How Cledara CEO Brad Van Leeuwen grew Cledara to $10.8M revenue with a 63 person team in 2024.

quick context this was recorded March 28th and 29th so a couple weeks ago at my live event SAS open.com we had a thousand software CEOs there if you missed it we hope to see at the next one September 5th and 6th in New York City SAS open.com but for now let's jump into the recording we started flatlining on our pipe gen so you can see that the changes that we made really did have an impact click-through rate of get started free was nine times higher nine times higher than book of [Music] demo hey folks if we haven't met yet my name is Nathan ladka I launched and sold my first software company back in 2015 and went on to write a book about it which you guys made a Wall Street Journal best seller purchasing over 30,000 copies thank you so much for that after the book I launched this show and went went on to create founder path.com I raised a large fund to do non-dilutive deals with B2B software Founders so far we've invested in over 400 software Founders totaling $150 million here in 2024 we're doing three to four New Deals per week so if you're looking for Capital and don't want to give up Equity go sign up at founder path.com for free to get your offer all right let's jump into the interview and so what I'll talk about today is something we've never spoken about publicly before we'll be talking about how we we changed our go to market and the decisions and puts we had for that and my hope today is that we all go back to the office on Monday and at least a you've learned something B you sign up to cadara along the way but see you can use some of this in your own go to market function so we changed our go to market very aggressively between Christmas and New Year um last year right so why did we do that well first of all we have a lot of data right so we could see among our customers that were buying software through us how buyer Behavior was was changing both at the initial purchase and the renewal um we could see how that was changing over time so what we'll do what we'll talk about is how we use that data what we changed how we approached pricing how we appro approached packaging how we aligned sales and marketing and then how we brought that all together in in our sales team quotas and the buyer Journey so hands up who found last year challenging who felt like they got punched in the face we've heard that before who got punched in the face a little bit last year yeah I everyone's got their hands up and probably everyone else that didn't put their hands up is not being entirely truthful so for us you know for a long time pipe gen was easy right pipe gen was something that just happened people would book demos people would respond to our outbound and we didn't need to think about it it was it was like the air we breathed it it just happened and then last year something interesting happened we started flatlining on our pipe gen right the the quota attainment was was dropping off as we were adding more sdrs we were not booking necessarily uh more demos we were being consistent it wasn't going down but I'm I wanted to um double Revenue last year and I was wanted to think about how we were going to double Revenue again this year and so Flat Line didn't make me very very excited um and so what did we do right how did what did we think about whilst this this section of the chart was was flat what did we do to respond so what we did was probably what a lot of companies did we decided to widen our aperture right instead of just selling to our ICP we said well you know what the Market's tough It's especially tough for smaller companies let's go a little bit bigger right we we had companies that had come inbound to us that had several thousand employees so we're like well let's go see if we can generate more deals there as well as sell to our Standard customer 50 to 500 people and you know what was interesting about it was though we did book opportunities with buyers of that size and though we closed them it didn't really have an impact on the total amount of pipeline we were we were booking and so coming into Christmas last year we were thinking okay um we've tried to go up Market in addition to our our S&B midmarket it's not got the results we wanted right we're not having a chart that's going up and to the right we need to make a change and you can see that last bar there this is a an index of our pipe generation from q1 this year till about two days ago so you can see that the changes that we made um really did have an impact and we'll be we'll be talking about it um as we go through so where did we start we we started by looking at our own data in our in our sales pipeline so we saw pipe was good not great but the problem was when we started looking under the hood yeah there wasn't a lot to like right here's our average sales cycle so for Clara we were closing deals on average every took us 30 days more or less since the beginning of time for us 30 days we had the machine that got deals done but as we widened that aperture what happened was well we were working on deals that were a little less familiar right so some of our AES attention shifted away from the deals they could close quickly in in an environment we knew to finding ourselves selling to different personas with different objections um you know big buying committees that we'd never dealt with before and look this is probably not a surprise to anyone that runs Revenue in this room but that was not a place we wanted to be we wanted our AES to focus on deals that we could close in a predictable way interestingly our win rate didn't change it just took a lot longer longer and we had to work a lot harder for it so that that uh that explosion in our sales cycle was a real wakeup call and what we decided to do was we needed to go one level deeper we needed to look at more data to see what was happening and how we could use that to think about our strategy so before I talk about the data we look at I want to share where we get this data from so I'd like you to all meet cadara cadara is a SAS management platform used by more than thousand companies around the world to discover buy manage and cancel the software they use to run their business uh we save our customers a bunch of money we save our customers a bunch of time but really interestingly it gives us probably the best real-time view of SAS buying that exists anywhere in the world we also get really deep data so this is I quickly talk through this data here but what this what this is is data from onboarding process so when we onboard a customer the first thing that we want to do is understand what software they've got because you can't manage what you can't see so uh when our customers deploy our our software we get to see their entire software estate whether they whether they know they've got that software or not and what you can see here is that more than 60% of companies have at least 40% of their software being stuff that it Finance didn't know uh that they had right sales and finance sorry sales and marketing teams are are big offenders here and so the point of sharing this is our data that we were using at that we Ed between Christmas and New Year didn't just talk about the official buying processes that exist in companies it actually used the reality of what was happening in our customers in their businesses and in the market SAS is everywhere right SAS is everywhere in business is I put this here mostly CU I like this GIF but to get the point across that um we have a lot of data so a th000 companies 32 countries in the last 12 months our customers have purchased or renewed nearly 3/4 of a million software subscriptions if you're a SAS company in this room you sell software chances are some or many of your customers use us to to buy you our customers buy from more than 5,000 vendors and every day this provides us more more than 2 million data points about the real time state of the of the SAS market so what do we do with all that data and what did we do with that data to figure out how we should change our sales strategy so one for anyone who follows us on our newsletter or on LinkedIn you'll see us share data like this all the time um what this is is something we call the SAS buyers index and I'll quickly walk you through what this shows and then what we did about it the SAS buyers index asks a very simple question we look at one single company and we say did they spend more on software this month than they did last month if they spent more on software we give them a score of 200 if they score if they spend less we give them a score of zero if it's about the same we give them 100 then we run that algorithm across every single company that buys software through us and average all those zeros 100s and 200s that means that if the the score becomes finishes up above 100 in any given month it means the average company is increasing their software spend it's below 100 it means they're decreasing what you're what you're looking at here is that data segmented by the size of the buyer right and segmented by the size of the buyer over time so you can see the light blue line of smaller businesses the the bigger line are bigger buyers of software and...