How SalesScreen CEO Sindre Haaland grew SalesScreen to $10.7M revenue and 350 customers in 2024.

[Music] and Norway I had actually a pretty famous name brother called Halen if you've ever watched soccer uh he's actually from the same place as well as the hunger so funny enough we're not related so unfortunately I don't have his talents uh but I'm gonna go over obviously you know the heading is about efficiency in the company and we're going to talk about three things that has really made it for us number one being you know dharmesh from CTO coined this but aligning vectors it's really really important when you're a few people and you're trying to do a lot to make sure that there's a top level strategy that everyone is working towards and that we're working in the same direction secondly and now we're getting more into the sales development of space but in general when you have business outcomes if you're seeking to to get to and outcomes you want to ride let's say we want to surpass a 10 million dollar refreshold threshold okay that's great but how are we going to get there like really bite-sizing it breaking it down is important and finally once you know what actions each individual is has to take it's all about motivation how do you get the team rallied out and and make those vectors even stronger so those are some of the things that we're going to go through just to set like sales screen in a bit of a context uh we should be around eight million dollars uh this year whereas sales studentification platform so we service tons of different inside sales teams and make their sales work really fun and engaging so you know think about having your sales team really dialing those extra 10 diets every day to get to their outcomes even quicker so how do you do that kind of make it fun and exciting you engage them in competition you visualize their data and yada not important the point is we actually started out as a bootstrap company so this is ingrained in My DNA and it happened all the way back in 2011 while the sales stream platform came out in 2014. and it wasn't until 2018 and I raised money for the first time and that's when I heard I was really terrible at spending money so it took me a year before I actually started to to have the appetite to burn cash but once we started to do obviously yeah you know growth becomes easier when you're burning money for sure but now the Market's turned again and suddenly it's sexy to be efficient we did as many others a right sizing of the team and we're back to our roots and we've learned quite a lot on the way so that's a little bit of us so I'm just going to start out with the most important topic because we as operators as Founders and as CEOs we really need to have a strategy and we need to have a plan uh if you're going to grow as a company and you're going to grow efficiently you need to have some sort of a vision and how that's going to happen so you have that top level plan right now you know we need to set clear expectations we need to communicate it in a way that everyone follows and we would create transparency around them and then make sure that progress is being checked in on regularly not only for the CEO and exec team but for everyone so obviously I would say that if you get people aligned and going down that path that's really when you're going to see the Maximum Impact some people might not you know do it at the same speed or really nail this but as long as you go in the same direction that's when you're going to move the needle as a company an OTR framework is obviously one that's really utilized to make this happen and we've done that as well for many years this is a screenshot of our notion implementation uh the problem for me with opr framework was you know there was something missing from it we set high level objectives we had the key results and we description everyone knew about it we talked about it we checked in on progress but it was still not really aligning everyone and when people are not online they're you know you're gonna do many things that's not valuable to the company overall so what practical for us was actually implementing a concept of initiatives and I've heard actually several speakers already talked to this so if you're a founder or an operator uh in a smaller sauce with a smaller team you might not have felt the pain yet but as you grow it becomes more and more important to take those key results and break it into monthly initiatives with key deliverables so for me this has been huge when we actually implemented this uh concept of initiatives then we made sure from a top level I knew that every key result that we were working on actually had something concrete happening and if there was no initiatives in the company on a key result how are you going to get to that one you're not going to get to that goal you're not going to get to that result unless something changes like that is the definition of insanity uh so then you're gonna have to challenge the one that owns that key result because each should be owned by an executive yeah why are we not doing any initiatives what's going on you need to gather uh more feedback from teams you need to to promote your key result so that next month when we get together as an executive team you bring me at least three initiatives that's going to influence this key result because if not we're never going to raise it and then you have obviously you cannot use that meeting at amongst Executives to align on your top priorities and then you will see that you have coverage and suddenly then you can go back to the company and tell exactly okay you know this is where we're at on the year-long objective of the company this is how we progress on the on the key resource that we set and this is the initiatives that we complete the last one this is what we're going to do next so when you're talking to someone else you know exactly what their key initiatives are what they're working on and what's important for that so you can help them but you can also be much more easily say no I don't have capacity right now these are the key initiatives that we're working on and I have to complete them by the end of the month it's not it's on me this is huge so when you have that from the top then you can start to be a bit more tactical on the manager level on the BP level so all right we have monthly initiatives with deliverables we have key results that were we were aiming for and often they are outcomes so how do you break them down and distill it into something that the individual contributors can actually action on this I call it bite-sizing goals and it's really about like trading a funnel of activity that leads up to that outcome in the end so I'm going to give you an example uh we work with tons of sales development teams and um you know scrs flexibility pipeline especially in the sauce industry I thought I was relevant so I gathered some data from some of our clients to figure out you know okay obviously they want to create five sales qualified leads every month how do they do that you know that's the outcome that you want to go for uh well mostly you need to have some Discovery calls all right how do you do that well okay um you had different touch points with that you call them you send emails to them you can connect with them all right so you know how do you get that going you want to start well just start by adding prospects to a sequence so you need to figure out the context we need the accounts with the prospecting add them to a sequence that generates tasks and you need to complete them regular similarly and be able to get happy so now we actually have actions that can be influenced on the icy level to get to that pipeline goal that we've been talking about so actually actually in many contexts you need to add every day how many calls do you need to make every day to get those meetings we checked with like five different Enterprise level so I've seen so keep in mind these have a pretty strong brand which makes it a bit simpler not gonna lie but the solution or the answer here is 58 so 58 prospects added to the sequence what's necessary to get an eating an average and also you need to do at least 33 cold call attempts to get a meeting I actually think this number should be much higher so I was a bit surprised that it was that low we have tons of customers that it's more startups and they have 70 80 90 calls to get a meeting that's not normal but now that you know the actions that you need to take to get to that goal the outcome that we're driving towards obviously it makes things a lot simpler because I talk to people who's doing 10 cold calls uh you know a week or 50 like you're never going to get to your target you need to know what is the actions that we need to take in order to get there and once you do that we're starting to to really recognize the fact that that's a small team like that's as an efficient team we need to put in the work this is not easy and you're creating that Benchmark and those goals and it's becoming very transparent to our organization everyone's sees it everyone's working on and you bite-sized the outcomes and the key actions that you're going to take and then you get into the final Point like once you have the quantity uh unlocked what about the quality like I hear this all the time like well 70 calls 33 calls 20 calls doesn't matter like one call is enough of this if it's excellent...