In this interview, Eric Siu talks with Sean Kelly, CEO of SnackNation, about how the company builds a profitable snack‑delivery business for offices. They explain the tiered subscription model (from $1.99 to $3.99 per employee per month) and the mix of inbound (content, SEO, paid LinkedIn/AdWords) and outbound (SDR‑driven list building, cold email, referral loops) sales channels. A large portion of the conversation focuses on how SnackNation cracked LinkedIn advertising by hyper‑narrowing the audience to specific job titles (office managers, HR directors, CEOs) and offering a free 15‑item sample box as a high‑value lead magnet. They also describe a data‑driven lead‑scoring system that grades leads A‑D based on spend, employee count, and other attributes, automatically routing low‑scoring leads to a self‑serve e‑commerce funnel or even selling them to competitors. Their outbound process follows the “Predictable Revenue” blueprint: list building, targeted cold emails that solicit referrals, SDR qualification (spend, headcount, cultural fit), conversion to Salesforce opportunities, and hand‑off to account executives. SDR performance is measured by activity metrics (dials, connects, emails) and conversion metrics (responses, opportunities created, meeting attendance, no‑show rates). The overall narrative shows how precise audience targeting, systematic lead scoring, and disciplined outbound execution can turn a niche B2B snack service into a scalable revenue engine.
Chapters
Today we are visiting Snack Nation. I'm going to talk to the CMO, and the funny thing about this place is I started out as an intern when this company was doing zero dollars in revenue in Sean's apartment, who's the CEO. So let's dive into it.
Lift off.
All right.
So with Snack Nation, how do you actually? How do you actually make money?
How do we make money? Yeah. Oh man, such a good question.
Well.
We provide snacks in exchange for dollars. There's the business model. It is a direct delivery healthy snack service for businesses. I mean, we have different curations for different businesses. You know, we have boxes that range from $1.99 a month all the way up to $3.99 a month depending on kind of the quality of the snack and the ingredients and all that. You know, we have an ultra premium level and then we have like a value tier. It gives the businesses choice of what kind of snacks they want.
Mm-hmm. And then we also have some specialty boxes.
Some people want just jerky, they want just chips, just bars, so we have those options.
And then SnackNation as a business, I mean, how do you guys generate sales mainly?
Yeah, so we have 2 main approaches. You break it down into inbound and outbound. So we have an outbound sales development team that builds lists, finds companies that we know a company already has a snack budget. That's very helpful for them. Otherwise, there's some qualifications, some prospecting involved to figure out if that business is qualified, but we have outbound reps doing emails and phone calls to learn more about those businesses, ultimately having them try the snacks with a sample box, and if they like them, then converting them into a, you know, a monthly subscriber. And then we have an inbound effort which we focus heavily on content, driving all the organic traffic. And then we also have a paid element where, you know, LinkedIn, AdWords, those types of channels that are bringing in inbound leads.
Cool. And not a lot of people talk about LinkedIn, so without going too much into the weeds, like, what are you doing around LinkedIn? Because you're one of the few that's Making it work with LinkedIn, and I've talked to a lot of marketers.
Geez, we were banging our head against the wall with LinkedIn. We tried multiple times, couldn't get it to work, you know, $5 to $10 clicks, that's what most people are seeing. The minimum was like $5 a click, you know? And we're like, geez, how that— you can do the quick math and pencil it out, it's like, geez, our landing page needs to convert like crazy in order for this to work. What we ended up doing, what we ended up discovering, was Marketing 101. Which is message-to-market match. So, what message-to-market match is, is niche down so far that you are talking to one person, not a big group of people. What's an example? Yeah, so for Snack Nation, an example would be office managers, right? So, we talk to HR people, we talk to CEOs, we talk to a wide variety of job titles. Let's just focus on office managers. So we create an ad on LinkedIn that is just for office managers, speaking directly to office managers, talking about how office managers can get, you know, the most delicious, healthiest snacks that everyone raves about. And then they click on that ad, they hit our landing page, they opt in for a free sample box. So having a good offer on that landing page as well, moving the free line. So, you know, we give away a free sample box that has 15 delicious snacks in it. which costs us a lot of money to get out the door. And so having that very tight niche structure, talking to office managers, getting to a landing page, giving them something free, that was the winning formula for us. And then when that worked, then we went to, you know, HR directors and CEOs of 10 to 50 employee companies. So really kind of targeting, doing the micro-targeting that LinkedIn allows you to do. So it is a lot of like, a lot of Multiple campaigns and a lot of build-out, but as opposed to having one general ad for everybody.
Nail it, then scale it, right?
Nail it and scale it, that's a good one. I mean, yeah, I mean, that's the thing is like you can do a very low ad spend and really fine-tune it and get that one humming, and then the replication of that, that's where you scale it and it works well.
So what can you talk about, I think, you know, during our little intermission earlier, you talked about being able to generate leads and maybe sell off leads as another revenue source. I mean, what can you talk to about that?
Yeah, so once you start scaling and you start generating, I mean, we're 1,500, 2,000 leads a month, you have a lot of, not all leads are created equally, right? So what we had to put in place was a lead score algorithm. It sounds complicated, but really what it is is on our opt-in form, we have the typical first name, last name, title, company.
What's a lead score first?
Yeah, so a lead score is just predicting how good the lead is, and we score them A, B, C, and D. On our forms, we have the typical first name, last name, all that, but the 2 important questions for us to qualify someone for snacks is, how much are you currently spending on snacks? So if you have a budget already, you're a better prospect, because we don't have to convince you that you need snacks, you're already doing it.
Yep.
And then also, how many employees you have. We found that for our business, 10 or more employees is, is good. If you start getting below 10 employees, it may not be as good of a fit. We still have a lot of customers that are fewer than that, but we found that there was a high correlation of, you know, certain buckets like 10 to 20 employees, 20 to 40, and then also like, you know, $400 to $600 in spend. And we bucketed it all out, we ran the data, and we found that there are some buckets that convert way higher for us than others.
Mmhmm.
So what we did is we made the lead score algorithm say, hey, if these leads have You know, this much spend and this many employees, that's an A lead. And then some of the other buckets that converted well but not as well as the A leads, okay, those are B leads. And then C leads. And then what we found is when we ran all the data on all of our past leads, there was a cutoff point where there was no more revenue, but there was all these leads down here that didn't convert, right?
Right.
So we looked at the common characteristics among all those leads, those became our D leads, and those get lopped off. We've adjusted the algorithm twice now, so we're cutting off about 40% of our leads now.
Mm-hmm.
40% of our leads that don't even go to a sales rep, those immediately go down a self-serve funnel. So now they're being offered healthier snacks in smaller box options, 'cause it's typically smaller companies. They don't want our full big-size box, and we're sending them down a self-service path so that they can just buy the snacks themselves with no sales rep. Before, when those 40% of leads were going to sales reps, and they're not converting, sales reps are like, like, ugh, another lead, right? And the overall impression of like, hey, the inbound lead generation system, it's okay, but it's not awesome. And when you lop off those 40% of leads that don't convert, and they're all of a sudden, the leads that they're getting, it's like night and day. They're like, oh my gosh, those inbound leads, they're awesome, they're converting. So sales reps' attitudes, it's very important as well, because they'll hop on the leads faster, they'll treat them more seriously, like they literally see these as higher value Leads, and they're gonna work 'em better. We choose to lop off our D-Leads and send 'em down our own pathway for an e-commerce play, but another great thing to do, a lot of businesses can do, is go sell those to your competitors.
Oh, totally, yeah.
You know what I mean? So you cherry-pick, if you have a good lead score, you take the best ones, and then maybe there's some of your competitors that can find some use out of those other leads that you don't, and you can sell 'em and get an extra revenue stream.
No, 100%, and just to give you a little context, that's what we do basically as an agency. Of the leads we get, only 10% are good for us. So the other 90% or so, there's a certain percentage that are good to pass over to other agencies or competitors, things like that. And passing off the ones that we can't service or maybe we're at capacity, that way we can focus on delivering great work at the end of the day. So it's just smart. Talking about your outbound sales process, I mean, at a high level, how does that process work?
Give Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin a lot of credit. We read Predictable Revenue back in the day. Read Aaron Ross's book, I think it was 2010, 2011, right when it came out. Kind of blueprinted that process with our outbound team, which is essentially List building, finding potential companies that you think are gonna be good for your product, sending out some cold emails, more of a referral type email saying, for us it would be, who in your office handles the snacks? We'd like to send over a really nice big box of delicious healthy snacks for them to try.
Right.
And so if you end up hitting the right person, they respond and say, that's me, send me the box, right? And they say, oh, that's not me, that's That's Joyce over there in the other department, and they tend to forward that email over, so it's more of a referral. That email ends up being kind of a warm referral, which ends up increasing conversion rates. So, that was the original approach that we deployed.
Mmhmm.
So, a lot of cold email marketing, waiting for people to raise their hand saying, that's me, and then we get on the phone, or our SDRs get on the phone, qualify them based on the amount of spend that we wanna see, and the number of employees, And also their why, why you're looking for healthy snacks, making sure that they're a fit culturally as well. And then if that location's qualified, then the SDR converts the lead to an opportunity. We use Salesforce. That opportunity then gets sent over to the account exec to have kind of the final call and closing call.
So what key performance indicators are you tracking with your SDRs? Is it activities? What are you looking at to hold your team accountable?
Yeah, it's top of funnel down. So we look at number of dials, We look at number of connects, we look at number of emails sent out, and then we look at the conversion rates on all those. How many people respond to the emails, how many of those dials, how many connects did you get? And then, once they get on the phone, how many opportunities is each SDR creating every day, every week? And then, we look at those opportunities that are sent over to the account execs, and then when that person shows up to the meeting, it's a sales qualified opportunity, so it's different. An opportunity created does not mean that the person shows up to the meeting. There is a bit of a drop-off. You have some no-shows, right? And you always want to like try to reduce the number of no-shows.
Whoo! I'm getting hungry. We got snacks in here? If you enjoyed this video, go down, hit subscribe, and then watch the next video in the playlist right over there. We're going to talk all kinds of strategies to how to level up your sales team, how to get your business rocking, and how to just level up your life.
