How SalesPlaybook CEO Manuel Hartmann grew SalesPlaybook to $3.1M revenue and 50 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is manuel hartman he's the founder and ceo of sales playbook building europe's number one sales acceleration platform for b2b startups they've got 170 startups using the technology today combining knowledge coaching offers and talents they bootstrapped to the first million bucks in revenue in under three years and help customers go from zero to two million in booked ar in under 15 months and more manuel are you ready to take us to the top yeah for sure thanks for having me just so just be clear if my audience falls in love with you and they're european-based sas startup they might hire you to help them scale you're like an outsourced sdr firm is that right uh we're not outsourcing sdr so we're not done for your business but really a sales coaching platform uh you think kind of thing coach hub but really specific for b2b startup sales uh in sauce okay so they can't you won't help them hire a rep but you could coach their current reps we can help them hire the rep we can help them write the right sales position contract put them in touch with top recruiters uh in europe um help them attract the right talent by being very specific as for a lot of starters that's not the case they just say like i need more bodies like to work in sales right interesting okay now when you came on a year ago well almost a year oh yeah it was about a year ago you had about 30 customers paying 500 bucks a month where are you today um we're probably at around 50 active customers or customer life that lifetime was back then around three to four months uh which is signing our first 12 months agreement so first of all item for some customers is increasing drastically still not at the two to seven years you won't deserve complete but we're getting there and how much are those customers still paying about 500 bucks a month uh no they're typically paying um like they're paying similarly or annually like investing 10 to 20k so pretty much like 800 to 800 bucks a month so how much revenue do you think you do in 2021 um probably around 700k 700k got it so you have done now to date well you've broken that million dollar mark in total sales which is a big big metric congrats thank you all right how do you do do you want and this is going to sound like a horrible question i do not enjoy consulting i just i have no patience for it i'm like move this ass as fast as possible so like are you gonna move to sass or do you enjoy this consulting thing um we we tackle this question a lot internally right how much do we want to do with the core team uh the core teams came from two to eight people but we invested 150k plus into the coaching platform so with a scalable knowledge basically standalone knowledge like information product and building a coaching platform so we're still going to do customer success we're still going to do um like the check-ins and the guidance but there we also implement the content of the lead coach which is not um basically employed by us but the customer comes in and say i really want to work specifically on the sales hiring and then there's like a recruiter for example which takes him on his journey and it's not the coaching is not done by us apart from the group coaching okay got it and so when you look at some of the companies that have been most successful going through your program you mentioned wow flow about a year ago but who's killing it right now killing it right now is for example boost party when zero to two million booked a or i know recurring revenue in 15 months uh so they started literally at zeros here i haven't seen it who is that sorry boost bar exactly so they just they just went into like validating market segments and like finding their icp really quickly for the first six months didn't really sell like a customer because um just like longer sales cycles but once they hit it they really hit it off and went to 100 points of sales really quickly um another customer yeah was class times a similar stage as well flow back then and they always had like 1k 5k tickets and now they just closed their second uh six figure deal with like a big um big institution which could grow to like hire six figures pretty quickly people especially my listeners will be very skeptical of like consultants i have on the show like why are you qualified to teach this what's sort of your background here uh my my background is like first sales rep as an ai sales company myself where i was really like good doing a lot of trial and errors i was talking to a lot of others uh sales people ceos like hey why do you learn these they were like pretty much by trial and error but some people go through successful startups right like that that scale with them like from 100k to a million to 10 and we just get the best um sales leaders to become coaches part-time like can be anywhere like two to four hours like a week or even a month and get them to make them accessible to people who they would otherwise not be how many folks are on your team now today uh eight eight people okay very cool now have you stayed bootstrapped or did you raise capital no bootstrap 100 bill we love bootstrap that's great any plans to raise or no ah no i've had some discussion like hey do you want to like do you want to build 100 million companies like so far 100 bootstrapped and how do you personally think about how old are you i think we're probably around the same age right yeah 33 at christmas for me oh very cool yes okay i'm 32 so how do you think about building your personal net worth here so you can take bigger risks maybe do some angel investing or other stuff i mean do you take distributions out of the company or how do you manage that i don't take distributions out of the company so my salary has remained the same for the last seven years pretty much like 90k um i want to leave it in the company so we can build the 10 millionaire company in the next four years uh what we all really interesting in these segments like all the mastermind coaches is um we all in similar phases of building a company from six to seven figures then eight figures in the next three four five years and then really have like the sales playbook mafia and just work like a navy seal team on market traction and it might be that we that we found like a little like an angel investor club like sales sales tech ventures or or however we do it or we become pretty operational as a swat team that you bring in if you need results really quickly we'll figure that out and so you've paid yourself 90 000 bucks a month for the past nine years is that what you said uh a year not a month oh sorry ninety thousand dollars a year for the past nine years interesting pretty much i was employed before it says playbook right so i didn't determine why i wouldn't said it before yep yep yep okay interesting this makes a lot of sense so you again got going in 2019 i believe right that was start right and and what was the company that you were at you mentioned you were at an ai startup yeah one dot so o-n-e-d-o-t interesting okay and for people listening right now maybe they you know they don't want to spend more time on this outside of this interview give me like the top three like do's and don'ts of scaling to the first five members of your sales team your outbound sales team i think that the first do is make really clear you have a halfway repeatable process right like finally does it first so you need to validate you need to sell the first five ten twenty customers depending on ticket size yourself number two hire for attitude uh so really like get people who are hungry hands-on intelligent curious rather than work that salesforce hubspot pipedrive mongodb whatever whatever and the third one is invest enough into ramping them into mock-up calls into like case studies taking them on sales calls early on coaching them right which which is like especially remote can slip pretty quickly on the three don'ts i think is higher too early higher before you sign your first customer and you you need to validate that product that message market first right because before you can validate the person sales fit so to say the second thing was just like hire people who want to have a really high base pay like that that's pretty much like total compass like i need 10k base like why are you confident and the third one would be really people that do it for the wrong reasons that are not customer-centric enough and that are not interested in helping you like build a company you just want to make a commission check because these will be frustrated and leave pretty soon for a big tech now are you competing with these firms like uvaro or do they go through your platform they just raised a 12 million series a yeah i actually had joseph found that the founder and ceo of avaro on our podcast just two weeks ago um fantastic guy um so they focusing more on a like salespeople people who want to build caring sales like cross from a truck driver bar keeper and so on which which is great uh we need more in the workforce that's helping us and secondly like we've established firms like vidyard ramping up their str's i think with the second one we would compete to a certain degree but we're actually just jumping on a partner call next wednesday uh to see because they're really strong in north america we're really strong in europe so the geography is like making non-competitive yep very interesting hot space now emmanuel people want to learn more about you guys where can they find you online uh you can find me online uh on linkedin manual hartman or desales playbook dot io very cool and famous five let's wrap up here number one favorite business book uh speed of trust number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um various industrial space like you like regarding your podcast dan martell um jerry meyer like uh actually the begs ceo for plus 100 million switzerland um you can imagine like um an accounting software like i don't know then the name like ser etc it's called in the us yep yeah yep okay great number four how many hour number three number four how many hours i sleep to eat every night roughly seven seven and situation married single kids married becoming dead on christmas pretty much oh wow congrats so you're turning uh you've got a birthday how how old are you 33 33 on christmas myself you have a birthday 33 and and a baby on around christmas plan for 27th of december let's see how it goes wow that's exciting congratulations last thing here what's something you wish you when you were 20 um going into sales like full speed on much earlier like don't don't divert to consulting and something else guys his customers have gone from zero to two million bucks in a run right in under 15 months he's running the sales playbook dot io he launched it back in 2019 after running sales and an early artificial intelligence b2b startup it was doing 30 000 bucks a month about a year ago about 360 grand total in sales last year he's gonna break seven hundred thousand this year a nice growth rate team of eight totally bootstrapped manuel thank you for taking us to the top thanks so much 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 pm 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 take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya

Introduction hello everyone my guest today is manuel hartman he built the salesplaybook.io bootstrap from 0-100 customers and 350 thousand dollars in annual revenue in less than two years to help committed b2b entrepreneurs selling deals grow annual revenues fast by hitting product marketing fit and skilling up their sales teams and specifically hiring uh those sales reps in an effective way without wasting capital man well you're ready to take the top sure okay so just be clear this is not a sas product you're building but i wanted to have you on because you're playing in the sas space aggressively so tell me quickly what like the name a couple of casas companies that use you and what you did for them yeah so sas companies typically come to us at a stage of having initial traction uh can be like five digit arr towards going to six digit arr or already having a small sales team of typically one to five sales people and wanting to hit this famous 1 million arr and grow from there we had these companies for example double mrr within three months uh go from five to 10k average can you name some of these manuals so we have real examples yeah for sure uh one of them is called wildflow bootstrapped entrepreneurs uh went to five digit arr uh doubled that within three months after working with us they've been in space of having five to 10k average contract value and basically after working with us close the 150k arr deal and this is a company called wildflow wow got it can you spell it yeah sure well uh w-o-w-f-l-o oh wow wow uh.com got it and um and how are they paying you i mean are you actually hiring their sales reps for them no we work in a sales acceleration says enablement model so we bring the best out of the coaching world and basically giving them the right assets instead of of a self-learning platform and uh 40 plus actionable templates how to define the ideal customer profile uh rambam they call email campaigns and so on and when did you launch this idea we launched it in this format early 2020 company exists as such in sales enablement space since february 2029 19 19. okay and um what i mean what got you into this why are you sort of qualified to do this for sales teams uh before that i built sales as the first business fire with the ceo of an ai startup myself and just learned that it's a lot different than if you do sales uh for companies like tesla world economic forum accenture and so on uh because a lot of like the product market is not there the resources aren't there the brand is not there and it's just a completely different beast to do it for um an early stage b2b company and i've seen like many entrepreneurs struggle with this like with amazing products but not having the knowledge and kind of processes to do this effectively so your middle plan called grow it's called accelerator it says go from 100k to a million annual revenues and you basically can buy i guess five users for six or twelve months and one of the things says get access to some of switzerland's best b2b sales people what does that mean are those coaches are they actually selling on behalf of the customer that's paying you they they are coaches they're typically vp sales or co-founder of uh started themselves quite frankly like these people are very tricky to hire as either the co-founder or like vp sales with equity or they're sometimes working an enterprise sales role earning like 150 to 300k and above but they tremendously enjoy coaching founders in like some of their spare time and doing like two to ten hours of coaching per week and and how do you structure your fees so if i wanted to use you what would i pay you you would pay typically like five to ten percent of your annual revenues to grow by 100 200 annually and that means typical like startup plans goes from like 500 bucks a month towards 5k per month so if i'm paying you 500 bucks a month you're going to help me go from like 10k mrr to like 100k mr or something like that correct um that's probably like more on the accelerate the model but it depends also how much you're investing we have people that went booster can launch package and within one month they revamp the whole websites resharp the icp close three deals and we have people that go accelerate and don't put in the work and a bit less successful as well and so how many customers are you working with like last month they paid you something last month uh around 30. 30. it costs Monthly recurring revenue okay 30. and can i take 30 times 500 i mean you're doing about 15 grand a month in revenue yeah well some of them are in larger tiers such as and scaler so mrr if you want to put it that way is probably around 25 to 20k right yeah i mean the reason i ask is obviously are you building a coaching business like this you want to know what your future cash flow is gonna look like so you can make hiring decisions yourself and part of the challenge with this model is once you help a company grow the churn is usually through the roof unless you can keep delivering new content new coaches new strategies so what is your churn like and how do you try and keep customers longer yeah excellent question and our customer lifetime value was probably around four to six months in 2020 and we're looking forward to basically double that in 2021 as we move from typical we move from three to six months engagement to six to 12 months collaborations and we're getting more and more renewals as we like hit closer to the icp and can deliver more value for these as well but but i mean how do you attribute though what you're delivering to the customer with their success and what i mean by that is you can give them all the best coaching in the world but if they don't have a sales person to execute they're not going to see growth or vice versa you could be the best coach in the world but if they have really talented sales people that are closing well then it's growing and they're not going to give you credit yeah excellent point i agree with your statement that you can only be as great as your customers and what we see is it's like with reading like the more we do work in space the the better our customers become like just regarding the fit but also the quality of entrepreneurs that we able to work with um regarding sales talent sourcing it's something we're working hard on right now to when we basically get people to a level where they need a bigger sales force we actually able to source the talent for them and actually able to create that flywheel for them the other part of people being really successful we have people reaching out to us that already doing like five to ten million revenue but select we confident we can make it happen which is leaving a lot of run rate and time and trial and error on the table which is why i would love working with you on this just avoid this process and be quicker now why don't you i mean why don't you go down and look at sort of this outsourced sdr model there's a lot of companies in the space alu you know was basically zoom info salesforce for a long period of time uh revgenius is doing this is this the model you'd ever look at yeah we look at it um there's a few different angles on it regarding pure play lead generation which does literary tones in the market also out of countries that are less let's say salary capital intensive than switzerland quite frankly um to put them like as a sales force for people we're looking to train people and busily gift them and like source them uh our our customers um it is tricky in these early stage companies to just put somebody there and basically said because these people ask like give me script give me the icp and so on and did this stuff is not there in the beginning which is why it's different than to do this for an established smaller medium medium i'm just saying it's easier for you to attribute growth of the company if the rep is trained and on your payroll and they are selling for your customers again this is like demand zen discovery call sales partners overpass stable work like this is a very fast growing hit convertus.com but you're saying you would never want to go you wouldn't go down this road uh never say never we looking to ramp up our own sales force right now so i hired our first uh str going account executive six months ago and we're ramping it up ourselves probably learning quite a bit in the process and the more people we train on that also the more basically the product gets better over time to do this Bootstrapped and have you bootstrapped or raised capital bootstrapped i love that that's great and were you profitable last year or no uh yeah definitely that's great so we hit around 360k revenue from 90k in 2019 so plus 300 i was the only ft until like august then colin joined and we have working with some freelancers and obviously that's the whole kind of sas sales stack and things around that and referral fees got it and um what do you think you can grow to this year i mean with all these extra pieces you're putting in place can you break a million bucks uh that's the objective yeah and what do you think the key is to breaking that is it just signing up new customers uh it's signing up new customers and figuring out delivery at scale because the people that are delivering the most value to our clients are typically not for hire as discussed before and uh either like we heavily invest into kind of uh building sales reps from ourselves who can become coaches uh within a short period of time or we're looking to basically like build a platform uh to just basically have more coaches on a platform who can deliver more value do you have any plans to raise capital or no no and what's your team size today our team size is literally like two people like me and colin and we're looking forward to hire uh probably like some more in the sales rep space but also potentially vp customer success and vp um talent acquisition got it very good and any plans i mean it sounds like you were doing sales another company at an ai startup then you launched this a couple of years ago in 2019 would you ever go launch a new sas company yourself uh yeah i think this this would be tremendous fun with currently working on something in uh the sales talent sourcing space which could become that um we built something around that in the end of 2019 acquired 100 uses zero revenue obviously put it on hold just as it was not hitting that kind of mark of being a must-have for companies mm-hmm describing what's happening is they're like a recruitment marketplace to hire sales people or something or what it is more uh a better version of linkedin kind of jobs in the sense of understanding a very specific market in this space switzerland for sales reps very in much in detail what makes a good sales rep so there's a lot of domain expertise for uh and then the price of like say seven to eight digit revenue got it manual on that note let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business uh book arabicons almanac probably are speed of trust of uh the ones i read in 2020. number two is their ceo you're following or studying not ceo in my space but more thomas dubendorfer of sictik so one of kind of the super angels in switzerland yeah um switzerland ict investors club got it number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business uh google suite does a lot of favors and then it's a stack of linkedin sales navigator plus intercellular plus jotform plus hubspot manual how much how much sleep are you getting every night uh six to seven hours roughly and situation married single kids uh married 32 no kitchet no kids okay and last question what's something you wishing you when you were 20 that sales can be a superpower enabling you to do pretty much as an entrepreneur what you want to do and basically like sell enough to basically get the talent and get the tools that you need to build something to achieve uh customer success guys the sales playbook launched in 2019 to help sas founders sell faster they did 90 000 in sales that year they did 320 000 in 2020 now working with 30 sas companies helping them grow their revenue and get their sales playbook going down the right path the goal is to break a million this year we'll see if they can do it and maybe we'll see in the next 24 months a sas tool coming out of the agency manuals but we'll have to watch and see manuel thanks for taking us to the top 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 take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya