Stan Rymkiewicz: How to Drive Revenue with Outbound Sales Teams With a Pay Per Meeting Model

Hello, hello everyone. This is your host, Akhil Jabbar, and welcome back to another episode of SaaS District. In today's episode, we'll be talking about how to drive more revenue with an outbound sales team using a pay-per-lead, pay-per-meeting model. Today we have our guest, Stan Remkovic is joining us. Stan is the CEO at Orapa, a platform that helps you find top sales talent and get more sales calls with the right clients. Stan's biggest dream is to be able to provide startups and companies a way to get more sales calls and introduce the gig economy to the sales world. So welcome, Stan. Super excited to have you on our show today.

Yeah, very excited to be here also. Thanks, Akeel, for the warm intro.

No worries. So for those of the people who don't know about you, don't know about Orapa, I know you recently launched What's the story behind launching Arapah? How did you encounter that opportunity and what's the problem you're really looking to solve in the market?

Great question. So basically my story started over 2 years ago. I was running a lead generation agency helping Y Combinator startups, digital agencies get more sales calls. And I used to run a service, a productized service where we would basically send out cold emails to potential prospects of our clients. I've been doing this for over 2 years, but at some point every client asked me, hey, can we do a pay-per-meeting model? Because, you know, retainer is good. We are getting ROI on this, but I would really want to have this flexible model. And this wasn't an option for me because I had to pay payroll and, you know, I had a 5-person team to deliver on the promises. and to bring the ROI to the clients. So I decided, okay, let's do a marketplace where we get folks like I used to be because I was a sales rep once upon a time and I was doing part-time work exactly like this. I was basically doing outbound sales as a part-time gig. So I decided, okay, let's launch a marketplace because I'm pretty sure that there is a ton of other startups that benefit from having more sales calls. And having a bigger pipeline in general. So we launched a company or a marketplace August 2020. So it's quite a new project. I stopped doing any agency work. So our focus is on this and we've been growing very quickly. We see some great success with it also.

Nice. So it's only been just over 2 months now. And I know you mentioned you're a big fan of, and so am I, building and launching Presales, uh, or pre-selling your SaaS company using no-code. I'm assuming you're— it looks like you're using something like Webflow, um, and then to develop, validate your demand. How did that look like? What was the process for you when launching Arapa? Can you share what was like, you know, the total cost to build it? How long? What was the timeframe to build it? And what were the results? So if other founders are considering doing something similar, they have an idea of what actual, you know, what it looked like.

Yeah. So basically my framework that I don't feel that it was successful in the past, but actually worked in this project, for this project, is I always try to sell before I build it. And so basically I send out a couple of, I mean, I think I have over 100 cold emails. Pitched the product, booked a lot of calls for a span of the week and tried to sell it on the first call. And after the first week or so, I had a couple of sales. Then I decided to keep going for another week or so. And after that, I gathered, I think, about 10 sales. It was a yearly subscription, $300. up to $500 and with 90-day money-back guarantee saying that, okay, if this won't work, I will refund you the money, but I really want that upfront payment from you. And then once I had customers, I tried to tackle on how the hell I'm going to build it. So I glued Webflow, Airtable, and Zapier. build a marketplace on it. It was pretty simple. I think I built it from the design to the sort of semi-final version, it took me about 12 hours or so. The cost of this was basically a Webflow subscription, Zapier subscription, and Airtable is free. So I think it was about $40 to get started.

Nice. And so 12 hours, about $40, and, uh, you made a bunch of phone calls pre-selling it. What was, uh, what were the— what were some of the clients that, you know, what were they saying when you were calling them and how were you pitching and saying, hey, I've got this service? Did you already have the website before or was this even before you even launched that, that, you know, the 12 hours process?

No. So I, I was extremely upfront with it, uh, saying, okay, I don't have anything basically. It's, it's, I'm working on it. Um, it's, it's in the process. Uh, we will launch it in a couple of weeks and I just want to give you a heavily discounted price for a yearly subscription.

So you got them to sign up for a yearly subscription. What were you doing to validate? Were they actually giving you the credit card and, uh, you know, subscribing at that point? Yeah.

Oh, sorry. I forgot about Memberstack. I used Memberstack to manage all the user management and the payment system for Stripe and stuff like this. Yeah, yeah. So it was also a service that I tried.

And were they, you know, when they were signing up for you, were they anticipating that they would have to wait? Because I'm assuming you didn't have a qualified sales rep at that time, trained, ready to go. And then you said, okay, it's going to take a few weeks, but I'll give you a discount. I'm assuming that was the conversation.

Yeah, so I said that it will take probably a month to ramp up, right? That's why I'm asking for a yearly subscription so you won't cancel after the first month because it will take time and that's why it's heavily discounted. I think I offered like 60% discount or so, so it was very, you know, half the discount.

That's awesome. And what are some ideal companies? I know it's only been 2 months and then you also had a few other presales that you've seen have better success with Orapa and your approach to the sales process? And how do you know if it's a viable solution for them? Who should be looking at this platform? And then a question on top of that is, do they provide the leads? Like, are typically the companies providing the leads to these sales reps and then they're setting up the meetings, or does the rep also source their own leads?

So the best success we've seen with our platform. So the companies need to know who they are selling to, right? Who is their dream customer? And they need to know, they need to be sure sort of the value proposition that they are going to lead with in that conversation with the prospect.

Mm-hmm.

So it's quite not the best solution for a startup that is just starting out, hoping to get first sale. But if you know for a fact that if you meet with CEOs of tech startups and you are able to sell one deal out of, I don't know, 10 or maybe 5 meetings, it's a perfect fit for you.

Okay.

And in terms of how leads are generated, you don't need to provide any leads to the reps. We take care of that as a platform and to help get started sales reps booking more meetings and help them earn additional cash. We take care of lead generation for them. I've been in business, lead generation business for a couple of, for 2 years now. So I know sort of how to get the leads and we are using many different data providers to streamline the process and just to help out Sales reps so they can only focus on executing their campaigns and the outreach itself. Yeah.

I mean, leads is everything, right? It's the life and blood of any company. So a company in order to succeed, especially who have that sales engine or trying to build a sales team, they always want to grow and exceed their sales goals. But it starts with sourcing high-quality qualified leads, right? Otherwise you could have all the best lists or the longest list, but if it's not qualified, You know, you're wasting your time. How do you suggest the sales rep or startups to find those targeted clients and make those calls at scale and, you know, be efficient as well?

So I think that you can easily get started without any data providers, just you going out and looking for companies and contact details. It's doable. Of course it will take time, but it's the best solution if you're on a tight budget and you want to just get started. So a few ways that you can— you need to find sort of a lead pool, right? Where the companies that you want to reach out to, they hang out. So for example, if you want to get in touch with SaaS companies, the best way is sort of to get on, I don't know, G2 Crowd or Capterra and just Get all the companies that are there, then find the right person from LinkedIn and then find the email. I don't know, many different tools like Hunter or .io. And that's the process to sort of get started. Once you hit certain scale, you can of course invest in data so it gets more streamlined to really hit scale with it, right?

Mm-hmm.

But if you don't have scale, It's really important to do things manually so you can find that maybe leaks in the whole process.

Is there any tools that you recommend that you really like? So you mentioned Hunter, LinkedIn, you look at G2 Crowd and Capterra, you probably scrape some of that and pull their data. Anything else that you like to use?

Yeah. So the perfect tool for me that basically does all of the things that we want in outbound sales is Apollo.io. I love Apollo. I've tested many different email sending tools for cold email, and this is one of the best ones out there, and they already have the data in the platform. And for me as a European, it's extremely important to have reliable data because not every big data providers, they have data in Europe. So this is one of the best tools to have the global reach that you are after.

I agree. Yeah, we actually used it in the past as well. I love using it as well. So yeah, super.

Yeah, that's great.

So from an outreach process, so somebody trying to build it or expand their existing sales outreach process, what are some things that, you know, the sales rep can do to improve the results in terms of, you know, the quality of the of the prospect, the response rates and getting more bookings from the prospect? Is it more detail and customized communication strategy? Is it using more automation? Is it just more volume pushing through that outbound process or what do you suggest there?

It's all of those things that you mentioned, but in the right balance, right? So the best way to really stand out in the prospect's inbox is to be different. Because then you are standing out across many different messages that they get every day. So the practical tip from my side here is use some cartoons, be funny, right? It will definitely stand out. You can use video if you feel like it, but if you want to hit scale, just use personalized cartoon and they work great. They're funny and they are different. And so my sort of rule on how much time you should spend on one prospect is just less than 5 minutes or so. Right. If you already know how to sort of go after those prospects and you want to personalize a couple of messages for one prospect, you shouldn't really spend much time. Right. If you can't find any valuable insight that you can mention and make it relevant to the conversation that you want to start, just move on to the next one, right? Of course, this tip does not apply if your market is extremely small, like a couple of hundred people. Then you should really take time and make sure that you sort of reach out to all the people and dig deeper and spend more time on one prospect because you are limited. But, and if you are Have a lot of prospects in your, uh, potential prospects that you can reach out to just sort of move on. And because you have a number of—

Yeah, yeah, it's a number. So you suggest cartoons? Yeah, I've heard the video process as well, people recording custom videos for each one. Or, um, so you like the cartoons? How often are you following up as well? Like, what is your— are you doing it 3 times, 5 times, or 7 times? How annoying do you want to be?

So I think it's 7 times, right? But, uh, it's really, if So I like to do a first message that is just text only. All right. It's extremely short, like 2 sentences or so. So it's different because it's very short. Then the second message, I like to do a cartoon with a follow-up. And after that, it's really— the returns are diminishing. So I like to keep it like between 6 Nice, nice.

And then in terms of hiring the sales reps themselves, so you guys have obviously a curation process because you want to filter good people who are going to actually drive results for some of the clients. What are generally some characteristics or skill sets that you look for, you've seen, to find high-quality performers in sales rep? And then how do you match that, the right rep with the right clients, right? Because I think there's a balance there, making sure they understand the How to present their product, right?

So what are the key sort of characteristics of best sales folks that we have on the platform is really be able to figure out stuff on their own. So they already, for example, we have an onboarding call with them, an interview before they jump on the platform. So the best sales that I've got, They basically know everything before we even jump on a call, and the call is just strictly to sort of, you know, chat about other stuff than business. So those are— if you— if they are coming prepared to your meeting, they will probably be prepared to take on the job, because if they are able to figure out most of the stuff on their own, they will do the job way better, right? And also, They will probably try to sell themselves to you even if they don't know about it. They will try to sell themselves just a little bit. Those are the 2 tips that I can give out.

Okay. And you're able to select and choose, right? You can, I guess, interview a couple of them and you decide who to work with, or how does that typically work?

Yeah, exactly. So once a company joins on the platform, they post a gig. saying, okay, who I would like to meet with, what are my value proposition. Companies also try to sell the vision and the mission of the company to the sales reps so the sales would get excited. And once sales reps, you know, apply to companies gig, then you get to speak with them on the short interview. And after that, you can pick your favorite rep to go about.

Yes.

And get some sales calls.

And from what I understand, you're— the way you compensate the sales rep is by how many meetings they actually book, or qualified meetings, right? And I think there's always a challenge there, right? Because sales reps are driven by, you know, it's nice to have some kind of base, a lot of them like that, but they'll be, you know, willing to forego some of that if the compense— uh, the commission side is a lot larger, typically. Um, how do you— what have you seen that works well in terms how you manage aligning incentives, right? Because you have, you have to properly compensate them to, you know, for, for team that— for startups that want to build the sales team without providing a base salary, and then you're providing a pay-per-meeting approach. And then are they giving it— what are they typically paying for a pay-per-meeting? And then are you providing commission, you know, with or without? What do you see has worked well?

So we as a marketplace sort of Right now, we get sales reps that already work in sales.

Okay.

And they do work on the platform as a part-time opportunity, right? It's after hours and the weekends. So they sort of have this basic means covered by their day job, and they only use this to sort of grow, get additional income, and be able to, for example, put awesome companies on their resumes. And in terms of like, what's the price per meeting? The usual price per meeting is between $50 and $200. Sort of the starting point is $100 per meeting. The more enterprise and the more harder it is to get the meeting, the more expensive it is. Those are the key things that sales reps take a look at because sort of for them it's important to spend Little time and get a lot of results, meaning meetings. Yeah, so they get paid based on the results. They can spend 1 hour setting up a cold email campaign and get a couple of meetings back rather than smash through the phone all day and not get any meetings.

Makes sense. And then when you're trying to build, you know, so if I'm just starting off, I'm a startup and maybe, you know, obviously I want to get a lot of leads. I want to get as many meetings as possible. Should I be hiring You know, just the one rep or, um, you know, what does that process look like? How many reps should you be looking for to work with your team? And then how do you clearly define a qualified lead? Because a lead, like, uh, for the sales rep and the client, because I feel there might be a, uh, you know, a client may say, yes, this is what I want. But then when it comes to it, they'll say this wasn't— they get on the call and then they say this wasn't a good lead. But from the sales rep, it was a good lead, right?

So I think you should always have 2 persons because then you can decide, okay, this is not working because I did something wrong, or it's not working because this person is not fulfilling on the promises, or they're just not able to do it. So you should at least strive for 2 people working on sales for you. And in terms of like how the lead, how the qualification process looks like. I mean, it's— I like to think of it this way, that it's company's job and responsibility to set the criteria extremely, extremely clearly so the sales reps have known exactly what to look for, right? If you say that you want to get in contact with startups in B2B space with 10 employees, it's sort of a very broad targeting and you may potentially want to sort of dial it down saying, okay, they have one head of customer success or they have this amount of employees in this sort of department.

Yeah.

Or they already hiring someone from this department. So add those buying signals to really make sure that the company makes sense. You can also give some examples. of good leads and bad leads just based on the websites. For example, if someone is not having a modern website, that means they probably don't care about stuff that you may potentially be solving.

Yeah, makes sense. And one thing I've seen with marketplaces similar to this, we've had a conversation with the previous CEO of Upwork and also some other folks as well who built marketplaces like Steve Buchros from And one challenge I think with this model is that after that first meeting, they see a little bit of success and they could possibly hire the sales rep off the platform. How do you guys manage that and control it to make sure that doesn't happen, or if you could?

So that's a problem that I think it's not a problem yet, but it will be in the future. So I haven't been able to really solve this. Because I didn't have the need to solve it. A couple of things that I think may solve this problem is, for example, a structured security system for them or a great community of sales reps that help each other out to really make sure that the rep is staying in that community and not going somewhere else. But in the end, if they want to hire them, That's great. We may potentially, you know, sort of make a deal with them. But yeah, those things come to my mind right now.

Yeah, yeah, it's gonna be a challenge, but I'm assuming you'll figure that out. There's a couple of things you could do there. Yeah. So kind of just kind of wrapping this interview up, what are some— I wanna hear kind of from a personal side, what are some of the best resources that have helped you throughout your entrepreneurial journey, through, you know, from the lead gen to building out this model? Has there been specific people or books or mentors you'd say has been most influential to you and your success?

So in terms of thinking big and really not caring much about the day-to-day grind, I think the My First Million podcast is great. Sampaar and Sean, I don't remember his last name, but they have a great podcast that's really, you know, there are 2 dudes and trying to make things work. And it's really been, you know, mind-opening for me that it won't be perfect every day. It will be hard and I gotta somehow make my way up.

Right.

That's sort of my best resource for this. And in terms of like books, The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. That's one of the greatest books I've ever read. And in terms of like what to do and for how to make the outreach more converting, I think the old videos of Alex Berman on YouTube. Yeah, those ones really taught me on how to do outreach and the ones that those videos helped me start my agency.

Awesome. Well, we'll put a link to some of those in our show notes so people can check that out. I do like The Hard Thing About Hard Things, one of my favorite books by Ben Horowitz or Andreessen Horowitz. Cool. And this is a question I like to ask people who've been through the journey. I think things change over time. What does success mean to you today?

So I think success for me is basically working on the problem that I'm deeply excited about and just making things work out in the end. That's sort of my success. I just want to work on good things and surround myself with great people. potentially build a great company in the process.

Awesome, awesome. I think that's what we're, we're all aiming for, right? That's combining those 3 things. Cool. And, uh, so I know you're providing a discount for our audience today. So for those of you who are looking to check out Orapa, um, Stan is giving us a discount specifically for our audience. You get 30% off, uh, just enter the code DISTRICT, right? Is that correct? Full, full, uh, district. Cool. So put that in today. I think it's only for this month. So make sure you guys take advantage of that. For those who want to get in touch with you, how can the audience get in touch with you, learn more about and trying out Orapa for their own startup?

So the best way to check out Orapa is to go to orapa.co. And to get in touch with me, I'm pretty much active on Twitter, LinkedIn, and you can send me an email at stan@orapa.co.

Awesome. Thank you so much for jumping on, Stan. I really appreciate it, and this was great.

Yeah, great, great, great chat, Akeel. Awesome.

All right, cheers. Thank you all for watching this episode and joining SaaS District today. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit the bell for future episodes where we interview top leaders in the SaaS industry. If you're a SaaS company looking to grow and unlock the true value of your business, Get in touch with us at Horizon Capital, and myself or one of our consultants will provide a free assessment to help you get there and hit your goals. If you have any feedback or suggestions for this podcast, please comment down below and help us improve our content for you all. Thanks again, and see you on the next one.