Hey everyone! In today’s episode, I share the mic with Gretta van Riel, a serial entrepreneur from Australia who built SkinnyMe Tea, The 5th, The Drop Bottle, and Hey Influencers from scratch.
Tune in to hear Gretta share how her entrepreneurial journey began with a love of tea, how she gained over 16M followers on her social media channels as an influencer marketing queen, how she grew SkinnyMe Tea’s revenue from zero to 600K/month in just six months, and opens up about her $1.3 million dollar mistake—a hefty loss that came with some valuable lessons.
Hey everyone! Today I share the mic with Amanda Bradford, CEO of The League, a dating app for aspiring power couples.
Tune in to hear Amanda share why her dating app for intellectuals has a 500K wait list and how it’s converting in high volumes, the effects of monetizing the app for both men and women (especially in regards to user habits), and the value of finding the right people to ramp up your company’s growth.
01:34 – Based in Austin, they are opening offices in Dallas and Houston; The League was recently launched in Miami, Atlanta and Philly
01:48 – Looking to expand their dating app to LA, San Francisco and New York
02:25 – Finding your perfect match
02:25 – Users are required to put in their Facebook accounts as well as their LinkedIn which results in a more curated environment
03:00 – Users are matched by considering a variety of factors such as earnings, educational institutions, fields and social graphs
03:31 – It aims to curate users that are ambitious, intellectual and looking for a relationship
03:40 – Just started generating revenue by offering paid memberships
04:04 – The waitlist for The League has ballooned to over 500,000
04:56 – Does not compete with Raya, a dating app targeting wannabe celebrities; at The League, they are targeting more professionally oriented people
05:23 – Appeals to intellectuals such as writers, bankers and journalists
05:54 – Matchmaking: an outdated concept
05:54 – Not uncommon for matchmakers to charge as much as $60,000
06:18 – Matchmaking is an ancient concept and dating apps will replace them over time
07:58 – With the emergence of smartphones and improving technology, people can select their date from a wider pool; chances of finding a good match increases
09:10 – The League wants to be known as a dating app and not as a marriage platform
09:29 – Sends congratulatory gifts on the birthday of league babies
09:44 – Folks in their early 20’s are just looking to date and figure out what they want
10:02 – In spite of giving only 3 to 5 matches, conversion rate is really high
11:10 – Analyzing membership structure and revenues at The League
11:10 – It monetizes impatient people who value their time and are actively looking for a perfect match
12:02 – Annual membership is $180 which works out to be $15 per month
12:47 – Unlike other dating websites which try to monetize the men, revenues at “The League” are split equally between men and women
13:02 – User behaviors have improved after switching to a paid model
14:00 – Marketing strategy
14:00 – Relies on referrals for marketing
14:16 – Uses Hustle Con as a platform to meet potential users and spread the word before launching the app
15:12 – Raised $2.8 million so far
15:18 – A successful match leads to two people leaving and many more joining the app
16:18 – In spite of Tinder being one of the top four Apps used by millennials, fundraising is not easy
17:18 – It’s a lean organization with every person wearing multiple hats
17:31 – They want to use the latest, cutting edge technology to solve people’s problems
19:00 – Aiming to retain non-singles even after they’ve found a match
19:51 – What is the one big struggle you faced while growing “The League”? – Getting the right people on board
21:17 – Entrepreneurs’ Organization managed to increase their revenues from $3 million a year to $22 million a year in a space of just 2 years by hiring great people
21:45 – Monetization has enabled Amanda to hire some great people which has placed The League on the path for fast growth
22:33 – What is one big thing, positive or negative that has impacted your business in a big way in the past one year? – Amanda moved her office to a live/work house and now lives in a studio on the top of her office
25:24 – What’s one new tool that you’ve added in the last year that’s added a lot of value, like Evernote? – Mode Analytics – It is super easy. You can hook it onto any database and put SQL in it
26:39 – What’s one must-read book do you recommend? –Shoe Dog – The story of Phil Knight starting Nike right out of business school
28:20 – Connect with Amanda on her website or Facebook
Hey everyone! Today’s episode is with Matthew Barby, Global Head of Growth and SEO at HubSpot, which is an inbound marking and sales platform.
Tune in to hear Matthew share the various SEO strategies he has employed in and outside of HubSpot (plus his most successful campaign to date), how you can write for top publications, and the importance of knowing the fundamentals of link architecture and Google algorithms so you can solve your own SEO problems, not just employ the tactics.
01:51 – Matthew was heading a marketing firm in the UK before joining HubSpot at the Dublin office
02:18 – He was primarily focused on user acquisition with an emphasis on free users
03:02 – Rampant experimentation using different frameworks and prioritization models at HubSpot
03:32 – Use of Frankenstein framework and PIE framework, similar to what is used at GrowthHackers
03:55 – Primary considerations at HubSpot while zeroing in on experimentation
04:01 – Ability to replicate and scale up
04:05 – Resources needed to execute the experiment
04:07 – Potential reward
04:29 – Matthew’s most successful campaign at HubSpot
04:58 – HubSpot is a huge B2B outfit publishing 250-300 blog posts every month
05:25 – HubSpot had more than 3,000 lead magnets which included e-books and templates
05:45 – Google was not crawling HubSpot’s marketing library properly
06:28 – Redeveloping the marketing library took just one week and resulted in additional traffic of about 600,000
07:10 – Investing in tools like Botify led to a proper log file analysis
08:10 – Every single experiment at HubSpot is carried out with the sole purpose of driving more free users to their products
10:39 – A simple and effective variation of ICE model and PIE model
11:06 – The experiment should have high potential to outweigh the downsides
11:48 – Assign an aggregate score and stack the scores from high to low
12:41 – HubSpot is one of the few SaaS businesses driving traffic in millions
13:10 – HubSpot is planning to be more laser focused with content; they want to concentrate their focus on “top of the funnel” content rather than wider-awareness content
16:01 – 90% of content is generated internally within the ecosystem of the content team, this includes writers, videographers, the podcast team and designers
17:32 – Reposting to Medium is a great way to drive traffic back to your website
19:58 – Posting content is easy and just a matter of adding a URL
20:15 – Better to re-edit a piece and position it differently while posting to Medium
21:02 – It’s not advisable to repost content to LinkedIn for driving organic search traffic
22:13 – How do you write for top publications?
22:50 – Different ways of getting into different tiers of publications
24:11 – The strength is in the relevance of the pitch and being able to prove your stance
25:01 – Do not try to reinvent the wheel
27:03 – Tips and tricks to get on the BuzzFeed front page
27:03 – Crawling through, scraping data and analyzing the same enabled Matthew to come up with some common themes for Buzzfeed
27:58 – Social posts definitely help
29:54 – Able to generate 100,000 visitors to the homepage in 3 days via BuzzFeed
30:32 – Matthew’s SEO campaign for BuildFire
30:52 – Needed to build site authority and land some big links
31:28 – Being featured in Business News Daily really helped
32:10 – Matthew piggybacked on this initial success and built authority in this space
32:48 – Generated a million visits in 9 months
33:16 – Contributors to successful link building
33:33 – Backlinks is the most effective SEO tool
33:47 – Anchor text is still relevant
34:32 – Stop focusing on tactics
35:55 – Understand the fundamentals of link architecture and how the Google algorithm works
36:35 – Content flipping is creating “top of the funnel” content and redirecting the content that is difficult to get links to
38:31 – What’s one must-read book do you recommend? – The Hard Thing about Hard Things and Rise of the Robots
39:51 – How do you stay on the top of marketing?
40:00 – Hire talented people
40:34 – Meet up with industry experts to discuss ideas and strategies
Hey everyone, today I share the mic with Rodrigo Fuentes, CEO of ListenLoop, which zeroes in on account-based marketing for B2B companies.
Tune in to hear Rodrigo break down how account-based marketing works, how a background in electrical engineering and law led him to a B2B retargeting startup, how one ListenLoop client saw a 22% increase in web traffic engagement with ABM, and what their most effective customer acquisition method is.
01:31 – Rodrigo thinks ABM or account-based marketing is now past the hype curve and people are executing campaigns
01:44 – ListenLoop primarily helps B2B marketers who want to go after a specific set of companies
02:02 – The software will place ads directly on the target companies and targeted job titles as they browse the web
02:31 – Rodrigo is an electrical engineer from Yale, went to Columbia Law School focusing on patent litigation and IP rights, and he practiced law for almost 3 years at Fish and Richardson
02:54 – Rodrigo says law was mentally stimulating, but he found himself more curious about his client’s business problems
03:12 – Rodrigo was asked by a friend to join his startup while he was still at the law firm; he decided to jump into the business
04:17 – Rodrigo is a visual learner and is currently into courses at Udemy because of how visual they are
05:12 – Rodrigo watches videos about marketing, outreach and other business related topics
06:52 – Rodrigo shares an example of a company that uses ListenLoop, called Engagio
07:07 – Charlie Liang, Engagio’s Director of Marketing, uses ListenLoop to combine their marketing activities and advertising with a specific list of target accounts
08:02 – Engagio saw increased engagement with their target accounts when they were exposed to the ads
08:17 – Account-based marketing together with advertising saw a 22% increase in web-traffic engagement
09:32 – Account-based marketing is a strategy that a sales marketing team will use to influence and close a specific set of accounts
10:07 – It is a strategy whereby sales and marketing teams are aligned on a specific list of accounts they want to go after; they use one or more communication channels to reach those accounts and measure the results of the campaign at the account level
11:32 – In a company, people are delegated with the task to research and compare information and this is shared internally
12:12 – Results are measured at the account level of the company and not per individual – you get a holistic picture of how the account is engaging
13:15 – ListenLoop works by getting the domains of a target account; specifically a location of where those contacts will fit
14:28 – ListenLoop has pre-roll personalization that adds animation on top of the ads; this includes a logo of the company you are targeting
14:59 – Ads can be segmented to the bio persona—there can be a different sets of ads that will resonate to the marketer and another to the sales person
15:34 – There can also be a segment across industries or companies
16:19 – ListenLoop is a different channel from Facebook or LinkedIn
17:47 – A CRM retargeting tool works for B2C or business-to-consumer marketing
17:59 – If you are in B2B, the match rate is lower compared to those who are in B2C
18:27 – The problem here is people do not use their business accounts for online transactions
19:28 – ListenLoop uses the triangulation method: the first party data, third party data and the geolocation data is overlapped to create a model; the tiny area of overlap of all these three that represents a B2B persona
20:26 – They were able to generate a 70% match rate in North America and 62% across all the campaigns
20:59 – The price is $99 per month and that includes targeting for 100 accounts that have received impressions
21:41 – Rodrigo says they are friendly to those who are still new to this strategy and pricing will increase for those who are targeting hundreds and thousands of accounts
22:13 – The most effective method in customer acquisition for ListenLoop is using account-based marketing
22:32 – They use ads one month prior to an email campaign, targeting individual contacts from top to bottom. They phone the people who opened the email at least three times, and send direct mail to those with whom they connected
23:06 – They also try to meet these people in person at conferences
23:33 – ListenLoop is managed through outreach and other different tools
24:12 – What’s one big struggle you’ve faced growing this business? – When the business first began, they had to make sure there was a product market fit
25:11 – They had to make two independent bets: prove they had a product market fit for investments and they had to generate enough sales
26:58 – They only had a few clients at this stage in terms of a sample size
27:33 – There is a correct path to do a business and it starts with the product
28:03 – The pressure to show product market fit in a short amount of time forced them to do two different things; they ended up being wrong
29:10 – What’s one must read book you’d recommend to everyone? – The Hard Thing About Hard Things
29:49 – Check out ListenLoop and email Rodrigo at rod@listenloop.com, you can also contact him via LinkedIn
30:31– End of today’s episode
3 Key Points:
Account-based marketing is a strategy that will target specific accounts and it can be segmented into different bio personas.
Account-based marketing can be done alongside other advertising campaigns.
The type of marketing campaigns you need depends on whether you’re a B2C or B2B company and the type of accounts you’ll be pursuing.
Hey everyone, today I share the mic with Zack Onisko, CEO of Dribbble, an online community for web designers to share, receive support, and post/find jobs.
Tune in to hear Zack talk about some of the trends and constants that he’s seen around growth in the last 15 years, why he believes that the key to growth and success is focusing on developing a product so good that it can’t be ignored by the market and how Dribbble is killing it on a global scale with literally zero marketing efforts on their part. He’ll also share what Dribble has up its sleeve today.
01:06 – Led Growth at Hired.com and now is the CEO of Dribbble
01:24 – Who Zack is and what’s he’s up to
01:31 – He’s been been building high-growth startups for about 20 years in the recruitment and design space
01:45 – He’s a designer by training
01:50 – Moved into product management and growth for several companies
02:17 – Now CEO of Dribbble
02:41 – What are some trends and constants you’ve seen around growth at these awesome companies?
02:55 – Everything starts with a business model and audience—this defines not only growth strategy but business strategy
03:20 – It also comes down to product and market—how big is the market and how much can you sell your product for?
03:39 – Tell us about Dribbble and how to use it
03:55 – It’s a space for designers to show their work to other designers and receive feedback
04:03 – There’s a board for posting jobs which is, essentially, a community
04:20 – It’s a Top 1000 website in terms of rank and traffic
04:38 – They have millions of visitors a month
04:52 – Dribbble’s parallel would be Linkedin
05:02 – They have multiple business lines: ads, subscriptions, and job boards that each have their own products
05:17 – They’ve also acquired two companies: an iPhone app called Ballin’ and a designer developer marketplace called Crew
05:43 – What’s the vision behind the company, Dribbble?
05:52 – “We want to become the center of the universe for all things design” where designers can come for inspiration, training, and a community
06:23 – He also wants to be the place where people come to find work
07:36 – He wants designers to have seamless transition between contracts
07:47 – He also wants to help with legal help, contract negotiations, and accounting
08:22 – The job board, subscription and ads are split evenly in regards to what brings in their income
08:35 – What is the most effective thing you are doing for customer acquisition?
08:45 – They’ve done zero marketing
08:58 – It’s an invite-only community which has kept the quality of designers high
09:41 – They have community hosted meet-ups all over the world
10:46 – They only provide the swag (meet-up kit) and send it to the host, and the community takes care of the meet-ups themselves
11:21 – Direct traffic is their biggest channel as we’ve built this global brand
12:35 What are some trends you’ve seen around SEO?
12:49 – Zack takes a common sense approach making the site as easily as crawlable as possible; he looks at their inbound links strategy, and makes sure the content people are looking for lives on their domain
14:34 – As long as they’re producing high quality content, it’s going to pay off over time
15:53 – Dribbble has grown organically and leans on their rich content
16:41 – Zack discusses how they began purchasing other companies
16:50 – Zack and the team really wanted to build a mobile app
17:22 – He reached out to the top 3 IOS apps in the market and contacted the founders to join the team
18:24 – How do you decide which companies to purchase? – Dribbble’s parent company, Tiny Capital, which came from Metalab, has been very profitable over the years
19:10 – Their investment thesis: Instead of investing at seed level, they buy young companies that are profitable
19:18 – Andrew Wilkinson, from Metalab, is the Warren Buffet of Internet companies and Zack has followed his lead and worked together on the Crew acquisition
20:21 – There are advantages to having properties like Crew, like WeWorkRemotely, like Designer News, which are revenue-generating properties that do not take a lot of operating labour to keep them going
21:25 – Zack wouldn’t be where he’s at without being around amazing people
21:33 – Zack started at Tickle and worked with amazing talent such as Stan Chudnovsky and Michael Birch
23:10 – Coming from a design to product role, Zack went through a growth spurt learning how to build, test, and ship off a product
23:46 – Zack has learned that product design is what will actually impact growth the most
23:55 – What’s one new tool you’ve added that has added a lot of value to you? Zen Prospect – Zack used them for their hiring pipeline
25:21 – What’s one must-read book you recommend? – The Hard Things About Hard Things and Remote
26:08 – Contact Zack at on Twitter, on his blog or by email
26:28 – End of today’s episode
3 Key Points:
Everything begins with a business model and audience—this not only decides your growth strategy, but your entire business strategy.
Your product design and the quality you provide is what will impact your growth the most.
If you’re producing high quality content, this will drive your success and people WILL notice you.
If I had to guess, I’d say that your hiring process goes something like this: you throw a job posting on Craigslist, Monster, Indeed or LinkedIn and expect people to come through. You go through a bunch of resumes, call up some of the better candidates, then invite your favorites to an interview. You might even do some reference checks, and then you make the job offer right there.
Close?
I think most of us can agree that there are ways we can improve this incredibly-important-but-quickly-becoming-outdated hiring process.
So how do you make this old way better? Let’s talk about the concept of trial week.
What Is Trial Week?
Most companies do a 3-month trial, but trial week is even more high stakes. Have your final candidates come in and work for you for a week. Put them on your team and see how they work, interact and communicate.
Basecamp does something very similar for hiring. After looking at resumes, they interview candidates using Skype. And they take their time with these chats. Let’s say you’re at a conference or you’re traveling—you chat for a bit, then travel a little, then a couple hours later you can come back and continue the conversation. It’s not even like you’re driving them through an interview process; it’s more like a long email chain, just through Skype.
When it seems like there’s a fit, they move a candidate into a trial week.
After the interview process, they might say, “Hey, we’ll pay you for a small project.” This lets Basecamp continue to evaluate all the small nuances of a candidate, like how well they communicate with your team, how well they do their work, how well they fit with the culture, etc. They also compensate these people so they’re not wasting their time.
What We Look for During a Trial Week
When we put somebody through trial week, we think about how they are as a fit within our team. Just because somebody produces great work doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a long-term fit. If they’re annoying, even if they do the work well, they’re not the right fit. If they spend all their time thinking about themselves, their output and their performance rather than the goals of the team, they’re not the right fit.
Now let’s say we’re looking for a PPC person. We’ll run them through an interview process, talk to them a little bit, and then we’ll give them read-only access to an ads account and ask things like, “What would you fix about this? What opportunities do you see? What are we missing out on?”
We want to see if this person can open our minds up a little more, if they’re going to teach us something, and if they actually know what they’re talking about. Because there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors in marketing interviews.
Let’s say you’re looking to hire an operations person. You can run them through a situational interview with a trial week. You can also have them do the actual work. Maybe have them look at your P&L or your balance sheet and have them make some recommendations. Give them some homework, too.
I’ll outline all the situations to a candidate and ask them, “What would you do here?” Then, afterwards, “Based on this, what kind of project do you think you can work on where we can evaluate whether you’re a fit or not?”
Don’t Hire the Wrong Person
The tricky part is figuring out the right workload balance. You want to have people complete projects that show their true skills. But at the same time, you don’t want to make it too extensive since a lot of people that you’re interviewing have full-time jobs. In some cases we’ve found really good people, but they don’t have the time to work on projects.
All in all, I can’t stress to you how important trial week is. Just recently, I almost made a mistake in hiring. This person did really well on the video interview and wrote an in-depth PowerPoint presentation. Then we put him through trial week and the communication skills were just not there. There were a lot of different issues.
We avoided hiring someone that looked really good on paper but wasn’t actually the right fit thanks to the trial week process we had in place.
Whenever we’re looking to expand our team, we make sure to follow the “Hiring Funnel” model, taking several steps to ensure that we’re finding a great fit for our company. The funnel model works by narrowing down your objective (and your candidates) with each step until you filter out the best of the best.
To lay the groundwork, we use a tool called Workable, which allows us to manage all our hiring candidates. Workable will post to multiple job boards, like Indeed or LinkedIn.
You can also have a widget that sits on your site, like we do in our job section. We also re-target people who visit our job section more than three times because at that point, we know those people are probably looking for a job.
In the very beginning, you’re just looking to fill the top of your funnel with applicants. There are several ways to do this. You can blast out to the job boards or use AI resume screening. You can laser target people that fit a certain description. I’ve had one of my assistants do cold outreach to people through LinkedIn before. All these methods work to start filling the funnel.
Keep in mind that many of these applicants will be unqualified because they don’t fit the job description. We’ll often put specific instructions in our job descriptions and if they can’t follow those directions, it shows right away that they won’t be a fit.
Next, the Video Interview
The next step is qualifying those people who do fit the job description and moving them to the next step: a video interview. This will allow you to get a good feel for how this person is through established questions.
The most important thing to look for when going a little deeper with hiring is someone’s ability to give examples. Ask people to give details. If they can’t give details and they can’t provide examples of what they’ve done, that’s when you know something is off.
Now, would you want to work with this person? Would you want to get a beer with this person? Would you want this person to hang out with your team? That’s the criteria you should be considering. It doesn’t matter if they’re skilled or not.
You can detect certain things when you meet people in person or when you watch a video that you just can’t get on paper, which is why it’s crucial to have this alternative form of contact. I like to follow a sequence: I usually talk to people initially through Skype.
If the video interview goes well, I might add them through Skype. We might do some text chatting here and there. If it goes well, then we’ll meet in person. Then, the next time we meet in person, I might have some of my team members sit in on the interview to see how things are going and how they feel about this person.
That’s when we’ll move to the next step of the funnel: the trial.
In addition to the interview, you need to have a trial period to see if these people are as good as they say they are. The interview tells you more than plain text, but in the end, it can only tell you so much. You have to see how this person communicates, what their working style is, how they interact with the team and so on.
Also, make absolutely sure that they’re punctual. If someone meets you in person at your office, they should show up on time. Almost all my interviewees have shown up on time, except for occasional exceptions due to things like traffic. In those cases, clarify the situation with them.
Say something like, “I noticed that you were five minutes late. Can you talk about that?” Then they can explain what happened. You want to get clear and set the right tone right off the bat.
If a person shows up to the interview five minutes late, not dressed properly, and comes in with a combative attitude, you know there’s an issue.
At some point, you have to be good at weeding people out. Even if they’re in person with you, sometimes it’s just not the right fit. You should stop the interview process right then and there. You don’t want to waste any more of your time or their time.
Make sure to do your homework and do a reference check as well as a background check on your candidates. One time, we did a background check on someone we were talking to, and it turned out they were a convicted felon.
Usually, the first three references a candidate gives are going to be really good. They’re going to say good things. It’s always good to ask for some other people to talk to as well, like their second-level connections. The feedback you’re going to get from those people is more unfiltered.
Make sure you’re building out some kind of hiring funnel because if you don’t have a good process established, the people you don’t want will seep through. Let’s say you only have one step. They get through that one step and you end up hiring them. They’re with you for only three or four months before they jump ship or you fire them. Then you have a major problem.
Most of the time, you’re making a big investment when you hire someone, so you want a great hire who can give you 10-20x ROI.
At the end of the day, it’s all about people and the sorts of people you want to work with. Don’t poison your team by adding bad members. Use the hiring funnel.
Hey everyone, in today’s episode I share the mic with Chase Granberry, co-founder of Authority Labs, which allows you to track rankings on Google and Bing.
Listen as Chase discusses how he built the company by hustling and being the best in the SEO software space, the value of zeroing in on one thing when it comes to growing a company, why it’s so important to track rankings, how he struggled to scale the technical side of the business when he knew nothing, and how positive thinking and reading voraciously are two key factors that have contributed to his own success.
01:25 – Authority Labs helps track your ranking and SEO in Google and Bing
02:15 – It is important to track your ranking for your brand name
02:56 – For the long term, your Google ranking will help draw organic traffic to your business
03:16 – Chase worked for a commercial printing company and he built an e-commerce site for them
04:20 – Chase worked for another company doing ad sales
04:40 – Chase did “anything internet” and got into consulting, building websites, email campaigns and SEO, and started to look for tools that he could use
05:30 – Authority Labs earns 3 million a year and they only have 4 full time employees
05:51 – The company grew by hustling, word of mouth, and being the best in the SEO software space
06:10 – There are more than 2,000 customers for Authority Labs
06:20 – Authority Labs has two different products: the interface product which starts at $99 and the other product which does data feed, it starts at 99 cents per thousand
07:48 – Chase wanted to add more products, but their focus is on scaling their service’s ranking for now
08:15 – The company is now coming to a point of trying out different products
09:15 – Eric likes Authority Labs’ focus on tracking and SEO
09:42 – How did you acquire your first 500 paying customers? – For the first six months or year, they were not charging the credit cards automatically
10:23 – All deals were straight sales deals and was going through direct messaging on LinkedIn
11:23 – Within the first six months, they got large data deals and grew their revenue from that
12:03 – Chase didn’t have any money at the time and had to work with what he knew and what could make the biggest impact
12:50 – They are now working on building more products and doing more sales
13:22 – They are also working on adding more blog posts such as technical articles and guest posts from influencers such as Todd Malicoat
14:35 – What’s one big struggle you had in growing the business? – This is the first company Chase has owned and ran
15:07 – A lot of the struggle is on scaling and growing the company as well as keeping up with the technical side of things
16:15 – Chase learned the technical side through a lot of reading and asking questions
16:30 – What was the one thing that was a game changer for you? – Reading about different cases of how people scaled and general concepts of doing work
18:33 – What’s one big change you made in the last year that’s impacted you or the business in a big way? – We intently started focusing on building new stuff
19:31 – What’s one new tool that you added in the last year that added a lot of value for you? – Datadog
First and foremost, I think most people think that prospecting, following up, doing sales calls, and closing deals can be pretty daunting, right? Most people don’t like to think of sales. “Oh, I’m just not good at sales” is something I hear all the time.
In fact, I’m still like that, to this day. I tend to avoid wanting to do sales calls, but you kind of have to if you’re running a company, especially in the early days. You have to close the deals. In the agency situation, like with Single Grain, if it’s a big deal, I’m going to come in and close it myself.
But the question is—how do you go about closing deals if you’re just starting out?
How to Close Deals When Your Business Is New
If you’re starting out, I think that the one thing you have to realize is that you have to look at your sales activity. How many deals is it going to take for you, or how many calls do you have to make, to eventually close a deal? Then you can work backwards.
Make a list of your sales activities. What you can do is figure out, on average, how many proposals you have to send before you close a deal. For example, let’s say I close at 25%. That means that I need to send out four proposals to close one deal.
Well, how many discovery calls do I need to get on to eventually get to one proposal? Let’s say 1 in 10 calls that I get on actually results in a closed deal. So, to close four deals, I need to speak with 40 people over discovery calls. But how many prospects do I need to reach out to in order to get one discovery call? Let’s say 5% of my total calls will lead to discovery calls. In this case, that means I need to reach out to 800 prospects every month to get four closed deals.
There are about 20 weekdays in one month, right? That means each and every day I need to reach out to 40 brand new people and then we also need to follow up with old clients or prospects, too.
Now, let’s say you’re starting out fresh and you don’t really know how you’re going to end up converting. Let’s say you are actually not that good at closing yet. In fact, let’s say you convert at 10%. You convert 10% of your proposals into a closed deal, 10% of your discovery calls will turn into proposals, and 5% of your prospecting will turn into actual discovery calls.
That means that instead of having to reach 800 per month, you actually have to reach 2,000 per month. That means you effectively have to send 100 messages per day. Which is why prospecting is hard.
Sales Books Everyone Should Read
One book I would recommend reading is The Ultimate Sales Machine. In this book, there’s a concept called your “dream 100.” In other words, who are your 100 dream clients?
Well, you can prospect for them by setting filters with SaaS sales software (like LinkedIn), or you could have sales development representatives reaching out. More likely, it’s going to be you doing it. Ideally, it’s you and your business partner tag teaming your ideal leads with hand-to-hand combat techniques.
Jason Lemkin is the founder of SaaStr, which is one of the biggest software as a service (SaaS) conferences in San Francisco. I’d recommend reading that book and all of Jason’s articles on software as a service.
Those two books are going to be gold for you, especially if you’re first starting out with sales. Then you just keep doing it over time and you’re going to get used to it.
I would also recommend supplementing your sales efforts with things like inbound marketing where you’re building goodwill with people over time.
You’re doing YouTube videos, you’re doing Facebook Lives, you’re creating a lot of content out there. You’re going out there, you’re speaking at events, you’re doing podcasts, and you’re creating all this content. That’s going to take a lot of time to get that going, but ideally you get that going so that a couple years from now, you’re not going to have to rely completely on sales and ads.
You can definitely do the prospecting thing, but you can see that having to send out 100 brand new emails per day and trying to personalize each and every one of them can get really tiring. So as soon as you can, I would recommend delegating the prospecting to two other people so that you can compare them side by side, and then perhaps you can focus on closing your best prospects.
Eventually, you can hand off the closing to the other people, too. At that point, you just have to focus on growing the business and making the right hires.
Using the Right Tools
There are so many different tools out there. Use tools like SalesforceIQ or some kind of CRM, like HubSpot CRM. I highly recommend using Mixmax to follow up with people automatically. You can see who’s opening emails, when they open it, where they open it from, how many times they open it, etc.
Long story short, everyone I’ve interviewed on Growth Everywhere gets their first 100 and even 1,000 customers by doing hand-to-hand combat.
Let’s talk about how to recruit great people to your team. One of the key realities to building up any type of company is that you can only go so far on your own.
It doesn’t matter how good you are individually. You might think you’re a really great individual contributor, but when you don’t have a team around you, or you’re not open to sharing information with people and bringing great people on board, you’re not going to be able to grow. Every step up is going to be a burden.
This might seem obvious to some people who have successful businesses already, but it’s less obvious to freelancers and small business owners who are just starting out. I used to think that because I was a really good individual contributor, I could hack it on my own, and that the quality of my team wasn’t as important (I know, crazy, right?).
Tribal Leadership
There’s this book called Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan that everyone should read. Basically, it talks about how there’s five different stages to companies.
At the third level, individuals are thinking they’re really good because they’re tasting success. At the fourth level, the whole company thinks they’re good. That’s a really good confidence level to be at. And at the fifth level, we’re talking about world changing stuff like NASA, for example, where you’re coming together to find a deeper, more impactful purpose.
How to Find Exceptional Talent
The billion-dollar question is: Where do you go find great people?
For me, it’s always been really good referrals, just asking people if they know anybody. But you can’t really rely on referrals all the time. You have to have a reliable, inbound way of bringing in high-quality applicants, too.
We use a tool called Workable, which allows us to post jobs efficiently. From there, we can qualify people. I can add multiple users, and I can move applicants to different phases. If they pass the phases, we move them to a final screening.
After that we’ll move them to a tool called Spark Hire. Spark Hire will run them through a video interview process. This is excellent for lower level to mid-senior level hires.
For right-hand-man-level hires who can really take on lots of different projects, help with IT, help with recruiting, and help with the financials for the company, there are multiple interview processes. You might run them through a test for a week or two. In this case it might be for an entire month and you might want to consider paying them for their time.
I remember reading about how Uber’s CTO was interviewed for 30 hours by Travis, the CEO. They were having a conversation the whole time and they knew this was kind of a big deal, so that’s what it took.
You have to do a lot of reference checking, too. Extreme reference checking. You have to ask the references for additional references when you’re looking to make this kind of hire.
Don’t be afraid to blast your email list and ask for referrals. We found some good people from our email list just by saying we’re looking for very specific talent. Often, it’s the subscribers that follow your stuff who are also your biggest advocates.
We often build a custom audience of people who have visited our jobs page and we re-target the ones that come back. Maybe the people who came in the last 30-60 days or so. Maybe you spend five dollars a day. It’s much better than spending $500 bucks for a random job post on some random job board like Monster.
I’m not saying the job boards don’t help. LinkedIn certainly does. We’ll buy those postings in bulk, like 10 in one year. That way we save some money, because recruiting can become very expensive very quickly.
One of our current clients right now is called Lever. One of their competitors is called Greenhouse. You can check out those two companies if you have some money to spend on recruiting tools and services. I think it’s a couple thousand per month.
What a Leader’s Role Is
Once you surpass a million dollars per year in revenue, your job as the leader of the company is to keep looking for the best recruits. It’s all about building a brilliant team around you.
Keep in mind that recruiting is both an art and a science. You’re never going to bat 100%. You’re going to miss and, yes, it’s going to cost you. In some cases, you might reassign somebody you just hired. In some cases you might have to let them go.
Whatever the case, keep in mind that you have to have a good process first. If all of a sudden you have to let go of a bunch of people at the same time, you’re going to lose a lot of confidence in your team, and vice versa.
When you’re the leader, people do look at you differently. You’re not an individual contributor anymore and you can kind of hide in the weeds. You have to take that into account, too. How you behave really affects the company. It’s why Glassdoor has a specific metric for CEO approval rating.
The people on your team are going to mimic your behavior, so it’s really on you as the leader to make the right decisions, make them quickly, and constantly iterate on the company and on your own role as the CEO.
