How Salesloft CEO Sam Loveland grew Salesloft to $110M revenue and 2K customers in 2021.

hello everyone my guest today is kyle porter he's the founder and ceo of salesloft the leading sales engagement platform delivering the best sales experience to customers the company is recognized as the number one sales engagement platform by g2 crowd in atlanta's number one best place to work kyle you ready to take it to the top i am nathan thanks for having me man glad to be here yeah how are there so many 100 million 200 500 million dollar companies in like the sales outreach kind of space you know i i can't speak for all of them i think there's a few that really have done a big a big deal in the marketplace you've got the data providers they're doing awesome you've got some of the content providers the seismics and show pads and then you get the sales engagement market of course outside of crm i think those are the ones that have made a big big splash in the market so talk me through how you're kind of where you see yourself in that stack where are you carving out where are you winning all the deals yeah of course so uh we we really invented this sales engagement marketplace and what that means is companies come to codify their go to market place they take their reps whether they're inside reps field reps customer success managers bdrs sdrs and every single one of those has something they want to achieve with customers and prospects they codify into one place and then execute on all those plays we hold those reps accountable to their activities measure their success analyze it and help them produce better results on going into the future so would you i mean in terms of like directly competitive we just had chris cabrera on i mean do you see yourself essentially as again the same basically a younger nimble version of zachary no i mean exactly handles compensation right we handle sales engagement so it's the activities that the reps are making to communicate with their customers and prospects to generate revenue we become the phone system we become the email system we link up with social systems help you control offline communications do all that in one platform and then what happens is reps are able to have more conversations get 100 coverage on their target accounts no leads fall through the cracks generate more opportunities general generate more revenue upsells renewals that sort of thing very cool okay so basically like an entire communications layer on top of the crm i want to get back in and we'll get into crm and kind of some interesting stuff you did it with benioff in salesforce and uh and folks like that back in the day but before we get that give me a general sense that's kind of a size here right so if someone wants to pay for your technology for a year give me kind of your sweet spot on average are we talking like you know 100 year accounts 100k a million dollar a year accounts where's the sweet spot for you so i'll give you the quick rundown we were four employees with zero arr and this product in 2014. we'll hit 100 million next year sitting around the 50 million mark growing 100 120 net expansion and we significantly differentiate from our competitors in a number of critical ways right in terms of our customers it is we are we are supplying to everyone from smb to fortune 500 enterprises which is something i learned from scott dorsey at exact target full gamut right so it's everything from a 15k customer to a million dollar customer okay and how many are you serving today thousands okay like okay like so call between two and ten thousand something like that yeah okay fair enough and so walk me through i mean there are different sales motions i'm sure you have for each of these different cohorts so i want to kind of go down a couple of those uh here you said launched in 2014 that was kind of zero revenue zero customers when did you guys write the first line of code though i started the company in 2011 we built other products up to that point the company as it is today our entire revenue stream that launched in 2014 so i had different products tested different product market fit had a data product that went from 0 to 7 million in about 18 months that i cancelled and completely changed the business on so we had a different history in the company but what you see in sales off today launched in 2004. i want to talk about some of that pivoting right because so for example job change alerts right you credit a lot of i mean that was one of your experiments right um some of these things like they have one helped you learn how to basically get to where you are today but also i think a lot of them were also potentially lead gen so tell me about one or two of those early experiments between 2011 and 2014 we had all kinds of things we had the job change alerts product which would link up with your crm see all the contacts that people cared about look on linkedin to see when they change jobs and alert you about it we had a news alert system we had this stream it was like twitter and you'd open it up and it'd be all the news articles on the companies that you cared about that you were selling to we had the data product which was the easiest way to build the most accurate and targeted list of prospects in the marketplace but really none of those aligned with the vision of what i wanted to do for the purpose of this company and they generated revenue they generated leads they learned they taught us a lot in terms of product management in terms of culture in terms of what customers need but at the end of the day we started looking at what the best sellers were doing and they were communicating with their customers in an authentic sincere but repeatable and scalable way so we decided to build an entire platform for that when you look at sales i was just going to say kyle yeah you led with that tell me finish up though real quick i was just going to say when you look at sales it is a harmonious blend of two things the customer demands this insightful real one-to-one human solutions oriented service from your sellers but then as a company you've got to have something that's predictable scalable something you can forecast off of and count on in the future right and bringing those two things together is very very difficult because what happens is people end up either shooting spam out of a cannon and being insincere in their sales communications or they go way too rifle shot and they can't repeat it and so we solved that with the sales engagement platform and that's what i learned through that journey take me back to 2014 because you are eating your own dog food here you had wayne anthony kevin in the early days shawn and chris doing demos how did you know where to put a stake in the ground in terms of where to set wayne and anthony's kind of monthly quota at the start which we'll talk about how they obviously beat that and you adjusted but how do you the reason i'm asking is there's a lot of entrepreneurs listening trying to make their first sales higher and they don't know where to put the stick in the ground in terms of like quota well you know for us it all boiled back to what was the purpose and why were we there i had been in sales my whole life going back to kid i sold beanie babies and baseball cards and olympic lapel pins during the 1996 atlanta olympics right and i had this passion for serving customers and seeing the look on their eyes when they bought something that they needed and what i learned in sales is there were a lot of sellers doing it the wrong way they were insincere they were sloppy they weren't delivering the customer the best experience and i learned that that passion for delivering for the customer was something that i just absolutely loved so i wanted to build a company that empowered sellers to deliver that incredible experience and do it in an authentic way where the buyer actually appreciated the sales communications so that became the purpose of the business from day one and as we did all these other things you know i kept looking at is this fulfilling our purpose and mission and that's why we made all those adjustments but on the sales side you know i wanted someone to i'm i'm quite evangelical with the way that i sell and i like to paint a big picture and i like to transform the customer so i brought anthony on board and he was super processor was he number one he was right was he the first the first seller that we brought on board i had met him at pardot i started the company inside the pardon offices with david cummings who we talked about earlier and so i saw anthony i saw him working and he just was a dog he was she's a sales guy there as well yeah he was and how much sales was like two quarters in a row and i brought him over how much sales were did you close yourself before you felt good about passing that script that system off to anthony yeah i don't remember the exact number i would say it's probably somewhere around 150 ka or r something like that okay you close the kind of founder closer okay yeah okay so then march new aor we're talking 2014 now anthony comes in the quotus 48 grand exact numbers no no you're good you're good he but i i i it's unfair because my research team does a great job but uh in march of 2014 right you sent monthly quota for anthony it's somewhere around 48 000 bucks in terms of ar he along with wayne we had hired other people too because we had you know that the data product was taking off and it was in the millions of are in 2014 right so we had an organization at that point in time and...