The Exchanges

Q too nervous to go make the first full-time, like, SDR or inside sales hire, like, I just want to test the system first, and there's so many firms like yours that are popping up that are doing this very effectively in an outsourced, kind of performance-driven manner. So, question to you is, how are you billing these SaaS companies? Is it a fixed fee, or per meeting booked, or what?

A Yeah. So it's a retainer model, monthly retainer model. And so what, because what we do is we do things a little differently than just booking the appointments. Basically if a, if a company has gotten like a series B or series C they're in, in their growth phase, they know they've got a good product or service. They have an idea who their ideal customer profile is, and they're just looking to put some, you know, fuel on the fire. You know, we come in and we are, are their outsourced inside sales team. So we come in, we, we strategize with them. We give them feedback. We work with their marketing department. And then we also get, you know, find out whether that is their best, you know, best, uh, target, uh, um, uh, uh, company and whatnot. And so we'll help them to pivot if they need to. And if we're not seeing, uh, results in the direction that they've pointed us, we work with them to recalibrate. And so what we found is that, you know, by working in a retainer model and just working on a monthly basis with them to make sure they're getting the opportunities or recalibrate where they're trying to go, we've been able to help them with, with, Really, you know, growing their companies through our services.

AI assessment note: “So it's a retainer model, monthly retainer model.”

Q Yep. What got you into this? Tell me about the launch story. When'd you launch?

A So I launched it in business school. I was going to business school at the Wharton School, and they had a business plan competition, and so I have been in inside sales before, and I just really, my goal going into business school was to not get a job out of, out of my MBA, and so I was just trying to figure out what I wanted to do, and I've been reading at that point, this was 13 years ago, about the remote model, which we're all kind of in right now, where everybody works out of their home offices, and so I loved sales, I loved inside sales, and One of the most important parts of inside sales is having great people, right? And so I thought that the whole distributed model of, of building a call center where people could work wherever they live and I could recruit anyone, you know, throughout the country, uh, just made a lot of sense to me. So I launched it. 13 years ago, we are a hundred percent remote then. Obviously we're a hundred percent remote now, like a lot of us. Um, and it's worked really well.

AI assessment note: “So I launched it in business school. I was going to business school at Wharton”

Q I love that. Okay. Now fast forward, 13 years later, uh, how many, uh, how many customers you working with?

A So we are still boutique, and we actually want to stay that way, so we have about 20 clients right now, but what we, what we've, we've found, and listen, this is kind of a little antithetical probably to a lot of the people that are, are listening to you, but we, you know, we help our, our clients scale, but what we found is that to really do inside sales well, and it's complicated, right, it's hard to do it as an internal company, right, and to do it well, and to do it for 20 clients is also really hard to do it well, and so what we found is we want to actually limit the number of clients that we have, And make sure that we make them super successful and super happy because all of the work is, we don't make money for the first few months of launching something. The amount of time that we put into the strategy to training the reps, finding the right reps, it just doesn't work unless our retention rates are really high. And so what we've done is we've limited the number of companies that we work with and we just do a bang up job with those companies and we've stayed boutique and it's actually a very, you know, good model for ourselves and for our clients.

AI assessment note: “we have about 20 clients right now”

Q Okay. Amazing. And, Tell me about the first customer. How'd you get your first customer, and do you remember, was it the same, even the same business model?

A So what, well, it was the same business model. Uh, so it was all outbound, uh, appointment setting. And my first business model was the first VP of sales that I worked for at an internet startup, uh, a few years before I started the company. And so he had, uh, uh, you know, a company that he was working with. So I obviously, you know, start with a lot of the people, you know, who trust you, you know, you do good work. And I asked him, listen, can you throw me a bone? Can you give me a contract? And, uh, and he's like, sure, absolutely. How many, how many reps can I have? I, uh, staffed two for him when we started, uh, Uh, started up that way.

AI assessment note: “well, it was the same business model. Uh, so it was all outbound”

Q Revenue, yeah, that's obviously a great target. Ok, tell me more about the team. How many folks are you there today?

A Uh, yeah, so we have about 75, uh, SDRs, um, and another thing that we do a little differently than a lot of, uh, internal companies is a lot of people within the SDR role, they hire people right out of college, which is great, and you get a lot of people who are really excited and, and, and energetic, but we actually hire people that are later stage in their career, love prospecting, if you can believe that, they love cold calling, they love going out and hunting for things, and they've done it, uh, successfully throughout their career, and so we have people who will As important as keeping our clients is keeping our employees and, and keeping them with us because we put a lot of time into training them, you know, you know, showing them our processes, things that have worked for, for our clients throughout the industry. Um, and so we really work on retaining our, our employees as well.

AI assessment note: “we have about 75, uh, SDRs”

Q I could see people liking your model versus working inside of a fast-growing company because it's less risk working with you. Maybe they have kids, they're wanting to settle down, and they go, you know what, I'm not reliant on one company anymore, but I love the SDR role. Now I can work with, you know, David and get the same thing out of it. Is that, is that accurate?

A Yeah, so I think, I think there's a number of reasons that people are, like, working for us. So we do, First of all, they can work anywhere, which is going to become more of a reality for a lot of companies and SaaS is definitely at the forefront of that. We're seeing a lot of companies that are going remote first. So that was been one, one big draw. Um, they also do like the variety. So they get to try different things. And, you know, we just have a culture around SDRs and cold calling and prospecting and training and having that infrastructure that makes it fun. They're learning every day just allows us to, to create, I think a pretty vibrant workforce, even though we're a hundred percent remote.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, so I think, I think there's a number of reasons”

Q So I just want to run that down for a second. So, so three SDRs, right, making a 150 calls a day is 450 calls a day. That particular customer of yours from 450 calls, how many qualified scheduled demos are they expecting?

A So it really varies, right? So it varies on a few different things. One is the, the level of person that we're calling. So if it's a CTO, right, it's a lot harder to get that person on the phone or get them to respond to an email, or we might be going after a director of sales. It really fluctuates. So it's anywhere from, we'll get one appointment per day, maybe two on the high end, right? To, it can sometimes be two appointments a week, but sometimes those appointments, you know, could be an enterprise contract. Client and you're getting the C level appointment with somebody who's interested, who could turn into a multimillion dollar deal for you. So it really can run the gamut, but we, when, when clients talk to us, one of the key things that we go over with them, and it's really important for them to do both with their internal team, or if they look at a company like us is to go through the metrics. So we look at, okay, who are you targeting? You know, how are you positioning yourself in the marketplace? Let's think about how crispy your value proposition is. Is that going to really resonate? Can you differentiate yourself? Um, and, and how have you been doing it so far? And then we make some estimates. We take a look and ask you, you know, especially the SAS clients, what is your lifetime value of your customer? Or what do you, you know, forecasting that to be? And then we …

AI assessment note: “it's anywhere from, we'll get one appointment per day, maybe two on the high end”