How Salecycle CEO Fabien Sanchez grew Salecycle to $53.5M revenue and 500 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest this morning is Dominic Edmonds he's the founder and CEO of a company called sale cycle and is focused on utilizing customer data to drive conversions and ROI through behavioral marketing Dominic are you ready to take us to the top hell yeah all right this is a tough tough space how is sales cycle winning yeah we're winning pretty well I think that helps being one of the early entrants in space which means it we've been able to develop our offering together with the view of the market as it's grown itself so yeah we went through a blend of our technology features together with service as well we don't shy away from giving people the best in bus what percentage of your revenue over the past 12 months was from professional services versus recurring SAS my head it's relatively small given that the professional SAS pieces what we've done terms of scalability but my background in agency means that you understand that when you talk about building relationships rather than vesting in hands-on client support it allows you for cross-sell upsell opportunity so it's all about building a relationship having someone didn't pick up the phone is really important to us so when you say relatively small mean are we talking less than 10 percent is professional service less than sorry a lot 10 percent yeah okay all right and then tell me about the rest of your model is the recipe like a pure play SAS model yeah yes so we've been through a number of different pricing models over the eight years existed we start out in a pure performance-based pricing model which is really cool because it allows you to really get ballsy with the market and really talk about what you want to deliver but as you mature you understand that actually you need to build something a little more predictable for those tough CFO's out there yeah and and your model so what how are you making money in that model and when did you shift it to more SAS soon find a number of iterations so we start out with performance now odester class performs as SAS for us because having done that for kind of three four years in the early days we understood sees now down to an art meaning that we understood what to expect from a client depend on their sales cycle excuse the pun so well that was fairly predictable however taking something then to a blend of a base fee which allows us to talk about servicing allow us to talk about the implementation fees the cost and go with it and then applying a performance fee on top was our second iteration and now we've moved into 100 percent flat fee model which and matches with the same kind of fees people wouldn't be paying us an average but it smoothes out rather than making it choppy I guess I don't understand that if you have a bunch of customers paying flat fees your revenues gonna be really chunky up and down versus predictable kind of stacking sass when I misunderstanding no no so when I say flat fees those flat fees means instead of a customer who may go through a period where they're in sale on there let's say it's a fashion retailer and they're paying of 20,000 a month and when they're not in sale that could be paying us 5,000 a month what we're talking about is picking effectively the equivalent of an average billing so a flat fee is between those mean over the year nobody loses out I see okay and then generally just so we can better understand your customers average contract size in your one is what are we talking 10 grand a million 100,000 we do have very expensive see working in different sectors as well we work very well you know yeah on average you'd be looking at a monthly MRI which is technically what we live in we'd be talking around about the $5,000 a month month okay now you launch let's go back and learn more about your story here launched in 2009 where was your head at at that time at were you you know struggling back against the wall had to make this work did you just sell your last company where were you at so I came out with agency so strictly speaking we started in 2010 for every 2000 cent for every fifth that she just passed her eighth birthday but I came out of an agency role where it was becoming clear to me that clients for approaching us to address abandonment issues on their side as they would list them as they had a high abundant rate they didn't they had an average abundant right the challenge you faced mr. Kline is the same challenge your competitors are facing and that really was a crystallization behind sir cycler could be a singular enterprise level product which can address this issue for a number of customers okay interesting so you and give me a sense of the size of the agency before you started thinking about building software I mean were you doing a million bucks si or a hundred grand so we would be doing around about five millennia fine okay so it takes some energy and focus to basically slowly shut that down while you ramp sass or are they both running in parallel right now so I've stepped away from that businesses gone from strength to strength and the interesting thing is the shareholders in that agency are the same shareholders I haven't sales cycle which means my relationship with them has continued but there's certainly 12-month transition period where I was wearing both hats interesting now when you talk about shareholders I star wondering about investment have you bootstrapped this thing or if not how much have you raised I think when the definition of boots strapped into certain terms of us terms so we raised 80,000 pounds of investment to build this and nothing on the agency side you mentioned you have shareholders there was that totally bootstrap as well yes totally this job okay got it with no institutional money today that's great so I love that and your based I think you told me earlier you're based in Leesburg Virginia my hometown which is great where are you based there what part of the Cassidy in London ah very good that's a good that's a good spot to be in and what's the team size today a team sized in the u.s. is 35 globally hundred eighty okay and walk me through the breakdown so so where else do you have offices and what do they do so officers currently we still have our headquarters based up the northeast of England we then have one in downtown Paris and we've got one in Singapore together with here in the US as well in terms of what they do they I suppose we split the business into regions as you might expect so we have the Americas office based in the US which allows us to win customers manage those customers support them implement them locally we do exactly the same thing in Paris exactly same things import exactly the same thing in the UK however we also have a Central Division as its referred to which is core technology functions finance roles like myself strategic roles which effectively all of the region's benefit from interesting now you're the foul you were the founders correct I'm the founder yeah any do you have any other co-founders or just you it's just me how have you catch look how have you kept yourself sane who do you who do you go talk to when you're when you're having a bad day my wife the cats the children realistically though I can speak to my shelves because they have a strong track record themselves of entrepreneurship and investment and seeing journeys like this through to multiple points Alexis so no I do rely on those relationships and what are you growing at right now would you say year-over-year just the software siding or the agency yeah yeah what i steped fully away from the agents I'm so growing at 30% year on you that's good I mean for a boot trip company that's healthy and what do you I now today in terms of total customers are serving I would got north of 500 customers we've been profitable for five years yeah life's good and is that all just to be clear is this all kind of karke abandonment related or you're branching into other parts of the sales cycle and other kinds of business models so when we started the business we focus very heavily on the cart baman piece because that was our entry to market but when we talk about being a behavioral marketing business it opens above much further I saw email as a channel and within that term you have kattabomman yours have post purchase cross sell up self survey based information but then we have the on-site channel which allows us to engage your year this is throughout the shopping funnel cut traditional data provide them with different points of entry to complete their purchase etc that's a channel and then we have the SMS channel as well so that's really the way the business is structured at the moment interesting so your value would say as you're pulling all these data channels together so the business can make the smartest decision on how to drive more sales that's exactly right interesting are you selling access to the data anyone else kind of like a clear bit model or no not currently okay something you're expanding to yeah interesting why enough said I can't go into any more about that okay why is it just too sensitive yes it's sensitive based off we're going through a great deal of an opportunistic learnings within the business and and I think it's fair to say that we're in a a path to become a data marketing business but there's a lot of sensitive information in both of them interesting interesting okay good um in terms of size by the way 500 customers $5,000 monthly are poo I mean I put you it out north of two million a month is that generally accurate that's pretty close okay and grown 30% you over here that means you're doing somewhere about what 1.7 is about 13 months ago monthly ah yes roughly speaking forgive me again not digging through a telephone yeah I'm just gonna say yeah...