How Dealpad Hit $7.5M Revenue With Founder-Led Sales and LinkedIn Virality (Interview with Co-Founder and CEO Adam Baker)

Event Context and Introduction

Nathan Latka

00:00Quick context. This was recorded March twenty eighth and twenty ninth. So a couple weeks ago at my live event, saasopen.com. We had a thousand software CEOs there. If you missed it, we hope to see at the next one, September fifth and sixth in New York City, saasopen.com. But for now, let's jump into the recording.

LinkedIn Post Generates $1M Pipeline

Adam Baker

00:18>> This post that I put on LinkedIn within seven weeks had generated a million of pipeline for us, and we've closed almost a 250,000 in new ARR.

Dealpad Overview and Revenue Figures

Adam Baker

00:32>> So I'm Adam. I'm the cofounder of Dealpad. I've founded three b to b software companies generating 20,000,000 in revenue. I'm currently running Dealpad as cofounder and CEO. We launched it four years three years ago

00:46now, 2021, and we finished on $3,700,000

Why Founders Are the Best Salespeople

Adam Baker

00:51>> last year. And we've grown 300 year on year over the last three years. So I want to talk to you today about why as founders, you're the best salespeople in your company. How many technical founders do we have in the room? Okay. So technical founders inherently aren't very good at being comfortable in front of sales in front of in a sales environment, in front of customers. But I'll talk to you about why I think that as

Founder Outreach Response and Close Rates

Adam Baker

01:17>> founders, regardless if you're commercial or technical, you're the best people to support your sales motion going forward. So my personal outreach, I'm a commercial guy, so my background is revenue. So I'm quite comfortable being in front of the market. But I lead things at Dealpad for my team. I lead by example. I get a 70% higher response rate to my outreach than my sales team because I'm reaching out to CEOs, I'm reaching out to CROs, and

01:47>> they respond well to another CEO reaching out to them rather than an SDR. Of the responses that I get of the responses I've had, 36% have led to sales. Massive. Now it's quite a small number. It's not a huge number, but 36% of everybody that responds to my outreach, we close. So for me, it's worth me investing the time in that outreach. I'm going to show you as well how we close some fairly big deals by

Story: Growing a Customer from $43K to $1.6M ARR

Adam Baker

02:21>> teaming up inside our organization to attract and reach the buying committee, the full senior buying committee of our prospects. Before I do that, I'm going tell you a story. So I was the CRO of a 50,000,000 ARR SaaS company. And the first thing I did was I looked at their customer list as I probably would. And the first thing I found was they've made a very common mistake. When I say mistake, I think it was a

02:48>> mistake. And they categorized their customers by revenue. Who does that here? When you think about your customers, when you categorize them into tiers, who does it by revenue?

03:00>> Quite a few of you. Okay. So I'll tell you why I believe that's the wrong strategy. I looked at their tiers. And in tier four, they had four tiers, which were companies that were paying them under $7,000. Their ACV was their average ACV was 14,000. They had eight customers that had 5,000,000,000 of revenue. And those companies didn't have a CS, a customer success person. They didn't have an account manager assigned to the account. There was no

03:32>> opportunity to grow those accounts at all because as far as the company were concerned, they were just paying them a few thousand bucks a year. So on my first week, I said to our VP of sales, I said, look, Amanda, we're going to increase our average order value from 14,000 to a 100,000. And she looked at me and said, how are we going to do that? I think we're jumping ahead of ourselves. We can't sell something

03:59>> for a $100,000 that we're selling for 14,000 today. I said, Amanda, you're right. We're not going to. We're gonna sell it for a million.

04:10>> And she looked she looked at me like I was just off a different planet. So I said to her, look, here's an example of a customer. They were a 43,000 ARR deal for us. It was one of our biggest customers at the time. I said to them, said to Amanda, what are they buying? And her response to me was, well, they're using our accessibility suite make sure that their web pages are accessible. And currently it's their

04:39>> APAC team using the product. I said, Amanda, that's not what they're buying. And I asked her again. I said, what are they buying? And she couldn't answer it. And if I ask each one of you, I would say nine out of 10 of you, and this is no disrespect, probably couldn't answer that question either. Because when I ask most people what the customer is buying, they will give me a product response. And I did I didn't

Segment Customers by Growth, Not Revenue

Adam Baker

05:02>> know at the time what that company were buying, but I assumed they were probably buying revenue. It probably meant that a large proportion of their web users were visually impaired and weren't able to read the website, which meant they were missing out on revenue. There was a reason that they cared about their website being accessible, and it wasn't because they wanted their website to be accessible. So really understanding what the customer is buying will be the

05:30>> biggest unlock to you growing revenue. It's how I've grown my revenues from 0 to 20,000,000 across two companies, and we're now at 7.5. Understand what your customers are buying. So I said to her, go away and come back to me with what they're actually buying. Within an hour, she came back and said, you're going to like this. I said, well, what is it? She said, they need to be accessibility compliant globally in the next three years.

05:57>> She'd been into their annual report. They were a public company. And she looked at their charter. And I said, what happens if they're not accessible, if they miss compliance? She said, well, they'll be fined. And I said, well, how much? And she said, I don't know. Millions. So we spent the next three months trying to figure out who was responsible for compliance and for hitting these goals in the next three years inside this organization, we found

06:23>> six people. So I went and rallied my senior executive team, including our CEO, and I said we need to drop tools for the next three months, and we need to focus on this. And we individually went and connected to all the right people, and I orchestrated it. And I just said, I need you to do this, and I need you to do this. And long story short, we moved that customer from 43,000 ARR to 1,600,000. We

06:49>> signed a three year contract. Well, it wasn't my money, unfortunately. I didn't get it. But we signed a three year contract worth more than $4,000,000 So my joke when I first arrived three months earlier and I said we're going to increase this by a million actually came true. Now that we hadn't sold it when I left two and a half years later, we hadn't sold any other million dollar customers. But the moral of this story is

07:15>> that you're probably leaving so much revenue on the table. Because when I walked into that company, they were proud that they had a customer paying them $40,000 a year. They didn't look at the fact that this company had $2,000,000,000 of revenue. They didn't look at the fact that they were really up against the wall with a with a massive fine impending if they hadn't hit these compliance milestones. So I'll I'll urge you to think about what

07:41>> good looks like and what great looks like in your business. If one of your reps or one of your salespeople come back and they say they've signed this deal, inspect it and actually say, you know, is this all we can get from the customer? Is there anything else? Because if you probe and you find a company wide problem that's a real pain, I promise you, and you you will increase the ACV. And if you understand what

08:05>> your customer is buying, it becomes much, much easier. So key takeaways from this little story is that talk about outcomes. Don't talk about product. Understand what your customers are buying. Segment your customers by growth, not by revenue. Understand how big these customers are. How big is the potential opportunity? Growth doesn't mean it's there right now. But if you've got a company with a billion revenues paying you $10,000 a year, that's a growth customer. That is not

Level Selling Explained

Adam Baker

08:43>> a customer that should be in your bottom tier and not getting any customer support. And find a company wide pain. I inspect all of our deals, and I make sure that we're actually we're shooting for as large as we can get. It's going to be more complicated. It's going to take longer to do it. But when it does, it's worth it. And this is how we achieved it. It's called level selling. This isn't my term. It's

09:10>> pretty well known, and it's very, very simple. We identify the key people inside the organization that we want to talk to, and I will then connect him with the CEO of that company. I will get my CMO to connect him with their CMO, my CTO to connect in with their CTO. And now we've got five or six people on my c suite connected in to five or six people in the prospects c suite as well. We

09:38>> don't sell to them. I'll reach out and say, hey. I I understand you're talking to one of our team. Would love to connect. That's it. And I'll do it via LinkedIn typically. I I don't sell to them. I don't badger them, and my team do the same. But you'll have these serendipitous moments where it comes back around and where your CPO might see something that they've because they now follow them on LinkedIn, they might they might

10:02>> have shared, and they'll lean in, and they'll give some insight into a problem they might be having. That nugget right there will come back in three or four months or a year to help you when you're now talking to that organization and the CPO says, oh, by the way, this is a great organization. I've been talking to the CPO of that company a bit. They're really they know their shit. Right? And so have a think about

10:25>> level selling. And don't just do it when you're ready to sell. Set this up and really think forward. If you have targeted accounts that you want to win every year, we identify probably 50 accounts that we want to win, that we're really intentional about. And obviously, we don't win the 50. But it really helps us understand what we need to do on those 50 accounts, and we put this into practice and into work. And it's it's

10:52>> worth doing it. Level selling is very, very powerful, and particularly as a founder. And the last thing on why founders are, in my opinion, the best salespeople in in a company is because you get shit done. You can move the needle. If a salesperson is inside a prospect and the prospect says, can you do this? They're gonna get three answers from the salesperson. It's gonna be no. It's gonna be I don't know, or it's gonna be

11:18>> yes, definitely. The third one's a lie, and that's probably where most salespeople will gravitate towards. And the second two aren't great because it leaves the prospect hanging. But as the fact if the founder gets asked that question, it's either no, but we can do it, or no, we can't do it because and but, or yeah, yeah, we this is this is easy for us. And if it's if it's your decision, you're gonna decide what we're gonna

11:45>> reprioritize things for the next couple of months. We're gonna build this product or this integration because we need to win this customer. And as the founder, you can make those decisions on the spot, and you can see it through. A salesperson comes to you, and they of my sales guys came to me a few weeks ago, they said, look. We've got this great customer. We think we can win it, but we need we need this integration.

12:06>> And it was an integration that we've never been asked for before, and we decided not to do it. If I was on that and I wasn't part of it. But if I'd been on that call, I might have decided to do it. But because it was the salesperson, they can't make decisions. Now their deal is scuppered because of me. So if you're a founder, get out there. Be comfortable with not don't sell. Be comfortable with engaging

LinkedIn Cold Email Script Post Goes Viral

Adam Baker

12:29>> with prospects. So I wanna talk to you about some experimentations and some hacks that I've seen work really well. I'm not really somebody that's on LinkedIn very well, that was on LinkedIn very much, but I've got a mentor. If you haven't got a mentor, get a mentor. It's the best thing you can do if you're the right one. And she said to me, you need to get onto LinkedIn. You've got a lot of experience. You can

12:52>> help people. And so I started writing some bullshit on LinkedIn, and people started to respond to it for some reason. And one of the things I I I found in in in one of my one of my files was I was the VP of sales at Salesforce. And during that time, my team and I built some scripts for cold email. And we just spent weeks and months optimizing these scripts for conversion. And then I took those

13:23>> scripts, and I've used them repeatedly well all of my other roles in my companies. We use them today. We just adapt them. And I just thought, well, why don't I share these because they work really well? So I posted a made a post on LinkedIn. Let me just jump to this. Sorry. So this is our experimentation sheet. So if you want this, I can share it with you. It really helps us measure and track and prioritize

13:49>> all of the experiments that we run. And so we just test the hell out of everything. A lot of this doesn't work, but it really helps us understand what we're testing, where we are with these tests. If you want this sheet, let me know. I can share it with you. So

14:08>> this post that I put on LinkedIn, within seven weeks, had generated a million of pipeline for us, and we've closed almost a quarter of a million in new ARR from this post. And I'll tell you what the post was. It was me saying, hey, I've got these scripts that we use at Salesforce. We had

14:33>> almost a million impressions for this post. 1,500 likes, almost 8,000 people saying they wanted the script. It was insane. I had people reaching out to me that I knew to say, you're you've gone viral. I've had so many people sharing your post with me because they thought I'd be interested in it. And this is this is from from a from a standing still on LinkedIn. I've you know, I I don't have many followers. It was just

15:01>> it resonated. And so not only now had I helped the sales community, I'd also generated a million of pipeline for my company. And I'd helped my sales team close almost a quarter of a million of sales to date. So that's one hack. Get on LinkedIn. If you've got something valuable to share, even if you haven't got a network and a large following, you're still going to leverage it. The second is probably the most powerful hack that

LinkedIn Recruitment Post Fills Four Roles

Adam Baker

15:28>> I've used, and it was around recruitment. And it was very serendipitous. So over the course of a few weeks, I had a couple of people that I used to work with reach out to me, salespeople, to say, I've lost my job or I'm looking for a new role. Do you know anyone?

15:44So I spoke to a couple

15:46>> of founders that I knew. And I said, look, there's a great person over here that's looking for some work. Are you interested? I connected these two people with two different founders, and they both got hired on the spot. They were good. And and the founders trusted me. I thought, okay. Well, maybe there's a lot of people in my network that are out of work or want a new job. Maybe there's a lot of founders that I

16:05>> know because most of my network is founders and CEOs that are looking to hire. So I posted something else, and I just wrote about it. And I had 650 people. Not a lot, but enough. Common to say, I'm a DevOps engineer. I'm a RevOps person. I'm a sales exec. I'm a VP of sales. I'm looking for work.

16:30>> And what happened there was now not only what was I helping the community, was I helping founders hire people and find great talent, getting people into jobs, which is the main outcome of what I was hoping to do? I also hired four people myself. I I filled four open roles with zero cost from one post. And two of those roles we've been trying to hire for months. So it was a really great hack. So the general

AI Lead Magnets Lift Website Conversion from 0.8% to 4.2%

Adam Baker

17:01>> kind of sentiment there is just to get on LinkedIn. Even if you're not comfortable with it, just find a way of adding some value to the community. And you'll find you'll get it paid back in droves. And then the final one is probably, for me, the most interesting. So back in September last year, we were looking at how we could increase lead conversion from our website. We get about 10,000 monthly uniques on the dealpad.io website. So

17:28>> not a huge amount, but meaningful enough. And our lead conversion was around 0.8%, which I've come to understand is about average, maybe just a little bit below average. But for me, it wasn't enough. So we started to run some experiments.

17:44And one of the experiments we ran

17:46>> was taking some AI that we've built for Dealpad. Now inside the Dealpad platform, we've got some AI that understands what buyers are interested in, how they're interacting and engaging inside the platform. So we can see what content they've consumed, how long they've looked at the content, who they've shared it with, lots of parameters around it. We redeployed that in a couple of weeks, and we spun it up on our website. So we could now see what

18:12>> keywords our visitors were coming in from. So we specialize in mutual action plans. So were they searching for mutual action plans and coming in there? Were they searching for sales process and coming in that way? And then we looked at what and profiled what they were looking at on the site. And we then built some lead magnets. So lead magnets, if don't you know what they are, they're just basically content, but you gate them. So behind

18:37>> a wall, you've got to put your email or your phone number in to be able to download that document. And within a few weeks, we'd moved our lead conversion from 0.8 to 4.2%. In real terms, that meant another 36 inbound leads every month, eight pipeline opportunities, and 60,000 of new ARR booked every month since we launched this in November. So we thought, okay, there's something here. It's worked for us. So we went to three of our

Spin-Off AI Product Beta with 2,900 Sign-Ups

Adam Baker

19:16>> customers that we thought were in a really good place to be able to leverage this. And we said, take this and use it. And they had similar results. So we've decided to spin it up as a product. And so this is our next kind of innovation at Dealpad. And one of the challenges that we've had internally is what do we do with this now? Do we bake this into our existing platform, or do we have a

19:41>> separate product for it? And we've chosen to have a separate product for it initially because what we don't want to do is to convolute our message and our market position. For us, that's really important. I think it's and it comes back to what your customer is buying. Our customer probably doesn't buy top of the funnel inbound leads and on the other side wanting to engage their buyers. And so we're running it very separately. And what we've

20:12>> built is the AI that will understand what your your web businesses are doing and will then enable you to have lead magnets on your website. You can place them anywhere on any part of the page that you want. And then the AI will decide which content to show which users at which time to increase the likelihood of them coming through as a lead.

20:39>> We've got 2,900 sign ups to our private beta so far, which is awesome. And what I'd love to do is to extend that invite to you guys. That is a QR code to get on the private beta. And what we're going to offer or what we're I'm offering you is the ability to, a, get it free so we won't charge you for it for the first couple of months. No obligation, obviously, to continue. And we'll also

21:04>> get you into the first group. So when you sign up,

21:09>> you've got a unique code on this QR code. We'll know you're from SAS Open. We'll get you into the first group. To get through 2,900 beta registrants is probably going to take us six months. But we'll get you in the first group if you sign up using this link.

Book Project and Audience Q and A

Adam Baker

21:25>> That's it. I'd love to take some questions. Before I do, just one other thing, and it's kind of an ask, is I'm writing a book. I don't know why, but I am, to kind of chart my experience and all the things that I've fucked up on over the last fifteen years of running three companies. I would love to interview and talk to founders that have done the same thing anywhere from the zero to 20,000,000 journey. So

21:54>> if you want to be in my book, I'll quote you and I'll ensure that everybody gets the ability to prove it before it goes live. Just come and chat to me. Or that should be my LinkedIn there on my QR. Again, if you want to link in with me, that should be my LinkedIn. Chat to me. I'd love to talk to you. But any questions that I can take?

Q and A: When to Down-Level as a Founder CEO

Nathan Latka

22:15For level selling that you mentioned,

22:19is it fine to down level? So, as a founder, CEO, my sales team doesn't don't want me in the sales team's sales calls because they're like, we're only speaking to director level folks. You're too seasoned, too senior type. So but I still push through and I want to be on a sales call. But the CEOs and our customer, and our potential buyers aren't the ones making the decision. So, as a CEO, is it fine to try

22:46to reach out to a lower designation on the buyer side?

Adam Baker

22:50>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

22:51Did you get that question?

Adam Baker

22:53>> Yeah. And so as a CEO, should we be reaching out to kind of people below us? I think you need to use some kind of caution and just look at the nuances of that particular deal. I wouldn't advocate necessarily

23:11>> so level selling is called level selling because you go into each level. And so if you're doing this, it's kind of an unbalanced level. Right? And so I wouldn't advocate it, but I think that if you've got a big account and you cut let's say for argument's sake, you're selling to Johnson and Johnson, the chances of you getting into the CEO of Johnson and Johnson are very, very slim. So then you wouldn't go CEO to CEO.

23:38>> But what you might want to do is you might you'd identify the most senior owner of that particular project. So it might be in that instance, I don't know, let's just say the VP of compliance might be the person that owns the problem. You level into them. And then you say, you know, your your CMO might go in after the head of marketing that or, you know, what whatever. You know? You you you just but I

24:03>> wouldn't necessarily advocate you going into a salesperson as a founder because you'll end up doing it all the time. You'll get sucked in. And if you do it once, your sales team will be asking you to do it all the time, and that isn't scalable.

24:16>> So just I think from a kind of an appreciation of your own time, just think about where it is you're kind of spending your time.

24:28>> Any other questions?

24:31>> Come on, there must be more questions. Speak up. Nope. Alright. Thanks, guys.

Nathan Latka

24:44Hey, folks. If we haven't met yet, my name is Nathan Latka. I launched and sold my first software company back in 2015 and went on to write a book about it, which you guys made a Wall Street Journal bestseller purchasing over 30,000 copies. Thank you so much for that. After the book, I launched this show and went on to create founderpath.com. I raised a large fund to do non dilutive deals with B2B software founders. So far,

25:11we've invested in over 400 software founders totaling 150,000,000. Here in 2024, we're doing three to four new deals per week. So if you're looking for capital and don't wanna give up equity, go sign up at founderpath.com for free to get your offer.