How Salesbolt CEO Craig Maxwell grew Salesbolt to $480K revenue and 80 customers in 2024.

guys sales bolt.com today is doing twenty thousand dollars a month in Revenue up from twelve thousand dollars a month just a year ago and 35 bucks a month a year before that caught in 2021. he's a one-man show with an army of contractors spends about five grand a month on formula Q it's a Dev shop based out of India then another one or two k on Fiverr Engineers he's got just a bunch of contractors building this thing he's about break even right now serving 80 customers helping him automatically enrich their HubSpot and Salesforce accounts with lead data again salesbault.com is go to market right now 90 of his leads are coming from the Chrome extension but as bigger contracts are coming from the Salesforce app exchange so we'll see how we choose to scale from here hey folks my guest today is Craig Maxwell he's a sales marketing expert with nine years of experience in the technology Industries the founder of sales bolt to this previous Hill various roles that uh companies like ebsta including SDR AE and SDR manager and in sales operations he's got a proven track record of driving growth and success which you can learn more about on his LinkedIn profile Craig you're ready to take us to the top absolutely thanks Nathan you bet why leave ebsta by the way I hear those guys are super Capital efficient they've got a nice scale what happened oh yeah that's an interesting one so absolutely love my time there it was a complete formative years of my Tech Career uh guy ribs is an absolute Legend and if you ever get a chance to meet him I'd definitely recommend uh doing so um it was more a case of my alignment at the time I was in an scr role going into an AE role started doing a lot of uh 360 work in terms of sales outbound and um I sort of saw my path going a bit more towards products I was really interested in learning to code I started to learn a lot of code and JavaScript and built a few different kind of hacky widgets here and there and I figured this is why I enjoy a lot more than just selling I want to do a bit more and um from there on I I just followed that path right that's great what was your what was your quota Target at uh ebsta uh it was never actually when I was back there it was so so young and innocence we never had a hard um hardcore query so I think my monthly attainment was around 15 20K um like small um transactional deals right A lot of them what does that mean so in one month you need to sell 20K of new ARR or new mrr uh New Era that was just yeah huge at the time we didn't have an Enterprise product I think the primary play Then was the Chrome extension for like bull horn and Salesforce integration back then since then I think they've pivoted well you're uniquely positioned a teacher audience quickly if they're trying to hire their first version of Craig Maxwell how to structure the quota Target right so like what did you like or dislike about how you had it structured at ebsta um I would say um it was very unstructured right so let's just recap on that the good thing is that it was quite flexible I could really do my own thing in terms of what worked for me in terms of tooling or um kind of process I remember putting together my own metrics kind of create my own dashboard and Salesforce tracking myself and what I really figured out what worked um everything just became um so so smooth from there right but I I would say having a process in place like that before hiring your first scr would be um yeah a nice place to start so let's fast let's fast forward to sales Vault then today so what's the company do and what's the average customer paying you per month or per year to use the technology yeah so we have two different products so I'll kind of split them there but the Chrome extension we have integrated links in with Salesforce primarily by recruiters to uh creating candidates searching for candidates on links in recruiter and getting an easy back and forth between two systems so they can add resumes edit and update fields and um create new candidates as they're working on the Fly essentially um the other app we have is on the Salesforce app Exchange and that's more of a data enrichment app with that tool we come up against you know user gems we kind of compete in that space for contact tracking um Champion tracking so imagine you know your Champions left one company moved to another company you've got a chair and risk at company a and an opportunity a company B where if you track the champion over time you can obviously resell them they're already on your product already on your value prop but now I've left a vacuum in that prior account which may churn out if not dealt with from CS as well and how many leads last month in in April 2023 did you get from the Chrome extension versus the Salesforce app Exchange yeah it was about 80 weighted towards the Chrome extension and I think roughly we get like in terms of pure inbound not referral it's like 30 40 leads a a week so a huge value 40 leads a week from the Chrome extension that's tracks yeah oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from Real Time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed around 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash valuations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview and that's impressive see a lot of people underestimate Chrome extensions because if I go to your Chrome extension no offense it doesn't look huge right you've got nine reviews now there are five stars which is great and you've got it says a thousand plus users but this is quite a powerful distribution channel for you and that leads us into the cross-sell of the isv app where it is a much bigger ticket item how big average well I mean the average field size in the current procession is skewed because you obviously we use a sign up CR touch which is great for the kind of bottom line but that really excuse the average deal size right so we have people paying 50 degrees a month up to 20 30 grand a year right with the ISP app the average is a much more smooth because we're paying uh they're paying on based on the usage sorry what is the isv you mean the Salesforce app is what you mean yes the image from the app so the contact tracking app I guess we could call it for for better term that has a minimum price span of 12K a year if that were tracking ten thousand contacts per month so every month on the month which saying history exchange jobs his way to currently work here's an email address with alert at the owner of the record update that send it to a foreign Outreach and far away from there so that we're selling some mid market and Enterprise interesting and how many paying customers do you have today title across both apps we have I think it's 80-ish 7880 that's great and is it split 80 20 about 80 of those are from chrome uh I'd say it's heavily awaited towards Chrome right we've probably got like 90 on Chrome and less than the rich chat because of the later time to Market with that tool we only started building...