How Slintel CEO Deepak Anchala grew Slintel 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...