would have like if i was hiring one of these books for founder pat it would be like sdr founderpath.com in my hubspot crm like in my zoom info account and then so if you and i if i stop paying you six months from now we can sort of still have the systems built nailed it can i hire that sdr full time or do you hate me if i do that i don't hate you at all i call it a golden handshake we do 15 of their first annual base very similar like a recruiter just the base or base plus commission just base okay interesting so if it's 60k you're gonna take call it you know seven thousand five hundred ten thousand something like that yeah nine thousand how many sdrs have you placed they started with you and they're full-time at a company now i currently have just under 70 sdrs month to month within clients i keep 20 clients uh at all times i i don't really like going over 20 i'm stretched too thin and wow we paced we placed five last month like i would say if i really had to like put us on par we fall between three and five full placements at our clients they like converting it's like they pay to play they usually take the best ones everyone's like this is like against your own interest not really because i would lose them anyway to a full-time w2 roll why not lose them to one of my money yeah exactly so make sense you know hey this is really valuable we're out of time um let's wrap up with where can people go by the way if you want to sign up for this and check you out yeah yeah it's www dot seed sed the number two in the letter c dot com that's my consulting we have a free slack community um aka the head of sales dev at for x and i started it we just passed 2200 uh sdrs that's called sdr ready we do a wine wednesday you can find that every wednesday we post a video and put the link under there it's completely free guys there you have it let's wrap up jean with the famous five number one favorite book oh i'd say they're already selling number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh not ceo but definitely sam blonde at brex i've watched him since his benefits days uh he teaches me a lot and i get to see him at least once a month in miami number three what's your favorite online tool for building cdc favorite online tool for building cdc well godaddy was probably the easiest uh i'd say usher connect they are unknown it's grey hat software never no one's ever heard of them they're powerful number four how many hours of sleep you get every night eight hours every night and i work 16 hours a day and what's your situation married single kiddos uh married and just moved to palm beach florida very exciting okay and how old are you 37 all right take us home something you wish you knew when you were 20. i wish i knew that you get out what you put in honestly that's it guys cdc he's got 70 sdrs on his team about 20 customer sas founders that are building str teams through him he builds them in your environment you can hire them at the end if you want and pay them a 10 fee for bringing them on it's a great way to get started in a low risk way you're trying to figure out a scale your sales operation gino thanks for taking us to the top thank you nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate 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