The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 72 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Founders are best at sales because they make executive decisions
“And the last thing on why founders are, in my opinion, the best salespeople in a company is because you get shit done. You can move the needle.”
Deploying AI lead magnet increased website lead conversion from 0.8% to 4.2%
“And within a few weeks, we'd moved our lead conversion from 0.8 to 4.2%. In real terms, that meant another 36 inbound leads every month Eight pipeline opportunities, and 60,000 of new ARR booked every month since we launched this in November.”
Building a $100M business requires multiple VC rounds, says Adam Baker
“If you really genuinely think that you could build a hundred million dollar business, then you're probably going to want to go out to venture money because you're going to need to raise two or three times. And debt probably won't help you do that over the long…”
Baker: VC obsession with unicorns harms founders building $10M–$20M ARR companies
“I think the expectations of these venture-led investors particularly are just completely skewed to these unicorns and these outliers. And it doesn't help founders who are building great companies who are, you know, 10 or on their way to ten million revenue cou…”
Sales processes win enterprise deals when product differentiation blurs
“And as product differentiation gets increasingly blurred, and competitive pricing kind of almost rules you out of the market, the one reason that you'll win more deals is your sales process.”
DealPad mandates executive sponsor access before conducting discovery or demos
“I won't let my team sell into a company. If we get past qualification, we do not sit discovery unless we get exec sponsor access. It's one of our conditions. If you want a demo, if you want to go through discovery with us, we need to have exec sponsors on that…”
Product demos must come at the end of deep discovery
“If you demo early, before you've gone through really deep discovery, you're forcing yourself to get embroiled in feature selling, because you're just showing people features. That's what a demo is. The demo should come at the end.”
Rapidly disqualifying bad deals yields massive enterprise sales advantages
“The benefits from doing the right thing are very small in sales. The benefits from pulling out really quickly are massive.”
Sellers must guide enterprise buyers instead of following buyer processes
“It's taking your buyer through a process, and not just running the process that your buyer wants you to go through.”
Founders are the best people to sell their company's software
“Look, the best person to sell Your platform is going to be your founder. It is. Doesn't matter if you're the chief sales officer, you're the VP of sales, whoever you are in this room, if you're not the founder, I can tell you the best person to sell your produ…”
Baker: Churnly requires five workshops before proposing or they walk away
“So we ask our customers to commit to five workshops before we even give them a proposal, right? If they can't do that, we're out. We don't talk to them.”
Baker: Churnly enforces strict rule against product demos on initial calls
“We hardly ever demo. We never demo on a first call ever.”
Baker: CEO sales outreach gets 70% higher response rate than SDRs
“I get a 70% higher response rate to my outreach than my sales team, because I'm reaching out to CEOs, I'm reaching out to CROs, and they respond well to another CEO reaching out to them rather than an SDR.”
Baker: Expanded single SaaS contract from $43K to $1.6M ARR
“We moved that customer from 43,000 ARR to 1.6 million. We signed a three-year contract, Well, it wasn't my money, unfortunately. I didn't get it. But we signed a three-year contract worth more than four million dollars.”
Segment SaaS accounts by overall growth potential, not current spend
“Segment your customers by growth, not by revenue. Understand how big these customers are. How big is the potential opportunity? Growth doesn't mean it's there right now, but if you've got a company with a billion revenues paying you 10,000 bucks a year, that's…”
Founders should avoid stepping in as standard salespeople on routine deals
“I wouldn't necessarily advocate you going into a salesperson as a founder, because you'll end up doing it all the time, and you'll get sucked in, and if you do it once, your sales team will be asking you to do it all the time, and that isn't scalable.”
Baker: Dealpad Targets $600K Quota for a $100K Base AE
“In terms of quota, it depends on how much you pay them, and so, so typically, you know, if I'm paying an AE a hundred K, I want 600 K in revenue back from that a year.”
Baker: Dealpad reps never ask closed questions on sales calls
“We never ask closed questions, so we're always asking open questions to try and open them up.”
Dealpad caps initial cold calls at 10 minutes maximum
“So we try and keep those, we call them, so this stage is a cold call, and we try and keep that down to 10 minutes max, and so either we try and qualify them on that first call if we need more time, we'll set that as a second step but typically we try and optim…”
Nearly 70% of unclosed enterprise deals fail due to people issues
“Almost 70% of deals that don't close are people related.”
Internal coaches are the most critical role in enterprise sales deals
“Finding the coach is difficult, but it's the most important role you can have, I believe, in any mid-market to enterprise sales motions.”
Founder cold outreach yields 70% higher response rates than SDRs
“And when I think about my personal outreach, I, you know, I do cold outreach, and I get 70% more response from the people that I reach out to than my SDR team.”
Baker: Enterprise Buyers Care About Value and Outcomes, Not Technical Mechanisms
“Nobody cares how we're gonna help them save their customers. Nobody cares. What they care about is, can we? And what does it look like? What's the indicative value we can offer you As a customer of ours, that's what wins us our deals.”
Baker: Founder direct outreach gets 70% higher response than SDRs or AEs
“And I can tell you when I when I outreach, I get 70% more response than my SDRs or my AEs.”
Baker: Sending follow-up meme emails yields roughly a 50% response rate
“And honestly, I get about 50% of the responses back, just from those.”
Baker: Selling features guarantees constant price negotiations and discounting
“If you sell features, I guarantee you, you're going to be drawn into price. And you'll be in price negotiations all the time. People are going to haggle and try and get your price down.”
Baker: Contraction is the biggest killer for per-seat SaaS companies
“So if you're selling by seat, contraction is the biggest killer for your business. Because you'll get, you'll bring a customer on, you might sell a hundred seats, and you've still got that customer in 12 months time, but you've probably churned 60% of your sea…”
Baker: Selling enterprise-wide yields higher ARR and retention than single seats
“What we've, when we sold by seat initially, and then what we did is turn that off, and we just go and sell into the company now, and we sell directly into the organization. It takes longer, but you'll get a much higher ARR, and you'll retain that customer much…”
Baker: Workflow-embedded SaaS experiences dramatically lower churn than browser-based tools
“Very, very difficult for a customer to leave you if you're embedded into their workflows. They're not going to turn you off. If you're not, and they're using your platform on a web browser, for example, it's very, very easy for them to switch it off, move to a…”
Baker: Incremental milestone close dates prevent enterprise deals from slipping
“So you're actually working to a main close date through very small little incremental close dates. And it's very, very unlikely that a deal slips.”
Baker: Holding previous startup 5 more years would have 10xed valuation
“I exited my last company way too early. And I think if, and it haunts me a little bit, I think if I'd held on for another four or five years, I would have probably 10 X the valuation I got out of my last company.”
Baker: Pricing software on retained revenue causes messy contract disputes
“I think you then get into lots of contractual disputes and I've had this before where companies would then start to debate about, you know, who, how much revenue they've actually got from us or if they acquire an organization and their revenue ramps because of…”
DealPad relies entirely on cold outbound sales over inbound marketing
“All outbound at the moment, we've not really focused on any inbound because for me, that was an investment. We weren't really sure what we need to produce to them, what would work. So we've just really focused on outbound.”
Baker plans to bootstrap DealPad to $10M ARR before raising VC
“If we can bootstrap this to ten million which is what my plan is AR then we might be able to make some different choices about, you know, rather than going out raising money, we could do it a different way.”
Baker split DealPad equity 50/50 with cofounder despite originating the concept.
“We decided to go fifty-fifty and, you know, despite it being my concept and something that I'd been using and I'd verified and I had the domain expertise, I wanted him to have 50% of this because I wanted him to feel that he had shared ownership.”
Churn prediction models do not easily scale across SaaS verticals
“What we discovered very early on is that churn, churn models aren't very scalable.”
Baker: Single LinkedIn post drove $1M pipeline and $250k ARR
“This post that I put on LinkedIn, within seven weeks it, had generated a million of pipeline for us, and we've closed almost a quarter of a million in new ARR.”
DealPad reached $3.7M revenue with 300% YoY growth
“We launched it four years, three years ago now 2021 and we'll, we finished on 3.7 million last year, and we've grown 300% year on year over the last three years.”
Baker: DealPad closes 36% of responses from CEO sales outreach
“Of the responses that I get, of the responses I've had, 36% have led to sales.”
LinkedIn post sharing cold email scripts generated 1M impressions and 8,000 requests
“We had almost a million impressions for this post. 1500 likes. Almost 8000 people saying they wanted the script.”
DealPad filled four open roles at zero cost from one viral post
“I also hired four people myself. I filled four open roles with zero cost. From one post. And two of those roles we've been trying to hire for months.”
Baker: Dealpad booked $400K ARR in 2021 and $1.2M in 2022
“Essentially in our first year, which was 21, we booked about 400 K of ARR. Last year we did about 1.2.”
Baker: Dealpad will finish 2023 between $2.7M and $3M in ARR
“And this year we're going to finish on about two point, anywhere between 2.7 and three.”
47% of enterprise deals fail due to missing buying committee access
“47% of enterprise sales deals don't close because you don't have access to the buying committee.”
Baker: Blotter reached $17M ARR having raised only $2.5M total
“I've raised 2.5 million across those four companies. And my last company, my previous company, Blotter, we got to about seventeen million ARR on that two and a half million.”
Baker: Blotter Built 1M User Network and 27-Person Team with Zero Revenue
“We built out some machine learning that authenticated news footage from anonymous sources around the world, and we built a global network of a million people. We had a team of 27 people and 18 months later we had zero revenue.”