How FiveRings Marketing CEO Shaheem Alam grew to $754.1K revenue and 15 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is shaheem alam he is building a company called five rings marketing really trying to help companies outsource and build uh their sales teams and sales appointments without having those folks full-time on staff he started his first venture at the age of 20 and it learned incredible highs and crushing lows eating pb j for every meal gained a lot of respect for doing door-to-door cold calling and managing a team of 30 commissioner sales reps after pursuing a few other ventures in that realm he gained a lot of knowledge about growing sales building teams and measuring this success and that is what led him to co-founding five rings marketing where they help sas companies grow their revenue by booking meetings with decision makers in their industry shaheem you're ready to take us to the top yeah for sure very cool so what's the model here are people essentially paying you for a team of sdrs uh yeah so essentially um you know we target companies that are smaller uh tech startups they're just in the you know in that point where they're deciding should we hire on a full-time sales person should we hire on an internal bdr or should i first figure out what my sales strategy is really going to look like what's the right messaging the right approach and that's when they come to us and we cut we do linkedin email cold calling outreach on their behalf so yeah they can definitely outsource we're essentially their outsourced sdr team so what is your average customer pay per month for that team uh yeah so our the average customer would pay us 2200 a month um but our packages go up to uh four thousand and what if someone get if they come on for 200 bucks a month what are they getting so what they're getting is a dedicated account manager um who is going to be creating their linkedin campaigns their email campaigns managing um all of their replies that are coming in from the prospects and to the point where the meeting with the decision maker is booked on to uh our clients calendar um they also get me i work with account managers more so on the strategy side on the best approaches to take make sure that the campaigns are performing getting them the results that they're uh looking for um and they get you know i mean the everything else is kind of unspoken which is you know your tech stack your sales expertise and all the experience that we have that hiring someone brand new it you just wouldn't get so how many sdrs do you have on your team ready to deploy to any one of your customers yeah so currently we have um two sdrs two account managers and the way that it works is it's not necessary you don't get a full-time equivalent of an sdr but really what we are targeting is you know we need to get you 10 meetings a month or 20 meetings a month or 30 meetings a month so we ramp up or down depending on you know the the results that our clients are looking for i see and how many customers are you working with today today we have 15 uh active customers okay that's great so i mean can i take 1500 times 2200 you're doing about 30 grand a month something like that something like that yeah okay and how's growth looked where were you exactly a year ago do you remember yeah um so we started uh a year ago we were at 5000 a month okay so this is what like december 2019 this would be like january 2020 okay yup yes and so what's driven most of the growth how have you found new customers that are looking for an outsourced sdr team uh we do the same thing that we do for our clients we do linkedin email cold calling outreach literally the same way that we got clients we help our clients get clients and do these people stick like when they sign up to stay with you for like a month and then move it in-house or what's the stickiness look like yeah um so we've done a lot of learning um on that and in regards to uh churn and which clients are the best fit for us and which ones aren't um you know a few things for example you know our clients they need to have an average annual contract value of 30 000 um otherwise it doesn't make sense for them to use our services um and then they also need to kind of uh be a little bit more validate us and they need to have their first few clients um when we're doing a brand new product and we're doing like you know completely cold outreach and the product hasn't been proven in the market not even a little bit yet that's what makes it tough um so those are the cases where you know a campaign may not perform and then they might try different things um or if their product is just the type of product that you need to actually do marketing for rather than outbound sales and that kind of comes back to that ticket value where if each client is not going to bring you as much you know bring you 30 000 a year they're going to bring you maybe 2 000 a year then it makes sense for them to go with marketing so we've had clients that have used our services and then realize that okay this might not be the best approach for me linkedin might not be the best let me switch over to marketing um and things like that and then other clients yeah they they're with us for six seven months eight months and then they'll you know bring it internally and then other clients we have were their sales and marketing team um and they were so so last year in 2020 total revenue what percent of your revenue came from people paying 20 200 bucks a month versus your other services like ppc ads and things oh 20 i would say like over 80 percent 80 was the 2200 per month fee right yeah yeah interesting okay and when did you get into all this what year i'm sorry when did you get into all this when'd you launch uh we launched in september of 2019 i would say kind of more officially and what what got you into it where are you coming from so i did uh your three years of door-to-door that's the experience that you know you kind of mentioned in my bio there um what were you selling were you cutco guy uh it was hvac oh maybe maybe tougher than i think ajax is probably even tougher than knives oh yeah and um water treatment systems so you know i did a ton of door-to-door i did a ton of appointments i built sales teams um after that i moved into the tech realm a little bit worked for um you know as an sdr because it was a completely new industry uh it was a it was a fintech company which one uh street context okay got it what were you selling there so we were selling their product which was i mean back then it was an email secured it's not email sorry emails solution for um brokerages like financial brokerages and wealth management firms um so the solution was for like traders this is like four years ago i think yeah so it's hard for me to recall i don't know where their products developed to today but um yeah it was a fintech product um and then after that i worked for another startup as an account executive at startup rental run run around you might have heard about them i'm not sure uh but what they do is construction materials delivery within two hours they have an app um contractors don't need to waste time making runs to home depot you know they can just order it from the app they get it within two hours to their job site um so as an account executive there and then base you know kind of all of that experience um i joined yeah uh co-founded fireworks marketing the lead you know the sales agency side with uh the ceo nilafar um and yeah you're uh here i am very cool now are you building this you have you said two sdrs two ae so you have four people i guess on the team how many people total on the team though eight eight so what are the other three or four do yeah so we have a sales coordinator who provides um you know more supportive uh activities so whether it's like data collection whether it's like building out some marketing reports um collecting all the stats building lead lists things like that um that our account managers like they just shouldn't be doing um then we have myself uh ceo nilofar and um those are three plus the four and then we have one um first our digital marketing manager who manages the ppc um seo things like that now have you done this bootstrapped or raised oh bootstrapped i love that i love that very cool any plans to raise or no uh not at the moment very cool and so what does the i mean what do you want to do with the business do you think that this sort of outsourced sdr thing can be a big niche you can grow it to a couple of million bucks in revenue are you going to pivot somewhere what are you doing yeah i think that um so our company you know we do have competitors that have done this and grown to five to ten million dollars who are some of those um i would say a predictable revenue they're you know a great company based out of vancouver canada they've done they've been in the game since email marketing and then they kind of you know they jumped onto linkedin marketing they're uh they're doing pretty well uh a couple others i mean there's a competitor called growth uh growth level they're doing good things um so we definitely see the potential by looking at our competitors seeing what they've made out of it and um that's definitely the the path that we want to go down so how do you get down that path faster what's the next step ramp up sales so a big um big big goal for 2021 is to push on sales we have um contracted sales people that are working with us and you know on like a commission only basis and that's my expertise building commission only sales teams so um yeah they're helping us push before i wasn't doing the sales it was uh nilfor who was but now i'm jumping on the sales side as well because i really you know uh systemized the client delivery isn't that hard to get talented reps though if you're paying commission only i mean the real talented people are getting a big fix and a big commission that depends because it's the people that are confident in their ability to sell that are going to accept a commission only position because they know that they're going to be able to sell and make their money if not they're going to be able to make more than if they were just getting a base plus commission so like what commissions are you paying out uh so we give them uh the first first month's revenue so first month's payment if it's 2200 they get 2200. i mean oh you're talking about how you get new customers you're giving customers yes i see i see got it god i mean that's not that much though for commission only i mean i know people that make a hundred thousand dollar base and then with commissions they can get up to call it 150 200 sorry 200 250 000 total comp uh and they're i mean i guess they make like 20 30 percent of the first like first year acv so maybe it's kind of the same i guess yeah working it out with um the targets that we've been able to hit internally if they're able to you know get close to that then they'll be making interesting very very cool all right let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book favorite business book uh there's a bunch but i would say honestly i think my favorite book would be psychology of selling by brian tracy hands down that's what got me started into sales and um that's one of the books i would say i still refer to number two is there a ceo you're following or studying ceo that i'm following or studying um i wouldn't say there's one in particular number three uh what's your favorite online tool for building a business online tool for whatsapp building your business online tool for building my business um but what do you mean by that i mean what a tool that a tool that you use a lot linkedin okay number four how many hours of sleep to get every night uh five six okay and what's your situation married single kids uh engaged oh congratulations it's exciting uh no kids yet no kids yet all right and how old are you i'm 27 27 last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 how to manage money better guys there you have it did door-to-door sales selling hvac and water treatment sales back in 2017 16 17 18 actually before that and then got into some tech sales and other stuff and then eventually in 2019 launched his own platform five rings marketing think of it like an outsourced sdr team to 200 000 in sales uh last year caught in 2019. sorry 60 thousand dollars in sales in 2019 now today up to about 30 000 a month in revenue as he scales across 15 customers that pay on average 20 200 per month for his sdr outsourced services looking to scale into one of these larger companies like predictable revenue or growth level we'll see what happens stream thanks for taking us to the top thank 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 back end dashboards their expenses their 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