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#28: The Final Outbound Chapter: Sales Success with Kyle Norton
What if you could transform your sales strategy and master the art of go-to-market discussions in the boardroom? Join us as we sit down with Kyle Norton, who has successfully overtaken the challenges of high-pressure sales environments at Vision Critical, League, Shopify and Owner.com. Kyle takes us through his journey, imparting his knowledge on foundational sales skills, the power of sales technology, and the intricacies of managing sales teams through various stages of growth.
Kyle Norton on LI
How to build GTM Efficiency in SMB Sales Kyle Norton, CRO @ Owner.com
Owner.com
Welcome to the GTM Pro Podcast, your essential audio resource for mastering go-to-market discussions in the boardroom. Here we share insights for revenue leaders at B2B software and services companies, especially those with less than $50 million in revenue. Why? Because the challenges faced by companies of this size are unique. They are too big to be small and too small to be big. This dynamic pushes revenue leaders into executive leadership without a lot of help or support. We are here to provide that support.
Gary:Your journey to boardroom excellence starts now. Now, all right, well, let's jump in. So we are really excited today to have Kyle Norton here with us. Kyle is the chief revenue officer at ownercom and we'll get into that background here in a minute.
Gary:But for those that don't know, if you haven't been around LinkedIn in a month, he did a saster workshop Wednesday here recently. That was very well received, very insightful, very thoughtful. We're big fans of it, and so we're gonna tear that down a little bit and actually talk about how some of that is gonna be very applicable to companies in the lower middle market. But before we do that, I am NOT I'm gonna not do nearly as good a job as you would, kyle. It's your own introduction, so it would be helpful, I think, to provide a little bit just kind of the arc of how you got to where you are today, because all those experiences build on. Next, you actually touched on that a little bit in the SASTR workshop, but a little bit of background and then a little bit about Ownercom as well, that'd be great.
Kyle:Sounds good. So first off, thanks for having me on Excited to dig in and talk outbound here. So, like many folks, fell into a sales career out of college, mostly accidentally, and grew up in a boiler room. So spent the first four years of my career selling pretty crappy conferences and with very little tech or innovation around me, but developed the real core craft of the crafts of sales so really great phone skills. It was a shark tank of an environment, so built that sort of competitive intensity which is being really helpful.
Kyle:So as a rep for only about a year then was fortunate enough to manage a team. That team became multiple teams and sort of by the end of the four years I had roughly 35 folks across four teams under me. I ran operations for a little bit and then ventured down the technology route and so couldn't get an even a sniff of an interview wanting to transition into the tech world. So I cold called my way into some meetings and and cold called mark bergen who was the evp of revenue at vision critical at the time. So they were late stage private company um and he gave me a shot running the global bdr team and that was like a pretty big reclamation job. Their bdrs reported directly to the aes and nobody was doing anything the same way, and so, yeah, it was. It was a cool experience to build in a very different environment, one where where I had the budget and ability to leverage systems at a much different scale and I went all in Kyle. What time period would this have been? That was 2015.
Gary:I started at Vision Corridor Right at the time, that whole kind of predictable engine thing kicking off. Yeah.
Kyle:Yeah, so, funny enough, I did Aaron Ross's podcast the Predictable Revenue podcast at the time because I'd read the book and we got hooked up somehow. But it was also at the beginning of the sort of sales engagement stages. I was a very early sales loft customer with their prospector product and then they got told no by LinkedIn and had to pivot to this Cadence product. So I think I was one of the first 20 sales loft Cadence customers and Kyle Porter onboarded me himself and that was my first experience with the value and the competitive advantage of sales tech and being early, which I'm sure we'll talk on, uh, talk about today yeah um, so did that for about a year.
Kyle:We like 5x per bdr output in the first six months and and generated way more pipeline than I think anybody ever thought possible. Um, and then a friend from university who was at a startup that was just raising their Series A reached out. They wanted to hire a head of sales zero SaaS revenue at the time. They were pivoting the company.
Kyle:And that was League. So I joined League to build their inside sales function. That was one of three go-to-market motions they were going to run. The other two didn't really pan out. I became the head of sales pretty quickly and then we scaled from zero SaaS revenue to about 25 million ARR over three years. Awesome journey.
Kyle:That was in health tech, like selling to large employers to manage their benefits and it was like a healthcare operating system it's what they described it as care navigation, benefits administration, what have you and had an amazing time. First head of sales gig learned a lot, messed up a lot. Now we do it right, yeah, yeah. And then I was on the road probably 45 out of 52 weeks that year my last year there, because we I was spending so much time with our US business. My wife and I had gotten married. We were starting to think about having kids and you know that's not the lifestyle I wanted to be living when I had kids and it's hard to even have kids if you're away that much and so started exploring other stuff.
Kyle:Got hooked up again by Mark Bergen, who was at the time the head of revenue for Shopify, and he introduced me to a guy building a new business unit at Shopify which was their point of sale group. And so I joined Shopify to build basically a sales team from scratch for their point of sale product. They wanted to take it to market. I inherited four or five people doing mostly random stuff, uh, at the time and it was time to like professionalize that group and build it, like prepare it for scale. So we went from five folks to almost 80 in 18 months. Really hit the gas. Yeah, the benefits of being a well-funded company like shopify and, you know, tons of conviction in the product and and we wanted to do it well. Um, and then we reorged and then I spent the last 18 months so that team got scattered into the wind and blood, sweat and tears into building this incredible group.
Kyle:And then, uh, out of almost 80 people I think, five ended up on my team. Post-reorg oh geez, yeah, hardbreaking for sure, especially because the reorg was so poorly executed. So then I ran in the Canadian market Basically all go to market, so revenue, so sales partnerships in BD, post-s sales, so cs, uh, and launch um solutions, engineering, onboarding, what have you um? And did that for another 18 months and then got the startup bitch and I've been the cro at owner, a joint owner as svp of sales two years ago, and now I own sales partnerships, customer onboarding, cs support, enablement and RevOps. That's it.
Gary:That's all. And DemandGen. That's all you do. That's all I did two weeks ago.
Kyle:We're trying to unify performance, marketing and growth with our BDR motion so that team slotted over as well.
Gary:That's a perfect segue for that I do. But for the uninitiated, tell us a little bit about the elevator pitch on Owner.
Kyle:like the product, the market you serve, yeah for software folks, they can think of it as Shopify plus HubSpot for little mom and pop restaurants. So we do everything from the website, email and text message, marketing, online ordering, loyalty, custom branded app all rolled up into one solution and largely done for the restaurant owner, because mom and pop restaurant owners are not digital marketers, and so we're trying to take that burden off of their shoulders and just deliver them the result they want, which is more online orders for takeout and delivery.
Andy:Yep.
Kyle:And so I started at $3 million. We're $23, $24-ish now. We raised the Series B in November $33 million B from Redpoint Saster Fund, which is Jason Lemkin's fund, and Altman Capital, which is Jack Altman's fund.
Andy:Right.
Kyle:All Insider round. That was a preemptive round. They basically insisted that we take money to go faster and yeah, we're off to the races now. It's been a lot of fun.
Gary:Yeah, yeah. Well, that's such a good the reason. I asked about the context there, so, and we'll jump around here a little bit if that's okay. So one of the things that you talked about was I loved the getting to finding finding the point of the efficient frontier of your sales reps to the point where they're begging for mercy, and the structure that you have today, which I think is two BDRs for every one and whatever that is An outbound yeah, yeah, an outbound, and what struck me there was the fact that you think about owner as the market that you serve.
Gary:I said, okay, well, that makes a lot of sense. Owners of restaurants that are small, it's like chances are they are knowing some of mine who are friends. They live their lives on their mobile phone. Sometimes they're in the kitchen, sometimes they're at the counter, sometimes they're bussing tables. They're doing everything, and so presumably one of the better ways to reach them is that. But when you started to pull this outbound motion together to try to get in front of this very, very hard to reach audience, what are some of the insights that you gleaned and maybe some things that you started to test that got you there? Or did you just have a strong hypothesis with a lot of inside knowledge of the industry to have some conviction from the get-go?
Kyle:Very little inside knowledge because I was brand new to restaurant and so a lot of this was learned pretty rapidly. But through just trying stuff, speed is a core value for owner. That's one of our corporate values. So we deploy fast, learn fast, iterate and change. So in terms of the key insights, like most companies, you start your BDR XDR efforts with the easiest stuff possible. You start your BDR XDR efforts with the easiest stuff possible, and so for us, you know there was a pretty healthy inbound funnel that hadn't really been tapped in the way that it could have. So the first BDR was a guy who came from Restaurant Tech. He was a former restaurant owner himself. He had to talk to restaurant owners and knew the craft of BDRing and so we basically just pointed him at.
Kyle:All of our former inbounds there were like thousands of former leads that we hadn't got to because you've got AEs trying to sell and prospect that they're just not going to do the prospecting with the same efficiency. And so in Braden's first month efficiency and so in Braden's first month I think he booked like 30 or 40 qualified ops and tons and tons of close ones. And we knew that was not long-term sustainable because you're going to deplete that reservoir of leads. So we started to think about okay, how do we go pure, cold outbound? And what are the concentric circles? And I think the advice I give to founders frequently is everybody talks about pure outbound or cold outbound, like, oh, you got to have an outbound motion, but if you're a half a million ARR company or you're a $2 million ARR, going pure, cold outbound is probably not your path to success.
Kyle:You want to start with those concentric circles of who are the prospects closest to you that will take meetings with you today and then, over time, how do you stretch to a market that knows who you are?
Kyle:Less and less and less, yeah. And so your first customers are people that are either friends of the founder we used to call them FOMs at League, which was friends of Mike, foms were the best people to go after or friends of the investors, friends of the board, people that you had personal connections to. Or then, once you start to have some customers, friends of your customers. And then how do you find pockets of customers, pockets of prospects that are two degrees related to you? That will take a call much easier than you showing up cold on the doorstep of some CRO that has no idea who you are, and so that's a much better approach to building your cold outbound motion is start with you can call it near bound or whatever terminology you want to use but like prospects that are really close to you, that are of high likelihood to take meetings, and then, over time, do the harder and harder things, which is pure cold outbound, and that's what we graduated into.
Gary:So I love the concentric circles idea. So, as you start there and start to work your way out, how did you think about the? What is the thing that you're leading with? What's the why? Why am I taking the call and what are you giving me? Why should I be there? Is it? You know, presumably, that very inner circle? It can be that there's some knowledge of us, or the people, the company and we've got, we know your problems and we would like to talk to you about our solutions. Are you willing to take the call? Yes, we'll give you a few minutes to do that. Versus, as you work your way out, you have to earn credibility, and presumably by talking about the problem first and leading to the solution. So, just to think about the layers of maturity, if you will, in terms of messaging, what does that look like?
Kyle:Yeah, messaging is going to change a lot. Somebody who has previously reached out to you has expressed that they have the issue that you talk about on your website. So, hey, gary, it's Kyle calling from Owner. I know that you reached out to us a couple months back about getting more direct orders for your restaurant or reducing the costs that you know the third party marketplaces are charging you right now and we've got and I recommend going in with you know good news, always have good news. Great news we just released a bunch of really exciting product features that I'd love to hop on and show you.
Kyle:And then the thing that doesn't change is your offer of value, and so at the end of the call, instead of like a CTA or call to action or a close quote unquote the way that I teach it is you have to have an offer of value at the end of the call. Love to introduce you to one of my restaurant marketing specialists. They can actually walk through your current site, show you a bunch of the areas of opportunity that you have. Now, if you bring a notepad, you can do a bunch of this on your own, actually, and obviously we'll tell you about how owner might be able to do that better or easier for you. Yeah, that offer value is the same.
Kyle:Yeah, okay, got it. That's when I start teaching pattern interrupt so that people actually stop what they're doing and pay attention. Establishing credibility. So that's where we use a local name drop. Hey, gary, I know that you're actually just a town over from one of our customers, pete from Pete's Pizzeria. Do you know them? Oh, no, but I have some friends who love it. Okay, awesome. The reason for the call is and then I'm establishing relevance, and in a cold environment that structure is so much more important.
Kyle:If it's a former inbound, you'd be like, hey, you wanted to talk to us, I'm here again and you get right into your value prop In a cold, open environment. Value prop In a cold, open environment. Your craft and precision has to be so much better as you really have to be testing your scripts. We can have a whole conversation about scripting. I'm a firm believer that your BDRs should be quite heavily scripted and that scripting is going to enable you to understand what's working and what's not and then A-B test your way to something great.
Kyle:When you introduce a local name drop, is that allowing you to have more over 30 second cold calls? So I can look at a chart of all decision maker connects bucket it by over under 30 seconds and I can see, once I've introduced this new thing, am I having more or less OK, because I know that credibility and relevance are the things that will will unlock the gate for me to get into the value prop, which happens around 30 seconds in, and so I have to be a lot more. I have to have a lot better craft at the beginning of the call just to earn the right to get to a value prop as you start to stretch into a cold, outbound environment.
Gary:As you think about Kyle. So that's in an outbound phone situation. So layer in kind of the multi, maybe less, I'm assuming, less relevant for owner but in other markets where phone may be not as reliable as a connection point.
Kyle:Which I believe is sort of a false narrative, but we'll come back to that.
Gary:Okay, good, I'm glad I like that. So where let's talk about the multi, multichannel, so email, social touches, taking that same mindset, concentric circles, you know the interrupt, credibility, relevance value, how does demand gen or the email component of outbound, or how does how do those work together to drive that same outcome?
Kyle:Yeah, so it depends on your market. And so we're in a very restaurant owners don't answer their email, and so our market is quite a bit different and you need to be really careful with what you're listening to on LinkedIn or on podcasts to match that to your own business model, because people speak in absolutes. Yeah, nothing is absolute, you know. You're just trying to find high probability practices and then test that hypothesis. So, if I think about in a more traditional like white selling environment, where I'm selling a white collar like tech workers, directors of finance or marketing or marketing or whatever and I want to apply the same systems engineering mindset, but the set of data that I'm monitoring now just changes, and so I'm layering these multiple motions on where, if you're selling into that category, I'm adding my entire book of business on LinkedIn, I'm sending them requests or I'm following them in Sales Nav and then I'm using that as an outreach channel in addition to email marketing or email prospecting, and I'm using phone and text and all of these tools and you're going to be trying to monitor the same sort of things. And you're going to be trying to monitor the same sort of things.
Kyle:So, instead of a rep having a number of post 30 second sales conversations. It might be the number of click throughs. Like, open rates are weird these days, they're not very reliable, but click through is. So can you offer a CTA that's not take a meeting with me? Take a meeting with me, but it could be like a resource. You don't want to put a URL in your first email for deliverability reasons, but you can try to drive people to some other action that you can track and monitor, and then you're consistently A-B testing.
Kyle:Yeah, but multitasking is certainly the key.
Gary:Yeah, and it reminded me when you said you talked about the offer of value. Right, that's that idea. That is something other than, hey, let's book a meeting. It is we would. Just, we know you have this problem. We have put this thing together that offers some form of a solution, whether it's and I think, even even today, it's gotten to the point where read this, watch this, here's a white paper, download this, what have you?
Gary:Even that has gotten less and less valuable because we're flooded in information right, so that offer of value being really valuable to the recipient, not as deemed by the deliverer.
Kyle:Yeah, just ask your customers, ask 10 customers hey, is this asset useful for you? I think in the content marketing world, we're moving from a world where You're just trying to blanket content out there so that you can potentially rank for some of those topics, and so you're just cranking out garbage. And now I think the content strategies that are really going to work in this world, where content is insanely prominent, is quality Like quality is going to matter again in a huge way. Is quality Quality is going to matter again in a huge way. And so, if you can offer people content and don't gate it, give people ungated content that's legitimately valuable and you can, over time, build some of that credibility and relationship strength through nurturing.
Kyle:Are your BDRs posting well-thought-through and useful content on LinkedIn? That's another way to build familiarity and liking, and so how do you stack these tools onto one another? Those are much less difficult to monitor and track. Linkedin has not been very cooperative in terms of letting that information flow back to a CRM or or be used for sort of intent purposes. But, um, yeah, that, that, uh, that relationship building at scale is is a critical piece of, I think, cold outbound in that environment today.
Gary:Yeah. So let's let's back up a bit, because one of the things I'm going to merge two points that you said in the disaster discussion, one of which was just say no, which was your first, and the second was scale smart. By the way, we'll link to this in the show notes, but what we always say, we have a framework. It isn't rocket science, but it's called bio led growth. It's got eight sections and it all starts with ICP, and I think people, people say that you know, we hear the words ideal customer profile and then we ask about how was put together, and it was obvious.
Kyle:it was, as we like to say, strong opinions and weak data yeah and it looks good in a fundraising deck a lot of the time, yes, exactly versus what's real.
Gary:So obviously you've got a very strong ICP at owner and then, after that, just as you described, quality, I think the next thing that companies so often miss at first, when you have the owner, the founders, typically they have some connection to this space and so they carry with them a lot of understanding, familiarity, insights into the industry. But as you progress and you cycle through people in different roles, that knowledge starts to get watered down and becomes tribal knowledge and you know there's not a that. To that point, the need for quality requires this core insight. How are you or have you seen work well, the reinforcement of that, so that you talk, to talk to your customers, right, but at a layer of depth that gets outside of what you want to hear, to what they're actually dealing with and struggling with. So, as you're reaching out like, how have you made that an always on practice or institutionalize that?
Kyle:In order to reinforce ICP adherence across the sales team.
Gary:To A, to confirm that we're still like our ICP. This is what they're worried about and therefore that's what we're talking about, like just to have that alignment from ICP through to messaging through where you know where it hits the front lines.
Kyle:Yeah, so we manage this centrally. I'll answer this question in a couple of ways. So we manage the leads that the BDRs touch through RevOps and data, so the BDRs aren't surfing through sort of lists of leads and choosing who they call. We take an entire database, we pull it into our system, scrape a bunch of stuff online, enrich that information and we've got two scoring algorithms that our data team has built. One is their estimated GMV, so how much gross merchandise volume are they going to do on our platform? That's like a proxy for deal size, and we know that higher GMV customers are going to churn at a lower rate. So we are really interested in targeting those accounts. And then we also have this thing called E-WIN, which is our estimated win rate, and those two numbers define what leads get routed to the BDR team. And so we're constantly like we have a lot of there's a lot of headcount expense that goes into just managing these lists.
Andy:Right.
Kyle:And we use a data provider to get us to a data provider, get us to a contact accuracy that we feel really good about. It's like 90% contact accuracy. So our team's calling cell phones almost exclusively Right, and so the sales team doesn't really have a chance to stray from ICP. And then, every single month, what we're doing to sort of stay as tightly built around our best potential customers we do a monthly business review and one of the sections is customer quality, and in the customer quality section we're cutting a bunch of our churn data by a bunch of firmographic or product criteria so we can tell oh, companies that look like this churn higher or lower, and then we feed that back into our scoring algorithms. And so actually at the beginning of May we made a fairly significant change to our scoring mechanism and we're essentially so. We took 40% of what was formerly considered our ICP and just completely deprioritized it Because the churn rates were mediocre.
Kyle:The churn rates in these other cohorts are incredible for an SMB business and then they're only okay for these customers. But the BDRs our market is not infinite but it's really big. So we don't need this other part of our previous TAM in order to supply our BDRs with enough things to hit every single week and month. So we're constantly fine tuning and we've made, you know, multiple fairly big changes to targeting, to just like continue to tune. And that's the beauty of my role owning pre and post sales is the churn number is just as much my problem as the close one number, and so I'm heavily incentivized to make sure that there's this closed loop and making sure that we're addressing customer churn at the BDR stage which is a little different.
Gary:Yeah. So that's a great segue. Compensation, right. We can design the most elegant structures and then our incentive structures screw it up. So talk a little bit about how you've aligned the incentive structures of the BDRs, the AEs. If there is an onboarding team, whether it's if there's a customer success team, does it only own logo retention or gross revenue retention? And then you have a separate team for expansion. Like, just how have you aligned all of those incentive structures so that the whole organism is working towards the economic value for the company?
Kyle:Yeah, incentives matter a lot, and so two weeks ago I brought my senior, my whole leadership team, here to Toronto and one day was on targeting and, you know, revamping a bunch of our systems to get more focused on our highest LTP customers. And so we did some pricing stuff, some some systems work, and an entire day was just focused on revising comp or comp plans. We haven't touched them in a little while, probably like nine months or maybe maybe in a year right and when's this episode gonna drop?
Kyle:on this friday okay, so I'll tell my team before this comes out, because we haven't, uh, shared the the full but we and it doesn't have to be this friday, we can, if you, next week.
Kyle:No, no, we have a town hall. So this was one of the topics. We have completely revamped our sales compensation specifically around this exact thing. How do you build a compensation plan that's fair for the rep, the business, the customer? So we're incentivizing our reps to go after the best possible customers. So we made a couple of big changes. One we were paying on, just like logo count, just how many locations did you close? And that was the comp. But a location doing a lot more revenue is worth more to owner than a smaller one, because they churn at a lower rate. So the LTV is higher and we uh, we have a take rate on, uh, the gross payments volume.
Gary:Yep.
Kyle:And so we're moving to an MRR uh format. So it'll be the subscription uh. The subscription amount plus an estimated uh take rate will be sort of the deal size and we'll pay on that moving forward, which is a big change, like it's a pretty foundational change, but it'll better aligns the business incentives with the, with the rep right the rep incentives with the business incentives, and we're also moving the payment trigger out.
Kyle:so instead of paying on close one, we're going to pay some of the deal on close one, some of the deal on customer launch, because a lot of our customers launch in under eight days and a lot of slow launches are caused by incorrect expectation setting or bad handoff or the customer quality Wasn't that great. And by tying the rep to a successful customer launch, it now ties the incentive together for the salesperson, the launch specialist and the business. And so the give for that because you don't want to just constantly make your comp plan harder. So the give for that is uh, in this new mr style comp plan we're adding some additional accelerators, we're adding some additional spiffs at the top end to make it even more lucrative for the rep to go produce high quality revenue so like net net.
Kyle:If reps are closing mediocre quality revenue, they will make less. Under this new plan, the reps who are already closing high quality revenue will for sure make more and the reps who really tilt themselves to high quality revenue that launches at a high rate will make considerably more than they did before Because, like, we're putting an incentive in for self-s-source deals, for example, because there's no marketing CAC, there's no BDR CAC, so why not pay that to the rep? So we found a pretty elegant way to make the sales comp plan much better for the business and the customer and also give a lot of upside to the rep, which we're excited about.
Gary:Let's come back to the. I want to come back to the self, self-source thing here around prospecting, but so let's just finish the chain here a little bit then too. So to get to launch is there? How will you make that bridge? If you're, if you're carving up comp and maybe it's, you don't have to get to specifics, but there's a bridge period where we were paying you on close one and now we're paying you out over a little bit more of an extended time. How do you help make that bridge? So there's not. You know, it'll all even out again.
Kyle:You're not missing 50% in that one month. Yeah that's a good question. So we, for the month where we so we're going to transition, it's going to go from 100, close one to 75, to 50 to okay, got it.
Kyle:Eventually it will only pay on the customer launch yep um, that will be the payment point, and so what we're doing is in that first transition month we're also going to pay the rep on their previous customer launches. So they got paid the full rate on the close one and we're going to pay them a spiff on all their customers that got launched in that month. So we're actually paying a little bit more like net net for that customer, but it gives an extra incentive for the rep to lean into getting as many launches as possible that month and also giving them an opportunity to bridge that 25% gap. We're essentially giving them a bonus 25% but our CFO is like extremely understanding of go to market and how sales reps work, which is a rarity. It's not very common, and so I think it might've actually been Josh's idea, but yeah, we found a way to make it work.
Gary:Yeah, got it. And then kind of related question is we now think about post-sales and expansion. Forgive me for my ignorance on the platform, but is it when you come in and I subscribe and there is some value there? Am I getting a subscription to the whole thing and then it's just a matter of activating it, or am I buying modules?
Kyle:No, it's all in one. So we don't have any features to upsell, so the upsell motion isn't big for us. Our incentive, because we have the take rate, is to make our customers as much money as possible. So we have a score called growth potential score and the GPS tells us how well or not well set up a customer is. And it was done off of analysis of, like, what are the things that are most highly correlated to customer success.
Andy:Right.
Kyle:And so we know all of the parts of our product setup that will drive results for the customer. So if you have a GPS of like four and a half, it means you're not very well set up and the customer success rep should be going in and trying to help the customer resolve those things.
Kyle:Got it and by resolving those things they make more money, we make more money and they retain at a much higher rate. So that's really the job of the CSM, or the RSM as we call it, is to drive down GPS, which drives up payments volume, and so they're not on an incentive plan right now. The launch team is they get paid on successful launches and to tune quality there. We've brought that growth potential score into the launch team so now we can actually we have a metric for the quality of the launch, and so we. It was like a bunch of a bunch of data work to make it happen, but we finally got that out the door in May and we saw growth potential score improved by like 12 and a half percent in a single month.
Andy:Wow.
Kyle:Just by putting that score in front of people and rallying people around it. And we're seeing that growth potential score drop at an increasing rate. Growth potential going down is good, it's like a good score, yep. And so we're seeing that, uh, continue to make progress and and we're soon to tie gps to launch comp so you won't get paid on a customer on a customer launch until their gps is like under two and a half got it. You know the bar for a good quality customer yeah and again.
Kyle:that aligns customer incentive, business incentive now, with the rep incentive and we think it'll have a really great impact.
Gary:Yeah, that's great. And then you also answered the question then on expansion, because we have it's not uncommon, you have several clients. That part of what can be a struggle is when you're only paying on closed one but you have a variety of levers to pull from an expansion perspective. You in many cases are encouraging the sales rep to swing for the fences at close which which jeopardizes the ability. Like if we get them started then it becomes expansion, but that's because the incentive structure is on the lines.
Gary:Then you get into how long do you own it and who owns it, and what does that look like and is it an AE? Anyway, you know the drill.
Kyle:Yeah, and that's tricky. Every business is going to be slightly different. I generally think that salespeople should sell the deals, and so if you've got an environment with a lot of upselling, then keeping the rep involved is a really great way to do it. Csms we went through this at Shopify. A bunch CSMs are usually not awesome salespeople. A lot of them don't want to do it at all. They feel uncomfortable with it. It's like not a thing that excites them, and so finding a way to pair those two teams well, where the sales reps can do what they love to do, which is chase revenue, and the CSMs can be the stewards of the relationship and focus on helping the customer be successful and surfacing those opportunities, makes sense. But every business is going to be slightly different.
Gary:Yep, yep, absolutely. So let's go back to prospecting real quick. So I'm curious if a rep is begging for mercy because you've gotten so good at filling their dance card, how do they have, should they be prospecting, or is there a more efficient way to do that? That's always the debate I hear, and I guess this is another case where, back to your point of you can't just take blanket advice off of LinkedIn and apply it to your business, because some of it may be. It's a you know, 100, 200, $500,000 ACV sale, different animal versus lower ACV, high volume. What are your thoughts there?
Kyle:I generally think that AEs should always be prospecting, but what that looks like is very different in different places. So, if you're a true enterprise seller, are you picking up the phone and banging out 50 cold calls a day? No, you probably haven't made a cold call in like six or seven years. But they should be prospecting by spending time with their customers, asking for references and referrals, expanding their book of business within existing accounts, creating a brand for themselves online and doing like really targeted LinkedIn outreach and working their network. Like you know, there's a lot that savvy enterprise sellers can do to supplement their own pipeline with 20, 30, 50% additional high quality pipe. I generally believe that AEs should always be prospecting In our environment. Yeah, some of the reps do make cold outbound dials, for sure, but they're also working previous closed loss. They're working their book of business Like. We track very closely customer referrals, so we use a tool called Momentum, which is like troops with AI, if you guys remember what troops was.
Kyle:It's an integration between Slack and Salesforce. So when certain things happen in the product, when there's certain customer success criteria met, then the sales rep gets a ping in Slack through Momentum. It says your customer just went live on their custom branded app or they just had their first $10,000 GPV month. It's time to reach out, and the AEs do a pretty good job hitting their customers up for referrals. So that's a version of prospecting. Yeah, for sure, it doesn't always have to be cold outbound. That tends to be like lower quality AEs don't love doing it. There's a thousand things that like they're like.
Kyle:Oh, I just got busy updating salesforce there's a lot of excuses to not make a cold outbound call yeah for an ae, uh, and I would love my team to prove me super wrong on that, uh, but there's very there's variants of it, and you just want to be smart about how your AEs are leveraging their time.
Gary:Right, right, and, and curious too. Maybe this is a season thing, but you know, as you continue to grow and over time you're going to have more and more closed loss deals. Is there a you know? Is there a? Maybe this is already happening? Is there a motion in place that's like, rather than relying on when our AEs have time to go canvas their close loss, we're going to actually be more methodical about it and then bubble those up? Is that something you've done in the past or think about.
Kyle:We have a system for it internally. Our iRouting process also takes that into consideration. So leads or contacts will get rerouted into the rep once they've had a certain cool down period or if there's like marketing triggers. That's all there. Interestingly, on the closed loss thing, we found at League. So that was like a true enterprise sale. You know multi hundred thousand dollar, million dollar deals and when with every previous close lost on an account, win rates rose and most of our and this is actually pretty common after I started asking around about it we almost never closed a deal there without two previous close losts, because it was a fairly significant upheaval of how somebody was managing their benefits program.
Kyle:Benefits touch every single employee. They're a very personal interaction between employer and employee. If you change it and you mess it up like somebody could be in have like a lot of personal family pressures due to that and so HR leaders are really hesitant to make a change. So they're not going to make a change after four hours of sales meetings after the first time you've ever met them. So we found that our close loss nurture was one of the most important things we did. So as soon as people close loss, we wanted to get them to events, into webinars. We wanted to be seeing them in person in our markets and trying to get them into second and third sales cycles, because that's where we started to win deals Like our win rate. Our win rates on first time opportunities was like single digits and by the time it was at the third go around, that win rate had climbed like two or three X.
Gary:Yeah, it's confirmatory. If you're familiar with, I think, matt Dixon wrote the article sense-making, you know, wrote the jolt effect and it really the same concept which is the biggest obstacle to success is not status quo or your competitor, it's the inability to make a decision because of all of those things you just laid out. So if we take a different approach and think about which isn't great for a salesperson to hear that closed, lost is just actually part of the journey, that's required to get to a customer your point.
Gary:It's like it actually is the beginning of future pipeline for you, which is a completely different way to think about it.
Andy:Well, is it prospecting? I got to chime in right Like is that even prospecting is probably a valid question to ask?
Kyle:I think it is. Yeah, it's pipeline generation. I just want AEs to generate some amount of their own pipeline and they are going to have a higher likelihood of booking a meeting with a former closed loss. Because I've spent 40, I've spent four hours or 10 hours in some cases with this customer before they've gone closed lost. That rep is going to have a much stronger idea of what's going to move the needle for them. Why might they re-engage signals in their account and just the personal relationship with the buyer to get them to take a new meeting. That's, I think, valuable prospecting time for the-.
Andy:Yeah, I think I like that frame of reference. It's bringing them back into the fold. It doesn't have to be cold outbound to be prospecting. It's bringing somebody back into a buying cycle.
Kyle:Yeah, like AEs should be the ones working with your executive team to map their LinkedIn and figure out who the execs know, and pre-drafting emails for the CEO to send to people who are two degrees away from the CEO. That was like a great playbook for us was the send on behalf, so somebody would have an account. Our CEO would be one or two steps away and then the AE would map for him. Hey, send an email to this guy asking for an intro to this guy, and that that led to a lot of meetings. Bdrs might not have your phone.
Kyle:Yeah, that that was actually so. Farms were at the very beginning where it was just like the ceo's buddies who were like, all right, like we'll do, we'll, we'll sign with you guys, just because, like mike's good friend, this was people that were, uh, two degrees away. But we threw, uh, there was this tool called nudge that this guy, paul Tashima he was one of the early, early guys at Eloqua built, which I really liked, and it would map relationship ship, map relationship strength in in your LinkedIn so we could see who Mike knew really well and then we could just take a guess. Okay, if Mike knows this guy and this guy's connected to these three prospects, we can ask him for an intro and and pre-draft email for the CEO to send to his friend to say, hey, I noticed you're connected with X. We think we can help them because of Y and it's got to be pretty sharp because that's coming right. The CEO, do you mind making an introduction? And so the AE is going to do a much better job with those emails because they have to be extremely well researched and have like a high degree of business acumen that a BDR is not going to have yet.
Kyle:So that's an example of a near bound AE prospecting activity that I would expect people to be doing constantly, and in today's day and age, where the inbox is basically getting incinerated like every month, more and more emails are sent Gen AI is making it easier and better People are just going to stop answering anything. Like I use superhuman for email, very little gets to me. Like I miss a lot of emails now because so much gets filtered out, and I think that's only going to happen more and more and more. So you need ways to get to people you want to engage with. That's not cold like cold into the inbox, and so these are strategies that people need to be looking pretty closely about, and you can dress it up and call it community-led growth or ecosystem-led. You can do call it whatever the hell you want. It's not new. It's not new. These are just classic techniques that we should be applying, and the best reps have always done it.
Andy:Yeah, so is your like. You talked about rev ops and enablement being super like, hyper critical. You obviously just mentioned spending good money on, you know, data ops and that whole structure around that is rev ops for you. Are they driving the strategy around like near bound, as an example, like you just described?
Kyle:are they driving the strategy and the implementation of that where who's they did yeah, responsibility is that yeah, it takes a uh, unique rev ops leader to do it at league. Uh, steve dinner owned, he built the bdr team, he was my bdr director and then ran rev ops in addition to that. So it was natural for him to coordinate all of this and he worked basically hand in customer in our top 100 accounts Well, way more than that, in the reps top 25 accounts, and we had 15 reps or whatever. Every single one of those got a custom landing page with custom language that the AE wrote into a Salesforce field and it got pulled out of Salesforce into this landing page with a picture of the rep and the prospect's name. This was our sort of ABM approach. And so, yeah, steve and Evan who ran Engine, they quarterbacked the entire strategy and the account selection and hounding the reps to fill out all their information in the Salesforce field so that we could pull it in.
Kyle:I think that it's a great place for RevOps to run, point. But your RevOps guy has to have pretty good sales acumen and just general business acumen and you know. So I think I'm lucky Steve works for me again at owner he's. He's like my guy. He came over to shopify. Now he's here with me at owner he's you're stealing him everywhere.
Kyle:Yeah, yeah, he's, he's a unique asset and I think, uh, uh, tier one, a rev ops individual, because he's he's not just a rev ops guy. Steve really operates as as an extension of me. The people, people are trying to get answers. They go to Steve knowing that it's going to be the same answer they get from me and I'll get a response much faster. Uh, uh, I think I'm such a um, such a believer in the power of rev ops yeah, and we're gonna.
Gary:Uh, we're at time and thank you for that. I do have, if you get 30 seconds I know andy's been dying to ask this as well is around enablement. What does that mean to you and how do you resource that?
Kyle:Maybe not 30 seconds answering that. So enablement is all things craft, messaging, knowledge. Rob does a bunch of tooling as well, tooling in concert with Steve. Rob will do a lot of the. My head of enablement will do a lot of uh tooling, how-to and best practices okay, because just building it and putting it out there is sort of pointless um. And again, you know rob is uh, he can think about a holistic business strategy. He's not just like an enablement guy pumping out like docs and how-tos that no one's gonna read like he. He understands the world of a rep quite intuitively. He spends a lot of time with customers and salespeople and post sales people to really understand, like, what's their day-to like. And so when we're building stuff, um, it can be done uh with the rep, with the rep first.
Andy:Right.
Kyle:Um with the rep, like, really like front and center in any of our decision making.
Kyle:Um and so what Rob ends up doing is going to move and change. He's running CS and support on an interim basis while I find a new leader for that team. So I like people who can be deep in their craft. They're T-shaped, they can be deep in their craft and also have a breadth of sort of knowledge and understanding of how the business works, because, enablement, sometimes you get like very siloed thinkers. Absolutely, yeah, that's very helpful, all right, well sometimes you get like very siloed thinkers, absolutely.
Gary:Yeah, that's very helpful, all right. Well, thank you for the extra time, kyle. How can people find you? What's something they should know about, if anything? And just thank you for the time.
Kyle:Hit me up on LinkedIn. That's where I post most of my content, so give me a follow there and I'll try to keep writing stuff that's helpful.
Gary:You keep it on. You're doing great man Well, kyle really appreciate it. Thank you very much. I know you got to hop, so thank you for the extra few minutes and we really appreciate it.
Kyle:Yeah, thanks for the time. Appreciate you having me on you bet. All right, take care. All right, have a good one everybody. Bye, bye.
Gary:That was outstanding and we could have gone for another hour. So thank you, kyle, for sticking around for a few minutes extra and we've got a lot to distill here. Sorry, andy, I didn't get into your enablement discussion nearly as deeply as you did when you asked that question. I was like I knew we wanted to cover that because that is such an important building block that people say oh, enablement. What does that mean and how do you do it?
Andy:Because it's not a free resource, but even that little bit he covered there was enlightening. Where it was the frame of reference is the vdr and it's it's helping them like it's, it's, it's. I can picture now greasing the skids for them and like what that means. I assume assume within reason, because you know everybody went oh, I want all these leads.
Gary:I mean we know how that goes. No, no, no. I think that to your point and this is where a lot of times product marketing ends up being responsible in small organizations for quote unquote training the sales team, and they're doing it oftentimes having never lived the rep experience, and so it it, you know, having that unique skill set which to me is almost again, it's an interpreter. They don't the enablement. A good enablement person doesn't need to do product marketing, but they need to understand product marketing. They also need to understand the rep or the BDR or what have you, to meet them where they are, so that they can deliver content that actually gets used and is understood and is relevant in the middle of a sales deck, versus what you know we think is produced.
Andy:That's also a very telling that he put that person, even on an interim basis, in charge of CSN onboarding. Yeah, that's very telling about their chops.
Gary:Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think we got a lot of insight here on and confirmed a lot of things as we think about the building blocks for go-to-market. We're going to pull these together as we always do in our weekly GTM short. So, if you do not get those, check out GTM pro Co and subscribe and there are some additional resources on that side as well, all of which are free. It's basically us open sourcing everything that we're learning and doing as go-to-market advisors so that we can all get better together. So with that, this was full of stuff, so buckle up, have a good week. Bye, thank you for tuning in to GTM Pro, where you become the pro. We're here to foster your growth as a revenue leader, offering the insights you need. The pro we're here to foster your growth as a revenue leader, offering the insights you need to thrive. For further guidance, visit gtmproco and continue your path to becoming board ready with us. Share this journey, subscribe, engage and elevate your go-to-market skills. Until next time, go be a pro.