How Craver CEO Amin Yazdani grew Craver to $2M revenue with a 30 person team in 2023.

hi everyone my name is Amin I'm the CEO of craer um food Tech startup working on smbs and today what we're going to be talking about is the SMB SAS Playbook and how you can go building a high growth sass engine by Bridging the Gap between the Enterprise and SMB tactics um over the next 20 minutes this is what we're going to be looking at so one is let's have a look at the SB SAS landscape why SNB SAS is a gold mine of opportunity and what are the key differences between SMB and Enterprise SAS and which one of those differences actually matter we're going to be then looking into Bridging the Gap between the two how to adapt Enterprise uh tactics when it comes to sales and marketing to uh SMB SAS and the importance of diversification when it comes to the sales and marketing tactics is specific speically for smbs we're going to be talking a little bit more about that and of course I'm going to be sharing some of our tactics and strategies and the Practical tactics that you can Implement uh to accelerate your growth today now why am I talking to you about this is because after an initial growth that we had we we've been dealing with six consecutive quarters of stagnation we hit a wall in early in 2021 and and we were not growing anymore those six quarters where we were really trying a lot of different tactics figuring out what's not working to be able to reignite our growth and thankfully we were able to do that so those strategies uh that helped us reignite that growth are going to be what what I going to be talking about uh today and how how did we go from there to turn around and really start our growth engine again but first I want to talk about the SNB SAS landscape and it's it's super important it is a gold mine in this is why I'm so bullish on SMB SAS in general vertical SAS it is a gold mine of opportunity there's more than 30 million smbs in the US AOW so this the size of the market is very big um and when it comes to what they need and how you can serve them um these a lot of times are competing with Enterprise like we are in the restaurant Market our customers coffee shops local coffee shops is competing with the starboxes of the world is it better now okay no worries so these are competing with Enterprise already so again a coffee shop a local coffee shop is competing with the Starbucks is competing with uh Duncan but they don't don't have the the tools and the technology available to them to be able to compete when it comes to technology and as a result of that in this David versus golias they're super underserved and they're that market is very open to disrupture that's why SB like you see a lot of vertical SAS going a a little bit deeper and understanding that these are smaller customers these are smaller uh potential buyers for you but they have their unique challenges a smaller teams a smaller budget but able to really work with you and go through uh through the getting a product that might not be as polished as a as an Enterprise and really work with you and iterate on getting what what they want is super important because then what you can do is that you can turn those unique challenges that it comes with an SMB into unique opportunities for you to be able to gain a market and really go deep on that side and this is why I'm so bullish uh on on the SNB landscape and what we've learned when we were dealing with that um big block of like grossing plateauing was that a lot of times when it comes to the SNB sass you hit the wall and you would think that the market is the problem and a lot of times I I bet that the market itself is not the problem but our approach to the market is usually the problem the way that you you can sell to an SMB is different than Enterprise how what they need is different how they buy is different how they find you is different so it's very important to take that opportunity to detour and to change your approach on how you sell to that so let's talk about Bridging the Gap and basically the Mantra here is that you don't have to reinvent the wheel we just need to adapt those tactics Enterprise have there's a lot of literature out there there Enterprise stas has been honing their tactics and strategies over the years and it's a there's a lot there to learn and we should do that we should pick pick up those pieces but when it comes to deploying them you need to adapt those those tactics and not just adopt them we've done that with bunch of tactics from Enterprise early years we adapt we adopted them and they didn't work and we just put them aside outbound doesn't work for SMB put them aside and then we had to come back to it a few years later figure out why doesn't it work and figure out the the formula and then go from there to actually adapt it to our business to the SNB Market that we are going after and really make it work and the last thing here is about diversification in for SMB s to really success succeed in selling to smbs and growing you need to diversify and it's it's very simple if you have an Enterprise task business in order to get to that $1 million Mark you a lot of times you just need one client sometimes you need four five maybe 10 but when it comes to SMB you need hundreds of clients to be able to get to that point and the approach that you can get on an Enterprise to go and knock on every door to get to those handful of client does not work when it comes to SMB so you need diversification because a lot of times things that happen is that some of those strategies work for a while and stop working you need to come back to them and fix that and we had to deal with that a lot if you don't diversify you will not be able to succeed there so I I want to jump on the outb I already mentioned it this is out was the strategy that we adapted adopted first without adapting to it and it didn't work but we came back to it and we were looking at specifically Why didn't it work for us we're going we're working with restaurants uh our aru at the time was around $4,000 per year and what what the literature was telling us is that if you don't have an RP of 2550 better 100 Grand a year outbound doesn't work for you but what what was missing from that big headline was that there are assumptions in there the Assumption on the number of leads on an SDR can generate in an Enterprise which is around one or two per week there are assumptions around how long it takes to close a deal in Enterprise which is between 3 to nine months on average and those assumptions were not true for us so there should have been a way for us to figure this out and this is what we did we had to increase and adjust our RP and and increase that RP and I will talk a little bit more about that a little bit later we we were able to increase that from 445,000 to 7,000 but then we figured out our time to close our median time to close a deal from a demo uh to a close deal is less than seven days so that 3 to n months does not adop apply to me so I can change the formula in a way that can that can apply to me so if I put that one week two weeks average in that formula then I can what I can do I don't need 50 demo booked a week but I need a seven to nine demo booked a week from an R and the question was that can I go and Achieve that so you can change the formula if you just go look at that and just don't take the headline so that was that was something about outman I'm G to come to this outman is in my view is the most underused Enterprise tactic that almost any SNB SAS business with with about $5,000 in RP uh average yearly uh contract value should be able to use today today Alan is producing 30% of our Topline Revenue every month now let's jump into the tactics and the strategies so Alman already spoiled it a little bit so we're going to go a little bit deeper on on this side as well but Alman is an important one so increasing aru was a key for us to make it successful on outbound the other thing that was key was channels again looking at the literature of our Enterprise says outbound means CA but for us Cod email doesn't work we are working with restaurant owners they use email but they don't really open it we tried a few different things we tried Instagram and Linkedin messaging Instagram worked a little bit LinkedIn they're not on LinkedIn so that didn't work at all but we figured out actually what works for us right now today what works for us on out one is actually the old school cult calling we pick up the phone we call the restaurant and we don't call their their mobile phone number we call the actual restaurant which you can find the data and for our Target customers a lot of times you can find a manager or an owner at a restaurant and if we can hone our messaging we can get them on the call and we can B book that demo right now we have an s strr team that consistently booking nine to 11 demos a week from cold calling the other thing that we had to do so we had to test test channels to to figure out what is the actual channel that we can we need to use to deploy that the other thing was that you need...