How Outreach CEO Manny Medina grew Outreach to $300.8M revenue and 6K customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is manny medina he's a ceo of outreach the leading sales engagement platform medina joined amazon's aws team as an early employee and helped microsoft drive the mobile division from launch to 50 million in annual revenue he has an mba from harvard business school and a computer science master's from the university of pennsylvania manny ready to take us to the top let's do it all right come on in the bio your team says the leading sales engagement platform you know i have to push you on the fluffy stuff so how do you know you're the leading one um you know we have a good sense of the market and we know you know we always know who's buying who we are in a in a very privileged position in which we are creating a new category so if the category is getting created people engage are talking to all of us to everybody in the category so we have visibility into who is doing what at all times so we track very closely they went to the losses and the sizes of each of those and expansion opportunities and so forth so we know by the numbers that we are the one that with the most accounts and the most money yeah you know because we're also growing we're also racing and you know we're close to silicon valley and everything we hear the feedback from investors telling us that we are the leading so it's both um you know the feedback loop and the market itself telling us so when you were back on the show last in february of 2018 uh you said you had about 250 employees at the time you raised i think 60 million in funding is what you said give us an update on those two numbers what's team size today and have you raised additional capital uh we haven't raised additional capital uh but we are you know we're always talking to investors so don't be surprised as news come out uh we are at 315 employees right now we actually just we're in brand new offices right here in seattle and um we are hiring a fresh new batch of uh the sea level suite so we have a new cro and um and what else well manny hold on hold on new cro this is usually like one of the first like signals i'm looking for for anyone that i think might be pushing 100 million in arr in terms of hey we're looking at going public so who was the cro and have they taken up a company public recently no so right all right so um no we had our cr we hired mike mooney from centrify yeah and he was involved in growing you know north of 300 million with uh hp and uh and then uh within perva he took him to almost 800 million in arr and then um and then recently he joined centrify but that got acquired by toma bravo so he's looking for he's looking for a clean slate something to take from zero to public himself uh well you're not exactly at zero anymore i mean maybe more like 60 to public right six into public and you know the public numbers are a moving target right so you can you know 200 is a new 100 so you can it's no longer is that right is it is is that it it's really you got to hit 200 million an arr to have have a good ipo that's why goldman is selling everybody it's interesting why why why i mean why do you think that is is the the amount of liquidity in the market is just stupid at this point so you can stay private for longer stay private for longer um funds are playing both sides now funds are playing funds that used to be public funds hedge funds and so forth they're playing the private markets now too because you can write a 50 to 100 million dollar check and invest it all like that whole thing into one company and then let that right out so if you have a 600 million allocation for a particular company you can start making bets early on and just capture the upside as the company goes from you know growth stage to public would you is you're in the back your head you're kind of like wow the whole team is kind of lined on we'd love to go public one day or do you think there's a path to actually staying private you know up to four or five six hundred million bucks in arr um i think that we have to go public now the accountability is different yeah the liquidity is different the liquidity the ability i want to do what amazon is doing which is they pay their they pay their theirs their salaries fairly they're fairly low but the the each employee is capturing the entire upside of their execution because of the market reward you see what i mean exactly it's a beautiful position to be in which you sort of cap your your base but the market is paying your employees you know their bonuses and their and their and their salary increases so it's it's an incredible position to be in and i want to i want to be the uh the amazon for for for sas enterprise yeah you see it as a way to potentially attract talent but save your cash flow use the equity value and the liquid markets to you know build a rockstar team exactly and it's it's like the market is paying the employees a bonus for performance yeah so we all oh alignment there's no better alignment than that yeah all right manny for people that don't know the rare person that doesn't know what outreach is what do you guys do so if you were to think of sales engagement means that if you were to think about what a rep does every day they wrap calls and emails and follow-up and book calendar appointments and documents linkedin etc that whole thing needs to be orchestrated for you to be able to measure it and prove it so in outreach it creates a single pane of glass where you can live and take all those actions so what we do is we're separating the crm layer which is where the data is stored to the system of action where the data is acted on so we by by creating a layer where the system is acted on you actually get better performance because you have visibility to what the rep is doing at all times and it's not working it's not getting what you need out of the wrap to move the deal forward yeah last time you were on again february 2018 you said you had about 2 500 customers what are you announcing sorry 2200 customers what are you now today 3 100. and so where is manny where's most that growth coming from what's the what's the tactic that you've been testing outbound inbound content what is it so we have been heavily abound we actually i used to pride myself of being you know called outbound engine for the longest time uh we bought we bought a company sales hacker since last time we talked yeah max by the way by the way i was like in the middle of trying to work a deal with him to like buy the conference somehow and i'm like he's not replying to my emails he's working on something big and then i see the news i'm like god damn it manny get out of my way man no max is a great guy and he has a book out too how's that going so far oh it's blowing up it's blowing up because again we're redefining what what sales means like sales is no longer bravado long cowboy do whatever it takes to win some people win some people lose sales is becoming a very scientific game in which you need to optimize the time of the rep and the activity that they take to get the most use out of that transaction yeah so and it create and sort of like it matches both empathy sort of um empathy science and and obsession into one package and that's what we're that's what the book is it lays out the groundwork for what sales engagement will be but to to get back to your question so we bought sales hackers so that we can actually have access to educating the community what we figure is that our our impediment to long-term growth was education was educating the market that any of the stuff that we're doing is actually possible yeah and every time we release something from the machine learning team and we tell the market that we just did this the market is like oh my god how is this even possible i don't believe you you said i mean and and because we are you know we're true to our seattle like roots in which we do what we say we're going to do you know we never market a head of capability we needed the ability for us to have analysis to tell our story and that's what we both sell soccer and that's what brings us here so heavy outbound give me give me the ratios real quick because i'm sure you've tested this um you're you're in kind of inside sales team so what's the ratio from kind of like sdr to ae right now oh it's less than one to one so last time we talked i think it was you know over one to one one one one and a half or so sdr per ae and now we're dialing that down significantly to less than one sdr and we're going to get to one scr for 280s okay for two a's what has allowed the sdrs to get more efficient outreach what outreach well your tool okay got it can you be specific though i mean i know it's your tool you build it in but but what actually is it is it higher higher response rates on the cold emails i mean what is it so it is it's because we've been as we are non-stop testing so we have a we have a team actually internally that what they do is they test language and they as we break down by persona right so we figure out what person are we reaching out...