How Dealpad CEO Adam Baker grew Dealpad to $7M revenue and 160 customers in 2024.

quick context this was recorded March 28th and 29th so a couple weeks ago at my live event SAS open.com we had a thousand software CEOs there if you missed it we hope to see at the next one September 5th and 6th in New York City SAS open.com but for now let's jump into the recording this post that I put on LinkedIn within s weeks had generated a million of pipeline for us and we've closed almost a quarter of a million in new AR [Music] so I'm Adam um I'm the co-founder of dpad I've founded three um B2B software companies generating 20 million of Revenue I'm currently um running dpad as co-founder CEO um we launched it four years three years ago now uh 2021 um and we we finished on 3.7 Million last year and um we've grown 300% year on-ear over the last three years so I want to talk to you today about why as Founders you're the best sales people 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 I'll talk to you about why I think that as Founders regardless if you're commercial or technical you're the best people to support your sales motion going forward so um my personal Outreach I'm a commercial guy so my background is is Revenue so I'm quite comfortable being in front of the market but you know I lead things at at dpad 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 C and 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 um in in that out in that Outreach and I'm going to show you as well how we close some fairly big deals by teaming up inside our organization to to um to attract and reach the buying committee the full senior buying Committee of our prospects before I do that I'm going to tell you a story so I was the cro of a 50 million AR SAS 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' made a very common mistake when I say mistake I think it was a mistake in they they categorize their customers by Revenue who does that here when you think about your customers when you categorize them into tears who does it by Revenue quite a few of you okay so I'll tell you why I believe that's the wrong strategy I looked at um their tiers and in tier four they had four tiers which were companies that were paying them under $5,000 $2,000 their ACV was their average ACV was 14,000 um they had eight customers that had 5 billion 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 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 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 for $100,000 that we're selling for 14,000 today I said Amanda you're right we're not going to we're going to sell it for a million and she Lo 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 um 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 to to make sure that their web pages are accessible and currently it's their 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 I didn't know at the time what that company were buying but I assume 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 biggest unlock to you grow Revenue it's how I've grown my revenues from 0 to 20 million 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 said you're going to like this I said well what is it she said they need to be accessible accessibility compliance globally in the next 3 years she'd been into their annual report there 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 is responsible for compliance and for hitting these goals in the next three years inside this organization and we found 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 3 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 mve that customer from 43,000 ARR to 1.6 million we signed a three-year contract well it wasn't my money unfortunately I didn't get it but um we signed a three-year contract worth more than $4 million so my joke when I first arrived 3 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 doll customers but the moral of this story is 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 billion of Revenue they didn't look at the the fact that they were really up against the wall with a with a massive fine impendent if they hadn't hit these compliance um Milestones so I'll I'll urge you to think about what good looks like and what great looks like in your business if one of your reps or one of your sales people 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 companywide problem that's a real pain I promise you and you you will increase the ACV and if you understand what your customer is buying it becomes much much easier so key takeaways um 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 bucks a year that's a growth customer that is not a customer that should be in your bottom tier and not getting any customer support and find a companywide pain I in I I I inspect all of our deals and I make sure that we're actually you know we're shooting for as as as large as we 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 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 in with the CEO of that company I will get my CMO to connect in with their CMO my CTO to connect in with their CTO and now we've got five or six people on my SE Suite connected in to five or six people in the prospect's sea Suite as well we don't sell to them I'll reach out and say hey um 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 um because they now follow them on LinkedIn they might they might 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...