How Slintel CEO Deepak Anchala grew to $6M revenue and 200 customers in 2021.

hello everyone my guest today is anna preet singh he's currently leading sales at slim tell a sas sales intelligence platform he set up sales teams and functions from scratch for various companies and firmly believes that the initial revenue target is achieved only when the entire organization works with grit to support those initial sales reps are you ready to take us to the top uh hey hey nathan uh thanks a lot for having me on the session you bet so before we jump into how you're building the sales team at slintel let's just get an overall the company right so you know are you sort of in the zoom info bombora b2b intelligence space absolutely and and you know very very excited about that space at large you know the way all of us have grown in the last two three years it's amazing so how are you picking you must you must have some trick you guys use whether it's a sales script or a piece of product or tech code that you have that zoom info doesn't have but how are you picking customers off from the legacy players very good questions uh uh so so you know nathan what we do is that we have algorithm that goes out on the web uh we try to understand digital signatures that technology sleep when someone is using them uh by which i mean you know there are different places in which a particular technology would leave additional footprint like for example salesforce gives you a dedicated login url which would have your companyname.my.css.com which means that each of the customer of salesforce will have a dedicated login url we have means to understand you know which urls uh have been dedicated to which companies out there similarly some companies would ask you to install a javascript in their html source code or in the javascript of their front end of the website and we would have means to identify which companies have have a mention of that javascript that has been given by that technology and then there are a lot of uh you know uh technologies that leave a footprint behind the firewall by which i mean uh you know uh for example mainframes it's a very very old you know programming language but the digital footprint could be in the job description wherein say a company that is using mainframe might mention in the job description that hey we need experience working with google and gcl and db2 all the mainstream technologies and that gives us an indication that hey this company is on main frames today so we could go to around you know 12 to 15 different sources and the number of sources is the trick and the frequency at which we refresh our digital signatures and the frequency at which we go out on the web and get this information together is the trick uh which is happening do you feel like you have identified leading indicators that others like bombora zoom info others they have not identified yet absolutely so bambooda follows a very different way to identify intent so they do search-based intent which is very different from technographics based intent so we believe more and more like in facts than you know assumptions if i'm put in that way so we we share fact based intent which is based on which company is using which technology have they recently started using a technology in your ecosystem like if you if you notice right a lot of companies uh fall into similar ecosystem like someone has just purchased the crm they might purchase a sales engagement tool next they might purchase the database tool next right so that leading indicator of which company has just purchased a tool is our leading indicator for buying intense course and then we toss it up with uh you know which company got recently funded which company has been growing their number of employees which company has a lot of job postings to further give an indication which companies will be investing in which kind of tools in the near future does intent based on searches so based on you know who is consuming what content on the internet and uh i'm not sure how it's doing for them right now but because of people working from home we believe that search-based intent is not as accurate as it used to be because it based on ip addresses and all of that so with this product understanding right i think my audience understands this now what are customers paying you on average per month to use the technology oh so we have customers anywhere ranging from around fifteen thousand dollars to around you know seventy eighty thousand dollars depending on the number of users and the numbers per year per year per year fifteen thousand dollars per year to seventy eighty thousand thousand dollars are you up selling against anything else and this is not getting into your sales world are you upsetting against anything else besides number of seats we are we also uh upsetting on the missile number of export credits that they require so in the more the number of exports that they need from our platform to their crm like salesforce and hubspot that also exports and if so do you roll them into the next year if you don't use them yes we roll them into the next year okay so you're a nice guy you don't make them disappear huh absolutely and we don't have a monthly limit uh most of our competitors do like per user per month kind of a limit we don't have that so we give you a pool of credits you can decide to use as many per user as you want you might want say 10 of your users to not export at all because they can just view everything on the platform and do their research while five sales of people would need exports two crms or two csvs so you know that's totally fine with us are you up so so you have a usage based upsell and number of credits you've got a seat based upsell uh which is obvious seats the last pricing axes you like to see is obviously feature-based upselling so or do you do any feature-based upselling uh we actually don't uh we don't piecemeal our product we don't like to uh you know uh so we like to give the full-blown platform to everyone that comes on on board the reason being that we see organic upsells and organic renewals when someone is getting success out of the platform and in our case success is directly related to revenue so if they are making uh revenue using our platform uh they will definitely upsell they will definitely renew so for us giving them everything that they need to you know get to those revenue goals is our motto and we don't limit them to the extent of features that they can use on the platform on a pre teach us about churn right so when you look at your gross revenue churn over the past 12 months what was it uh we've seen 110 uh as our as our uh nrrr so mostly we've seen that you know uh 10 if there is around 10 20 companies that are churning against that we're able to upsell around 30 so so far we've been maintaining a pretty healthy uh nrrr so far we've been in the business only for the last two three years so you know uh it's very early to kind of predict the return rates annually but we're doing pretty fine so far so you launched in 2018 we did uh so first one one and a half year was all about building the product and then we went into the gtm side of things so you were there in the early days i believe you how what employee number were you i was in the first end okay first time great so so uh question for you i mean how did you guys get your first five customers very interesting uh so first right customers like anyone else was more from you know friends and families we started uh reaching out to uh companies that we've worked at and organically we started doing very well in the hr tech side of business because deepak the founder is from eightfold uh i am from metal which now got acquired by mercer so you know both of us have uh an hr tech background so initial few customers were from hr tech for those reasons then staffing companies started coming in organically when we started closing to hr tech and then we expanded into other industries so first 10 20 customers were from the hr tech for those reasons and they're still sticking around with us uh i always like to ask that first year of operations it's usually an embarrassing number but it's part of the process do you remember what that first year revenue was yeah so before i joined the total revenue of the company was hundred thousand dollars uh uh and that was like kind of first year revenue where the founders was trying to sell most of the deals himself and then the second year like 10k of mrr then yeah if you do only do annual deals we only do annual deals so it was 100k error uh when i joined them and uh from there was the actual you know massive journey that we've taken so far we just announced our series eight today by the way uh with gtv capital of for 20 million dollars so we've closed two rounds in the last six months so we've we've just expanded very very fast in the last two years we'll talk about the 20 million raise today the 4.2 million uh last year and even the initial 300 grand back in in 2018 but first i want to understand how we're getting customers now today right so what's the sales motion look like today uh so we have uh sdrs and account executives in place uh we have further divided the sdr's into inbound and outbound uh most of our revenue today today comes from inbound uh we do massive ad campaigns against our competitors we do massive uh investment in our seo uh by by nature our seo is pretty strong because we have data of you know around 15 million companies customers of around 40 000 technologies so all of that results in a lot of seo strategy for us uh but yeah i don't know how to type in there for a second so on the seo side of things have you launched individual landing pages for 15 million companies so when people search like company x revenue yeah you rank high or something yeah be it there yes what are those combinations that's what i'm really interested in because that's the magic to this right so it's company name plus what word uh plus funding plus revenue plus technology is used uh you know uh plus uh it could even be at a personal level so we have around we have total of 250 million people profiles on the platform today uh so we're building pages for individual people profiles as well as we speak uh so if some person's name plus what keywords yeah like for example you know your name plus your designation might land you to our company you know page dedicated to you so we're trying to you know get into that as well so that you know the seo is taking care of itself there's so many so many uh pages how are you out ranking others i mean you're you're young your domain authority on ahrefs is 29 so that's not great you want to see like 60 70 80. how are you out ranking others with higher domain authority yeah so i think uh we know that it will take some time in terms of our overall uh uh you know website rank we are around ten thousand in us uh as of today uh so in the us our rank is ten thousand lxrn is 10 000 which means that you know and it was around i think 30 35 40 000 uh last year same time so we're trying to you know improvise on those ranks uh gradually uh we're doing better than any other company in any other industry which is three years old but competing against our own industry for seo is very very difficult the reason being that all of them have the similar strategy of you know having multiple pages for multiple uh companies and multiple people so it's difficult to promise you're trying to boil the ocean you're not there's no you're not hyper focused on one business sector you're trying to do every business possible so it's hard to win in one spot absolutely absolutely this is interesting okay that's seo let's talk about paid how much did you spend on paid ads last month uh we're spending around 200 000 right now every month uh on paid ads and are you the guy that's going yes keep doing it or no shut it off it's not working uh i'm one of the influencers because every time they do a 200 000 i definitely have to maintain cac uh and i have to give them that hey do i have the capacity uh do i have the you know ae capacity to handle those many leads uh so i'm one of the influencers but the decision is taken together by the marketing head myself and the founder how many leads will 200 000 in paid spend drive uh right now so it's very difficult to attribute the lead directly to a page spend the reason being that a lot of times people would just search for slim till but instead of clicking on lintel.com they would click on the ad that we run for our own brand so but overall we're able to drive around i think around 700 to 800 leads every month uh from and take me down the fun all right so how many how many current a's are on on the team uh we have a total of 10 a's uh already expanding that to 15 uh gradually and 220 later at this point later next quarter and are the aes the only one that carry a quota yes so so okay so 10 account executives 10 how many how many like when you add up your entire sales team sdr csms everyone how big is that uh the sales team is around 30 people and then we have a 10 member csm on top of that so str's around around 20 str's 10 account executives and 10 customer success management do you give your csm's quota targets for expansion we do yeah so our csm's carrying expansion yes they carry a coat of upsells and cross cells and you know maintaining the retention rates okay i'm working for you i'm a csm i'm a year and a half into my work at slintel we're having our 101 performance meeting what kinds of questions are you like tell me what my goal is for the next year absolutely so you know you'll be given a certain uh book of accounts uh which might amount to somewhere around a million dollars uh for the year and your goal is to maintain uh you know the one million dollars as it is but by trying to sell upsell into the accounts that are extremely happy and are you know using the platform thoroughly and the ones that are not trying to understand what's going on try to set up one-on-one weekly calls with them because you know we want to know if there's anything going wrong we need to know that immediately so if they're happy to do a weekly uh call with your call with you you should do that every week with your customers so your goal is to keep them happy uh see if there's an absolute opportunity and make sure that that one million dollar is not slipping away on a pre in a year when we have our next call man i want to raise so i want you to tell me a metric that i have to beat where you're going to be really happy with me what metric do i have to be oh so you know making sure that you're maintaining and managing the most important customers really well and they're able to upsell to even a 2x uh kind of standpoint if uh you know your your customers are using our competitors as well fine means to replace competitors completely in the next one year we'll see how many customers could you double up in terms of the total number of users in terms of number of credits consumed which kind of indicates that they're using more of us than the competitor uh because you know in our industry those co exists we can't coexist with zoom info and that's my what's my net retention goal uh we've been maintaining an average of 110 so we'll stick to that no but is that the goal is that the goal for every csm that's what i'm trying to get into here what is your metric okay so you say here's a million dollar book of business your goal is to keep 110 net dollar attention on this million so you should grow this million to 1.1 million in error in a year if you do that nathan i'll be really happy with you correct anything less than 90 is is really bad for our company right now so because anyone who's doing less than 90 is not anywhere close to our goals right now that seems really conservative i mean you guys i feel like should be like 130 125 net dollar retention why so conservative uh so we see that the biggest growth comes from only the enterprise customers uh the ones that are or from fast growing startups but we also have a chunk of less than 50 employees customers that kind of turn after one year a lot of those companies shut down so we have to take into consideration that a lot of companies that started working with us because sales intelligence soon is one of the first few tools that companies start using so those are small rpoo accounts if they churn it shouldn't impact your net dollar retention in a big way yeah but in the first year or two right we had a lot of such customers coming out of it so we're moving away from them and we're also focusing a lot more on the 51 and above so we know that those companies those customers are still in their pipes the goal is to definitely go towards 120 130 in the next six months or so but today the book of accounts that we have we know that that has a mix of both very small accounts as well as relatively larger accounts uh and now our focus from here on after this uh recent race is going towards enterprises you know 14 000 fortune 500 500. so uh so that's when you can focus on that kind of as a csm if i hit 110 net dollar attention what bonus do i get how do you incent me to do that quite a few things so you get four percent of every upsell uh that you do four percent yes uh like four percent uh flat for the upsell so if you upset uh ten thousand dollars you get four hundred dollars in your practice just for the first year it doesn't go on in perpetuity uh for the first year yeah i got it yep and we also do it just for the first year for the account executives as well we don't do it for opportunity for account executives well just for the first year and then we also give you uh spiffs so we have 500 space for you know every little achievement so for example a spiff if you are able to get a video testimonial or spiff if you get a great d2 review a space if you were able to uh you know uh uh get a reference from a customer so there are a lot of scripts to we want so yeah there's a lot of okay very good um this is really valuable we're getting strong time here so i want to keep digging here but just to summarize that you basically give a million dollar book of business every csm and they're going 110 net dollar retention they make four percent whatever they upsell okay okay talk to me about your first sales hire what quota did you give them that's always really hard to figure out absolutely so when we started off uh we figured out a way to do around fifty thousand dollars per month uh you know internally so we had just one person uh first couple of months there was no quota uh for that person uh me and he that that person was trying to you know figure out means to deliver fifty thousand dollars per month uh consistently and once we're able to do fifty seven dollars between the two of us we started hiring more with a target of twenty thousand dollars per per uh per month so you're adding fifty thousand dollars in new monthly recurring revenue per month or 50k an acv value fifty thousand acv in the beginning uh per month so these are days when our total acv was hundred thousand dollars right so we started from there in three months we started doing 50 000 per month of acv so so yeah so when you were back when you were figuring out the model you set a quota target of basically 600 000 of new acv right so 50 grand per month right for you as the first rep and then you said how do i edit this to go hire my first external ae talk me through that absolutely so when we hired we hired two a's and two str's together and we try to make sure that this 50 000 even if i am not in the picture i'm not going to the demos we are able to maintain this 50 000 per month consistently uh and then we plan ways to go from 5200 which we did eventually in three months uh but 50 000 for the first three months were split between three a's uh with a target of somewhere around twenty thousand per ae per month uh when so we went from two ways twenty thousand dollars per per day per month to three days twenty thousand dollars per a per month eventually they started doing 30 35 each and we went 200 000 with just three a's and then eventually to 150 000 with just three a's while their target was 30 000 per month so the the thing that we did differently from others was that our targets were still low while they were doing 200 of their numbers and even today the per a target is still 30 000 while we have you know quite a few ways and most of them are over achieving so with 10 a's we're doing 30 000 per month but it doesn't mean that a's are only doing 30 000 it basically means that there are some a's doing 200 percent 150 percent anything like that less than 100 they feel that it's low themselves so for us 100 is just the number that you need to meet to be an average ae and every good a is doing 215 so 10 aes they're all doing way more than 30 grand a new annual contra value close per month many are at a hundred grand i mean so what you i mean you guys are adding like 500 600 000 bucks a new acb per month right now something like that submitted on that yeah okay that's great now with all this strategy now we understand how the whole machine sort of works how many customers are now today uh we have 200 customers uh today we've recently hit that number of 200. that's great so yeah can now can i multiply the 200 times the rpu you gave me earlier of about two thousand dollars you guys are doing about 400 000 per month right now in revenue uh so we just started doing that right uh uh but yeah you can uh so right now is when we started hitting 500. uh we've been doing like almost uh 2x every quarter if i'm about it that way last year we blew 5x so last quarter was not as big as this quarter uh so yeah and next quarter will be probably double of this so you're at about 500 000 bucks per month right now in revenue and a year ago you were only at a hundred thousand dollars per month in revenue for 5x year over year growth absolutely that's great but you've raised a bunch of capital to do it so why did you guys raise 20 million why'd you need it uh it was inbound uh we did not need it uh to be honest we did not even spend our 4.2 million uh when we got an offer for 20 million there was no way that you were accepting it there was no way that it was on the card but ggb was a great partner to have uh let me put it that way uh they come in with a lot of u.s experience uh you know we're our founder is indian uh most of our leaders are from india we have all the intentions to now start hiring in us pretty aggressively and that in that next phase of growth right we wanted uh deepak is one of the only people in the leadership team that is in us right now most of our other team members are in india so while we expand uh you know our us team we wanted uh someone from us to participate as an investor and uh the partners should be us the board of directors should be in u.s and ggb was a great partner that way so when we got them on board uh the other things that opened up for us was exposure to the us markets in terms of hiring in terms of campus recruitment they referred us to stanford recently we had a bunch of interns from stanford uh in that virtual campus drive so i mean a lot of things opened up for us and that's the reason why we accepted that inbound offer from ggb yeah now do you were you early enough to get equity in the business personally yes okay so anytime obviously you do a round right you're getting you're getting hit right there's a bit of dilution most series a companies are giving up between caught 10 and 20 of the business like on that series a round were you guys sort of in that range yeah we were absolutely but i think the valuations are also crazy uh the valuation has increased uh approximately 20 times since i've been hired uh what was what was the we won't talk about today but the 4.2 million you raised last year what valuation did you raise that at uh somewhere in the range of 15 to 20 million was that valuation that is so crazy 15 to 20 million so 15 to 20 x that your million dollars in ar at that time yeah that's crazy and and um and you said valuations growing basically 5x year over year uh revenue is and yeah valuation is also in the same page yeah okay got it so i mean we can say it in this last 20 million raise you guys it was above 100 million valuation yeah we can say that it's in somewhere in that range okay fair enough very good well listen this is interesting last question i have we talked about your sales team what's your total team size uh total design is the size around 35 right now 30 the total team is 35 and you have 30 on the sale just the sales team excluding the csm so csms don't really report into the sales function they have a different vertical altogether so only the sdrs account executive sales operation sales enablement operate you know reports into this what about like engineers and everybody oh the total oh sorry i thought you asked me the question around says whole team is uh more than 100 100 okay got it that makes sense and then what how many engineers uh around thirty thirty very cool three engineers ten product managers uh yeah that's great let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh it is actually this one good to great uh i just love it by jim collins also one of the most first few books that i read ever uh around sales so really like number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh quite a few actually uh i like to follow ceos who are from sas ecosystems so girish from freshworks is one of those ceos that i follow very very closely so if there's one name i would say from freshbooks we'll see if the ipo here in the next 12 months i know it's he's he's uh he's really wanting to we'll see number three what's your favorite tool for building slintail besides your own uh i think gong uh gong has been a great great partner uh we use gong for all our forecasting today all the stand-ups happen ongoing are you in acquisition talks with gong we have 250 million bucks of fresh power to work no we're not we're not looking for acquisition at all but we're getting a lot of inbound interest from a lot of companies but uh not looking to get required at this point what's the largest company that's reached out i can't give out the name but uh largest abm company reached out to us okay interesting fair enough all right number four how many hours a sleep ticket every night uh i work in the u.s arts and i'm in india right now so i sleep from 5 a.m uh to around one or two two a.m so uh one or two p.m so i sleep very very odd hours but around i take around seven hours of sleep okay and what's your situation married single kids i recently got married no kids oh congratulations and how old are you uh i'm 29 turning 29 this month yeah very cool last question anna pretty what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 oh sorry what was that something you wish you knew when you were 20. oh i think i wish i knew that uh money is not as uh as important uh when i didn't have money at 20. i thought money is everything and i kept chasing that uh and that is one of the reasons i was so aspirational in my life that i became a sales leader at 26. i'm the youngest sales leader in the industry today uh you know leading such a such a big function and was leading sales function since i was 26 but the reason i could do that is because i was so aspirational but after i achieved that i realized that money is not as important as i thought it was guys slimtell competing in the b2b sas intelligence space they had a hundred thousand dollars in mr a year ago now over five hundred thousand dollars in mrr or six million dollar run rate over 200 customers again growing rapidly they spent 200 grand on paid ads last month and also doing a strong seo motion uh 30 folks on their sales team 10 aes carry a quota 10 csms carry a net dollar attention quota we dive into all of it today on april thanks for taking us to the top absolutely thank you so much nathan i had a lot of fun thank you so much for making it so insightful i hope you know the listeners get some value out of it 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 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 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