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Once you hit $1MM in revenue, the race is on to get to $10MM. Warning: Growing a business is really freaking hard. Don't believe everything you read on the intenet. But if your TAM is big enough, you can do it. Here are the 8 things you need to get to $10MM:

Great interview question: Which topic could you give a 15-minute TED-talk on with no preparation? No business-related topics allowed.

I have an axe to grind. It’s about compensation for SaaS sales positions. Too many salespeople have unrealistic comp expectations. If you are a a SaaS Account Executive and you are trying to increase your OTE, here's my #1 piece of advice: If you want to make more money, carry a bigger quota. Your total comp is relative to how much revenue you bring in. Forget what your friends are telling you about how much you "should" be making. Here's the deal: The golden ratio for quota to OTE is 5x. Said differently, the fully loaded cost of sales should be around 20-25% of each new dollar in ARR. That means you need to close $500k in ARR to earn $100k in TOTAL compensation. The standard OTE breakdown is 50% base salary / 50% variable compensation. So a $500k annual quota should offer a $50k base salary and $50k variable compensation. Beware of companies that are paying more than this. These companies do not last long. Go do the math for your own compensation. If your annual quota is 3x your OTE, be careful. Your company is trying to buy revenue growth. This kind of comp plan is temporary. Either the company will change the comp plan or they will go out of business. I have seen dozens of salespeople jump from job to job every 9-12 months because they are chasing a higher base salary. Your base salary is not where you get ahead in SaaS sales. Instead, focus on these 2 things: 1. A good variable comp plan with quotas that are attainable. Make your money by hitting accelerators. 2. A good sales leader who will build your sales skills. Find a role where you can learn and you can crush your number. The money will follow.

Once you hit $1MM in revenue, the race is on to get to $10MM. Warning: Growing a business is really freaking hard. Don't believe everything you read on the internet. But if your TAM is big enough, you can do it. Here are the 8 things you need to get to $10MM:

Outbound sales is not going anywhere. But the stakes have changed. Lazy, spammy outbound sellers are going to get crushed. If you are using outbound to drive revenue for your business, here are a few critical things to remember: 1. Your customer doesn’t care about you or your product. They only care about what you can do for them and their business. Be clear about “what’s in it for them”. 2. Deliver value every time you reach out to the customer. If nothing else, educate them. 3. When you sell to everyone, you sell to no one. Be specific about who you are targeting and what you can do for them. 4. The goal of the first sentence is to get your prospect to read the second sentence. 5. End every message with an obvious and attractive call-to-action. Usually, this is a request for a meeting. 6. People like to do business with people they like and trust. So build trust by educating and helping your prospects

If you are under 30 and work in sales, you need to be in the office at least 4 days a week. There is no substitute for being within 30 ft of your team and execs who will help you get better daily. Sure, you can work from home. But you won’t grow as quickly.

Outbound is not dead. You just have to know how to pick up the phone and get people’s attention. Outbound email isn’t going to get you there. You have to pick up the phone.

20 business days left in the quarter. I survived 40 consecutive quarters running the revenue team for a VC-backed SaaS company. Most quarters we hit our number. Sometimes we missed. Here’s what I did at the start of every month to make sure I hit my number: 1. Review the stack rank for the sales team Go rep-by-rep through the team and see who is performing to plan. Schedule a 1:1 meeting in the first week of the month with each rep that is below 80% to plan. The purpose of this meeting is to diagnose why they are missing their number and to create an execution plan to coach them to 100% 2. Go through every close-lost deal from the previous month. This is time-consuming, but necessary. Try to understand where the team is losing deals. Specifically keep an eye out for a drop in the demo-close rate. This is easiest to fix in short order. If there competition creeping in, you will know by looking at the opps and listening to calls. 3. Go deal by deal through the existing pipeline to see which opps have a chance to close in the next 20 business days. Look at deals that have a close date in July. You may be able to pull some of these into the month. You have to create your own, independent assessment of your team’s pipeline. Don’t rely on the stage probabilities. That’s a fools errand. You have to get granular in the pipeline. 4. Pull the team together on Monday to review the previous month’s performance. In the meeting, make a BIG DEAL about every person who hit plan or who was pacing to 100% of plan. I can’t scream this loud enough. You have to manufacture moments with your team. Celebrate the bright spots, the team will remember. And they will do more of the things that achieve this recognition. —— Running a sales team is hard work. There’s no shortcut, you have to get into the details of the team and the pipeline. 20 days left to hit your number. Let’s go make it happen!

99% of sales reps would rather send an email than make a phone call. The best performing sales reps, the top 1%, always pick up the phone before sending an email. Sense of urgency. Bias for action. Whatever you want to call it, the best reps share this trait in common. It is so easy to hide behind an email. But that's not where the selling happens. People buy from people they trust. You can't build trust by sending emails. When you pick up the phone, you show that you are deliberate about building a relationship. This is true early in the sales process when the customer is just learning about your product. This is equally true later in the sales process when you are working through the customer's objections. Go look at your inbox right now and find the most recent inbound email from a customer. Rather than craft a well-written email response, just pick up the phone and talk it out with the customer.

Sure, you can manage a small sales team without a CRM. 3 or fewer quota-carrying salespeople? It’s ok to use Airtable or google sheets. But as soon as you add that 4th rep, you need a real CRM (I like HubSpot for early-stage companies). You can’t scale without a real CRM.

Got this banger in my inbox this morning. Where do I even start? This is a prime example of how NOT to do outbound.

50% of B2B salespeople will miss their quota this month. If that’s you, listen up. This is what the top 1% of salespeople do on every deal so they never miss their number. It’s called a Closing Plan.

The most underrated role on Go-To-Market teams: Revenue Operations A great Rev Ops leader gives your revenue team leverage. I waited too long to hire for this role, instead choosing to do the job off the side of my desk. I was being lazy. I didn’t fully understand what

Great interview question: Which topic could you give a 15-minute TED-talk on with no preparation? No business-related topics allowed.

Got this banger in my inbox this morning. Where do I even start? This is a prime example of how NOT to do outbound.

I have an axe to grind. It’s about compensation for SaaS sales positions. Too many salespeople have unrealistic comp expectations. If you are a a SaaS Account Executive and you are trying to increase your OTE, here's my #1 piece of advice: If you want to make more money, carry a bigger quota. Your total comp is relative to how much revenue you bring in. Forget what your friends are telling you about how much you "should" be making. Here's the deal: The golden ratio for quota to OTE is 5x. Said differently, the fully loaded cost of sales should be around 20-25% of each new dollar in ARR. That means you need to close $500k in ARR to earn $100k in TOTAL compensation. The standard OTE breakdown is 50% base salary / 50% variable compensation. So a $500k annual quota should offer a $50k base salary and $50k variable compensation. Beware of companies that are paying more than this. These companies do not last long. Go do the math for your own compensation. If your annual quota is 3x your OTE, be careful. Your company is trying to buy revenue growth. This kind of comp plan is temporary. Either the company will change the comp plan or they will go out of business. I have seen dozens of salespeople jump from job to job every 9-12 months because they are chasing a higher base salary. Your base salary is not where you get ahead in SaaS sales. Instead, focus on these 2 things: 1. A good variable comp plan with quotas that are attainable. Make your money by hitting accelerators. 2. A good sales leader who will build your sales skills. Find a role where you can learn and you can crush your number. The money will follow.

Once you hit $1MM in revenue, the race is on to get to $10MM. Warning: Growing a business is really freaking hard. Don't believe everything you read on the intenet. But if your TAM is big enough, you can do it. Here are the 8 things you need to get to $10MM:

Most sales leaders are scared to have this conversation. I know I used to be afraid of it. What do you do when you have a person on your team that isn’t putting in the work? A salesperson that isn’t booking enough meetings. Because they aren’t making enough calls. You have to address it with them, head on. I used to run from these conversations. Felt like it was “micromanagement”. These were the thoughts going through my head: “I hired great salespeople, I shouldn’t have to look at how many calls they are making!” “I only focus on ‘below the line metrics’, the things that really matter!” But I was wrong. Here’s why. When you are scaling a team and you have a clear understand of what leads to success in the sales role, it’s your job to inspire and coach the salespeople do the work. And hold them accountable to doing the work. Start with quota attainment. If they hit their quota? No problem. If they didn’t hit their quota, but they are holding enough meetings? That’s a coaching opportunity. If they didn’t hit their quota AND they aren’t holding enough meetings, it’s time to look their activities. This is the scary part. No manager wants to look at activities. It’s frustrating because activities are table-stakes. No one wants to talk about how many calls a salesperson is making. But its important. If a salesperson didn’t hit their number AND they didn’t hold enough meetings AND they aren’t making enough prospecting phone calls…. then they aren’t doing the job. If a salesperson isn’t doing their job, then they shouldn’t be on the team. Leaders are there to inspire and coach the team to do their jobs well. And sometimes inspiration comes from tough conversations.

If you are under 30 and work in sales, you need to be in the office at least 4 days a week. There is no substitute for being within 30 ft of your team and execs who will help you get better daily. Sure, you can work from home. But you won’t grow as quickly.

Cold outreach works when you do it right. Let’s outline the components of successful cold outreach. This could be an email, a linkedin message, a twitter DM, or a piece of direct mail. 1. The subject There are many subject lines that work. My favorite is to use the keyword that is most relevant for your business. Something that your prospect will immediately recognize as relevant. For example, at Levelset we used “mechanic’s lien” as our subject line. The buyer persona knows this term and is likely to click on any email that has that term in the subject line. 2. The body Keep is short and sweet. 5 sentences or less. Make it about the customer. “What’s in it for them”. Start with the context for why you are reaching out. Make it relevant. I like to highlight the problem that your Ideal Customer Profile is struggling with. For example, at Levelset we focused on helping contractors get paid faster on construction projects. So that’s what we talked about in the cold email body 3. The call-to-action Perhaps the most important part, we need to have our ask. The ask should be a simple step forward. Avoid asking for a “quick call” or to “schedule a time to meet”. The prospect doesn’t know who you are so they are not likely to agree to a meeting. We don’t want to take the customer to Paris on the first date. You haven’t earned the right to ask for a meeting. So create a half-step toward asking for a meeting. Create something of value that you can deliver to the prospect in the click of a button. For example, at Levelset we would choose five construction projects that we knew the customer was working on. We would share a list of insights about these projects if the customer clicked the call-to-action. This doesn’t work at a scale of 1,000 prospects. But it definitely works when you are going after your top 100 best fit strategic customers. Note that this works because it is highly personal to the business that we are trying to sell to. More personal outreach leads to higher conversion rates.

I used to assume that everyone on our sales team wanted to be successful. Why else would you be in sales? Turns out, not every person on the sales team actually wants to be successful. Ambition is rare, even amongst salespeople.

In New York for a few days, haven’t been since last March. Already have most meals lined up. What’s your favorite coffee spot in manhattan? Best place for cocktails? Best late night dive bar?

Once you hit $1MM in revenue, the race is on to get to $10MM. Warning: Growing a business is really freaking hard. Don't believe everything you read on the internet. But if your TAM is big enough, you can do it. Here are the 8 things you need to get to $10MM:

I ran a 70-person revenue team with a single spreadsheet.‍ On the first day of each month, I would sit down with a coffee and manually run each report. Then I would insert the appropriate number into the corresponding cell. This document tells me EVERYTHING that I need to know about the team’s performance and where we should be investing to increase revenue. I have shared this ritual and format with hundreds of founders and sales leaders over the years. The reason this report works? It cuts through all the noise in your business and puts the raw output right in front of your face. There’s no way to hide from what’s going wrong in the business when you can see each part of your sales funnel month-over-month. This report is only as good as the insights that you gain by reviewing the numbers. Whenever I review this report, I gravitate toward a handful of metrics that tell me about team performance. Here’s what I look at: 1. Dials and talk time This is our “above the line metric” it tells me if our team is putting in the work. Specifically I like to look at the “dials per rep” and the “talk time per rep”. If these numbers start to get low relative to other months, I know how to address it with the team. An increase in activity generally leads to an increase in revenue. ‍ 2. $ per SAL Perhaps the most important metric for a sales team. How much money are we generating per lead that we work. This one metric cuts through all the others. It tells me how the team is woking the company’s assets. When you drive up revenue per lead, bookings increase. ‍ 3. Scheduled:Hold Rate Or simply “hold rate”. This is the number of demos that actually show up to the scheduled time. This is a signal for demand quality. You can’t sell to people that won’t show up to a meeting. ‍ 4. Hold:Close Rate How many demos are converting to customers? This becomes VERY important when you are onboarding a class of new reps or when you are rolling out a new product. When your close rate drops, the team is struggling with the sales playbook. That’s where you lean in. ‍ 5. $ Per Rep on Quota This is the second most important metric for a team. It shows the average bookings per rep carrying a quota. This is important relative to the average quota per rep on quota. You want these numbers to be close to each other. Honorable mention: % of reps at 100% of quota and % of reps at 80% of quota. You know that it’s time to add reps to the team when you have at least 50% of the team at 100% of quota, and 80% of the team at 80% of quota.

Hot take: Customer Success should not carry a quota. Your Customer Success Team should not be responsible for a revenue target. Build an Install-Base sales team instead. Early in my leadership career, a friend told me “salespeople don’t do sales and other things well”. I have found that to be true of salespeople and all other roles at a company. The issue is focus. When we are responsible for too many things, we don’t do any one thing well. It’s for this reason that your Customer Success team should focus on helping customers get the most out of the product and services. That’s enough. Nothing more. The Customer Success team is your army of trusted advisors. You hire candidates with a knack for managing relationships, onboarding new users, putting out fires, troubleshooting issues, proactively delivering amazing experiences for customers. The best customer success managers are like air traffic controllers for company resources, ensuring all of the customers are getting the right level of value. If that job doesn’t sound hard enough, imagine also being responsible for asking customers to buy your new product that was released last quarter. Imagine getting through a grueling onboarding process with a customer only to find that the salesperson undersold their planned usage and now you have to ask them for twice as much as they were expecting to pay. Yikes. A person’s focus can only have one master. Companies that give the Customer Success team an upsell quota run into two problems: 1. CS focuses on the customer, slower sales growth 2. CS focuses on the sales, customer relationships suffer and churn increases Instead, build an install-base sales team. Install-Base AEs are a different breed than your uber-competitive “hunter” style salesperson. They are more attentive to a customer's needs. They have a knack for value engineering and helping the customer visualize the future of the partnership. Most importantly, they are not afraid to “ask for the money” when it is clear that the customer is ready to buy. The best part? When your install-base sales team really starts producing, revenue growth accelerates. So make the change if you don't have an install-base team. Start today. Give one person on your team the sole responsibility of selling into existing customers. 12 months from now you will be grateful that you did it. Agree? Disagree? Let's hear it in the comments. Need help? My DMs are open.

I was talking with a founder last week who was excited because his price is 90% less than a competitor’s price. Price is a terrible differentiator for B2B SaaS products. Walmart and Costco can differentiate on price because they have economies of scale that matter in retail.