How Alleyoop CEO Stephen Hays grew Alleyoop to $21.1M revenue and 45 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is stephen hayes he's the ceo and founder of alley-oop a demand generation agency that fully realizes the culmination of sales marketing tech automation and creative thinking over the past decade his company has grown from 10 to 50 people and has been honored to drive revenue for companies like adobe discoverorg and cleveland golf they provide the ultimate assist to growth-minded companies all right stephen you ready to take us to the top i am thank you you bet hey what you're doing must be working because discoverorg just you know paid a lot of money for their number one rival zoom info so that's all you right well all would be uh overstatement for sure i have to tell you discovery org is one of the best companies we've ever worked with they would have done amazing things without us but i think if you ask them they'll tell you that we've certainly been an important part of their growth story but uh they were gonna do they were gonna do great things regardless the way they're built the way they're wired and the type of people that that work at discovery or just an exceptional organization back in episode 15 17 uh henry came on and talked about how they passed 165 million bucks in arr and he broke down how their sales operation worked even down to the ratio of sdr to account executive customer success rep and how the cs folks are responsible for expansion and they are quota carrying as a team walk me through how your lead generation services kind of feed into the machine he's built internally yeah so what we found is the way we start with the company kind of evolves over time as they grow and we grow with them so when we started with discovery work they had two sdrs they were kind of trying to figure out does this work what year was this it was five years ago okay approximately five years ago um so i flew out met with henry and said hey listen you guys have the most amazing platform i've ever seen more of the world needs to know about it and good things will happen when you get in front of the right people and so we scaled the heck out of it and we offered to them just technology that maybe they weren't quite ready for in-house uh we offered them capability what was it what was some of the tech just some automation um outreach type sequences at the time we were using a different platform than we do today and some of it's a bit dated in terms of even talking about it well tell us what you're using today what automation platform we use today so today we use outreach for that particular part of the outbound engine at that time we were using three or four different tools to accomplish what we do today with outreach yep that's very good again we had we had and manny's killing it as well he thinks he'll hit 10 million per quarter uh here by the end of q2 and that was episode 1136 so you're you are riding the backs of wales that's for sure yeah and outreach outsourced part of their sdr function to us early on as well and one of the benefits you see is even a company like outreach who has an amazing sdr function we help them kind of learn a little bit grow a little bit and best practice is sharing and competition yeah when they outsource part of their function to us their internal teams production went up by 20 so let me ask you a question i could imagine a ceo listening that's going yeah but i i love what nathan and steven are talking about right now i'd love to i'd love to pay stephen to do this but it makes me nervous putting something so critical to our business externally how what would what advice would you give that ceo to manage that risk well i think you have to look at the company's history who've we done it for how do we do it and i think if there's not cultural philosophical and operational alignment you shouldn't do it if you're someone who can't handle not seeing and knowing every single thing then outsourcing is not an option it just you should do it in-house because it wouldn't be fun for anybody but there's certain parts in your life in certain moments in your life where you have to make decisions that equate to scale and equate to success and a level of success you simply wouldn't have found on your own being a solo type person or company mindset um so what i would say to you is there's probably three thousand companies that do what we do there's probably three or four of them that if you really care about your brand and you really care about operational aspects of the business and it's not results at all costs there's only three or four companies that you could outsource to yeah so it's actually not that hard of a decision even when you think of it through the right lens yep no but by the way this is um this is a space is extremely hot you know if people want to build this same kind of thing internally just your software costs per person that you have operating the machine can get expensive and i'm looking at some of your pricing starting at 2500 bucks a month going up to five grand a month for 1500 target prospects for either you know meetings or demos et cetera i mean so i can see where there's cost savings here and efficiencies what about knowledge right so if if if if a henry uses you uh for for discoverorg and then uh their competitor a zoom info came along and said hey we want to use you too um wouldn't discoverorg be concerned about the the knowledge they've essentially paid you to learn building their system you would just think give to zoom info well there's different types of things that we do with certain companies so i'll give you you know i can tell you flat out that we've turned down working with every every uh discoverer or competitor on the market okay so you need to offer exclusivity we do we don't offer it to everyone and we don't offer it always but it's certainly an option and discoverorg was worthy of that loyalty and that commitment and no no regrets and certainly we've done that for others so stephen do you um if i was in your shoes uh and this this isn't a good trade of mine but it is a natural human one when i read that henry's passing 160 million bucks in arr and just double the size of his business buying zoom info so call it 200 250 million bucks right as a private b2b sas company that's one of the larger ones and maybe he's following maybe a qualtrics route right where they then go get bought up by someone big i can't help but think my gosh i wish i took equity instead of making henry pay me 2 500 bucks a month back five years ago uh do do you ever take equity for these and if so have you ever ever taken equity it turns out to be worth nothing uh yes and yes and i asked henry i made that offer to henry uh all those years ago uh he said no yeah yeah cool yeah he had double done on himself that's funny he did yeah but you know what um them is a referral and a reference and and telling our story in a way that we couldn't tell our story that you know it comes back yeah it comes back in a big way regardless of it's not just financials so yeah so stephen my audience is going to learn two i think things from this you know the next 10 minutes of this one is you're running your own business and how you grew it but the second is they're all sas my audience is almost all b2b sas ceos and they're trying to build their own internal engines and they're going to learn from you how you did it for other people so let me focus on the former first your business is it a true agency or do you have true recurring predictable revenue we have true recurring predictable revenue okay so there's a software component underlying the human aspect right now there are software components um but it's a subscription okay essentially that includes technology okay marketing services sales resources and consulting okay so our programs all come with playbook design they all come with database services they all come with creative services so for most of our customers we're building a package that includes video production explainer video production uh call 1 analysis and recommendations we're aligning to someone doing a demo we're going to make darn sure their demos top notch we don't want to align to someone who has a bad demo and no offense to them their demo might just be bad their product might be great so we're going to help with that so it's a bit it's a subscription that includes different layers of services depending on when someone comes to us how how fully baked or not baked they are their product might be fully baked but their go-to-market strategy might not be so we have an in-house agency data team tech team services team to support that effort because we also don't want our sdrs going to market half-baked either that's not a rewarding experience we want them to be professionally supported and have success rates that far outpace industry averages so they can have success and make money too yeah so stephen how kind of walk me through on average what's the company going to pay you per month for kind of again your average plan sure so a digital only plan that replace replaces someone putting say hubspot in uh is 2500 a month okay so that includes data content services creative services delivery of messaging to the market and it includes lead generation and response management what's the end point though of your of that part of the process if i pay you that is it a scheduled meeting or skill what is it it's a lead so it's okay uh scoring of interaction of content and responses okay got it and...