SaaStr 737: How to Build Go-to-Market Efficiency in SMB Sales with Owner.com CRO Kyle Norton

This episode explores strategies for building go-to-market efficiency in SMB sales, particularly through the lens of Owner.com's experience.

1. Importance of High-Quality Customer Focus: Prioritize quality over quantity in customer acquisition to ensure sustainable growth.
2. Data-Driven Decision Making: Leverage data analytics to enhance lead quality and sales efficiency.
3. Strategic Use of Technology: Utilize technology to streamline operations and improve data accuracy, significantly boosting sales team efficiency.
4. Operational Excellence: Develop a structured, efficient sales process to support scaling efforts without sacrificing quality.
5. Focus on Learning and Adaptation: Continuously adapt strategies based on operational data and market feedback to optimize sales processes.

1: Introduction and Sponsor Acknowledgment

Brief overview of the episode's theme and acknowledgments to sponsors. Jason Lemkin: "Welcome to the official SaaStr podcast where you can hear some of the best SaaStr speakers. This is where the cloud meets."

2: Kyle Norton's Background and Owner.com's Growth

Discussion on Norton’s experience and Owner.com’s growth trajectory. Kyle Norton: "I run sales partnerships, customer onboarding, enablement, rev ops and whatever else hangs on there and been with the company about two years."

3: Building Market Efficiency

Insights on creating market efficiency in SMB sales. Kyle Norton: "And so what I'm going to show, what I'm going to talk about today is some insights about how you can build better efficiency into your go to market motion."

4: Importance of Data and Customer Quality

How focusing on data quality and ideal customer profiles enhances sales outcomes. Kyle Norton: "We said no to about 40% of prospects who we uh, 15 days prior would have gladly closed one."

5: Operational Excellence and Scaling

Strategies for scaling operations effectively while maintaining or improving efficiency. Kyle Norton: "And then this year the goal is to find the outskirts of rep capacity."

• Refine Customer Targeting: Focus efforts on high-quality prospects identified through detailed data analysis.
• Invest in Data Management Tools: Enhance lead quality and sales efficiency by improving data accuracy.
• Streamline Sales Processes: Use technology to eliminate inefficiencies and automate routine tasks.
• Monitor Sales Performance: Regularly review team performance to ensure alignment with business goals.
• Adopt a Learning Mindset: Continually adapt and refine strategies based on new insights and feedback.

SaaStr 737: How to Build Go-to-Market Efficiency in SMB Sales with Owner.com CRO Kyle Norton

How do you build GTM efficiency in SMB sales? The CRO at Owner.com, Kyle Norton, shares his learnings and strategies for building better efficiency into your GTM motion.

While this title is SMB-oriented, the advice applies to Mid-Market and Enterprise, too. The three topics we’ll cover in today's podcast are:

The importance of staying focused and how to say no. Ways to scale that don’t include rampant inefficiency and burn. How to build operational excellence into your organization at different stages of the growth curve. Full playbook, video and recap of this session here on saastr.com.

People

Jason Lemkin, Kyle Norton

Companies

Owner.com

Books

Mentioned: "Range" by David Epstein

Guest Name(s):

Kyle Norton

Content Warnings:

None

Jason Lemkin
Welcome to the official Sastre podcast where you can hear some of the best sastre speakers. This is where the cloud meets.

This episode is sponsored by our friends at Pendo, the all in one product experience platform. Pendo helps your users do things you really want them to do. You can try pendo for free at Pendo IO Sastr. That's Pendo IO SASTR and check out mind the product their community for product people like us.

Are international Payroll regulations giving you a headache? Remote.com is your solution. With our best in class interface and expertise, we consolidate payroll for your employees, whether in one country or 100. Trustremote.com was swift to secure payments for your team while you focus on scaling markets and driving business growth.

Get more when Northwest registered agents start your business, they'll form your company fast and stand up your entire business identity in minutes. That means business free domain business email, website hosting address, mail scanning, business phone app all within minutes. Visit northwestregistered agent.com sastr to start your business today.

Hey everybody up. Today on the Sastre podcast we have a very special one on how to build go to market efficiency in SMB sales with owners CRO Kyle Norton Kyle has become legendary in this sort of shopify mafia us go to market alum ecosystem, especially up in Toronto. And he came into owner probably at a million in revenue. And now that it's at tens of millions, growing 10% a month, he's really done some incredible things. I'm on the board of the company and his ability to get outbound, to work at scale with SMBs, to ignite growth, to reach restaurants who are their customers who are hard to reach.

They're hard to reach in general. They don't reach email and more and to really build an incredibly efficient SMB sales engine. This was one of the best received workshop Wednesdays we've done with some great AMA after, so I really encourage you all to dig in here. Thank you for having me. Excited to chat with everybody today.

Kyle Norton
So I'm the CRO of owner.com. So we're a series B vertical SaaS software business. We target mom and pop restaurants. So think of like your local pizza spot that you order from on Friday nights. That's our ICP.

I run sales partnerships, customer onboarding, enablement, rev ops and whatever else hangs on there and been with the company about two years. So joined shortly after their series a and I'll talk more about our growth trajectory as a frame up for the content. We're going to talk about building efficiency and go to market a little bit about me. I've been in sales for 16 years, leadership for 15, tech for ten. This is my second early stage startup.

I joined around 3 million ARR ad owner and previous to this I ran a quarter billion dollar go to market unit at Shopify. Being in big companies, small companies. My first startup was enterprise. This is SMB, I believe in range, a la David Epstein from his book called Range. So I like to do a little bit of everything from a learning and growth perspective.

And so what I'm going to show, what I'm going to talk about today is some insights about how you can build better efficiency into your go to market motion. The title of the deck is about SMB. This isn't necessarily SMB oriented only. I've run mid market and enterprise teams. A lot of this content is very much applicable there, but we're going to do it through the lens of owner, which is an SMB motion.

And so there's three topics to focus on. So one is the importance of staying focused and how to say no. Two is we're going to get into ways to scale that don't include rampant inefficiency and um. And then three, we're going to talk about how to build operational excellence into your organization at different stages in the growth curve. You obviously can't manage with the same rigor when you've got a small handful of reps and you're the CRO direct as the manager versus later stage when you've got support teams and other layers of leadership.

But we'll talk about that maturity curve and in terms of audience. So who I'm really speaking to here is founders and revenue leaders from companies that are post product market fit. So you're winning some non friends of founder deals. There's some repeatability, but it's not a system. But you've got some patterns.

You as the founder or the revenue leader, revenue exec have some patterns that look like they're repeatable and you're just endeavoring to build that repeatability. Everything from that onwards to series BC, potentially beyond, is applicable here. Okay, a little bit about owner, because this is going to frame up the journey. I'm going to try to keep this as real world and as practical as possible. So we're going to talk about the owner journey.

This also helps frame like why do I feel like I'm qualified to speak on this topic? In my opinion, it's because I've done it really wrong. I've made a bunch of the mistakes that I think we've all made over the last four to six years in this bull market, then Zurp era and now Im starting to learn. Ive learned some of those lessons and ive started to make some of the right decisions at ONR. And so I joined in June 22.

We went from three to 6 million in that sort of half year. We went six to 16 last year. Weve strung together a bunch of 10% month over month growth months. So weve just broken through 21 million in ARR in 22 months. More importantly than that.

So thats a bit of the growth story. Weve done it while consistently improving productivity, weve reduced calc pretty significantly and weve operated with a one or a sub one burn multiple, which is really where everybodys trying to get burn multiple is just for every dollar of revenue you acquire, how much did that cost you? And if your burn multiple is two, it takes you dollar two to spend to acquire $1 revenue. Not a super efficient business. If you're 0.5 very efficient you could probably spend more money.

So a little bit about the journey. I inherited this team with one manager for reps and early churn was a massive drag on efficiency. So it was definitely like a cleanup and a reboot job. I had to exit two of the four AE's within my first, I think 45 days. And we really needed to get our hands on early churn, which is going to be the first topic I touch on.

So that 2022 was just a foundation building year. We had to redo how we use Salesforce. We replatformed our sales acceleration tool, brought in some new infrastructure. It was foundation building in 2023. We grew that team from six to ten reps.

So pretty modest growth. And we also built an SDR function. We started like a small SDR pilot at the end of 22. It was giving us good market feedback. And then we grew that function from one and two bdrs to a team of ten, then twelve, and now we've got over 20 bdrs.

And you're like man, that's a lot of bdrs. That must be inefficient. It is not. And I will tell you how we've done it. And so we grew 2.5 x last year while operating in an LTV CAc of four and a half to one.

And the growth rate was actually better in Q 420 23 than it was in Q one. So more efficient, growing faster. And im going to walk you through step by step how we got there. And then this year the goal is to find the outskirts of rep capacity. I keep thinking that weve hit the capacity of what a rep an AE can handle and they handle it really well.

They keep crushing the win rates stay pretty consistent. So this year is all about really finding how much more efficient we can make the AE team now that weve really nailed the demand gen playbook, especially on XDR. Okay, so now let's zoom back to 22. This is when I started. Now that you've got the story arc, things were not so peachy, but the product crushed with the right customers.

There was a huge group of people using the platform who got tremendous value. We were shipping product fast, but the culprits for a very leaky revenue bucket were bad or no targeting on prospects. We were closing a lot of poor fit customers. There was a lot of miss set expectations from sales and the handoff was sketchy at best. And so this led to fairly unsustainable levels of churn of early churn.

So within the first 90 days, we were losing way too many customers for us to feel like we wanted to put a bunch of money in the top of that funnel. And so the first lesson here is about learning to say no. And for us it was about saying no to a lot of customers. Culprit number one was deal quality. And we had a growth plan and I basically paused on it.

I said, until we get a churn in a better place, I don't want to add a bunch of reps, I don't want to spend a bunch of money in marketing. Let's just dial in the economics and get to a sustainable place to feel like the machine was working before we added gas to it. And this is the exact mistake that I made six years prior when I had a sales for my first startup. We got early signs that we were closing some deals and reps were now starting to figure things out. So we hired a whole bunch of reps we had way less figured out than we thought.

Then we spent all this time hiring and ramping reps and we werent spending that time on figuring out how to win with repeatable, great economics. And so counterintuitively trying to scale made us scale slower. And so saying no to growth is one of the important things. And focusing on customer quality before you focus on jamming in as much quantity as you can. And a lot of this has to be data oriented and ill walk you through that.

And so to give you a flavor for it, we said no to about 40% of prospects who we uh, 15 days prior would have gladly closed one. So fun fact my, the month I took over sales at owner, we did less close wins than the month before I arrived. And the month after that we did even less close wins than that. And then I went into a board meeting the next month and felt really good. We had cleaned up deal quality.

The customer quality was way better. We started to see good signs. Jason Lemkins on our board and who I've read and looked up to for a long time, and he basically said to me, sounds great. None of its showing up in your revenue number, so let me know when that happens. And a bit of a terrifying moment for me as the new CRO, but it really reinforced that we had to find a fast path to making sure that the improvements we made on efficiency then showed up in the revenue number, which it did.

And board meeting number two was a lot better. Let's get into the data. So you got to figure out who to say no to. And a lot of that is it has to be data oriented. And I partnered with our biz ops team to understand what a high quality deal looked like.

So what were the, what was the digital footprint of a high quality customer that then turned into high quality revenue? And the guy's name's Jonathan Schenkman. He's a whiz. We could not do this without him. He figured out what a customer looked like from their digital profile and built a machine learning scoring mechanism called ExpectedGMV.

And that indicated based on, for us, it was like their review quality web traffic, their third party marketplace volumes we sell to restaurants. So how many reviews they get each month over month on a third party indicates order volume. And so we built a tool that then we could point at our ecosystem, our tam of potential prospects. And you can see that highlighted on the right hand side, that red and green chart there. So these are the different bands of expected eGMV, of expected gross merchandise volume.

So youll see when the volume is higher, the churn is green. It looks really great. You would dump money into an SMB business that has that profile, but smaller customers churned at a rate that we didnt like, and we basically got rid of all those customers, but it made it so now we understood really carefully what made a good customer. We understood then the digital footprint of those customers so that we could go find them in demand gen marketing in outbound. And we shifted 100% of our time in energy to those higher quality customers.

Your sales team might not be super pumped, you're taking away a lot of ICP or a lot of tam in quotes. And it's an education exercise. And then it's your job as a revenue leader, partnering with your data team, Rev ops or whoever, to fill their funnels with high quality leads. And so this. So learning to say no is question number one.

And I just, I generally say take on less segments, less customer types, less reps, just do less and just nail one small niche of a, of a market before you hit the gas to scale. We always take on too much as revenue leaders. Like, I think we're in founders too. We're all optimists. Oh, like we can go, we're crushing an SMB.

Let's do mid market. We've got this restaurant, this like takeout restaurant customer. Let's do it for dine in restaurants. That's a lot of the time, maybe most of the time, like the wrong move. Staying focused for longer is a great way to nail your economics.

Now that we knew what that customer looked like, we want to be able to target them. This is big takeaway number two, invest way earlier than you think in prospect data. Theres a few folks on the call that ive had individual conversations about this topic with, and I know how much of an impact its made on their business. This is one of the biggest takeaways from todays session.

Spend the time figuring out how you can equip your teams with really good prospect data. Because typically a BDR, an outbound BDR, wastes like half their time calling bad leads, like having to do research of their own to enrich the leads that they've been given. And we don't have, our BDRs basically do any lead research. If they get a lead and it's partially filled out, or if it doesn't have a mobile phone number, they just punt it back to the Garden of Eden. And we resend that through our enrichment flow because youre basically saying to your BDR team, hey, just work two and a half days a week, thats okay.

If you give them bad leads, its that impactful. I did this analysis when I got my first head of BDR role at a software company that was enterprise, and 40% of their time was basically wasted. I did the same analysis at Shopify less because it was more inbound, but still lots of inefficiency. If you can get great prospect data, good things will happen. Essentially, if you go like us, from 40% data accuracy, because we sell to restaurants, super challenging data market, we went from 40% accuracy to 85% accuracy.

Your BDR team, overnight, doing nothing else, gets twice as efficient. Our BDR team was unsustainably inefficient. We would not have scaled it in its original iteration. We figured out the data thing and now each BDR cranks out like over $60,000 and closed one ARR every single month. So highly efficient.

And so you just have to triple click on this data strategy. Theres good providers out there now you can hire somebody internally, hire somebody on contract. AI makes this way, way easier, but spend the time on this. And so we had a system where we took an entire restaurant database, pulled it into our snowflake instance, ran a bunch of web scrapers and enrichment tools, filled in a bunch of the data that didn't exist, then we would have, there was a confidence score on it to let us know if we think the data was accurate or not. Then we apied into people data labs to pull a mobile phone record and we did all of this stuff, which now we use a vendor for called data Lane, who's incredible.

And I just can't stress how important this was. Don't bother hiring more than one or two bdrs until you figure out this data piece, because just the economics won't make sense. And this is a picture of how that impacted connection rates. So the little red purple bar on that top right chart is connect rates. And that's the connect rate of when we use this like upgraded enrichment flow.

So we originally had a 3% call to connect rate. So a rep making 100 calls would talk to three prospects. Really tough to make that work from a scale perspective. And now it's hovering around like 14% to 16%. DM call to DMC decision maker connect rate.

You can definitely scale a team like that. Data is your superpower here. Spend the time on prospect data. It will make everything downstream better, because if they're having more customer conversations, they get better faster, they put up better results. You build a culture of winning.

The economics are good. I can't stress it enough. Okay, so we figured out what a good customer looks like. We found the digital footprint. We enriched our database like crazy to make our bdrs efficient.

You can also feed some of that information to the ad platforms less directly. Impactful, but possible. Now let's fast forward to 2023. And we feel like the economics of this base pilot team work and we want to scale. So how do we scale without rampant inefficiency sort of exploding?

So going back to this topic of focus, less is more. Well, talk about the importance of single threaded ownership. This is a slightly contrarian take, but something I believe in and then, well talk about infrastructure. I've talked about this a little bit already. We made this mistake at my first startup.

We had one rep closing a bunch of deals. We thought we figured it out, and then we hired a bunch of reps and it just wasted our time hiring, wasted our time ramping, and we ended up having to lay off like 25% of that team and basically burned like six months, six months chasing our tails. And I always, I say frequently to my team, to anybody who will listen to founders I work with, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Take on less and go deeper with it and you'll have more success. And this is one other point I'll say on this less is more thing, because I think is one of the most common mistakes we make.

You probably don't need as many reps as you think. The way that we build our growth models, the financial model, is the sell for the number of deals per quarter is you always like Reps times quota and you're like, that's how many deals come out of it. But that's not really how a business works, or else you just keep dumping reps into it. Reps can. That math only works when there's the proper pipeline to make those reps successful.

And so I would say 80% of the time, companies that I work with have a pipeline problem and not a rep capacity problem. In fact, if you just do the calendar test, this is something that Sam blonde talks a lot about who was early echo sign guy. So im assuming got it from Jason. But just look at your reps calendars. And if they dont have three or four customer facing meetings on their calendar every single day of the week, you dont need more reps.

And I bet if we all looked at our reps calendars today, itd be like two one to three. You have a pipeline problem. It seems counterintuitive to have double the number of bdrs to AE's, but the bdrs are half as expensive and you have a pipeline problem. So it's in my opinion, better to just go spend the money on building more opportunity volume for your team than expanding rep headcount. This is a massively common mistake.

You're also better to have less reps and pay more for them. In my opinion. Just get better reps. Take your budget. You had six allocated only hire four.

Give them more pipeline and hire better reps. Pay a little bit higher in the market. I think that works out pretty nicely. We had this experience at owner, we paid way above SMB market. I went and got to hire only top 5% presidents club performers from all over the place because theyre like, wow, this is 30 grand more than Im making today and everybodys hitting quota.

This sounds like a sweet deal. It's expensive in quotes, but those reps are way more productive and way more impactful for a business than hiring more, slightly less qualified reps. All right, so topic number two, under scaling smart. I think single threaded ownership is really smart for SaaS companies. You're seeing it more and more.

And what I mean by this is having your sales leader own post sales. And I could do probably like a 20 minutes talk on just this, on just this issue. It's hard for sales leaders to think beyond the thing that they're targeted on and paid for. And so I've seen this multiple times in my own experience. When I inherit post sales teams, I'm automatically way more interested in making sure those post teams work really.

Those post sales teams work really well. And I'm way more concerned about the quality of deals that go from sales to onboarding or launch. We made this decision in October 2023 and we saw an immediate improvement in deal quality, immediate improvement in rep responsiveness, collaboration. It really starts from the manager down. If you bring the managers into much closer contact, the AE managers and the launch managers, or if you're in a smaller company, all of those people being in one channel at the IC level, things just start to resolve themselves because you build a more human connection and people inherently want to take care of each other and this is a great way to drive that shared objective.

This also makes the customer problem, your sales leaders problem, which means theres no more finger pointing and I think thats really valuable. So im a big believer in single threaded ownership. Make your post sales problems your sales leaders problem somehow. All right, I'm going to move on from this topic. All right, so now you've got the basics here.

You've got the basics of economics that make sense. You've got some replicability in your BDR motion or your pipe gen motion. Now you got to get busy on infrastructure. And so the two goats in this picture refer to my director of Rev ops and my director of enablement. There's like the engine of our business.

Steve, who runs Rev ops has been with me for eight years. This is our third stint together, which goes to show like, my reliance on him and Finding Budget for this can be challenging because you're like man, this is a big cost to layer on top of like only four reps, but you want to have these problems figured out before you hit the gas because those inefficiencies as you add reps just stack and stack. So I encourage people to find creative ways to solve this problem. So for us, it was about hiring these two leaders on contract. So they were both from in my network.

I could do it with a lot of trust. And they started doing contract work with us like 10 hours a week, then 15, then 20 until the team was big enough and our ARR run rate was big enough to afford them without it blowing up. CAC and I think this is a smart move. If you can find really high quality fractional folks in this area, it will make a night and day difference on your team because you want to have a bunch of this stuff figured out before you hit the gas or else it just becomes chaos. And so the only takeaway here is likely hire and invest in rev ops and enablement earlier than you think.

Buy it off the shelf, find contract help, but try to find a way to do this would be my advice here. These will be two of the most important hires you make for sure. Now we're going to go into pillar number three. We're fast forwarding to late Q 220 23. We've built a bunch of these foundations.

We've got some repeatability, we've got some good systems and technology in place. Now I want to talk about how to operate a team with slightly more scale with rigor. And as your team gets bigger and as theres more managers between you and the team, if youre the founder or the revenue leader, things are just going to start to leak and break down because its harder to communicate. The feedback loop isnt as tight. So you need instruments in the business to make sure that things can move really smoothly.

So theres three tools here that Im going to talk about, the monthly business review. Im going to advocate for very tight performance management, and I want to talk about my love for documentation. These are very boring topics and incredibly critical in my opinion, and don't need to be super complicated. And if you're taking advantage of these three things, like you're really getting the Pareto principle of the high impact stuff and then all the fancy operating rigor downstream of it is important. But if you can do these three things, you'll be in a pretty good spot.

This is like a screenshot of the MBR template. If you guys want this template, I'll publish it. I'll just strip it out in our notion and publish a copy for folks to use. Each team has a section the manager. There's like a prompt in each section, as you can see in the right hand section that the managers of those teams fill out.

And then the revops team is in charge of supplementing of providing the data and charting for everybody to use. So this is a forcing function that happens every single month. Its within four days of the month closing, depending on when the month closes, to pause and think structurally about your business. Its really hard to get out of the weeds and view things from a wider scope unless you put this into your calendar. And so you spend a few hours on it thinking about operations strategy, like inspecting the data really closely and everything gets more clear in my time and the prep work is key here.

So we're a remote company and so asynchronous. We strive to be asynchronous in a lot, but I actually think this is a framework that works for all companies. So I'll give you like a little bit of a framework for prep. So one, you gotta have your template, you can use mine, you could use a slimmed down version depending on your level of like size and sophistication. But just decide as a group what are the most important questions you want to answer every single month.

What's churning and why is it churning? What's the rep performance and what's the stack rank look like? What are just like the key questions. And as you get bigger and the business is more complex, you will over time add more and more to this. But sitting down and agreeing to the framework is number one.

Number two, revops populates this data for everybody. We try to have that done two days before the meeting. Then the leaders of each of those teams first or second lines will answer the questions that you framed out based on that framework and based on the information revops has published. Then everybody has a 60. For me, it's a 90 minutes block in the calendar before the MBR to review the deck and all the comments.

Everybody goes in and reads every other section of this MBR deck. It's a, it's a notion page. And then people use comments to ask questions, talk about things that they see as opportunities, and then what we're talking about in the MBR meeting, because it's a very expensive meeting, you have a bunch of senior leaders, everybody has to get on one call. We only pull out the most important discussion topics. Do not read the deck in MBR.

This is like the old way of doing it. Rev ops builds a deck. They spend 60 minutes flipping through the deck, telling people things you don't ingest the data as much as, as much as you should to make or to have thoughtful discussions, in my opinion. So this pre rep process where Rev Ops populated managers answer questions, everybody reviews, then pull out the discussion topics. That flow will allow you to get a lot more insight.

And it also makes it so that people who are not as brave or as extroverted in that synchronous meeting also have a chance to provide thoughtful, thoughtful impact, thoughtful feedback, because they're doing it asynchronously. And again, if you want the template, actually, don't email me, I'll just send it out. I was going to say email me and I'll send it, but I'll just do a public notion page and you guys can grab it if you want. Okay, so now that we've got our MBR process, let's talk about performance management. This is another really important efficiency driver.

So this is part of MBR. In MBR, every function gets a stack rank that looks something like this. It could be, this is like a simple version, but you could have your win rates, your close one attainment. You could have deal quality as a part of your AE framework. This is like an, this is a, an older one.

It's a simple one, but it's important that you have the rhythm that you're looking at a stack rank consistently because especially as a small company, as any company, the cost of mediocre talent is very high, especially in this market, because youre giving them valuable leads. Salespeople are very expensive and theres a cultural impact to letting mediocre performers hang around. So you have to maintain excellence in order to drive a highly efficient growth. So you need to manage their bottom performance pretty consistently, even if they're doing okay. If people are only okay, but they show up in the bottom of your stack rank, you just got to move them out because the talent market is really good right now.

For startups, there's a lot of, there's less companies competing for talent, so you can probably go replace that person with somebody better. And for us, it's like the cost of entry to being a part of the owner team is excellence. The standard is the highest performance. So I'd encourage people to like pretty tightly performance manage. It's uncomfortable to do, but you got to find the rigor.

And doing it dispassionately in this MBR is a good way to do that. All right, last thing, I'm going way too long. So documentation is a pillar for scale. I love documentation. It's a great way to force really clear thinking for me as a revenue leader.

And it also publishes all of this information so that people can get answers without a bunch of annoying slacks and questions and slowing people down. Great documentation will let you onboard folks, way faster. It's really challenging to find the time to do this, but just force yourself to do it. Put in like a calendar block for an hour or 2 hours a week and just make this your documentation time. Could be how to guides a training framework could be content that your reps can give to the market the best the only thing I'll mention here is my favorite hack that I used significantly before I had revops or before I had an enablement team and folks helping.

I would do one on one trainings with reps and so cold calling. So I would go through my cold calling framework. I had really crappy notes for it, flip through a couple slides and then I would take the recording of that training. I would pull out my part of the transcript. You can use any transcription tool, but pull out my part of the transcript, dump it into chat GPT and just say this is the recording from a training exercise.

Turn it into a how to document, turn it into a training guide and your prompt can be that vague and it will still work. You'll have to do a cleanup, but I could produce content at probably like two to four x the speed doing this because it's easy to talk and just riff. Especially as a salesperson, you're used to just talking. So you can just riff. Or I do this on my phone on the peloton, I'll just riff on a topic, drop that transcript into chat GPT, have it clean it up for me and then that becomes a training page.

Just find a way to document. Virtual assistants like whatever, just document. It'll give you scaling superpowers. All right, those are the three pillars. One more bonus tip for the revenue leaders.

If you want to make the leap to being like mediocre to great, you have to build p and l fluency. It's the massive missing ingredient for revenue leaders today. You need to be able to focus and think outside of just your close one number. And founders need to hire for it and coach it. And if your head of Rev doesnt have this today, you got to find a way to give them exposure to it.

Obviously Saster has a whack load of really good content on this. This is how I learned in my early days. Now theres way more courses out there that are great. Pavilion is the one that I send my folks to revenue architecture school I have a manager of mine in it and he knows how SaaS works now and he really understands how this thing functions. So CRO school revenue architecture, school pavilion, I would highly recommend those courses and if youre having frustrating conversations with your revenue leader and they dont get it, send them down this path.

Theyve got to be p and l fluent. Okay. That is all I had for content. We learned about how to stay no power of focus, some lessons on scaling smart the importance of data infrastructure, my opinions on single threaded ownership and some light frameworks to operating with excellence on that growth curve. I know that was a crapload of content.

Jason Lemkin
Jason, before we get hey Jason, the others. Hey, thanks for doing this. Yeah, no problem. Owner is doing well, it's well funded, but we are, as you highlighted to us, we're in an era of more efficiency. So for someone that's even an outlier, how are you thinking?

Are you thinking any differently about quotas comp? What percent of the how payment works? Let me step back, maybe I'm rambling. Are you thinking any differently about sales rep compensation specifically in this environment than in the past? Any new insights or learnings on compensation?

Kyle Norton
Yeah, so I ratcheted back our sales component over my 22 months here. We just wanted to pay for the best talent we could upfront. You're dropping into a very ambiguous, challenging market in an early stage startup. As you build more and more structure, comp should match the complexity of that role. We've got scripts and playbooks and training and people you can learn from now.

And the product is so proven.

Finding more efficiency by right sizing comp. And there's a lot of comp. We haven't changed comp significantly in the last six or nine months, but we're thinking about how do we tie the rep to the customer outcome more tying them to the size of the customer through that scoring model I talked about PGMV. The activation rate should probably be a part of that model. Yeah, I don't want to overcomplicate rep comp.

That's not what I'm asking. Maybe I think it's always a question everyone's fascinated with, is comp right? Maybe a more strategic way to think about it is, and it goes to your earlier point about, and Sam Bond's point about slightly fewer reps doing better, higher performing. Right. Do you have higher expectations for attainment, for yield, for bookings per rep in the current world?

Jason Lemkin
Do you owner has a decent acv, but it's still selling to SMBs. Right. So in the old days we aim for three x would be a nice place to skate to. In the old days, an SMB rep really didn't make much. Right.

Sometimes they still don't, and we'd hope they'd bring in three x. Are you driving that up in any ways, or how are you thinking about that, that metric, in terms of the efficacy or attainment? Yeah. So I mentioned in one of the first slides, 2024 is really about making the reps beg for mercy, is the joke that I say internally. So, like, how far can we take rep capacity this year?

Kyle Norton
And so we've been pretty modest in adding AE's. We've basically doubled the BDR team. And so I'm actually reworking our growth model as we speak, based on new conversion rates and attainment, and really trying to find the balance point. Like, seems crazy to have two bdrs for every AE in an SMB business, but if your bdrs are generating six to ten to twelve close wind deals cold every single month, because we figured out the data piece, it's a compelling product, then it's counterintuitive. It might feel weird, but that makes total sense.

Yeah. No, I want to lay the other question, for what it's worth. I don't think it's unusual. I think some of its market dependent, but actually some of it's the skillset of the sales team. I've two for one.

Jason Lemkin
There was a moment, I'm dating myself. I don't know. There was a moment where outbound had its second coming, maybe, I don't know, 2016, 2015 early sales acceleration days. Yeah. And then actually, a lot of folks did the two to one model because outbound seemed to work for everybody.

Kyle Norton
Right. Outbound. And now you actually have to be quite good at it. Yeah. For the most part, in 2024.

Jason Lemkin
But it wasn't unusual. And then I would talk to different leaders that were great, like you and they. And some of them had none. Some of them, it was like you would share an SDR. But two to 1 may sound crazy, but I think if you're good at.

If you're truly good at outbound, which is harder today, like you are, two to one is a great place to skate to. Yeah. Right. Don't be scared if it's. If it works, don't be scared of it.

Kyle Norton
Yeah. And so we've more than doubled per month bookings, like aggregate per month bookings. And the size of the team has basically stayed constant. Yeah. And that's because rep productivity has increased through training and the enablement and then better, better pipeline going to them.

We're trying to automate away as much of the rote sort of manual admin tasks now. I gave a shout out to momentum earlier on the call thats a tool were using for it. So yeah, and in my model, the per rep attainment has gone up. The newly revised model, the per rep attainments gone up in every single segment because were seeing its possible and were seeing the reps get better and better and productivity keep growing. So im bullish on it.

I dont know what the limits of capacity is. We have to find out. I thought I knew. And the reps keep keeping up. If you really can get to a two call close or 1.5 call close, and you have a high energy team, you can be surprised what the ceiling is.

Helps have a good product and a compelling problem to solve for sure. Did you do this type of outbound at Shopify? Did you learn it on the fly at owner? How did you get. Let's assume, let's stipulate you're good at it.

Okay. But a lot of folks aren't, and a lot of founders and vp of sales, they're either. There was a whole thread on LinkedIn this week about outbound not working from mark from outreach. Right. One of 10,000 threads on outbound network.

Jason Lemkin
Yeah, it doesn't work, but I don't quite agree with that. And you don't agree with that either, but you don't disagree with it. How did you get good at it, learn it? Did you screw it up at owner for the first twelve months? What's the learning, what's that process to get good at outbound?

Kyle Norton
We got good at it at league. That was probably the thing we did. So my first role in tech was in software, in the software industry was to run global BDR for a enterprise company. And so we, I think I like five x'ed per BDR output because I eliminated all the like, silly activity. We got super targeted in ICP.

I rebuilt I love I come from a boiler room, so I think that's why I'm good at it. I come from, well that's a good insight. You come from a boiler room, right? Yeah. Like my first job, I had a phone, a stack of paper leads in a pitch book on my desk.

And emailing was for bad words, emailing is for like sissies. And so that's how I learned to sell. And so I think that's been with me and the super structured nature of that cold call, that boiler room people don't like to be scripted. They're like, oh, I don't need to just read off a script. I'm not some phone monkey.

No. Scripting is awesome. Scripting is like the most powerful thing you could do. So just thinking about it, hey, Jeff. Yeah.

Scripting is, I think, really critical. And the more tightly you can get people onto what we call golden script, the better they'll perform because then you can smartly a b test what's working, what's not. Do you think learnable? Yeah, that's the last question I'll have. I could spend the whole time on questions on this.

Jason Lemkin
I think it's very interesting. Generally speaking, there's always exceptions. You started off in a boiler room, right? And I think so many revenue leaders I know that are good at outbound started off door to door in a boiler room with the yellow Pages. Generally speaking, the founders are trying to make a bet.

Generally speaking, can you learn it late in life? Learn outbound? Oh, that's a good question. If you've grown up and you've been great at wherever, I would say I'm really an inbound model. Can you learn it as your first vp of sales of zero gig or is it almost hopeless?

Kyle Norton
I wouldn't say hopeless, but I would say it's not very likely. If you want to run an out, if you want to run an outbound model and you've got a vp of sales who is being in 80% inbound models, because for that person to really grok outbound, you have to do it. And I know you've talked a lot about vps of sales not wanting to get in front of customers and theyre afraid to go and pitch. Im very strong agreement on that. And so theyre not going to pick up the phone, make cold calls.

Theyre not going to figure it out themselves. So I never say never, but I just hired a vp of sales whose first job was door knocking selling solar at Tesla solar cities. I like those ones. Im a believer. Yeah, youll like Brett.

Jason Lemkin
All right, let some other questions in. Thanks for those insights. Yeah, yeah. Thanks, Jason. Thank you, Jason.

Kyle Norton
That covered a lot of the questions, actually. Thank you so much. Great, great week this week. Great content, great interaction. So thanks, everyone for joining.

And of course, a big thank you to Kyle for sharing all these tips. Thanks for having.

Jason Lemkin
This episode is sponsored by our friends at Pendo, the all in one product experience platform. Pendo helps your users do things you really want them to do. You can try pendo for free at Pendo IO Sastr. That's Pendo IO SASTR and check out mind the product their community for product people like us, our international payroll regulations giving you a headache? Remote.com is your solution.

With our best in class interface and expertise, we consolidate payroll for your employees, whether in one country or a hundred. Trustremote.com was swift to secure payments for your team while you focus on scaling markets and driving business growth.

Get more when Northwest registered agents start your business, they'll form your company fast and stand up your entire business identity in minutes. That means business free domain business email website hosting address mail scanning business phone app all within minutes. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com Sastr to start your business today.