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[Music] propose if I is the tool that's awesome our rep team loves it but Kyle's grown like one of the things we talked about and the thing you're talking about today is building a sales team from scratch and so I'm super pumped because you guys started as a like a web design agency and you crew to something that's like I don't want to say the revenue number but pretty damn impressive the product is pretty cool I know we've got a call to action at the end so everybody can check out the the link if or check out a demo if you want I recommend it truly because I like Kyle but our sales team recommends it because it's better than the tool we were using before and we don't have any more issues with that being said calling a pass adopts you let you sort of take the reins here all right thanks a lot Colin appreciate that it looks like there's some propose if I love in the chat here as well I saw that thank you very much appreciate it I'm able to share my screen I I take it yeah you betcha perfect okay a whole kit can do it now so thanks again for the for the intro Colin and thanks everybody for joining so I guess the thing that I wanted to share with everybody today was the whole concept of starting from zero that's sometimes the hardest thing to do it's you know once the engine's going a little bit it's it's kind of easy to keep it humming but how do you go from zero sales team to a sales team that's actually productive and generating revenue and that was a challenge that we had faced a few years ago because when we started to propose a PHY we were really a self-serve stash tool we sold very small priced plans we sold to small businesses and freelancers and we were attempting the up market move where you start selling bigger deals that required our sales team so you know we fumbled a lot along the way and I want to share some of those lessons with people so hopefully you can avoid some of our mistakes and then some of the cool stuff that we tried that did work out you can learn from that and apply that as well so usually if you're starting a sales team from the ground up it's usually a couple of common scenarios so like us you know you've got to eat maybe a self-serve product and you want to start selling those bigger deals you've got that third tier on your pricing page that says it's enterprise call for pricing and that's that's where you need to start with a sales team another one is sometimes people start a new software startup and they're already selling to bigger companies but it's the founder who leads all the sales every single prospect who comes to the door talks to the CEO or the founder and now you're kind of at a point where you've got to start scaling yourself you know you don't have time as the founder to take every leave that comes in the door you don't want to turn away lead so you need to now train somebody else to do it and the other scenario is you've just raised investment and you know you you've got fuel you've got cash in the bank that you've got to spend now to hit some some impressive growth numbers to please your investors so those are the common scenarios the common mistakes that that I've seen that often I've experienced myself is you know you go okay well we're just gonna hire hire a sales person you know kind of throw them into the mix and let them figure things out and go from there I'll explain more about why these can be mistakes another one is you've got cash in the bank from your investment and so now you're gonna hire like you know you can afford ten sales reps let's hire ten and let them all go in the mix and figure it out together the other one is okay again we've got cash we can afford it let's go and hire the biggest you know the the best VP of Sales that money can buy from you know insert huge giant SAS company here and there they're the ones that email it's a virtually guaranteed they're gonna lead us to victory and and scale this huge organization and then the other common things is you know well and maybe this is if you're not funded but you go well we have a support team and you know they already field kind of questions from new prospective customers or trial signups so let's get them just jumping on the phone with people to kind of talk about this enterprise tier and those are all very very common mistakes that people make I've made some of these myself and so now I'm going to talk about kind of what what is the best approach when you're starting from from zero so let's talk about this you know the let's talk about I guess first who's gonna lead the sales team because this is you know one of the most important hires that you're gonna make now if you to date have been the founder who's doing all the sales let's say you already sell kind of to enterprise as you sell fairly high price plans then you were the one who rolled up your sleeves and you know dug in and talked to every prospect on the phone you you probably could make a good first leader for your sales team until eventually you can bring in a VP or a director or somebody who really specializes in leading sales teams but I guess the key thing to keep in mind is that it's often very difficult to translate your sales ability as a founder to to a sales rep they don't have your clout or they don't have CEO in their title or founder in their title and so instantly you have a leg up you've also this is your baby you've built this product from scratch you've you know you've you've owned this problem for probably years in your head so the ability to talk about it comes very naturally that doesn't always translate well when you hire a sales rep you need a really good system to onboard them and train them and get them understanding the value and being able to speak to it so in the beginning you know the leader even if whether it's you is the founder whether you you hire somebody to lead the team they're still going to be wearing a lot of hats they're gonna be hiring reps training reps looking at the sales funnel the sales process they're gonna have to think about sales commissions how to optimize sales scripts or Dex tons of coaching so you know be prepared to hire somebody who is you know a real do or a builder they're not somebody who you know is just expecting to come in and and kind of wear the hat of a boss they're ready to roll up their sleeves and do some work I'm a I really recommend avoiding hiring you know a VP sales with a capital v you know I talked about the person from big company X who's maybe come off of an acquisition and has worked with companies that are in the tens of millions or more in revenue because often that doesn't necessarily translate well to a startup I think it's I think it's actually in predictable revenue where they talk about mister dashboards as being one of those VPS of sales yet meu bem in yeah absolutely and and I love that analogy because really the kind of leader who's gonna lead a bigger team when you're in hundreds of reps or you know your massive organization that's a completely different skill set then somebody's gonna have to build it from scratch and and we were really lucky to you know after a couple missed hires to really get Daniel hey bear who's our Director of Sales to come in and really you know he was somebody who had worked on marketing teams he worked at early-stage startups he had kind of gotten that first no million or so in revenue and you know understood demand gen sales and a but able meant all these different things so he was really able to come in and kind of clean up a bit of our mess and implement some things that really started to have a meaningful impact and that's not something that everybody has especially if they're a more polished seasoned executive right they're used to this stuff being all they're ready for them so let's talk about the AES you know the the who are the first sales reps that you hire you know generally speaking you're gonna want your first sales reps and I say reps because you probably want to if not three no more than that but you'd certainly don't want one because really it's remarkable two sales reps with the exact same training the same materials the same product can have vastly different outcomes in terms that are they able to hit revenue numbers so hiring two or three gives you a sense of okay is it okay none of them can sell we either grossly miss hired or maybe our product isn't ready for the enterprise or maybe our pricing is wrong or maybe our messaging and our positionings off there could be a whole pile of other things at the company level that you're missing but giving you getting two or three AES will give you sort of a sense of okay is it possible because if one or two of them can hit numbers then then you can start really thinking about scaling it but not for that so generally you're gonna want your AES to be very hungry very curious very coachable really good at assessing their own performance and not feeling you know sometimes you get a sales rep who's been successful in another sales role and they come in with those bad habits or they come in with a bit of an ego thinking I crush my numbers I was the number one sales rep at company X and so now they can't be coached you can't now develop a sales process with them because they've come in with their own sales process and that's really what you want to avoid you also want to get your your sales reps I call them full stack because I guess I'm more of a more of a development background than sales but really you want your sales rep to not sit there idly and wait for for marketing to hand them leads or wait for an outbound BTR to hand them leads they should be you know hungry and ready and willing to pick up the phone and start you know prospecting and not be afraid of that we've had really good sales reps in the past you've come and gone who we're good in all fronts but terrify to the phone did not want to pick it up and that's that's a red flag with a sales rep especially at an early stage startup or a start-up that's trying to build a sales engine also this is maybe my own experience but in the past I haven't been that successful with sales reps who have SAS backgrounds you would think that that a sales rep who came from SAS and now is that your SAS company is going to already kind of understand how to do it but more often than not we've had more success with people with sales reps who have had more diverse experience maybe they've done canvassing or you know one of our sales reps used to run and operate a retail outlet so you know know just feel like you have to hire somebody with SAS experience often the ones who have been high achievers in other in other types of jobs can be really effective and again no bad habits and you can really mold them and coach them into what you want you know specializing roles so this is this is something that I think it's pretty industry-standard now and SAS is that you know you want your inbound STR who does this part of the sales you know funnel and then you want your AE there's a handoff and all these kind of specialized roles and sales and that works but again only once you have a repeatable engine and we'll talk more about those specialties in a few minutes but really you know again you want your eighties comfortable making those dials learning the talk tracks jumping on discovery calls doing some prospecting you don't want an order-taker and if you have somebody who has done the the really the hardest role I think which is the outbound prospecting that's gonna equipment equip them later on if they develop and become managers now to actually be able to coach other outbound BTR's so everybody on the sales team especially in the early days have to be productive you don't you know there's no sense having an AE sit around idly and twiddle their thumbs while they're waiting on you know marketing or some VTR's to generate leads for them you you really need everybody being really productive the next point is this this idea of focusing on learning over numbers so I think especially founders can do this where you're just so anxious to get to the point where you're like you know predictable quotas you know every reps hitting quotas and so you start to implement these processes that really look more like big companies where it's like if you don't hit your quota you get punished a little bit you know you get like a decelerate er and then when you get when you hit above your your quota you get an accelerator but I think what we had found in the past was there's a lot of fundamental issues that we hadn't yet solved as a company that it's not really fair to put on reps right if you're a product if you're trying to sell a product to enterprise but you're up against more established competitors with more robust feature sets and more integrations and they're losing deals because that you product just can't compete with what's out there that's on you really your product and engineering team to solve right so sales reps seem to be the only ones who get punished for not you know hitting their numbers and that might work in a bigger company when when really everybody should be able to hit quotas but in the early days it's like use your sales to reps as a learning tool and don't punish them in fact what we had started doing was even just giving them their Commission's for a set period of months while we knew that there was a lot of behind-the-scenes work that we needed to do to help them you know build pipeline and and be able to hit numbers now of course if an AE is you know if they're not applying the coaching you're giving them or they have you know bad lack of work ethic you know that's something you want to let them go really quickly but if they're working hard if they're if they're hitting their activity numbers and they're just not seeing results because of problems that are outside of their control then you know go easy on them so this is one of the things like a really effective leader does in the earliest stages of sort of jumping into a sales team and figuring out okay how do we make this work is you know you don't try to optimize the entire sales funnel all at once you really attack each stage and hone it and get it right before you move on so this is something that Dan hey Baer had done had to did done done when he came in first was just looked at the discovery decks and looked at the discovery calls listened to them and tried to get them to the point where discovery was working we were they were moving to the next stage or bad fit customers were getting pushed out and disqualified you know Malik an move on if if the founder has been doing the sales to date you know one thing that you can do is use the founder vision in your calls this is something else that Dan had done and I've actually been on sales calls where sales reps had done this is that quite effective is talked about hey you know so-and-so is our founder this is the problem she wanted to solve this is what you know she saw in the market and she wanted a better way to etc etc and kind of using almost that that script that your CEO is using in their early days and actually arming your reps with it can be effective as well having a methodology super important so it you know there's tons of methodologies out there there's Sandler there's solution selling there's the Challenger approach there's spin selling we use the Sandler methodology ourselves but just having a methodology is better than not having one of course do you have to actually use it so one of our mistakes that we had made in the past was we had spent a lot of money on Sandler we'd gotten the the training every month but we weren't really using it if you went and listened to the reps calls they weren't actually applying that so something that Dan had had done was when he came in installing we used chorus I think yeah we still use chorus gong is also an alternative but really start to listen to those calls this is something I didn't do is the founder when hiring our first reps was I didn't listen to their calls so I would had no idea what they're saying or not saying I would only see the output or the outcome did they close the deal but listening to calls is one of the most important coaching tools and really essential you have to do it the other thing is using the methodology and building it into the actual decks this was something we also we weren't really doing until until Dan came in was okay you've got your Sandler you know methodology your pain funnel let's actually make sure that our our qualification decks our disco decks our demodex use this methodology and kind of in a sense force the reps to all use you know the funnel in the in the most appropriate way and the last piece was that he built it into Salesforce itself so there's actually this is a real sandler scorecard from within our Salesforce but this actually has the custom fields built it out with the Sandler methodology in the pain funnel so that reps are kind of forced in a sense to fill this out so having a methodology is one thing using it is another thing and this is a practical way of how you can use it lots of lots of discussion is around comp plans so you know the thing is calm plants they're gonna change all the time you're never gonna get it right on the first try so the best thing to do is just pick something simple go with it and tweak it from there I'm a big fan of especially in the early days of sales is you know just a a flat goal that they have to hit or that we want them to hit of course if they don't hit it you know you're not you're not gonna hit a home run every single month but if you can hit this number two or three four months in a row okay we've got some predictability in our forecasts and then if they exceed it you've got an accelerator so maybe you know every dollar above their quota they get instead of ten percent its twenty percent and again maybe using draws until there's some predictability if you're still thinking about positioning and product you know letting them kind of have some some guaranteed income during those months where it's just not really predictable and when you get to the points where the AES are hitting quota you've got two or three that are like three four months in a row calendars are booked full of meetings and they don't even have time to prospect or qualify that's when you want to start moving to phase two so I'll talk about phase two which is a little bit briefer how are we doing for time am i I know we had 20 minutes and there was time for Q&A am i yeah am i over we're we're at 8:45 Pacific we've got until 9:00 until the next speaker is going or we wanted to leave or some room for questions so we can either you know you want to take another ten minutes and then we can leave five for questions yeah I think I could probably blow through this next part a little faster so we can leave more time for questions as people want them and just before you jump in some people who are asking hey do you is Kyle sharing his slides Julie has thrown them in the slack Channel I've posted a link in the chat so you could join the slack channel and then jump into the live chat room and that's where you can get a full copy of these slides all right so back to you Kyle yeah so I mean phase two again we're not going to dig into this in detail because these are all pretty big topics that we could spend a lot of time talking about but it's kind of like okay you've got a good Sales Leader two or three Aes who are hitting quota consistently how do you start to scale it from there and this is kind of an order of operation I think one is you really need an embed on meteor maybe two but at least one because now you want somebody who's a little bit more fresh and junior to come in and train them on how to take those trials demo requests get them on the phone qualify them and then set them up for a demo or disqualify them so the AES couldn't spend most of their time demoing and having you know really financial discussions about how to move the deal next step to the next step so that's kind of inbound BDR outbound SDR is one that it's not for everyone you certainly don't want to build a big team too quickly because outbound is just hard to get it right when it's when you get it right it's amazing it's super scalable but it is difficult and it can take a long long time to figure out that but that's something that you may want to experiment with is just you know get somebody who's out there prospecting may be targeting accounts what we have that proposed a Phi is an open SDR Brandon whose amazing whoo-hoo he'll go through content lead so people who like maybe download with lead magnets so they're kind of familiar with proposed a Phi but you wouldn't say there's no wallet out ready to buy and he'll just start conversations with them that can be a nice way to sort of have a little bit of a warm intro to somebody but not going completely cold with just hey check out our product the other one at sales operations sometimes some some companies wait a really long time to build sales ops into their team it's something we did pretty early and we had actually are inbound STR call and transitioned into you a sales ops manager but it really it's like if your sales leaders tied down to generating reports and you know dealing with lead routing and cleaning update of the records and automating parts of the process it's just not a great use of their time and you could get somebody who's much better at that to come in and own the CRM and and really try to make the sales reps more efficient and effective last piece - again doesn't always get built until way later dan hey bear our sales you know director is is you know an actual sales enablement manager by trade that's what he was before he came with us and actually started with us as an enable them integer so he believes in it and it's something where if you can build that in in the earlier days and have you know somebody to create curriculum and training programs that again is gonna take some pressure off the sales leader and and they're gonna be much more at you know making the reps more successful in their jobs so just quick recap some key takeaways is you know hire the right sales leader for where you're at don't necessarily hire you know the big VP of Sales if you're too early for that it's not a great use of mister or missus dashboards you know emphasizing playbooks coaching reps really trying to learn and make make every rep efficient I shouldn't stay efficient effective because it's really not about efficiency it's about you know do we have product market fit for what we're trying to do is the enterprise plan working can we predictably move prospects through a deal cycle and have some predictability about it and you know learning really learning as you go you know another key takeaway is just have a methodology and actually use it and use some of those techniques about really baking it into your sales process and you know don't wait until you're too big to hire ops in an ableman because if you have ops and enablement even in the earlier days when it's a side of a 10-person team that's gonna help you speed up while you grow so you kind of went through that part a little bit quicker now one of the things I did want to offer people if they wanted to check it out is we've actually gone through over a million documents in our product propose a PHY and actually pulled out some interesting insights in the SAS market specifically so it's called our SAS data proposals you can get it at propose a fight comm slash state of SAS proposals and there's some pretty cool insights you can check out as Colin also mentioned people can definitely sign up for a trial or a demo if they want to check out the product propose a Phi and see if it can help them speed up their proposal process so that's all for me I'll hand it back over to Colin all right thanks Kyle definitely agree with with the outbound is hard I like the way you structure it I love the the way that you have your qualification matrix in yours in Salesforce super cool we do the same thing the person who's on the who's coming up later today I think around 10:30 Pacific Jaime boss she showed me her medic qualification tricks and we did the exact same thing and we built it in the only difference was we used to stop light instead of a smiley face so that's my that's my one regret with implementing it in Salesforce yeah and yeah I think like and Sara can build on this Sara I know you're hanging out here and Kyle if you could kill your could you kill your screen share in there yeah so we can see Sara and friends again let's see if I can get the the views all right here but Sara's actually has done something similar we've done you know mid bounds is what you call that I think that's what we call them and that's kind of a it was from BEC Holland's idea of a post bounce that's what she calls it I guess everyone has their own kind of but it's not a true cold I would found as you said they're not completely cold but they're not while it out ready to buy it's like right in the middle mm-hmm and we've got that column coming on as well there's so many awesome people that I'm excited to actually hang out so Baek Holland is at 12:30 Pacific time today she's probably gonna cover maybe cover a little bit of that I'm I'm excited all right so now we're gonna go to the Q&A here we've got a Q&A tab going and we've got the live chat in slack I'm just gonna see if there so now's your chance I'm watching the lives the the live chat room in slack I'm also watching the Q&A and you might be able to hear my little monster children on the other side of the door I'm not sure how sensitive my mic is but if you hear him you hear him a little bit um so Kyle when you are hiring a PDR what key points would you consider stand out Oh things keep moving around stand up from the rest so this is an inbound BDR I assume they mean or outbound Rodrigo I'm not sure which one well let's let's do one for inbound and one one for outbound what do you think yeah sure so right now Gaby is our is our inbound beadier and she's she's amazing I think one of the biggest traits I think of Gaby that's that's that is something you want to look at it is just pure work ethic because it is a tough job to be on the phone a lot she Rush's like a hundred dials a day and just doesn't light up and in fact dance is often like kind of pushing Gabby to like slow down a little bit take breaks I know she's been posting about that on LinkedIn but just like just a workhorse and you can find somebody like that who's just ready to like roll up their sleeves and and work their ass off that's that's an amazing trait because because it is a job that requires that perfect all right and we've got let's see Owen was asked in a what size sail team sales team do you think is best for a new startup I mean if it's a brand new startup without product market fit and you know essentially not I mean I would say probably don't hire a sales team at that point but if you've got some product market fit or the founders been able to you know make some customers successful and and close deals and on board them everything else I mean I think like I kind of posted earlier in the slide it's like a two-person AE team maybe with a leader or maybe the leader comes a bit later z' is probably a good number to start with yeah I'll +1 on this one it's it totally depends on the skills of the sales team like we were able to with pretty fickle revenue we got away with quite a bit because my background was in sales and so I was I was our only AE until about a million and air our I would not recommend that to most founders I probably hung on to it for way too long but it was just he was one of those things where like this is this is what I know I don't know how to be CEO and so I'm good at being a salesperson and so I definitely hung onto that for too long but I think it totally depends on it's sort of like how long is a piece of string I think you're you're totally right Kyle it's like if you have product market fit and you've been near the founder and you're selling something then absolutely you know you can start to scale a little bit faster and hire a couple more people if you're still figuring things out and you need somebody that can help you figure that out you probably want one of those like AE hustlers that can do both prospecting and closing and provide that feedback loop because they're almost acting as an extension to your product team at this stage oh yeah absolutely bringing those insights it's like why are we losing deals or you know we have feature racks that's a huge I think it's an under leveraged tool for the product team totally we got one from slack Patrick's asking how do you continue to motivate sales reps if they're in a slump great question and we've definitely been in slumps in particularly last year there was a it was a rough summer or we were figuring a lot of things out I mean I think what we did in particular Dan did with the team and I was involved in various points was really just getting really close with them like they had a book club they would talk about you know we had like offs and off-site to sort of build that that camaraderie of like hey we know it's rough this is what we're doing we're figuring out and then the financial piece of like cover their quota if the whole team is in a slump you know there's more going on if one person's in the slump then you know it's it's shitty for that person and there's other ways to kind of try to motivate them and get their mojo back because everybody gets in slumps every sales rep even their best one will have bad you know a bad two months or three months at a time but if the whole team is it you know that's really when you have to come together as a team beautiful one last one I'm going to answer quickly and then I think we need actually need to get get rolling and because we've got these are all in the same zoom accountants so we've got one last one from anonymous asking have you worked with commission only sales agents what's your opinion go in that direction personally as somebody who grew up in sales I hate that model because I think it's sort of it's very old school and I think it's almost disrespectful to the sales talent and saying like you're you're not valuable unless you're closing and I think it puts too much of the onus on the on the account exact too much risk on the account exec and not enough on the company for training and onboarding and and all that it's also bad for the company because that rep is gonna have to bring in every deal that they can and whether they're good deals or bad deals they're gonna close everything yep all right that's that's the time we have I love these questions if you've got some in the where's the twitch stream link again so we'll get let me let me just copy and paste it here I think you can go to growth dot predictable revenue comm and it's embedded there it's also pred Rev on twitch so you can check that out there the questions here if you didn't get a chance if I didn't answer them please throw them in the live chat and kyle's will get Kyle in there as well so he can answer questions afterwards if you've got questions about or pose if I or if you want that link we'll also throw them in the live chat there so thank you thank you everybody for everything here if you're hanging out on Twitch you're just going to follow me because I'm gonna click out of this zoom if you want to jump on Twitch we're there but big thanks to Kyle I know we can't he can't hear you but we'll do the clap or the this that our team from Latin America in South Africa says is basically like happy celebration time so we do this now instead clapping because otherwise if I clap them I mic is gonna go crazy and then the volume drops off but Kyle thank you so much for coming on thanks for having me appreciate it man and we'll throw a link to your LinkedIn in the live chat there so if people want to just say hey or thanks then they can do that they're awesome well I'll see everyone on slack right on thanks Kyle thanks Sarah thanks everybody [Music]