How SalesQualia CEO Scott Sambucci grew SalesQualia to $2.6M revenue and 35 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is scott sambucci he is the sales coach for b2b tech startups he's an author speaker podcaster an ultra marathoner he was the first head of sales at blend and has over 20 years experience in silicon valley with three b2b startups a unicorn and exit and one's still going scott you're ready to take the top let's do it man all right which one's still going uh still going to altos research say that a little slower altos research halo joe's okay very good yep so you spun off i guess this new business and now is this new business coaching or is it also b2b sas play uh it is a coaching company today we actually think of ourselves more of a co as a content media company we happen to make money by coaching most of what we do is content production and distribution uh people pay us for that content and that help day today through coaching right now and when did you get into this what did you launch uh i started the business about 10 years ago actually all the way back when i was at altos research i started off just doing workshops i'd written a book uh that led to workshops i did a workshop at the lean startup conference way back in like 2013 and that led to the next thing and the next thing inside gigs and so i was running this as a side gig for about five years and then in 2015 uh stepped away from blend and made this my full-time work interesting okay so 2015 full-time and at that point when you went on it full time like what had it done i'm curious how big you grew it as your side focus so in 2014 what was your total revenue do you remember 2014 revenue the business was probably like 50k just between workshops side gigs speaking uh those sorts of things i was also doing some teaching as an adjunct professor at an international university so it was just a way for me to kind of bridge the gap and pay the bills in that first year to step step away from the full-time work to making this my my life's work so what gave you that confidence i mean it was only doing 50 k's a site maybe not only i mean that's actually an impressive side project but it sounds like you were doing something in a full-time business what give you the confidence to step away and jump in and bet on yourself uh i don't know if it was i think confidence was that i'd been you know three b2b startups and had successfully gotten them all from zero basically zero revenue the first couple of million um i knew what i was doing in teaching workshops was working for clients i knew that the clients we worked on inside was working and it was also a personal decision and that my wife at the time was working on her phd i had a two-year-old son at home i was commuting through hours or two and a half hours each way to san francisco on the train to go work at blend and that was a good week because i was actually home the the bad weeks were when i had to travel to dallas and chicago and dc to do implementation so uh i was about 40 at the time and it just got to the point of my life where i'm like you know what i think i've had enough of the startup fun and i wanted to be home and this is an opportunity that i built as a foundation that i could jump into i knew it was going to be hard that first year or two to kind of make the transition and make it self-sustaining but i had i was pretty clear that i knew there was demand and that the niche i was focusing on was one that i could serve quite well did you at least get some equity in blend yes there you go okay it makes it so bad as i say so it's tough yeah we're doing fine because uh yeah i mean they just raised again on like a 3.3 billion so um i mean at the time i didn't i mean of course i didn't know for sure what that was going to mean but yeah i mean we have here we have some chairs when you when you exited did you already know you had that in your back pocket was the valuation track of blend already clear that your stock was gonna be worth something as a backup plan it was pretty clear when i left it was just as we're raising a series c and we had uh successfully implemented at about four or five large banks and lending partners so the trajectory was there uh there's and there's still a lot of work to be done but i mean the reason i started i joined blind was because of the founding team there i knew them they were actually customers of mine when i was at altos research so i knew them personally and they came out of palantir they knew their stuff and i just knew like if i if i could help grow this this team uh out of the earliest stage i was employed 13. it was like 12 engineers in me no wow so my feeling was like if i can help them get off the ground and contribute at that capacity for a couple years um then somebody else is probably going to take it from you know 3 to 10 million and somebody else from 10 to 30 and so on yeah so i was pretty confident going in that something was going to work out and when i was leaving you know the rocket ship was really starting to take off so 2015 you're now all in on the new business it's sort of a blend of coaching plus maybe you've productized some of that just to be clear is there real code behind what you're doing now or are you that still to come still to come the code our code base is the content that we have in our library that we use as part of our delivery of the coaching that we do yep so who's we what's the team look like today uh so the core team we have a head of operations amy we have a head implementation coach named matt and he works with our clients more of as a project manager giving them sales advice based on the frameworks we teach and then we have a couple of coaches that we that we bring in to teach in very specified areas um so we have jason bay who is actually has his own company bloodstone prospecting he teaches on prospecting and outbound we have megan mishyack who teaches on pipeline and deal conversion uh so those are that's kind of our core team as some admins as well so how many people is that total full time uh full well full time there's six including me we have two regular coaches that we bring in that are doing coaching calls every week with our clients and then there's sort of a perimeter outside of that where we bring in additional experts based on topics that our clients are in need of so we'll look at what the clients need the client needs are if it's something like sales forecasting and territory then we have somebody who we know that knows that topic really well and we'll have them come in and coach and teach so one of the things that i learned early on in the business is that um if you let ego drive the business then it's going to stunt its growth meaning that i can't know all the answers even just going to linkedin today you can see so many good experts in different areas and so one of the learnings we had after the first couple of years just realizing this is that transition from being just a coaching company it's got like the scott show where i'm teaching everything and instead thinking about well what a real job is it's it's to solve the matching problem it's a matching problem a founder has question needs to build a system who's the right where's the right place to get that answer and that translation has actually really helped us grow okay let's play that game real quick we'll call it founder has sales question for scott okay so first question you're making your first sales hire internal it's an str it's your first quoted carrying rep do you hire one to start or do you hire two so that you can compare the performance yeah i mean we usually recommend hiring two when you're setting your quota for those first two sales hires is it okay if it's only a three to one ratio of full on target earnings to quota or do you really want to start a five to one ratio i don't know i think the answer is depends it depends on the situation i had this conversation yesterday with a founder and the the challenge that they had is like they're producing certain numbers and they think well if i get an sdr will they be able to do the same production chances are probably not not at least not initially it's going to take some ramp time so if you start setting quotas based on what you want versus what's possible then you're going to get an sdr that's discouraged so we actually think about comping quotas uh as a more uh fluid uh conversation to have with your team especially in that first year or two you know it's like hey this is your program for now these are your goals for now we're going to use that information over the next three to six months to kind of bootstrap the next model that we're going to build for you a lot of sas founders are just not sure if their good emotions should include quota carrying reps at all and a lot of that's tied to price point and is their margin in the price point to pay out a commission what's the minimum acv that these b2b stats companies need to be selling at to say okay yes we can start to afford to put touch on these sales and have a sales rep with quota yeah i mean we usually talk...