The Harris Consulting Group revenue, CEO Richard Harris, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is richard harris he is teaching reps how to earn the right to ask questions which questions to ask and when to do it as the primary growth driver behind his neat neat selling methodology 20 plus years of experience he's got clients that include gainsight google cloud sales loft and others he brings a liberal arts degree in school of life to sales he's been a full cycle account executive sdr sales manager director of sales you name it he's done it richard you're ready to take us to the top thank you that was the longing i hate my introductions no i think you're right i have to caveat this by saying i get consultants asking me all the time to come on the show because they sell sass companies and i always say no the reason i dug deeper on you is because i've interviewed a lot of the founders that you've worked with and i know some of their sales motions and they're sometimes unique or different so if you're sort of the whisperer for this kind of thing i said you know what we're gonna have richard on so thanks for coming on i appreciate it man like i i know i'm not probably your normal guest so thank you so much i really am flattered to be here so when do you usually get involved with sas companies and can you talk maybe about gain sight like how early do you get involved typically insight is a really fun story i'll give you the short version i had one client in austin it was my first client i was using a yahoo email address i'm flying back from austin my first week i sit down on the plane next to this guy literally in suede shoes and jeans and a blazer and it's nick made it from game site this is 11 years ago 12 years nah eight years ago nine years ago and they had 15 employees right he and i had this amazing conversation we got shushed by the flight attendant twice um and we were sober we weren't drinking at all we were just having a good time and you know you know the biggest mistake i made in that deal is i should have taken options but uh that's so that is an instance where i got in really early to build 2011 right um say that again nathan when did you start with game site 2011 yeah i think so right around the time they were founded right so no it's probably 2013 because i've been doing this nine years-ish so it was right after i started doing this okay great and what did it look like i mean how did nick engage you was it a retainer were you actually a full-time employee what it looked like no it was it was a retainer engagement for about 30 days um where i came in and really built out the process and trained the whole team they they really got the concept early of that everybody sells even the accounting department right like how you treat your vendors matters um and the content i teach is very tactical so if i'm teaching i don't want to get into a pitch but if i'm teaching certain tactical things it always becomes relevant no matter the role sales sdr customer success got it and so what did nick pay you for that 30-day trial i'm sorry what did nick pay you for that 30-day trial back in 2013. what did they pay me yeah uh a healthy five figures okay healthy figure so does it stop or do people continue working with you typically yeah no it's a great question it's very different now particularly because of cobin cobit it used to be the traditional show up do a day of training maybe one or two coaching sessions because of cobit we shifted to a five-week training and reinforcement model um i'm conscious of sounding pitchy so please stop me nathan so uh where we spend the first week doing two hours a day four days in a row so like monday through thursday we do two hours which allows for micro learning greater greater reinforcement greater retention and then for the next four weeks i do once a week meetings with both the managers and then once a week meetings with the sales team so that it now is a much different engagement with gainsight it was totally different because they wanted me on site listening to calls you know it was a completely different game uh you know they were my second client like you know thank you so much to nick for you know taking a shot on the guy with the yahoo email address of the day so um so that's what it looks like now because now it's it's always been but now i've built out the reinforcement piece and so what is that monthly cost now you know during code what are customers paying you on average uh or for something like that it's around 18 give or take 800 a month yeah for the five weeks and so and and i don't charge by the hour and i don't charge by the head so like if you got a you know if you've got a team of 20 i'm gonna it's the same as if you've got a team of ten yeah right and are these all sas teams or you go across industries it's mostly sas it's not all some of the fortune companies are different right um you know google was google cloud so it was like their aws service so kinda sass but kind of not right uh visa was literally their you know their corporate cards right how do they go and sell a corporate card to delta airlines or you know those kinds of places so uh it but 90 of my clients are sas related and how many clients are you working with today uh i usually take on about two to three per month um i can capacity more because the way i revamp the program they're shorter days and i don't have to travel um anything more than about five clients in a month those a lot at least for me i can do more i just you know at some point you know i don't need to grind that hard yeah yeah but it's a five-point startup right like i'm not trying to go public i'm not trying to do those things i've built a really nice healthy business that's more than a lifestyle business but um you know i love the fact that i'm home for my kids every day and all those kinds of things so five sort of five coaching clients at any time sort of paying you know call it two brand per month again that's a great business right uh for yourself you're doing a lot about leadership too now you've done this since 2013 um obviously your model changed over time there's a lot of folks in this space you know my first sales book was neil rackham spin selling back in the day uh and there's a lot of new sales that's coming out all the time have you put out sort of any books like tell me more about what meat means well yeah thank you for asking i'm in the process of writing it you know i have been for about two years and i got lazy about it but now i'm actually committed to it there's a great service out there that i found that really guides you through like nine steps in a box yeah kind of yeah i mean it is not kind of it is about book in the box and so i need that leverage i need that piece because otherwise i'll just get distracted so i'm a i'm super open about things i'm very focused on mental health and i have adhd so if i don't have uh parameters around me make some things a little bit harder yeah let's talk uh about gainsight because again nick has come on many times right so last time he was on the show uh was back in late 2019 he talked about flirting with a 70 million dollar run rate he talked about 700 customers they'd obviously raised and they've raised a bunch of money but his team size was 700 and i asked him how many quota carrying sales reps do you have and he said 22 and i also then looked up what the past reps were on linkedin in other words ones that were at the inside now are not against anymore there were 36 so there's a lot of sort of churn in the sales team the annual quota target he told me was eight hundred thousand dollars for those quota carrying reps right down this system for me where do you think it scales where does it break should other people copy this yeah so i think that the answer to that is everything's an experiment the first two years in sales right there is no here's the playbook for everybody right because you have to figure out what product market fit you don't have product market fit or 10 or 20 customers i just learned this yesterday from the vc in austin um and and i really thought it was interesting is that at 20 customers you got a baseline you got to get to 50 to really decide if you've got the right market fit and he was talking in a very specific niche so that you know obviously there's a little bit of difference there so what i think the key piece is bringing on that closer first you need to bring in the closer who knows how to do it without the process being built that's the question you're asking me and yeah you do want a sales process but not super early on not with your first second or third rep maybe by the time you get to your second or third you start to figure out what your first process is and even then i call it a process hypothesis because it's gonna change i can assure you that what nick put together uh way back when when i was there we talked about creating the stages is probably very different than what it is now and as an early stage founder and even a mid-stage or even nick you should be looking to break it what do we what what do we need to do...