How DocSales CEO Mauricio Kigiela grew DocSales to $2.7M revenue with a 14 person team in 2024.

I want to introduce Mauricio giguela from Doc sales we'll be talking about how revops doubled his mrr in three months thank you guys good morning so thanks for being here so I had a problem this morning because my the title of my presentation was wrong and the previous speaker was not here and the room was empty and I thought oh my God what the hell is going on with my speak my so I'm from Brazil and I'm very happy to be here too great and I'm very happy to be here so it's a big challenge for me to to talk to this such qualified audience especially in English that's my first time uh that I speak in English give a speech in English so I'm kind of terrified but that's okay I'm gonna do my best and I hope you enjoy so where'd my control okay so let me give you uh first a context about doc sales so we are a contract and proposal automation platform so what we do we help sales reps to prepare sales documents and close deals with designing processing the payment and the payment and so on so we add a kind of automation layer on the top of the CRM so the sales reps just need to drag the opportunity card from one phase to another phase and the magic happens in the background so we started this business in Brazil two years ago the idea was to be International first but then we were caught by the covet pandemic actually we and everybody else right and we had to change our plans and then we focused for the first two years in the Brazilian Market so we had to adapt product and everything because we we had to focus on Brazil and since May we are focusing on the U.S market so over the next 20 minutes I'm gonna discuss a problem that we face it on doc says about a year ago so basically what happened was I thought my business was not scalable we were growing actually we were selling but we are not growing our growth rate was flat during like six months in a row and I thought oh my God what's going on if you are selling well if everything looks well what happened what's going on with the company so at the time we were at the 26 or 30 000 dollars in mrr this is all mrr now you can see that from June on we started growing faster so we were able to solve the problem look at this uh in a year we double our pool we triple the number of paying customers our churn rate was at a very reasonable rate so for the stage of Doc sales was really good and in October 2021 we prepared this report to our investors and we show the problem so if you take a look on this graph you're gonna see that the growth rate was flat for several months and at the time we listed a lot of actions that we would take to solve the problem in terms of lead scoring customer support lead qualifying or lead generation and so on so we thought we knew the problem we thought we knew how to fix it but in fact we had no idea about what was going on for several months I am I am on my fourth company two exits and when I faced this problem I thought oh my God what what can I do can I go why what I'm doing wrong you know so what's going on with the company because we're facing this kind of problem so the first conclusion was uh even small companies have a very high complexity and I made them some mistakes on the beginning of the company and that caused like a high a higher complexity than than I could have first of all uh we should start selling to one Persona on one ICP and I wasn't at this purchase sale so I was sell it to whoever wanted to buy dog sales and that caused a big problem because when I had to analyze our customers our the behavior of our customers I was analyzing in average and for the average was really good when when it we took a deeper look at the cohorts of the customers we found very serious problems second thing we should generate kpis since the first day I know that it it seems very early to generate kpis when we are starting the company when we don't reach we haven't reached the product Market fit yet but that information will be very valuable in the future not at the moment that we are selling but after that we could analyze we would be able to analyze it in a different way think is of course don't use spreadsheets to to generate kpis so actually don't don't use spreadsheets to generate to make controls over departments because they don't generate kpis automatically and and that will make your your life harder after that and you should take care about what people think about the company so people care usually about their goals about their objectives if they are making money or not but they don't are as soon as you have like a very aligned culture in the company people would care just about themselves and not about the others or other departments so when we take a deeper look on all departments we were in 12 guys only so 12 guys is like a small family you know so we figured out that there was a Chasm between the apartments so everybody was taking care of their own department and they were not worried about what was happened to the company and in general so we started a deep analysis and we came out with the idea of the the revenue operations so just to have an alignment do you know what weaponal Revenue operations is nope no one okay so nobody implemented and it didn't help Revenue operations in fact the revenue operations is a kind of mindset I know that we need to do a lot of things to implement it but Revenue operations is when you take a dynamic look of all your company and you have all departments aligned and that's not easy to do so you can imagine it's when I talk about processes we use talk about our internal processes how we do things how we uh sell to customers how we upgrade customers how we can sell customers so how can we charge customers and and so on but imagine you become a customer-centric company and now we are talking about their processes their Journeys we can call Journeys but in the in the end of the day we're talking about processes so what happened to a customer when they want to buy from you when they want you churn they want to cancel the subscription when they need to upgrade or they they need to save money and you you need to offer something cheaper to them like a downgrade or or maybe a coupon or so on so first of all we have goals for departments so the marketing department has uh has a go to generate X number of leads sales has a go to bring IX number of mrr ARR or whatever metric when we Implement Riven operations we are not talking exactly about each department but we are talking about the company so if we bring to the company Global goals how is the growth rate and who is responsible for the growth rate probably all departments are responsible for that instead of each one of those of those departments so if you can have monthly real time a dynamic vision of your whole company probably you're gonna identify and fix all problems much easier and quicker what we did on our assessment was first take a deeper look into our customers as I told you before we're selling to everyone now I separated here only accountants so when we sell to accountant offices we have a LTV of one thousand and four hundred dollars the payback of cost of acquisition is like four months only four months our LTV per our points 45 times which means 45 months we spend the first four months to pay the acquisition and then 40 months to make money with them which is really good and the churn in average 1.4 percent per month but when we take a deeper look now we separated all the accountants by group of users all their content with one or two users have just 30 months it's not bad but if you take a look on this one the triple you know look at the churn 5.3 percent per month so if we if we tell the marketing department that that are generating leads not to generate these kind of company so not qualify this kind of company probably our metrics will be much better and you know the problem we have we had at that time much more accountant with one and two than the other ones and what happens when you had this situation customer support was struggling with a lot of tickets the product Department was receiving a lot of requests for features that fit only small companies so you change the the whole company and probably in the future your pro product will not fit for those other better customers and also you need to to to be careful with that so we we cannot take a look on the average so if you if you put your your head on the oven and they're fit on the fridge probably the average temperature good and what I'm showing you that you don't need to take the kpis for average as serious as we used to take and if you if you go to this regular uh dashboards and kpi software such as chart Magoo profit wow and so on we use profitable and we like them but they don't they don't show this kind of reality to us they show the average only so overall churn is not the most important kpi we need to take a a deeper look into the customer there are many ways for us to predict Pro customers or predict um what they will do their behavior based on engagement based on the behavior based on the number of tickets based on how they add or remove users to the platform how they interact to the plan so if we can put some kpis...