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...