How Pipeline Signals Inc CEO Jamie Shanks grew to $1M revenue and 24 customers in 2023.

hey folks special guest today jamie shanks he's the ceo of sales for life a learning and a service company they're pioneering social selling training program for mid-market and enterprise companies they've trained over 250 000 sales reps in dozens of industries they recently founded pipeline signals a b-pass company that mines signal intelligence from linkedin for any accounts in our customers total addressable market or for sales opportunities versus risks jamie you're ready to take us to the top fantastic thanks for the invite this sounds like you enjoyed training 200 000 sales people on like a one-time pay for the class module and then you're like you know what i sort of like sas better let's launch pipeline or signals yeah so i mean over the years sales for life was a one-time project-based revenue business and we've tried our darndest over the years the lifetime customer lifetime value would be on an average of about two and a half years now rpoo 80 000. but yeah it started out project-based revenue and we've done our darndest to make it uh stretch it out but what was happening as a training business was people were asking can you just do for me and so this managed business service of pipeline signals was born to be able to mine that intelligence on their behalf very interesting so give me a bit of a back story here um when did you launch sales for life so i actually merged my own consulting firm with sales for life which was at that time toronto's first sales recruiting company so it had nothing to do with the training space and at that same time when i merged in in 2012 i self-discovered and pioneered this concept called social selling so the ability to actually prospect using linkedin and built the world's first curriculum on it for global enterprise and our so basically our first revenue and that topic was in the year 2013. and how much revenue did you do that year it's always a fun question 390 000 you remember it you have right on the money hey you know i prepared for this interview i know three hundred and nine thousand dollars back in 2013 79 379 okay 379 in 2013 and so what did that look like but who'd that come from how many customers so at that time i originally didn't have much of a plan other than helping local toronto businesses and i got really lucky that content marketing started to explode and immediately um exo communications level three communications oracle adp thompson reuters kind of picked up our blogs invited us in for training and we jumped we jumped multiple levels very quickly we went from the smb to the global enterprise in leaps and bounds in months and we stayed in the global enterprise and global mid-market and although now we're even going downstream opposite of most companies uh but we primarily serve the global mid-market global enterprise from that day forward okay so so so today uh how many customers do you have on just the training program ignore the ignore uh pipeline sales singles yeah so the average uh average year we're servicing anywhere between 25 and 50. we'll call them programs or projects now one customer might have let's use thermo fisher as an example might have a launch in america's emea latin apec so we'll have these cohorts of 25 to 50 customers in a year i see and sum all that up for me last year what was total revenue across the whole business 2.2 million 2.2 okay and and was any of that a pipeline signal at that point or no no so pipeline signals uh was a service that we were using as a reinforcement after certification so what was happening is we enable sellers to sales generate or self generate pipeline at scale in 90 day time horizons once they do so they have to defend it in a case study but then they needed this intelligence as a tailwind behind them and that's when pipeline signals well kovid kind of fast forward the idea that well hold on if you took a took us off airplanes why don't we think about what else could we do and use that opportunity to build pipeline signals yeah so so was cobit good or bad for you more people are doing sales on zoom i imagine you should have seen a spike right yeah so we were uh prepared years in advance we were one of the first sales training companies to self-develop our own learning platform online learning platform we also moved to virtual instructor led five years ago so the live part of our service offering was ten percent of revenue was speaking engagement sales kickoffs and quarterly business reviews but that was 80 flights a year for five years in a row take that time back my business partner amar and i looked at this holistically and said well we have other services businesses we want to create the managed service side has greater scalability and you know the total adjustable market is endless let's develop that because our customer sentiment is we can't turn this tap off once we start interesting okay so so how many people today are paying for pipeline signals and what's your pricing model there yeah so pipeline signals right now has eight customers active uh mrr ranges between two thousand and four thousand the average is twenty five hundred us that's what they're paying per month on average per month yes and it's a payment gateway pay by credit card and the idea is that the price fluctuates based on two variables which is the um the volume of accounts around the world they'd like us to monitor existing customers perspective and white space and then the other leverage point would be a time horizon of the report do you want it daily weekly or monthly so you know it's kind of like microtransactional and stacking that mrr per customer over hopefully a lifetime yeah i mean eight customers 2500 bucks a month you're doing what twenty thousand dollars a month in revenue there and just launched it this year nice we launched it actually a couple days ago a couple of days ago okay so where did you get those first eight customers from where they service folks they came from existing sales for life customers who were excited to be able to you know we had been enabling an alpha then a beta and kind of battle testing it within sales for life but then with the ability to roll it out uh as a standalone company because the unit economics are completely different than a sales training business and it really needed to be in its own entity why build it inside of the same business or is it already spun out as a separate entity altogether like pipeline signals own website locked and loaded but what about like like the cap table is it the same ownership is it the same c-corp in delaware uh yeah so we're canadian-based organizations sales for life owned 50-50 by jamie shanks and a march chef pipeline signals own 50-50 by jamie shanks and i'm marcia both i see your own businesses yeah so no no outside capital no i'd say council um that's great um would you raise capital so that's one of the compelling events and reasons for separating the two businesses they travel on very different horizons and enterprise values so because of that pipeline signals managed services are trading exponentially greater than the lack of sales training companies that go for sale so because of that we potentially would consider a variety of different uh financial vehicles to scale the business and where let's just let's not go down to like would you raise be seen how much if you did have more money where would you spend it to grow pipeline signal uh our go to market we're using a singular sales play that is working extremely well and it it's a sales play that henry and zoom info did essentially you're giving away bits of value and intelligence every month to a set of named accounts you want to win and so you're enticing them with a fish on a lure to say here are compelling events that your sales team are probably not mining and and engaged in and you're proving the opportunity cost of what they're missing and so you do that at scale and so that's basically so what are you giving what's your bait a debate is giving away 10 free signals to each account on that list ideally developing a list of up to ten thousand accounts uh over time primarily in the tech and telecom space it's where we've made our bread and butter at sales for life and then scaling it from there um and it's an automated sales process that seems to be working so that's part a and then the second part where we deploy capital would be in connectors and integrators because we are an intelligence play uh our intelligence is best served within our customers crm sales loft outreach and so forth so making it more seamless for our intelligence that we gather to be flown into our customers tools of record and so how much revenue with these two things now working side by side do you think you'll do this here so our goal is in the next 12 to 18 months to be able to do 100 000 mrr okay but what do you think you'll be in december this year december this year our plan would be to get ideally halfway there okay and where were you at a year ago uh with sales for life or pipeline signals like sorry i'm sorry yeah for the combined couple days ago yeah yeah i i know that but but now always asking is combined both businesses this year how much revenue do you think you'll do oh combined so sales for life will do 2 to 2.5 million dollars uh then let's say we can get this to a half a million dollar run rate uh pipeline signals you're looking at three so both businesses what i'm most proud about what we've created is while we grew compounded growth at sales for life at about 24 uh keger over that time horizon we grew um ebitda at 29 and our goal right now while we sit at 25 percent ebitda our goal is a 50 ebitda in both businesses so it's really being able to get to that scale in pipeline signals as well at a fifty percent even so jamie just break that down right so last month how much total revenue did you do across the whole business and how much went to the bottom line total revenue in last month for sales for life the whole business uh well it had been 200 give or take two hundred thousand dollars okay and make 50 net net margins at the bottom got it so 180s 180 sales for life and then 20k is the mrr from pipeliners 200 grand and then you're taking basically 90 000 to the bank bottom line cash flow give or take yeah well as a founder cash was a great thing to have what you choose to do with this another story do you reinvest in the business do you pay it out to yourself as dividends and your co-founder what do you do with it yeah so we have been listen amar and i do well but we plow a lot of it back into product development uh we plow it back into marketing so most of it is getting reinvested okay and what's a team size today how many people 20 teammates our teammates are all uh globally dispersed uh we do not have teammates sitting in north america as an example but we have teammates all around the world and 20 teammates there's a kind of a shared services model between two businesses how many engineers uh engineers too two okay got it interesting very cool heck of a story here let's let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite book favorite book right now is called the boutique by greg alexander if you're in proserv it's like a must number two is there a founder you're following or studying well i kind of study the story of sales benchmark index which greg was the founder matt shares as the ceo now um it's want to be like them one day in the future number three what's your favorite online tool for building a business besides your own it's got to be linkedin i mean all my money on linkedin yeah number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night jamie seven and a half i've been tracking my sleep for three years and uh i'm pretty religious about understanding my sleep number four our last question here which situation married single kiddos two kiddos uh eight and seven and married married and how old are you i'm 42. last question something you wish you knew when you were 20 which i knew i was 20 is um don't be afraid to fail and don't try to please everybody like do things for yourself not for other people guys there you have it sales for life launched in 2013 with 379 thousand dollars in total revenue that year they've now scaled up to 2.2 million last year on the agency side and then launched an internal sas tool it's called pipeline signals that's already doing twenty thousand dollars a month in revenue should go to about call it thirty forty thousand dollars a month from revenue by december and this year they'll close out somewhere around three million bucks in total revenue spread across between 30 and 60 customers their profitable last month the 200 000 top line took about 80 to 90 000 to the bank which they'll then go and reinvest 20 people on the team right now so they try and help you automate your sales process and pull signal from the noise on your hottest leads jamie thanks for taking us to the top thanks a lot nathan 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 revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 p.m central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to 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