SalesPlaybook Revenue (2024)

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 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