Dealpad Revenue & Funding (2024)

[00:00] Quick context. This was recorded March twenty eighth and twenty ninth. So a couple weeks ago at my live event, saasopen.com. We had a thousand software CEOs there. If you missed it, we hope to see at the next one, September fifth and sixth in New York City, saasopen.com. But for now, let's jump into the recording. [00:18] >> This post that I put on LinkedIn within seven weeks had generated a million of pipeline for us, and we've closed almost a 250,000 in new ARR. [00:32] >> So I'm Adam. I'm the cofounder of Dealpad. I've founded three b to b software companies generating 20,000,000 in revenue. I'm currently running Dealpad as cofounder and CEO. We launched it four years three years ago [00:46] now, 2021, and we finished on $3,700,000 [00:51] >> last year. And we've grown 300 year on year over the last three years. So I want to talk to you today about why as founders, you're the best salespeople in your company. How many technical founders do we have in the room? Okay. So technical founders inherently aren't very good at being comfortable in front of sales in front of in a sales environment, in front of customers. But I'll talk to you about why I think that as [01:17] >> founders, regardless if you're commercial or technical, you're the best people to support your sales motion going forward. So my personal outreach, I'm a commercial guy, so my background is revenue. So I'm quite comfortable being in front of the market. But I lead things at Dealpad for my team. I lead by example. I get a 70% higher response rate to my outreach than my sales team because I'm reaching out to CEOs, I'm reaching out to CROs, and [01:47] >> they respond well to another CEO reaching out to them rather than an SDR. Of the responses that I get of the responses I've had, 36% have led to sales. Massive. Now it's quite a small number. It's not a huge number, but 36% of everybody that responds to my outreach, we close. So for me, it's worth me investing the time in that outreach. I'm going to show you as well how we close some fairly big deals by [02:21] >> teaming up inside our organization to attract and reach the buying committee, the full senior buying committee of our prospects. Before I do that, I'm going tell you a story. So I was the CRO of a 50,000,000 ARR SaaS company. And the first thing I did was I looked at their customer list as I probably would. And the first thing I found was they've made a very common mistake. When I say mistake, I think it was a [02:48] >> mistake. And they categorized their customers by revenue. Who does that here? When you think about your customers, when you categorize them into tiers, who does it by revenue? [03:00] >> Quite a few of you. Okay. So I'll tell you why I believe that's the wrong strategy. I looked at their tiers. And in tier four, they had four tiers, which were companies that were paying them under $7,000. Their ACV was their average ACV was 14,000. They had eight customers that had 5,000,000,000 of revenue. And those companies didn't have a CS, a customer success person. They didn't have an account manager assigned to the account. There was no [03:32] >> opportunity to grow those accounts at all because as far as the company were concerned, they were just paying them a few thousand bucks a year. So on my first week, I said to our VP of sales, I said, look, Amanda, we're going to increase our average order value from 14,000 to a 100,000. And she looked at me and said, how are we going to do that? I think we're jumping ahead of ourselves. We can't sell something [03:59] >> for a $100,000 that we're selling for 14,000 today. I said, Amanda, you're right. We're not going to. We're gonna sell it for a million. [04:10] >> And she looked she looked at me like I was just off a different planet. So I said to her, look, here's an example of a customer. They were a 43,000 ARR deal for us. It was one of our biggest customers at the time. I said to them, said to Amanda, what are they buying? And her response to me was, well, they're using our accessibility suite make sure that their web pages are accessible. And currently it's their [04:39] >> APAC team using the product. I said, Amanda, that's not what they're buying. And I asked her again. I said, what are they buying? And she couldn't answer it. And if I ask each one of you, I would say nine out of 10 of you, and this is no disrespect, probably couldn't answer that question either. Because when I ask most people what the customer is buying, they will give me a product response. And I did I didn't [05:02] >> know at the time what that company were buying, but I assumed they were probably buying revenue. It probably meant that a large proportion of their web users were visually impaired and weren't able to read the website, which meant they were missing out on revenue. There was a reason that they cared about their website being accessible, and it wasn't because they wanted their website to be accessible. So really understanding what the customer is buying will be the [05:30] >> biggest unlock to you growing revenue. It's how I've grown my revenues from 0 to 20,000,000 across two companies, and we're now at 7.5. Understand what your customers are buying. So I said to her, go away and come back to me with what they're actually buying. Within an hour, she came back and said, you're going to like this. I said, well, what is it? She said, they need to be accessibility compliant globally in the next three years. [05:57] >> She'd been into their annual report. They were a public company. And she looked at their charter. And I said, what happens if they're not accessible, if they miss compliance? She said, well, they'll be fined. And I said, well, how much? And she said, I don't know. Millions. So we spent the next three months trying to figure out who was responsible for compliance and for hitting these goals in the next three years inside this organization, we found [06:23] >> six people. So I went and rallied my senior executive team, including our CEO, and I said we need to drop tools for the next three months, and we need to focus on this. And we individually went and connected to all the right people, and I orchestrated it. And I just said, I need you to do this, and I need you to do this. And long story short, we moved that customer from 43,000 ARR to 1,600,000. We [06:49] >> signed a three year contract. Well, it wasn't my money, unfortunately. I didn't get it. But we signed a three year contract worth more than $4,000,000 So my joke when I first arrived three months earlier and I said we're going to increase this by a million actually came true. Now that we hadn't sold it when I left two and a half years later, we hadn't sold any other million dollar customers. But the moral of this story is [07:15] >> that you're probably leaving so much revenue on the table. Because when I walked into that company, they were proud that they had a customer paying them $40,000 a year. They didn't look at the fact that this company had $2,000,000,000 of revenue. They didn't look at the fact that they were really up against the wall with a with a massive fine impending if they hadn't hit these compliance milestones. So I'll I'll urge you to think about what [07:41] >> good looks like and what great looks like in your business. If one of your reps or one of your salespeople come back and they say they've signed this deal, inspect it and actually say, you know, is this all we can get from the customer? Is there anything else? Because if you probe and you find a company wide problem that's a real pain, I promise you, and you you will increase the ACV. And if you understand what [08:05] >> your customer is buying, it becomes much, much easier. So key takeaways from this little story is that talk about outcomes. Don't talk about product. Understand what your customers are buying. Segment your customers by growth, not by revenue. Understand how big these customers are. How big is the potential opportunity? Growth doesn't mean it's there right now. But if you've got a company with a billion revenues paying you $10,000 a year, that's a growth customer. That is not [08:43] >> a customer that should be in your bottom tier and not getting any customer support. And find a company wide pain. I inspect all of our deals, and I make sure that we're actually we're shooting for as large as we can get. It's going to be more complicated. It's going to take longer to do it. But when it does, it's worth it. And this is how we achieved it. It's called level selling. This isn't my term. It's [09:10] >> pretty well known, and it's very, very simple. We identify the key people inside the organization that we want to talk to, and I will then connect him with the CEO of that company. I will get my CMO to connect him with their CMO, my CTO to connect in with their CTO. And now we've got five or six people on my c suite connected in to five or six people in the prospects c suite as well. We [09:38] >> don't sell to them. I'll reach out and say, hey. I I understand you're talking to one of our team. Would love to connect. That's it. And I'll do it via LinkedIn typically. I I don't sell to them. I don't badger them, and my team do the same. But you'll have these serendipitous moments where it comes back around and where your CPO might see something that they've because they now follow them on LinkedIn, they might they might [10:02] >> have shared, and they'll lean in, and they'll give some insight into a problem they might be having. That nugget right there will come back in three or four months or a year to help you when you're now talking to that organization and the CPO says, oh, by the way, this is a great organization. I've been talking to the CPO of that company a bit. They're really they know their shit. Right? And so have a think about [10:25] >> level selling. And don't just do it when you're ready to sell. Set this up and really think forward. If you have targeted accounts that you want to win every year, we identify probably 50 accounts that we want to win, that we're really intentional about. And obviously, we don't win the 50. But it really helps us understand what we need to do on those 50 accounts, and we put this into practice and into work. And it's it's [10:52] >> worth doing it. Level selling is very, very powerful, and particularly as a founder. And the last thing on why founders are, in my opinion, the best salespeople in in a company is because you get shit done. You can move the needle. If a salesperson is inside a prospect and the prospect says, can you do this? They're gonna get three answers from the salesperson. It's gonna be no. It's gonna be I don't know, or it's gonna be [11:18] >> yes, definitely. The third one's a lie, and that's probably where most salespeople will gravitate towards. And the second two aren't great because it leaves the prospect hanging. But as the fact if the founder gets asked that question, it's either no, but we can do it, or no, we can't do it because and but, or yeah, yeah, we this is this is easy for us. And if it's if it's your decision, you're gonna decide what we're gonna [11:45] >> reprioritize things for the next couple of months. We're gonna build this product or this integration because we need to win this customer. And as the founder, you can make those decisions on the spot, and you can see it through. A salesperson comes to you, and they of my sales guys came to me a few weeks ago, they said, look. We've got this great customer. We think we can win it, but we need we need this integration. [12:06] >> And it was an integration that we've never been asked for before, and we decided not to do it. If I was on that and I wasn't part of it. But if I'd been on that call, I might have decided to do it. But because it was the salesperson, they can't make decisions. Now their deal is scuppered because of me. So if you're a founder, get out there. Be comfortable with not don't sell. Be comfortable with engaging [12:29] >> with prospects. So I wanna talk to you about some experimentations and some hacks that I've seen work really well. I'm not really somebody that's on LinkedIn very well, that was on LinkedIn very much, but I've got a mentor. If you haven't got a mentor, get a mentor. It's the best thing you can do if you're the right one. And she said to me, you need to get onto LinkedIn. You've got a lot of experience. You can [12:52] >> help people. And so I started writing some bullshit on LinkedIn, and people started to respond to it for some reason. And one of the things I I I found in in in one of my one of my files was I was the VP of sales at Salesforce. And during that time, my team and I built some scripts for cold email. And we just spent weeks and months optimizing these scripts for conversion. And then I took those [13:23] >> scripts, and I've used them repeatedly well all of my other roles in my companies. We use them today. We just adapt them. And I just thought, well, why don't I share these because they work really well? So I posted a made a post on LinkedIn. Let me just jump to this. Sorry. So this is our experimentation sheet. So if you want this, I can share it with you. It really helps us measure and track and prioritize [13:49] >> all of the experiments that we run. And so we just test the hell out of everything. A lot of this doesn't work, but it really helps us understand what we're testing, where we are with these tests. If you want this sheet, let me know. I can share it with you. So [14:08] >> this post that I put on LinkedIn, within seven weeks, had generated a million of pipeline for us, and we've closed almost a quarter of a million in new ARR from this post. And I'll tell you what the post was. It was me saying, hey, I've got these scripts that we use at Salesforce. We had [14:33] >> almost a million impressions for this post. 1,500 likes, almost 8,000 people saying they wanted the script. It was insane. I had people reaching out to me that I knew to say, you're you've gone viral. I've had so many people sharing your post with me because they thought I'd be interested in it. And this is this is from from a from a standing still on LinkedIn. I've you know, I I don't have many followers. It was just [15:01] >> it resonated. And so not only now had I helped the sales community, I'd also generated a million of pipeline for my company. And I'd helped my sales team close almost a quarter of a million of sales to date. So that's one hack. Get on LinkedIn. If you've got something valuable to share, even if you haven't got a network and a large following, you're still going to leverage it. The second is probably the most powerful hack that [15:28] >> I've used, and it was around recruitment. And it was very serendipitous. So over the course of a few weeks, I had a couple of people that I used to work with reach out to me, salespeople, to say, I've lost my job or I'm looking for a new role. Do you know anyone? [15:44] So I spoke to a couple [15:46] >> of founders that I knew. And I said, look, there's a great person over here that's looking for some work. Are you interested? I connected these two people with two different founders, and they both got hired on the spot. They were good. And and the founders trusted me. I thought, okay. Well, maybe there's a lot of people in my network that are out of work or want a new job. Maybe there's a lot of founders that I [16:05] >> know because most of my network is founders and CEOs that are looking to hire. So I posted something else, and I just wrote about it. And I had 650 people. Not a lot, but enough. Common to say, I'm a DevOps engineer. I'm a RevOps person. I'm a sales exec. I'm a VP of sales. I'm looking for work. [16:30] >> And what happened there was now not only what was I helping the community, was I helping founders hire people and find great talent, getting people into jobs, which is the main outcome of what I was hoping to do? I also hired four people myself. I I filled four open roles with zero cost from one post. And two of those roles we've been trying to hire for months. So it was a really great hack. So the general [17:01] >> kind of sentiment there is just to get on LinkedIn. Even if you're not comfortable with it, just find a way of adding some value to the community. And you'll find you'll get it paid back in droves. And then the final one is probably, for me, the most interesting. So back in September last year, we were looking at how we could increase lead conversion from our website. We get about 10,000 monthly uniques on the dealpad.io website. So [17:28] >> not a huge amount, but meaningful enough. And our lead conversion was around 0.8%, which I've come to understand is about average, maybe just a little bit below average. But for me, it wasn't enough. So we started to run some experiments. [17:44] And one of the experiments we ran [17:46] >> was taking some AI that we've built for Dealpad. Now inside the Dealpad platform, we've got some AI that understands what buyers are interested in, how they're interacting and engaging inside the platform. So we can see what content they've consumed, how long they've looked at the content, who they've shared it with, lots of parameters around it. We redeployed that in a couple of weeks, and we spun it up on our website. So we could now see what [18:12] >> keywords our visitors were coming in from. So we specialize in mutual action plans. So were they searching for mutual action plans and coming in there? Were they searching for sales process and coming in that way? And then we looked at what and profiled what they were looking at on the site. And we then built some lead magnets. So lead magnets, if don't you know what they are, they're just basically content, but you gate them. So behind [18:37] >> a wall, you've got to put your email or your phone number in to be able to download that document. And within a few weeks, we'd moved our lead conversion from 0.8 to 4.2%. In real terms, that meant another 36 inbound leads every month, eight pipeline opportunities, and 60,000 of new ARR booked every month since we launched this in November. So we thought, okay, there's something here. It's worked for us. So we went to three of our [19:16] >> customers that we thought were in a really good place to be able to leverage this. And we said, take this and use it. And they had similar results. So we've decided to spin it up as a product. And so this is our next kind of innovation at Dealpad. And one of the challenges that we've had internally is what do we do with this now? Do we bake this into our existing platform, or do we have a [19:41] >> separate product for it? And we've chosen to have a separate product for it initially because what we don't want to do is to convolute our message and our market position. For us, that's really important. I think it's and it comes back to what your customer is buying. Our customer probably doesn't buy top of the funnel inbound leads and on the other side wanting to engage their buyers. And so we're running it very separately. And what we've [20:12] >> built is the AI that will understand what your your web businesses are doing and will then enable you to have lead magnets on your website. You can place them anywhere on any part of the page that you want. And then the AI will decide which content to show which users at which time to increase the likelihood of them coming through as a lead. [20:39] >> We've got 2,900 sign ups to our private beta so far, which is awesome. And what I'd love to do is to extend that invite to you guys. That is a QR code to get on the private beta. And what we're going to offer or what we're I'm offering you is the ability to, a, get it free so we won't charge you for it for the first couple of months. No obligation, obviously, to continue. And we'll also [21:04] >> get you into the first group. So when you sign up, [21:09] >> you've got a unique code on this QR code. We'll know you're from SAS Open. We'll get you into the first group. To get through 2,900 beta registrants is probably going to take us six months. But we'll get you in the first group if you sign up using this link. [21:25] >> That's it. I'd love to take some questions. Before I do, just one other thing, and it's kind of an ask, is I'm writing a book. I don't know why, but I am, to kind of chart my experience and all the things that I've fucked up on over the last fifteen years of running three companies. I would love to interview and talk to founders that have done the same thing anywhere from the zero to 20,000,000 journey. So [21:54] >> if you want to be in my book, I'll quote you and I'll ensure that everybody gets the ability to prove it before it goes live. Just come and chat to me. Or that should be my LinkedIn there on my QR. Again, if you want to link in with me, that should be my LinkedIn. Chat to me. I'd love to talk to you. But any questions that I can take? [22:15] For level selling that you mentioned, [22:19] is it fine to down level? So, as a founder, CEO, my sales team doesn't don't want me in the sales team's sales calls because they're like, we're only speaking to director level folks. You're too seasoned, too senior type. So but I still push through and I want to be on a sales call. But the CEOs and our customer, and our potential buyers aren't the ones making the decision. So, as a CEO, is it fine to try [22:46] to reach out to a lower designation on the buyer side? [22:50] >> Yeah. [22:51] Did you get that question? [22:53] >> Yeah. And so as a CEO, should we be reaching out to kind of people below us? I think you need to use some kind of caution and just look at the nuances of that particular deal. I wouldn't advocate necessarily [23:11] >> so level selling is called level selling because you go into each level. And so if you're doing this, it's kind of an unbalanced level. Right? And so I wouldn't advocate it, but I think that if you've got a big account and you cut let's say for argument's sake, you're selling to Johnson and Johnson, the chances of you getting into the CEO of Johnson and Johnson are very, very slim. So then you wouldn't go CEO to CEO. [23:38] >> But what you might want to do is you might you'd identify the most senior owner of that particular project. So it might be in that instance, I don't know, let's just say the VP of compliance might be the person that owns the problem. You level into them. And then you say, you know, your your CMO might go in after the head of marketing that or, you know, what whatever. You know? You you you just but I [24:03] >> wouldn't necessarily advocate you going into a salesperson as a founder because you'll end up doing it all the time. You'll get sucked in. And if you do it once, your sales team will be asking you to do it all the time, and that isn't scalable. [24:16] >> So just I think from a kind of an appreciation of your own time, just think about where it is you're kind of spending your time. [24:28] >> Any other questions? [24:31] >> Come on, there must be more questions. Speak up. Nope. Alright. Thanks, guys. [24:44] Hey, folks. If we haven't met yet, my name is Nathan Latka. 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 bestseller purchasing over 30,000 copies. Thank you so much for that. After the book, I launched this show and went on to create founderpath.com. I raised a large fund to do non dilutive deals with B2B software founders. So far, [25:11] we've invested in over 400 software founders totaling 150,000,000. Here in 2024, we're doing three to four new deals per week. So if you're looking for capital and don't wanna give up equity, go sign up at founderpath.com for free to get your offer.

[00:00] Guys, dealpad.io was launched in 2021. They're doing $200,000 a month today in revenue, up from a 100,000 a month just a year ago. And total revenue in 2021, that first year was 400 k. Adam's done this a couple of times. He knows what it's like to bootstrap to many millions in revenue to keep his options open. That is what he's doing today with a 160 customers. Again, dealpad.io is helping you understand how to get your whole [00:22] team organized around a sales process, specifically the buyer collaboration platform for sales teams, hoping it to end this year at $2,700,000 of ARR. He's got a team of 16 people, five engineers, four sales reps, two carry quota as he looks to continue to scale. Hey, folks. My guest today is Adam Baker. He is building dealpad. Which is a buyer collaboration collaboration platform for sales teams. He's a three time SaaS founder, ex Salesforce VP of Sales. He's [00:48] been there. He's done that. Adam, ready to take us to the top? [00:52] >> Hey, How are you doing? Yeah, of course. [00:53] I'm good. What does that mean buyer collaboration platform for sales teams? [00:58] >> Yeah, that's really important because it's a differentiation that I think most sales teams aren't really thinking about. So today, most sales teams have invested in what I would call internal software for their sales teams. So Gong, Outreach, Clari, a CRM. We are an external [01:20] >> kind of piece of software that sales teams use to align with their buyers. So it's buyer collaboration. So we're very much focused on picking the sales team up at the point that a deal becomes an opportunity and taking them all the way through to closing that with a customer. So it's buyer collaboration. [01:39] And give us an update, you came on in July of 'twenty two, you said you had about 100 customers, how many today? [01:45] >> Yeah, we've got about a 160 now, just over a 160. We've doubled revenue this year. [01:52] That's okay. Think you told me revenue last time was 1.2. So you're at 2.4 run rate now? [01:56] >> About 2.3. Yep. [01:58] 2.3. That's great. And still wait. Let me see. Yeah. You're basically bootstrapped. You had a hundred hundred and twenty k seed back in the day. Right? [02:05] >> Yeah. We went through we went through Techstars and and they they put some money in. [02:10] That's it. That's all though. Right? [02:12] >> That's it. [02:13] And have to remind me, did you invest a bunch of your own per I mean, you've had success. Did you invest invest a bunch of own personal money in the MVP or no? [02:19] >> Yeah. I did. Yeah. A bit. [02:21] Yeah. How big of a risk did you take back then? [02:24] >> Not a huge amount. Like, hundreds of thousands. Not like, you know, millions. [02:28] Okay. It's well, it's all relative. You know, someone at a school is gonna go hundreds of thousands. Oh my god. That's so much. Somebody else is gonna be like, oh, that's pennies. You know? Alright. So you risk your own money. That was, you know, you launched, I think you said in '20 late twenty twenty one, early twenty twenty two. Right? [02:43] >> Yeah, late twenty one. We launched the platform, we were building it from the beginning of twenty one. Essentially in our first year, which was 2021, we booked about 400 k of ARR. Last year, we did about 1.2, and this year, we're gonna finish on about two point anywhere between two point seven and three. [03:02] That's great. Where's most of that growth come from? You know, a 100 customers to one sixty, one seventy, what channels are you using? [03:10] >> Well, we've been to your conferences a couple of times. Thank you. Thank you. They've genuinely worked very well for us. So I think events have worked well for us. We find that we're able to meet the right people at these events and show them the platform. We do a lot of our work on LinkedIn, our buyers are all on LinkedIn. So we're quite intentional about how we use LinkedIn. [03:35] What does that mean? What do do on LinkedIn? [03:37] >> So we've got a really nice hack where we will find somebody that we believe is our ideal buyer and can be an influencer. So they're not just a chief revenue officer, they're a chief revenue officer with a big network. We gauge that by how many followers they have. And then we'll link in with them and we'll follow them. And the way that most people have, the high people with the high followers, is you don't connect to [04:05] >> them now, you follow them. But what it means is that you do follow them so you don't have to wait for a connection and now you get all their posts. And so what we're looking for is who's commenting on those posts, who's liking those posts, how relevant are they to us? And then we build out and expand our kind of sphere influence that way. [04:23] Not manually, you're clicking on an influencer's post and seeing if they got 200 likes, you're looking at every single like, and then how do you do that? [04:30] >> Well, yeah, we have got some software that automates a bit of it, but a lot of that is manual. [04:36] What's the software that you use? [04:38] >> We use a software called Connected. [04:41] Okay. Okay. And you're like, they're doing well, you like them? [04:44] >> Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. But a lot of the work we do with this is manual. And so our SDRs carve out a piece of their day every single day to do this inside LinkedIn. [04:57] How many SDRs? [04:59] >> We've got four. [05:00] And how much time do you require they do this on LinkedIn? [05:03] >> An hour a day. [05:05] Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 interviews I've done manually. Saves you a lot of time. Well, we've done this. We've built it into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect [05:28] your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time, you can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna [05:52] get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, private equity firm is different. If you're gonna do a minority sale, that's different. And if you sell the whole business, that's a different valuation. You can see all those when I hover over here. Right? So the teal is what a VC would pay. Yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright. Now what's cool about this is this is [06:14] not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple. Maybe you're [06:40] going out right now and you're raising your seed round. Well, go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down, what they raised, what valuation they raised at, and what percent that they sold. There's never been a larger dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if [07:02] you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products, click on get your valuation here, and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl. Again, all that valuation data live right inside the platform. I hope to see you there. Alright. Let's jump back into the [07:28] interview. Wow. Okay. Okay. So four hours. And then how does Connected support what they're doing? [07:34] >> So Connected will automate the outreach that we have to them. [07:38] Oh, I see. Yeah. I see. [07:40] >> So we'll find them because that needs to that almost needs to be, [07:45] >> are they our ideal buyer? What are they speaking about? What topics are they kind of liking and posting on? Is this relevant to us? So that needs to have some kind of human kind of element to it. And then we'll use connected to automate any outreach we have to them. [08:02] But that's io, right? [08:04] >> Yeah. Exactly. [08:06] Connected. Io? [08:07] >> Yeah. Yeah. Okay. [08:08] And so how many there's four SDRs. What's the total team size today? [08:13] >> We're 16. [08:14] Okay. Flesh out the rest of the team for me. How many engineers? [08:18] >> Yeah. So we've got five engineers. We've got Kim and I. So Kim's my co founder and CTO. We've got one product, one design, two CS, four a four SDRs. Okay. Two. [08:37] Do the SDRs carry a quota or only the eight to two AEs? [08:42] >> Only the AEs carry quota. [08:44] Yeah. I see. I see. How did you I mean, you've done this now. You you built your last company to 4 or $5,000,000 of ARR before getting the dealpad. Imagine you use the sales team there as well. When you hire these first two quota carrying reps, how do you go about setting their quota, and how much time do you give them to ramp to that quota before you say, you're not doing it, you're fired? [09:02] >> Yeah. So all of the early sales are founder led for me. So I do all the sales initially. And when I get to a point where I'm kind of, you know, I'm on a limit and I know then how much I'm booking, I will then, that kind of is one of the first kind of triggers for me to want to go out and hire an AE. In terms of quota, it depends on how much you pay [09:27] >> them. So typically, if I'm paying an AE 100 ks, I want 600 ks in revenue back from that AE a year. [09:36] That's 100 ks base or base plus commission? [09:39] >> Base plus commission. So essentially, we're paying them 200 k if they deliver 600. [09:46] Okay. It's a 100 k base. If they get 600 k quota target hit, then they get another 100 k on top of So OTE on target earnings is 200 k for that AE. [09:53] >> Yep, exactly. We want between 6 and 750 k back and there's a ramp obviously. So in kind of year one, we wouldn't expect 750 k from them. But we would over the kind of as we went into year two. [10:09] Are you guys remote or in person? [10:11] >> We're all remote. [10:12] How do you deal with document control? You know, the sales team puts together a script that works well, but then you have a new salesperson that doesn't know the script exists, they make another document before you know it, you don't know what the master documents are, you don't know where the official scripts are, how do you manage that? [10:25] >> Yeah, it's pretty straightforward. I've got a process nailed down. And so a number of things that go into that. One is that we record all of our sales calls, both the meetings that we have on Zoom, but also the calls that we make, the cold calls. And so we optimize every What software? Which is HubSpot. We record from HubSpot. [10:48] You can record in HubSpot. [10:50] >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we have weekly reviews where we play back the the calls. I sit and listen to a lot of the calls as well. And so we can coach and we can really optimize on how do we get to a repeatable script where it's working most of the time. So it doesn't matter about who it is, if anybody says this, it's probably gonna work. It's just a time thing and you go through [11:15] >> it and optimize it, but we record everything. And we play everything back. [11:18] So what is your cadence? Is it every Friday for two hours you listen to recordings as a sales team? [11:23] >> Yeah. It's it's once a week. Not on Friday, once a week. Two hours. [11:28] Two hours. And when do you do it? Monday, Wednesday, Friday? [11:30] >> We do it on a Wednesday. [11:32] Two hours on Wednesday. Interesting. And how do you like, okay. If you listen to a call recording in HubSpot and it's twenty minutes and you have a bunch of notes from it, where do you document, like, the changes you wanna see made and then test the week after if that sales rep used the updated script? Like, how how do you create that rhythm? [11:48] >> Yeah. So we so we've got a master document in we shoot drive, Google Drive. And so we've all got access to it. And so it's an iterative kind of document that we update. We're at a point now where we don't change it that much. There are tweaks, but it was like really for a long time. [12:10] How many pages is that Google doc? [12:13] >> I don't know. Can tell you. [12:15] I'm just curious order of operation, five Yeah. [12:18] >> It's probably five or six pages at the moment. [12:20] Okay. Yep. Interesting. And what are the major sections of that document? Is it like call scripts, call objection handling? Like what are the headers in that document? [12:29] >> Yeah, so it's opening. I think the opening part of the call is the most important because it's gonna give you the opportunity to talk. [12:37] >> A lot of SDRs I see just get hung up on a lot. And so you don't even have an opportunity to say what you're doing. I think the second thing is how do you cut through people that aren't listening and will just give you an answer to say they're not interested, but they don't know what not interested in because they haven't listened to you. So how do you get them to listen? So what's the value prop? [12:59] >> What's the compelling statement that's going to surface some pain that's going to give you another thirty seconds to talk to them? So we look at opening, we look at that kind of the whole value statement, it's going to open them up a little bit. We never ask closed questions. Questions. So we're always asking open questions to try and open them up. [13:17] We'll- Give me example of a closed question. [13:19] >> Oh, did you have a good day today? [13:24] Give me example of an open question. [13:26] >> How's your day? [13:28] Ah, I see. Okay. [13:29] >> Yep. So how was your day? You're going to say, yeah, it was great. I did this, did this. Weather was pretty shit, but whatever. A closed question is, did you have a good day today? Yes, no. And so we always try to open up with a question that's going to help us explore a pain that they might have. And [13:48] >> a really great opener that we use is, Hey Nathan, we speak to lots of people like you every day, and this is what we hear. [13:58] >> Are you seeing the same thing? [14:01] >> Right? Are you asking your teams to do anything differently? You know, how are you thinking about this topic? Yeah. Right now. And so we try and show them that, you know, we do speak to these similar people every day and we are hearing these similar things. Is it the same for you and how are you thinking about it? Do you subscribe [14:21] to a target talk time? In other words, if it's a thirty minute call, will you look at each call and say, hey, sales rep, do you talk for 60% of the call? That's too much, get under 20. [14:29] >> So we try and keep those we call it so this stage is a cold call and we try and keep that down to ten minutes max. And so either we try and qualify them on that first call, if we need more time, we'll set that as a second step. But typically we try and optimize that call to qualify them either in or out. And if it's in, then right, get your calendar out. Let's go into a [14:55] >> deeper discovery. It's probably going to take thirty five to forty minutes, and we'll do this with some of the wider team. [15:02] Yep. Yep. If you had to pick a book that most accurately captures what you believe about how sales should be done at dealpad, what book would that be? For example, at Founderpath, it's definitely Neil Rackham's spin selling. [15:14] >> Yeah. So I think it would be challenger, the challenger set. [15:21] >> Particularly in our market, our buyers don't necessarily know they've got a problem. And so we need to challenge them on it. We need to challenge them on what they're doing today because we know that we can optimize what they do. And you'll have a sales team that will say, we've got all the software we need, so you're hitting quota. Well, no, we're not. All right, so here's the gap, right? Where is the gap here? Is it [15:45] >> top of the funnel? Is inside the deal and mid funnel? And really try and understand where the gap is for them and really try and challenge them to think about where that gap is. And then what's missing? What could you do? So yes, oh, great. So you did an 80% year last year, fantastic. But if we could get you another 30% and you did 110%, what would that mean to your business? How could it grow faster? [16:09] >> How many more people could you hire? And so it's not necessarily about what you're doing today, it's about what you're missing and [16:18] >> where we can get you to. That's the challenge itself. [16:23] That all makes good sense. So what's the plan for the next year? Do you anticipate raising or do you think you'll stay basically bootstrapped? [16:31] >> I mean, I've obviously this to you for a long time now. I mean, bootstrap for as long as we can, but I think there'll be a point where we can accelerate quite heavily if we do start to bring some money in. And that doesn't mean necessarily that we'll raise, we could debt finance, we could do a whole bunch of stuff, right? But I think it will probably make sense for us to bring some money in at [16:54] >> some point next year. [16:56] Yep, yep, interesting. Well, you obviously know me well, you know what I'm always biased towards debt, but how do you think about debt versus equity if you want to raise money next year? [17:05] >> I think it depends what you want to do, right? So I think that if [17:10] >> you really genuinely think that you could build a $100,000,000 business, then you're probably going to want to go out to venture money because you're going to need to raise two or three times. And debt probably won't help you do that over the longer term. Think if you think and you're happy to build out a 20,000,000 ARR business and flip it for 200,000,000, then debt could be a really good opportunity for you because you don't have to [17:35] >> go out and raise all those venture rounds and you retain the equity. [17:38] You just nailed it. Yeah, it's so weird. The way you phrase the last minute of you speaking is like, there's nothing wrong with a $20,000,000 company that you sell for three X. That's a great way to get rich. There's so many ways, there's so many buyers. [17:52] >> Let me tell you that 99.9% of companies don't get past 10,000,000. If you're a business that's sitting on 10,000,000 ARR right now, you've got a great company and you can get that to 50, you can probably get it to a 100. I think the expectations of these venture led investors particularly are just completely skewed to these unicorns and these outliers. And it doesn't help founders who are building great companies who are 10 or on their way [18:24] >> to 10,000,000 revenue could probably get to 20. I mean, if you sit down and spoke to 99% of software founders today and you said, Hey, look, I'm going to get you to 20,000,000 ARR and you can flip for 200,000,000. Are you okay with that? They will bite your hand off for it. [18:41] Yep, Yep. Yep. A 100%. A 100%. [18:43] >> It's difficult to get to and it's a fantastic achievement. [18:47] Well, Adam, listen, I miss hanging out with you. Hope you guys see you at the next SaaS open or we'll meet up at a Soho house somewhere or whatever. But in the meantime, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, your favorite book. [18:57] >> Oh, I'm reading thank you for being late. I'm reading that right [19:03] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [19:07] >> Not at the moment. [19:08] Number three, favorite online tool besides your own? [19:13] >> Favorite online tool. We're we're into Apollo right now. [19:17] >> Yep. [19:18] Number four, how many hours of sleep do [19:19] you get every night? [19:21] >> Seven. [19:22] Seven. Okay. And situation, married, single kiddos? [19:25] >> Single daughter. [19:27] Okay. And you I think you had a birthday. I think you're are you 48 or 49 now? [19:31] >> I'm 49. [19:33] 49. Nice. Okay. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20. [19:38] >> Go slower. [19:40] Guys, go ahead. Go ahead. No. [19:43] No. Go ahead. [19:44] >> Go slower, I think, is thing that I'd probably coach myself on. [19:47] Guys, dealpad.io was launched in 2021. They're doing $200,000 a month today in revenue, up from a 100,000 a month just a year ago. And total revenue in 2021, that first year was 400 k. Adam's done this a couple of times. He knows what it's like to bootstrap to many millions in revenue to keep his options open. That is what he's doing today with a 160 customers. Again, dealpad.io is helping you understand how to get your whole [20:09] team organized around a sales process, specifically the buyer collaboration platform for sales teams, hoping it to end this year at $2,700,000 of ARR. He's got a team of 16 people, five engineers, four sales reps, two carry quota he looks to continue to scale. Adam, thanks for taking us to the top. [20:25] >> Awesome. Thanks, Nathan. [20:26] One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We [20:33] call it deal or bust. One founder comes on three hungry buyers. They try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday one p. M. Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at two p. M. Central. [20:59] To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if [21:20] you want to take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign up for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in [21:42] the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode. If you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your [21:59] guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.

[00:00] Hi, everyone. I'm Adam. So in the next twenty minutes, I'm going to just talk to you about three things. One is some mistakes to avoid that I've seen consistently that kill sales deals, and AEs make them all the time. Even the best AEs make them. The other is to know your ICP and how important, really understanding who your ideal customer is. If you don't understand that, you're not going to scale sales. And then finally, some kind [00:25] of tactics and processes that I've implemented to win complex deals. So a bit about me. I'm a three time software founder. I've generated $20,000,000 of ARR across my three companies. I'm currently building Dealpad, which helps sales teams generate revenue. And I've also been a sales leader at Salesforce, Intuit and three kind of sixty seventy million ARR SaaS companies. And across that period of time, about twenty years, I'm actually quite old, I know you wouldn't really know [00:54] it, but I've built a process to help my sales teams win more of the deals they're working on. And as product differentiation gets increasingly blurred and competitive pricing kind of almost rules you out of the market, the one reason that you'll win more deals is your sales process. And so that's what we focus on at Dealpad, that's what I'm going to talk to you about today in terms of what you can do to implement some ideas [01:17] in your sales process that will help you win more deals. So I like this. I'm a I'm a founder. I'm an entrepreneur. So this is a a great graph of founders, but it's also really true for salespeople. Right? One minute, we're brilliant. We've got all the confidence in the world. We think we can go out and close that 1,000,000 plus kind of ACV. And the next minute, we're really shit, and we can't do anything. And so [01:37] the line is there, just keep working because you're going to get there. And so I don't know how many founders in the room, but this is great for founders and it's definitely great for salespeople. [01:47] So the five mistakes that I've seen across my time in selling software over the last twenty years, except in the first pain that you see. This is super important. And AEs, really good AEs don't do this, but the average AEs do. And what I mean by this is you're going to talk to a buyer, probably not your champion, and you're going to find a pain. And that pain probably sits locally inside the organization. It's probably not [02:13] a global pain. It doesn't sit across the company. And what you really need to understand here is that if you accept that pain, you're losing revenue massively. You're leaving it on the table. And so drill in. And I keep telling my AEs to drill into the pain because the first, second, third pain you see is not the real pain. You need to make sure that you've got access to the executive team. Is this problem business critical? [02:35] Does it sit across the organization? And that's where you're going to start to build out really high value deals. And AEs miss that because what they do is get excited when they hear that first pain, and they dive in for that. It's not a bad thing. So there's nothing wrong with this. But it does mean that you're now going to be in an organized and we I had an AE that sold into Oracle, and we had [02:55] a 7,500 ACV deal in Oracle. [03:00] Nuts. Right? But but we the the team were happy because we'd just signed Oracle as a customer, but Oracle didn't know anything about this deal. It was some guy sat in wherever he was in Poland and and, you know, needed something that that we we delivered. But we it was try now going back into Oracle and selling through that organization. It was impossible. Oracle stayed a £7,500 customer. We couldn't we just couldn't upsell them. The next [03:25] is do not invest time in deals if you don't have executive sponsor. I see this so often. Salespeople spending time in deals where they don't have access to buying authority. They've got a champion. They've got someone that loves the product. They're evangelical about it, but you can't get access to the exec sponsor pull out immediately. I won't let my team sell into a a company. If we get past qualification, we do not sit Discovery unless we [03:50] get exec sponsor access. It's one of our conditions. If if you want a demo, if you want to go through Discovery with us, we need to have exec sponsors on that call. Otherwise, we don't move forward. And if they want to buy from us, then they'll do that. If they don't, then they won't. Really important, you can waste hours of time in deals that don't close because you don't have access to the people that actually are [04:10] gonna sign this off. The third one is demoing too early. If you demo early before you've gone through really deep discovery, you're forcing yourself to get embroiled in feature selling because you're just showing people features. That's what a demo is. The demo should come at the end. Don't show your product until you've actually gone through a discovery. You've identified the pain. You've agreed with your buyers that we are a solution that can solve that pain. Now [04:38] great. What does this look like? Who's going to use this? Let's get them on a call. Let's show them the product. But you don't need to see the product until we actually agree that we can solve a problem for you, and we know that we can solve it as well. And that takes time. If you're demoing on that first call, you're embroiling yourself in feature selling and not value selling. And so again, your ACV is going [04:58] get low. You might close the deal. You might not walk away from this that that deal and think, oh, god, that was awful because you've got a new customer, but you're leaving revenue on the table. [05:08] Allowing the buying teams to dictate the process, this is a hard one, particularly as you get into more complex kind of higher enterprise type deals. Most buyers are very fairly sophisticated these days and they have their own process. One of the things that we're really focused on at Dealpad is how to align with the buyer through the process so you're partnering with them. And so it's not me selling to them, and it's not them running their [05:31] process. We do this together. And it's it's a game changer. But make sure that, you know, your team aren't just telling you what's going on in this process and you have no control over it because that's the worst place you could be as a salesperson. And then finally is not quitting fast enough, staying in these deals that you don't think you're going to close. Really, really important. One of my teams I think I've got a slide [05:52] in it, but one of my teams wasted two and a half thousand hours one year selling it into deals that we didn't close across that team. If we redeployed that time into deals we thought we could win or had a better chance of winning, you know, I think we we delivered about 75% of our annual quota that year. We could have smashed through it if we'd actually redeployed the time we wasted in deals that we didn't [06:14] close. So close fast. And the benefits from doing the right thing are very small in sales. The benefits from pulling out really quickly are massive. [06:25] It's discipline. Trying to coach a sales team to leave a deal and walk away from an opportunity is hard. But it's in the long run, it's the best thing to do. [06:37] So how do we find our ICP? Well, the first thing you need to understand is why are customers buying from you? A typical if I ask nine out of 10 AEs, a typical answer would be, well, we've got an ERP system that helps automate accounting. Well, that's not why customers are buying from you. Customers are buying cash flow because with your ERP system, they get cash in the bank thirty days faster. That's what they're buying from [07:06] you. Understand what customers buy from you. Dealpad customers buy revenue. They want to close more of their deals. They want to book more revenue. That's why they come to us. They don't come to us because we've got mutual action plans and we've got a buying experience platform. They come because we have the ability to help them generate revenue. That's what they're buying. So really understand what your customers are buying from you. And again, it's something that [07:28] gets overlooked quite a lot. When we started our ICP for all of my companies, really, we look at kind of understanding what the pain we're solving is. How critical is it? What happens if we turn this off? What are they doing today? You know, what tools are they using? Why is it inefficient? Why is their life not where they need it to be today? We really try to understand the pain we're solving from our from our [07:50] ideal customer. And then we look at the the customer themselves. Who's who are our buyers? You know, what do they care about? We we actually go personal on this, and we go deep, and we really wanna know who they are. This is probably not even work related. We just want to understand who our ideal buyer is and what they look like, [08:08] And it makes a big difference. So let's go into how we won ultra complex deals. So there's a few things here. 47% of enterprise sales deals don't close because you don't have access to the buying committee. [08:22] 18% of competitors had stronger relationships. So these two are people related. So we're looking here at almost 70% of deals that don't close are people related. And it just goes to show how important it is when you're sitting out talking about a sales opportunity, you have the right people at the table and you are able to access them. If you don't, it doesn't matter how good your solution is, how good your story is, it won't close. [08:47] 17% no decisions. How can you affect no decisions? It's the biggest killer of most mid market deals is no decision. We're not going to do anything. And it's a challenge. And there's no real answer to no decision. It's more about how you partner with that buyer. Because if you can partner with them, you can take them through the process together, you're more likely to force a no decision into into a decision, which will mean they'll buy [09:09] from you. And this was the two thousand and a half hours loss. What's the what's the opportunity cost of your sales team sat in deals that aren't going to close? [09:21] And then champion, everybody gets a champion. Everybody has believers. The one thing that I see a lot of AEs miss is the coach. The coach for me is the most important person in your sales process. Your champion is probably gonna be the influencer. They're gonna be the ones that are gonna get the exec team to the table. Your believers are the people that really want this because they see the pain. They feel it every day. They [09:43] live the pain you're gonna solve for them. But your coach, that's the person that's going to take you through that process. That's the person who's going to tell you, you know what? We've had this competitor come in, and, you know, they've got a really great relationship with the CEO. Or I was sat in a meeting last week and, you know, great sentiment about your product, but X, Y, and Z is a little bit, you know, a [10:05] little bit skeptical. You need a coach inside that business. You need to understand how they're thinking. Finding the coach is difficult, but it's the most important role you can have, I believe, in any mid market to enterprise sales motion. And then you've got mutual action plans. And this is a kind of a bit of a demo for Dealpad. So mutual action plans, if you don't use them, are a really great way of aligning through the process [10:30] with your buyer on everything that needs to happen. With Dealpad, you can lock in everything that needs to happen here. You can bring all the people in place. Your buyers bring each other in. So now you don't need to go out and find your buying team. You're discovering your buying team through the process because your buyers add them in. And then it locks in a date for this task. So everything now is not built on intuition. [10:54] So if I ask my sales team before Dealpad to forecast and they say to me, well, this is going close on the April 30. And these are the reasons why that's full of optimism and intuition. So my CRM pipeline is just built for optimism. Now when I do my deal reviews and we've got Dealpad, I'm actually saying, do we have everything aligned with our buyer, everything locked in, all the people we need, and has any date [11:17] slipped? That's how we forecast now. And it makes a massive difference. [11:23] And then finally, on this place, it's about value. It's taking your buyer through a process and not just running the process that your buyer wants you to go through. Have a process, whatever it is. This is what ours looks like. Ours is a kickoff, an exec sponsor meeting. We start there. Like I said, we don't go any further unless we've got an exec sponsor. And then we kind of build out workshops. We interview people. We want [11:47] to understand who our users are. We want to understand what their problems they're solving are. And everybody that we speak to in that team will have a different reason for using it. Everyone. And understanding what those reasons are are going to help you solidify that deal when you go through the process. This was a I asked my customer if I could share this and they agree with me. So this is a close one from [12:11] Q4 twenty twenty one before one of our customers this is one of our first customers, before they use Dealpad. They took Dealpad on in their first quarter, that's their close one. No shit. And that's the next quarter. By building in a process, by allowing your buyers to partner with you, by doing the right things, you're going to close more deals. [12:37] Look, the best person to sell your platform is going to be your founder. It is. It doesn't matter if you're the chief sales officer, you're the VP of sales, whoever you are in this room, if you're not the founder, I can tell you the best person to sell your product is going to be the founder. If your founder isn't involved in sales and your company is less than $100,000,000 in revenue, you want to campaign and make [13:00] sure they get involved in sales. Because they be the ones that will help you close those big deals, 100%. That's not even up for debate. If your founder is not involved in your sales process, you need to get them involved in your sales process. And when I think about my personal outreach, I do cold outreach and I get 70% more response from the people that I reach out to than my SDR team. That tells me that [13:26] I should probably do more of it. And it's hard to do more to be an SDR when you're running a business, right? But I see it works. And it's just gravitas and it's bullshit because my SDRs are way better than me at what they do. I can guarantee it. But because I'm the founder and I've got the CEO title, it just helps me get a response. And it's my job, because it's my company, to do whatever [13:51] I can to generate revenue. And yeah, the C level relationships became a difference to us, closing 1,000,000 ARR contracts in my previous business. I spent the equivalent of probably about, I don't know, of hours with our big top enterprise customers, helping my team close them, flying all over the world to do it. And it's not easy, but it makes a difference. So I just want to talk to you very quickly about a process that we build [14:20] at Dealpad. And so we take the prospect from the kind of the very first engagement where you build out these personalized buying experiences and you curate all of the content and materials that your buying team needs to have in one place. And now you've got your buying team in, your buying team invite each other in, so now you've got all the people involved, and you go through the process together, and you won't really understand intent fast. [14:46] So you've got analytics that will show you how your buying team are engaging through your process, where the gaps are. Do you have all the right people in your team? You know, where do you need to really focus in? You can collaborate with them. So you're building a two way sales process now. You're not sharing documents on email, chasing them up for introductions. You're actually partnering with them. And again, I can tell you from experience, if [15:07] you're in a vendor ship with five three or five other vendors, I can almost guarantee you today this will probably change, but today most vendors are sharing documents on email, on G Docs, on SharePoint. They're chasing their buyers up. From a buyer, to have that from three or four vendors, it's a massive headache. If you can partner with them and you can show them how easy it is to work with you, you're way more likely to [15:31] win that deal. And that's why, as I go back to one of the first things I said, building a sales process that will become your differentiator in winning more deals is critical when you're selling software today. [15:46] So So that's it. I'm not sure how long that was. But come to us come to our booth. We'd love to give you a demo of Dealpad, talk to about what we can do. We've got free mutual action plan templates, free SaaS playbooks. Come and get them. We'd love to talk to you. Thank you so much.

Introduction hey folks my guest today is Adam Baker he's the founder of four B2B SAS companies and two exits he's currently the founder and CEO of churley doai and deal pad. iio he boot drop chle to 6.5 million bucks in ARR and in six months has generated $400,000 in ARR for deal pad Adam you're ready ticket us to the top hey how you doing good to see you good so my obvious question is churley seems to be killing it why go get distracted with deal pad well um ch's doing well I think we we really rid a wave on churley during um the last two years where where companies were doubling down on retention uh and and timing for us was was very good obviously um companies really wanted to understand the root cause of why their customers left they really wanted to kind of keep their customers so we um we on board it a we went from a 1.5 million AR to about six million AR um in in that period what period oh so from um from June 2020 until April this year so wow some two years yeah strap no outside Capital no outside Bootstrapped Capital at all Tot so you own 100% of that business um no I don't um I own 85% of that business okay who's it what 15 15% as your your engineers or what yeah so our employees um earn uh earn a bunch and uh and we've got um I've got some advisers that I've given shares to Etc but you know with have no outside funding at all that's amazing so when you see a deal like like paddle buying profit well you know now that that profit well retained product just the retain product is doing about 400,000 bucks a month so they're about your same size um you saw the exit price do you look at selling chly on the back of that yeah you know M you know mainly I'm focused on building journ I I exited my last company way too early and I think if and it haunts me a little bit I think if ID held on um for another four or five years I I I would have probably 10x the valuation I got out of my last company so I'm uh I'm a little bit paranoid about getting out too early which might not be a good thing but tell us that story real quick what was that first company you thought you sold to sold too early yeah so that was my second Venture my first company was was acquired um way back in 2007 um my last company was called blotter and and we were we were acquired um by the guardian Media Group and um it was we were we were basically authenticating news footage for news rooms all over the world and it was we were kind of you know doing fake news before fake news was even coined as a ter and and um there were only two players in our market and one was acquired about six months before us and it made me panic um thinking how many exits can there be now and um and we were really in the kind of the news media content space there's not a lot of m&a happening in that space so um I I I kind of went in with both feet um and and exited uh it was a good result um don't get me wrong it was a good outcome but I think if I'd held in I I I could have you know built that company to a considerably higher um valuation we we we to that yeah interesting well you've been there you've done that it makes sense now before move into deal pad on terly today Currently serving 100 customers how many customers you have and are they mainly B2B SAS all b2bs and um we've got about 90 customers oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all valuation data out from over 287 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your founder paath dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from realtime valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22% of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round we'll go in here and look at all the recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founder path.com for / products SLV valuations or if you go to founder path.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview there's some concentration Monthly recurring revenue right I mean with 90 customers 6.5 million Revenue you got some big customers yeah we've got big customers the the one of the things I like about the business one of the things I really get frustrated about this business and why I'm founding dpad um is it's extremely complex and and so this is not offthe shelf software so we've built our our models um you know we've we've got proprietary algorithms but we have to customize everything and so when we go into a company um you know our services cost usually 3x is our SAS cost so we're not so our our Revenue isn't just on um isn't just SAS it's SAS plus services to implement I and it just takes so long and and and I get I just get bored with it and so we're we're carrying on journe definitely um you know building a great company um but dpad you know um is a combination of my work really over the last 10 years of helping my sales teams deliver quotas and and make sure they hit Clos dates on time so we can forecast well and and and and whilst the two companies and two products are very separate there's definitely a lot of um Synergy and and I can see that the the two products unifying at some point where we take a a pro you know a kind of a a product to Market where it's you know we're going to help you um win customers with deal pen and close deals and we're going to help you retain them and we're going to show you how to ah retain them so I can see you know somewhere in the future potentially there's there's the opportunity for us to to to go out with a joint prop but at the moment they're very separate um and um you you know so so I've been using the dill pad kind of model behind it for years to help my Sal teams and and um consistently see that it helps and so we're we've turned that into software and the the validation we've had so far has been phenomenal that's amazing let me um I want to spend the second half of the show all on Deal pad on the chly stuff you mentioned SP between service and SAS what would you say this like if if someone listen I'm really asking if someone listening right now wants to sign up what's like the minimum AR they have to have to value out of it what are they going to pay you on the service side and what are they probably going to pay you on the SAS side honestly I couldn't tell you because it varies customer to customer based on the size of the customer complexity data sets data maturity um typically though um we're running at about 70% AR on SAS and then about 30% on onetime services to implement that I see and the 70% SAS are you taking like a percent of retained revenue or is it a flat fee it's a flat fee oh that's nice that's different than the market yeah yeah so we decided not to take that route because um well for for a lot of reasons but I think you then get into lots of contractual disputes and I've had this before where um companies would then start to to debate about you know who how much revenue they've actually got from us or if they if they acquire an organization and their revenue ramps because of the acquisition does we do we include that or not um you know it just gets really messy so we we kept it really clean um we're happy we've Tak you know a decent sess um fee and we think that's fair for us and fair for our customers yeah no it feels very I mean it's so I mean just trying to do math 6.5 million total 70% is SAS so about 5 million is pure SAS 1.5 you could call as services but that 5 million SAS split among 90 customers would mean the average customer there is paying what $50,000 acvs right that's super healthy yeah yeah yeah it's good yeah okay so someone needs to really have like five 10 20 million bucks in AR to to get comfortable paying a $50 annual fee right yeah we've got customers lower than that on eror okay okay but but yeah I I think typically the size of our our customers when I look at them are around about the you know that that that type of level yeah yeah okay let's go into deal pad so you're building this internally it's helping your sales team out chle now how many sales folks out chle were using the first version of deal pad um we had eight using it at chy okay we've had 100 using it over over the the last 10 years um 500 or probably more than that but at chy specifically about eight ex use it and so when did you so it's now you've spun it out as its own entity do you have customers on that that are not from your other companies oh yeah all of them are I mean I don't have any repeat customers we've had to go out and and build out a sales motion from scratch and all of our all of our prospects and all of our customers are new oh wow okay it's very diff we're we're talking to different types of customers um so with dpad our Sweet Spot um are companies software companies again B2B um but where there's anywhere between five and 50 million AR um we we think that we can really help that segment um where there's an Enterprise sales motion but also where there's complexity in the sales process where you're managing multiple stakeholders um where you are you've probably got an average contract value annual contract value of 10K upwards um so it's you know not trans ction or it's not you know kind of you know you know docy sign who are just kind of trying to you know sell 50 $50 seats um it's but it could be Doc if they go into Enterprise and start to sell you know their Enterprise suite and so yeah so so our our ideal customer is very different to uh although they're both B2B SAS very different to churley and so when you look at just deal pad the customers paying for the software you just described what are they paying on average per year or per month again it depends um it depends so so it depends on what they buy from us um so we've got so dad has a kind of a solution set of um account planning of um kind of buyer alignment so there kind of a two-way buying process that they can they can Loop into and then Mutual action plans and and so um it depends what they want to buy a lot of our customers um initially go for the middle of that they they want to they want to actually understand what's happening in a deal and I think this is where this is where I see that we customers get most excited so inside their CRM whether it's sales force or HubSpot or pipe Drive um you know they're relying on intuition because ultimately the the the CRM can only tell you what's in the pipeline what data they have right they can't actually look into a deal and tell you at what what point that deal is at and how it's being evaluated what you know and and and um that's what we do so that's where we that's where deal pad comes but B are we talking like a 100 bucks a month or a th a month or 10,000 a month what's like The Sweet Spot yeah so average um I guess average investment into Dill pad is going to be somewhere around about the 12K so about a thousand bucks a month a thou okay okay perfect and and then you're are you upselling you're obviously upselling based off features it sounds like are you upselling based off anything else seats number of deals anything else no just just features just features okay interesting okay very cool and then again when obviously you've been building this for it sounds like a long time internally at other companies when would you say that that you started the company though uh we we started deal pad about two years ago um in terms of building the software um actually that's not true sorry we started building the software about two years ago and we started deal PAD as a company about eight months ago okay that's that's amazing and then so you've got customers on your site some hoot Suite uh fresh fresh books fresh Works Etc how many total customers are you working with today um we're working about 100 at the moment oh wow so I mean that's impressive and eight months you sent up 100 customers how are you what's your go to market right I assume you're using deal pad for your sales motion but what's your go to market yeah yeah deal pad helps a lot um so all outbound at the moment we've not really focused on any inbound because for me that was an investment we weren't really sure what we'd need to produce and what would work so we've just really focused on outbound um and we've got a team of sdrs we um deploy I guess three software um kind of vendors in our in our sales stack that help us go out and Prospect well um and and that's been it really it's just been a case of let's get leads in let's sit great qualification and Discovery calls let's really understand the pain we're solving um and and and let's solve that pain repeatedly for our customers that makes sense and and all these 100 customers are paying again about a thousand bucks a month yeah on average that's great so you're what 120 Grand a month in an mrr uh yeah yes but we we um we we're not M we're AR uh okay so you got it so you're well said differently you know about what is that 1.5 1.6 million something right in yeah if we place it over the course of 12 months yeah yeah yeah wow okay that's impressive that's really impressive um so yeah I mean zero to 1.6 million AR in eight months again that's super impressive now obviously you've you've eating your own dog food you use a tool so you know what's needed what does your team look like today at deal pad how many full-time yeah it's small uh we've got nine folks here n and bootstrapped right y totally bootstrapped again um are we gonna get stay bootstrapped you think um honestly I don't know he has a term sheet right now that's what that face means he's sitting on a term sheet right now I I I I think that there's a huge there's a huge white space with DPed um what's the offer what's in the term sheet how much we we we don't have an off yet all right fair enough what would make you decide I mean you're already wealthy right you could fund this yourself what would make you decide to go ahead and and raise VC yeah I think just like I've said there's a huge white SP at the moment we're not really we've got a few customers in the US um actually we've probably got about 20% of our customers in the US but that's a market I really want to um move into um that's going to take money um I think as well you know we're focused very much on software at the moment but there's you know I mean every organization in the world with a sales motion um could use deal pad and get value from it at that level of scale we'd have to we'd have to find money you know um and so let's let's see how it goes I mean if we can bootst this to 10 million um which is what my plan is AR um then we might be able to make some different choices about you know rather than going out raising money we could do it a different way we'll see I love that and are all most clients are they all B2B SAS all B2B SAS at the moment that's awesome I love your focus it's all be be SASS and and how did you get the MVP built do you have Engineers full-time or use a Dev shop neither um so well so I found there there was a um by the way if you're looking for a co-founder there's a great um it's called zhaw and it's a it's a really great platform for finding co-founders so I I basically just registered on there signed up they wanted me to pay off the bat and I'm like well I don't even know what this site is but I did it and I found a I found a co-founder we I I probably did a beauty parade of about 25 um technical people that wanted to cound wait how do you spell it it's Z Hawk yeah I think so I've proba we got that wrong um you can I'll I'll ping it to you after this and you can edit it out try right now because I'm almost certainly got that wrong um but I think you're I think you're I think you're thinking about Starhawk doio Starhawk there yeah yeah yeah and so yeah good good research and um and so I I very specifically needed a technical um co-founder um because I'm not I'm not a technical founder and U met Kim my my founder he was at Facebook and uh and and so Kim was a um a program manager at Facebook and prior to that he'd been a um lead at King on Candy Crush W and we we just hit it off and um he you split evenly you go 50/50 or what yeah 5050 yeah and so um you know he was the first person in the 25 or 30 that I've met and I'd spent quite a lot of time in conversations with people that we he just got it and um and he's built the platform um you know from almost from scratch and um you're using my models uh but he's you know he's gone and built the platform from scratch and and you know the for both of us I think you know we decided to go 5050 and and you know despite it being my concept and something that I've been using and I verified and I had the domain expertise I I I I wanted Kim to have 50% of this because I wanted him to feel that he had shared ownership and and me that was really important for him it was also really important well we're we're we know you have great playbooks we're excited to have you come to speak on September 1 in Austin you're going on stage at a.m. this the headline there the email templates that turnley and deal pad used to break uh 10 or grow to 10 million bucks in AR so we're really excited to to learn that stuff you've got playbooks for everything huh no I wouldn't say everything but um particular all right fair enough Adam let's wrap up here with the famous five number one last book you read um uh What the Dog Saw What the Dog Saw number two is there a CEO you're following or studying uh question probably not at the moment okay number three what's your favorite online tool for building deal pad besides one of your own tools yeah Lusha Lusha yeah number in love with Lusha right now yeah number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night uh quite a lot um nine nine love that and situation married single kids um single kids how many kiddos uh I have a daughter who's 26 and a grandson who's one oh wow that's pretty darn cool all right and how old are you uh I'm 48 48 last question something you wish knew when you were 20 um oh BL me um so many things um don't raise money early guys there you have it he built churley he built churley about 6.5 million bucks bootstrap 70% that revenue is pure SAS working with 90 customers but now he said you know what I've got to spend this tool called deal pad out which is sales enablement helps you track these deal flow the deal flow over time it's growing this from0 to $1.2 million run rate here in just under 89 months which is incredible found as Co founder on start Hawk they split at 5050 totally bootstrap serving 100 customers today he wants to bootstrap it up to 10 million bucks we'll see what happens Adam thanks for taking us to the top see you one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1 pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares backend dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu CAC LTV you name they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 p.m. central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2 p.m Central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe button below here on YouTube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the Sass World whether it's an acquisition a big fund raise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else I don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack Community for B2B SAS Founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at Nathan la.com slack in the 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