The Sales Structure that Grew SalesLoft into the Fastest-Growing SaaS Company with Kyle Porter

Today's episode of Growth Everywhere is brought to you by Single Grain. Single Grain is a digital marketing agency ran by yours truly that has helped venture-backed startups to Fortune 500 companies grow their revenues online. Single Grain covers services such as search engine optimization, Facebook advertising, Google advertising, YouTube advertising, content marketing, and conversion rate optimization. To learn more about Single Grain, go to www.singlegrain.com.

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SingleGrain.com/Grow to learn about 8 marketing campaigns that we've used in the past to help clients grow, including the one that helped generate over 1,500% return on investment. Hey everyone, so in today's interview we are talking to Kyle Porter who is the CEO of Salesloft. And Salesloft is a company, in the past 10 months or so, they've jumped all the way up to $3.7 million in revenue. They have over 22,000 users and they're doing some crazy stuff right now in the sales space. So if you're in enterprise sales or if you do anything in the software as a service world, you should definitely be paying attention to this interview because there's a lot of gold nuggets on how to build a sales team, a lot of specifics there. And also how to find sales talent, how you might want to structure a team, and a lot more gold nuggets like that. Enjoy the interview and I will see you at the end. Hi everyone, welcome to this week's edition of Growth Everywhere where we interview entrepreneurs and bring you business and personal growth tips. Today we have Kyle Porter of Salesloft, which is a sales tool that helps you increase the number of qualified appointments or demos you set by 300%, and it's used by over 17,000 people today. Kyle, how are you doing?

Doing well. I do have to correct you unfortunately, when I gave you that, we were at 17,000, we're now at 22,000, so a little bit of growth since You and I started planning for this thing.

That's a good correction. I love it. I love the growth. Great, man. So, you know, why don't you talk a little bit about your background first and then we'll go from there.

Cool, man. So, you know, I'm a sales entrepreneur. I came up learning sales from an early age, selling anything I could, whether it's baseball cards, Beanie Babies, comic books, getting in the landscaping business. So I've always been kind of out there trying to find things that people needed and wanted, and I got a passion out of presenting and providing those things for people. So that's been kind of since You know, kind of ingrained into me from day one. But I started Salesloft in late 2011 after a few fun ventures and some roles with some startups. And I'm all about sales and marketing, man. And now I'm in the software game and loving every minute of it. Cool.

And are you by trade— do you have a technical background?

So I did go to Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta here, which is a top engineering school in the Southeast. But really more of a business mind, and, you know, I've obviously come to fall in love with technology. So to my peers in business, I'm a technologist. To my peers in technology, I'm a business guy.

Great, man. So why don't we talk a little bit about Salesloft and how it helps people? Let's say I'm a startup and I need to get into enterprise sales. How does Salesloft help me?

Yeah, sure. So, you know, obviously, you know, in sales, one of the most important things is getting qualified conversations. Demos or opportunities with the people that you care about. And so Salesloft really helps in 2 ways. One, we are the simplest way on the internet to build accurate and targeted lists of prospects. So we've got a tool called the Prospector, and it's just super simple to identify who you want to go after and then pull an accurate and targeted list of those people— first name, last name, company name, title, email addresses, phone numbers— sync it all up with CRMs and CSVs. So build a list. And then our second piece is once you have that list, you want to turn those people into qualified demos or conversations or appointments. And so we've got a communication platform called Cadence that allows you to do that through a rhythmic process of emails, phone calls, and social drips over periods of days in order to maximize the percentage of people who take qualified opportunities from you.

Got it. And what are some numbers you can share, you know, some success numbers you can share around Salesloft? I always like to hear those.

Yeah, sure. So in January of this year, January 2014, we were 30 clients, $200K in annual recurring revenue, and 5 employees. So today, less than 10 months later, we are 35 people, $3.7 million in recurring revenue, and 660 clients.

No way!

Yep. So some people have said that we might be the fastest growing SaaS company on the East Coast. I actually don't know of one faster nationwide right now. Now, albeit some of it is the law of small numbers, but we may be one of the fastest growing software companies of 2014.

Yeah, that's the fastest I know of in 2014. Holy shit, man. Congratulations.

Well, thank you very much.

Cool. So, you know, my understanding is that Salesloft, it does have to make use of LinkedIn, right? There's a lot of pulling data information, or you could call it scraping or whatever.

Yeah, the prospector piece does, but not the—

So what happens if LinkedIn says, I'm going to shut this all off?

Yeah, so we don't use the LinkedIn API, so we're not part of that ecosystem. Really, they don't have a supportive developer ecosystem. So when you join LinkedIn, you give them permission to put your information out on the internet, but it's still your information. And so it becomes public domain when the search engines start crawling it, and you've got traces of your LinkedIn profile all over the internet. So what we say is, if it's public domain, The browser can capture it and send it to us. So we don't get phone numbers and emails from LinkedIn, we just get that publicly available factual information that exists as public domain on the web.

So how high is the risk of them saying, okay, we're just going to shut off all that information so your tools and other people that crawl LinkedIn can't use it anymore?

Yeah, so what they'd have to do is they'd have to say, Google, you can no longer have access to LinkedIn, and they'd be cutting off a big chunk of their revenue and their traffic. So I don't think that the street would ever allow LinkedIn to say, Google, don't index my stuff anymore.

Yeah.

Because if I put Eric at Single Grain into Google, Google wants to give you back the best result, and the best result is likely one of your LinkedIn— your LinkedIn profile. So as long as that information is publicly available on the web, as long as people are making their profiles public, as long as you can see it in a browser, then somebody can capture that information and help you store it and do things with it.

Cool, sounds like you guys are safe. All right, cool. So, you know, you did a SlideShare presentation about, you know, your reps beating their quota by over 400%. Can you share some of those tactics, ideas behind that?

Yeah, that was before we raised quota.

Okay.

So quota's higher now. They're still beating it, and they're beating it by about 2x. But what happened was, is when we started the company, we didn't know what quota should be, so we just copied a popular SaaS company that had been very successful. It was a company in town that had a big exit, a company called Pardot that sold to ExactTarget and later became part of Salesforce.com. So we said, let's make the same quota they had, and my first rep actually came from Pardot. So we put that as our quota, and then the team just started blowing it out of the water. So we're like, alright, well let's change quotas here and make them more reasonable. But I think the big thing is, is on the front end, we do a really amazing job of getting lots of at-bats.

Mm-hmm.

So we've got this sales development team that's broken up from the account executive team. And the sales development team, their number one mission is just set up qualified demos. And so each member of our sales development team is setting up over 40 qualified demos per month, and we now have 8 people on the team that are doing that. And so you can imagine we've got now 300+ demos. This month just closed today, we conducted over 300 demos at Salesloft.

Wow, okay.

Now, we're also closing over a third of those demos. So we closed over 100 deals this month alone. And so we've got a lot of really good kind of science on the front end, and then we've got really talented people that are able to use this rhythmic process of prospector plus cadence in order to get those 300 demos. And then we've got an executive sales team that comes in and closes those demos. So our sales organization, they don't set demos, they come in and close them.

Got it. So this is more like the Aaron Ross predictive revenue type of model, right?

Yeah, so we do subscribe to predictable revenue, and we think we kind of take it to the next level with this sales development model. But the one thing that I didn't tell you is that you still got to execute on the sales side. And so when there's a demo set up, our sales executives, they're peers to the buyers at the organizations they're talking to, and that's a big, big, big important fact. So when they get on the phone, they're looking that VP of sales in the eye, or they're doing it over the phone, they're talking to that VP of sales and they're saying, Hey, what are your revenue goals for this quarter? How do you plan to get there? What would happen if you did this? Okay, well, are you thinking— you think you can get there with what you have in place today? Do you mind if I challenge that assumption? Okay, if you're only doing this much numbers of calls and emails, you're only going to get this many demos, how are you going to convert that to enough deals to get your number? Okay, so what happens if you increase the numbers of calls? What happens if you increase the right number of prospects? And they get on the same page and basically Our sales executives align our offering with our buyers' corporate objectives, which is grow revenue, add more sales, and it's the thing that they're getting pulled into board meetings to say, how did you grow revenue? And they've got to have a tool that helps them to get more prospects so they can get more at-bats.

Got it. And just to let everyone know, we use Salesloft as well, and you actually sold me in an email, and boom, I just converted. But it's a tremendous tool. Our prospectors love it, and we've been getting— it saves so much time, and it just makes us more effective.

We're honored to have you as a client and appreciate your business.

Yeah, man, so anytime. The one thing, the one question I do ask or do have is where do you go about, first of all, finding really great prospectors?

The actual people?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, great question. So, you know, we believe in, like I said, the sales development model. So these are our prospectors, we call them SDRs. We have 3 tiers of SDRs. The first is our inbound sales development rep. This is someone that only handles inbound leads and converts those to qualified demos. The other one is an SDR 1. SDR 1 is the entry-level outbound sales development rep. This person has a base of $37.5K and has a bonus of $70 per demo completed within the month. When they reach their demo goal, Which is $30,000 per month times 9 months, then they get promoted to an SDR 2. SDR 2, bump in base, bump in quota, bump in OTE. And when that rep hits their number in 9 months, they promote to an Account Executive 1. And we can talk about that stuff later.

Um.

But now we gotta look for great people that can fit this model. So the first thing that we do is we have a very important element of our business, which is our core values and our culture at Salesloft. And so the very first thing that's the most important is do they fit those core values? And what we're looking for is the top 1% of prospectors or sales development reps for the following 3 categories: positive, do they keep a positive attitude throughout the day? Supportive, are they always looking to help somebody? And self-starting, are they making it happen on a daily basis? And so we're looking for people that we would classify in the top 1% of those categories. So we ask a bunch of questions about those sorts of things. An example would be, Eric, why did you choose the school that you went to? And then we're going to dig in and say, okay, this is self-starting if he was aggressive and proactive and chose it for a reason. It's not as much if you said, oh, it was the only school in my neighborhood and it was the only one that I got into. That's less proactive and less self-starting. So we ask those questions. Then what we're looking for is someone who, what we call, punches above their weight class. So, we're looking for someone on the come up, right? Someone who's been there at this stage before and it's time for them to take that next step up. And so, we're always looking for that kind of up-and-comer, if you will. We like to recruit from recruiting companies. That's a place where you can find really good folks who are good on the phone, good with email, good with being rejected. We like people who have sold in financial services industries, you know, like insurance sales, broker sales, that sort of thing. Then obviously, if we can find them, we like people who have been in software companies that have sold software that has the same deal size as ours, same volume, that sort of thing. Athletes are great. Comedians are great. We have some amazing women on our team. Salesloft is— over a third of our company is women, and we're really proud about that. We just think that if they fit in those categories, we're a meritocracy. We're going to hire them and give them a shot.

Nice, man.

Cool.

You know, these prospectors, are they mostly younger coming out of college? Is that how it usually looks?

They tend to be millennials, and I think the reason behind that is, is that A, we're looking for people who are digitally savvy. So we're looking for people who can work their way around a Chrome extension, people that can get the shortcuts in Gmail, people that can navigate LinkedIn on the fly really quickly, people that can understand Salesforce.com in 30 minutes. And so what we found is usually people of kind of the millennial age fit that category. We're also paying these people less. I mentioned the base is $37,500. A lot of senior people won't fit in that, and so we tend to find people on the junior end of their career, and it's kind of a junior role.

Got it. Cool. So now let's—

go ahead. I was just going to add one thing. One thing that I would recommend and that has been really helpful for us is to get super involved in the community. So at Salesloft, we're a member of the Atlanta Tech Village. which is the largest coworking facility in the southeastern US. We were the first member of the Village and we're now the largest company there. So we host sales events, we host entrepreneurial events, we host events with 300 people on a monthly basis. And so we're getting the community to come out, we're showing how much we care about the Atlanta tech community, but we're also getting up on stage and saying, hey, we're hiring, let us know what we can do to talk to you. And we're doing cool things with the culture of our business, like for example, I won't name their names, but we have some competitors, and the other day I had the sales development team at our— at the gun range down the street from us at the office, and we had the competitors' logos on the t-shirts, and we were unleashing fully automatic machine guns. So we just have some fun, and people see that, and they want to be part of that kind of environment.

Nice. Cool, man. Cool. So to build upon that question, you know, now we have the prospectors nailed down. So where do you go to find great account executives, you know, the closers?

Well, the best place is your sales development team. So the people that already work for you that are promoted from within.

Mm-hmm.

So that's an awesome place, and we've got some great success stories of promoting from within. But also, getting started early, you kind of have to get out there and find people to go straight into the closer role. And what we did is we looked for similar SaaS companies with a similar product space, a similar purchase price, And a similar contract value. So we ended up hiring 3 folks, 4 folks now, that worked at a company in town called Pardot, which is a marketing automation B2B. We talked about them earlier.

Mm-hmm.

Very similar in the way we've kind of done business. And then we found some folks at some other high-speed tech companies, one called AirWatch that was sold to VMware for $1.5 billion. And after the acquisition, some of the sales folks wanted to get out and start again. And so we found some folks there. So, you know, kind of similar tech companies with a similar type product and ACV.

Okay, and what does this typical salary look like for a closer?

Yeah, so it's not that much higher for the— we have 3 tiers of account executive, AE1, AE2, and AE3. And it's something like the bases are basically like $40,000, $70,000, $90,000, or $40,000, $65,000, $85,000, something like that. But the OTE is $150,000, $175,000, $200,000. So the OTE is obviously a lot higher than it is for the SDRs.

Got it. And just to let the audience know, OTE means on-target earnings. You guys can follow that.

That's right. Yeah, so base plus commission equals OTE.

Perfect. Great. Maybe after we get off this, maybe I can get a checklist from you in terms of the sales team tiers and we can share it with the audience.

Yeah, and one more thing that's important to note is we pay a lot of attention to the ratio of sales development reps to account executives.

Mm-hmm.

And so what we found is, is that if an SDR can set 30 to 40 demos a month, but an AE can conduct 50 to 60, then you need more than one SDR per AE.

Mm-hmm.

So at Salesloft, we currently have 3 SDRs for every 2 AEs.

Okay, got it.

It's important to know that ratio.

What are— so for the SDRs currently right now, you know, what's their expected appointments? What's the target, I guess, appointment set number?

30 per month.

30 per month, okay, got it.

And they're paid— so they're paid like $70 for 0 through 30, $85 for 31 through 40, and $100 for everyone above 40. Yeah, above 40.

A lot of people say, you know, you can't control, you know, the results, right? But what you can control when it comes to sales is the activity. So how many emails is like an SDR expected to send on a daily basis?

Yeah, so we think we can control activity, or can control results through activity for outbound. Inbound's a little trickier, right? Because the marketing team is generating those leads, and then the inbound person has to turn those into demos. And so we don't actually comp our inbound sales development on variable compensation. This is a more junior role. We have a base salary and then we do like fun bonuses when they perform well qualitatively. So it's not as much quantitative performance driven. But yes, with outbound, our outbound sales development reps contact 50 new people each business day.

Uh huh.

So 50 times, what is there, 25 business days per month? On average. So you're looking at, you know, 1,250 people a month that our outbound SDRs are contacting.

Got it, okay.

And they're usually emailing them between 1 to 3 times based on how— when they respond.

Now, interesting note, Ken Krogue from Inside Sales, you know, they have a model where it's like they should be reaching out like 14 times. You know, they have all the numbers to prove it. I mean, what's your take on that? You know, you guys do 3 times, they do like 14.

Yeah, we actually do 7 in 7 days, and 3 of them are email, 4 of them are phone calls.

Got it.

So the way our process works is day 1, the rep will send an email out to the 50 people, and they'll actually, using our cadence tool, can even customize a little piece of each of those emails if they want. And when they hit send, it doesn't go through a transactional email server, it actually uses their own email outbox one by one. So it doesn't have to be CAN-SPAM compliant, have unsubscribe links or addresses. So this is like the most sincere and personal way to do email, but it's also allowing them to do them in batches. So they send these batches out, and then immediately they're going to move on to their other tasks, but later in the day they're going to put their headset on, and inside Cadence they're going to call those 50 people. And when they get one on the phone, they're going to save it automatically to Salesforce, and they're going to log that process. Really easy. They don't actually have to ever go in Salesforce, they just use the Cadence tool.

Mm-hmm.

Then the next couple days, they'll do things like, I'm going to email the people who never replied to the first email and who didn't answer the first phone call. Then they'll do the same thing for the next phone call. You'll see that people keep falling off as they respond back and say something like, hey, I love it. I'm ready to have a conversation, or, hey, take me off your list. I'm not interested anymore. We get an answer from those people is what's happening.

Right.

After the 7 days, over 80% of people are responding.

Wow, 80%. Okay, that's crazy. So Cadence, is that— does it come with Salesloft or is it an add-on?

No, so there's 2 different products. One is Prospector and one is Cadence.

Got it, okay, clear enough. So how did you guys, you know, talking about customer acquisition right here, how did you guys acquire your first 1,000 customers?

Well, we only have 665 customers.

I thought you guys had—

22,000 users.

Oh, okay.

665 clients.

Let me rephrase. How did you get your first 100 clients?

Okay, so I'll talk about the first 10 first and then we can talk about the first 100. So the first 10 were the hardest, obviously. I acquired them, me and 2 developers. So it was just, we would build things and we would see who wanted them and we had some free tools that people were signing up for, so we had some inbound interest. A lot of relationships in the Atlanta technology community. That we were able to leverage. And so we just hustled and grinded to get our first 10. After we got our first 10, we hired a salesperson. This was a guy who came from Pardot. He had run— he was the first sales development rep there and had run the sales development team. And so he came on board and then he hired an account executive, and those 2 gentlemen got us to 100 customers by taking inbound leads and converting them into closed deals.

Wow.

After that, we moved to the outbound model and started really filling the funnel.

Got it, okay. Now, these initial inbound leads that you got, I mean, how did you get these inbound leads?

We had a free product called jobchangealerts.com. We no longer have that product. And about 1,000 people a month were signing up for that product. And we would say, hey, thanks for signing up for the product. We have some other tools that we'd like to show you. Do you mind taking some time to have a call with us?

Got it. Okay, perfect. What is, or what's one big struggle you faced while growing the business?

It's really hard to find software developers. So we did a really good job up to the first 7, or 6, I'm sorry. And now it's become really hard because there's a lot of demand for software developers and they're not always aggressively looking for the best companies. So for example, it's interesting, we'll have a software developer that comes in to interview and they won't ask us questions like, how much money do you have in the bank? What's your revenue run rate? What's your churn rate? How many customers did you add this quarter? What's your growth rate? They don't ask me that question. They're just like, what's your tech stack? And I'm like, come on, ask questions about the business too. Don't just hone in on that one thing. So getting developers that are very technical and skilled but also can align with the metrics and the and the mission of the business is very hard. So that's one. Pricing is hard. I think it's always hard to figure out what price to charge your customers. So we've gone through some challenges of, you know, is it annual only, or do we do month to month? Do we charge based on emails, or do we charge based on users? So we've gone back and forth trying to figure that out. I think pricing is a really tough one.

Mm-hmm.

If you don't establish the culture up front, you'll have trouble there. And then when you do, even when you do establish the culture, you always have to keep working to maintain it. And so culture is super important. But yeah, there's challenges with everything. There's always challenges.

With you coming up with the core values, do you think a lot of that embodies you as the CEO, or does it embody like— who does it embody exactly when you first come up with something like that?

Yeah, for us it embodies me, a gentleman named Rob Foreman, and another gentleman named Tim Doerr. We were the first 3 people to be running Salesloft. They're my co-founders. What we did was we would always think, what are the things that we honor and value, and how can we make sure that we hire people that have those sort of traits? That's when we honed in on the positive, supportive, and self-starting traits. Cool.

Got it. Okay. Because I think having a simple set of core values is great, but I look at some other companies and it's like this laundry list of core values and some of them they don't really embody and I think it just becomes BS after that.

Yeah. I mean, the cool thing about ours is that, like you said, they're simple and you can ask anyone at the company, what are our core values? And they'll say them like that with a smile on their face. And if you've got 5 or 10 or 15 or sentences, You won't even be able to get the CEO to remember it.

Yep.

So, you know, having these positive, supportive, and self-starting core values, so simple, it makes a huge difference.

Got it. Cool. And I couldn't agree more, actually. And let's shift gears a little bit into the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals. What can you say about that?

So what's happening is that the sales professional is moving behind a computer. You know, I don't think of salespeople as inside versus outside, field versus that, strategic versus enterprise. What I think about is you have salespeople who spend a small percentage of their time behind a computer, and you have salespeople that spend a larger percentage of their time on the computer. And guess what? The ones that are on the computer are more effective. They cost less if they're not traveling around, not doing dinners and golf events, and quite frankly, If you want to put me out in the field or put me anywhere, I'm going to be better off with my machine as my counterpart. So we think of the Inside Sales Revolution as the Iron Man concept. It's Tony Stark plus Jarvis, right? So it's salespeople plus Google Chrome. And we love this concept of the sales superhero who's got his extension on his side to tackle the challenges of the sales world. And so American Association of Inside Sales Professionals is totally focused on that inside sales model. And personally, I've been involved. I love the organization. Got introduced to it by a close friend of mine named Steve Richard, who's an amazing sales guy if anyone's out there and wants to learn about top-of-the-funnel strategies to really move your business. And the folks that run that group are unbelievable, Larry and Bob. And about 2 months ago, I became the president of the Atlanta chapter of the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals. So we do a lot of events in Atlanta, bring out inside sales pros and bring out outside salespeople and then show them what we're all about and have them connect. There's a good kind of culture of recruiting. Like I said, if you want to recruit, build community. That's one of the other things that we're doing with that.

Nice. Let's talk about that for a second. Building a community, I've heard that from a few people in the past. How do you go about— you said you have these events with 300 people. What's one way for someone starting something up to really just start building a community?

Yeah, so my company Salesloft had the pleasure of being a part of an accelerator called Techstars back in summer of 2012. We were at the headquarters office in Boulder, Colorado alongside folks like Brad Feld and David Cohen. When we were out there, we learned of this event called the Boulder-Denver New Tech Meetup. At the Boulder-Denver New Tech Meetup, they'd have 5 entrepreneurs step up on stage and for 5 minutes give a demo of their product and then do 5 minutes of Q&A afterwards. It wasn't stuffy sports coats and revenue projections and popcorn shrimp and trying to sell investors on your product. It was raw. It was all about the community, it was all about the entrepreneurs, it was driven by the entrepreneurs in order to make amazing things happen and bring people together.

Uh huh.

So we took that idea and that concept and brought it to Atlanta when we got home from Boulder. We said, we're going to start something similar, and a friend of mine, John Birdsong, he led the charge. He was an employee of Salesloft at the time, and we decided that we were going to start the Atlanta Startup Village. What that is, is that same exact concept. 5 entrepreneurs, 5 minutes, story and demo, 5 Q&A. We did it in a couple of accelerator places around Atlanta, and now it's like over 300, 400 people sign up every month. It's the first Monday of the month— or last Monday of the month, and it's just been amazing.

Wow. Okay, well, I think that's a whole other subject to dive into, but I think that's a good starting point. You talked about it being very hard to hire talent, so I imagine it's pretty hard in in Atlanta when everyone's saying, oh, you need to go build a company in Silicon Valley. So, you know, you've managed to bring in people from Pardot and these other companies. I mean, where do you find these people, first of all? You know, the Pardot people, do they just fall out of the sky? Like, where do they come from? These are experienced people, man.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it's funny, you know, as much as I complain, I don't think I complain near as much as the people who are actually in Silicon Valley because there's so much competition for talent there. In Atlanta, we've got amazing educational institutions like Georgia Tech, which is a top engineering school. I think it's like number 2 in computer science nationwide right now. So it's unbelievable. You've got Emory, you've got University of Georgia, which are great colleges. We also have some great other assets. We have one of the largest Fortune 500 ecosystems, companies like Delta, Home Depot, UPS, Coca-Cola, and there's a ton more.

Mm-hmm.

We also have amazing It's the number 1 airport in the world. Hartsfield International is the number 1 airport in the world, so we can travel anywhere direct for usually pretty cheap. That's really awesome. We've got really good things in the city that bring people together. We just stay connected. LinkedIn is one of the greatest places to find people. I started my company inside the Pardot offices, so it was kind of like shooting fish in a barrel.

There you go.

Yeah, we love that kind of culture. What they did was so amazing. It's just all about finding the type of people that you want to bring on board. When you need to, don't— we went a long time without using recruiters and probably went a little bit too long than we should have, but it was the scrappy entrepreneur in me. But we're now using recruiters to find folks. If you get good recruiters, they're worth their weight in cash. There's a bunch of different ways. It's almost like there's not one silver bullet. You've got to try all different types. It's all bound.

I agree. All right, so yeah, I used to be really against recruiters as well, but I mean, they've been a blessing. So I think that's the one takeaway. You get that from other entrepreneurs on this show too. So Dreamforce, you know, you talked a little bit about that earlier. I mean, it seems like a lot of people in the software as a service world, Dreamforce is like always the conference to go to. I mean, how, you know, why is that and how has Dreamforce benefited you guys?

Yeah, I mean, everybody's out there. There were 140 sponsors this year, and over 40 of those were clients of ours. We're looking at 40 clients that have booths at a show. The number one thing that I did, I walked around and I met them. I said, hey, thanks for being a customer. How can we be more valuable? What are the 2 things you'd like to see in the product? How's your team grown? Is there introductions that I can make? That was the number one most important thing for me.

Yeah.

But then we had a booth as well this year and had 3 or 4 speaking opportunities at the show, so that was great. Ran a panel on sales development, spent some time with my good friend Ken Krogh and got up on stage with him at the Inside Sales Acceleration events at Dreamforce. But the coolest thing was by far, and I think it was the marketing hack of the year at Dreamforce this year, is our director of marketing Brought a Marc Benioff impersonator to the show, and he went around with his personal bodyguard and PR agent and did over 30 selfies, ended up donating a can, meeting the firemen, going up on stage at one point in time. And the second day after doing this for 48 hours, the real Marc Benioff and his security came up and said, hey, we know that you've been impersonating Marc for the last 2 days. If you stay right here, we'll bring him to you. He wants to meet you. Benioff came out to our booth and met our fake Benioff impersonator, met the other members of our team, took a bunch of selfies, ended up tweeting it out. If you look at Benioff's tweet stream from Dreamforce, there's a bunch of tweets of Salesloft in there. It was a pretty fun marketing hack that has gotten thousands and thousands of shares on all the social networks that we've published the blog post to it. If you want to find something fun, type in marketing hack Benioff impersonator into Google.

I love it.

Wow.

You know, just to let everyone know as well, the SalesLoft blog is also an incredible resource for learning sales stuff too, so I recommend you check that out. We'll leave that in the notes too if you wanted to add that note.

Thank you very much.

You're welcome. 2 more questions from my side. What's one piece of advice you'd give to your 25-year-old self?

Ooh, it's the culture stuff. It's the— when you wake up in the morning, if you don't love what you're doing, if you don't have an environment where your people love what they're doing, start over. Go back to square one, because life's too short to not love what you're doing. Unfortunately, we talk to way too many people that just aren't passionate about their day-to-day, and that's not cool. This is 2014, about to be 2015. There's no time to do what you hate. So stop doing what you hate and do what you love because that's what's going to make you successful, passionate, and awesome.

Love it. What's one must-read book you'd recommend to the audience?

Just one, okay. So that's a tough one. I think if I'm going to just pick one book, it's going to be Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence Others. Because at its core, it teaches you how to be human and how to love one another and serve other people and respect them for who they are and treat them with the utmost love and honor. I think that book.

Yeah.

I'm going to cheat and add some other books.

Sure.

I absolutely love Tony Robbins. If you get a chance to go see him live on stage, it is awesome. Get his tapes, put them in your ear, and go run a 10K, and you'll run it faster than you ever have. There's a book called— this is another book, a book that Steve Richard introduced to me. It's called RSVP Selling. This is a fantastic book by Tony Hughes. I think it's called The Joshua Story as well. That's a great book. There's so many good books out there that I can recommend, but those are a few.

Got it. Cool. Just to kind of piggyback off the Tony Robbins thing, if everyone just Googles Tony Robbins Tim Ferriss podcast, if you listen to those 2 episodes, You guys will get hooked because they talk about investing at a level, I think at a level everyone should at least try to understand or aspire to be at. I actually lied. I had one question I missed here. What's one productivity hack you can share?

Here's a cool one. This is gonna be more applicable to— I think this will work for anyone. Twitter is an awesome resource for information, but it is very, very noisy. Especially now with all the ads that run in the stream on the mobile app, and, you know, it's just really tough. And so I see a lot of sales teams, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of marketers spend too much time on Twitter. What we've done is we've taken the most important people on Twitter, just the ones I want to hear every tweet about, and we built this little tool called Birdhouse. You can find it at birdhouse.salesloft.com.

Awesome.

It's an absolutely free tool, and what we do is, is that I'll take the top 12 VIPs on Twitter that I don't ever want to miss a tweet from. These may be big customers that I want to close, they may be investors I want to talk to, they may be content marketers that I don't want to miss a beat on, and I sign them up with Birdhouse, and then every single morning I get an email and it just summarizes their tweets from the last 24 hours. So, it's one look. I don't ever have to go to Twitter if I don't want to, and I can get the summary of the most important tweets by the people I care the most about via my email inbox. I love it.

So, Birdhouse— I'm sure if you just Google Birdhouse Sales—

Yeah, it's birdhouse.salesloft.com.

Perfect.

And the cool thing this will do, Eric, for the salespeople out there, it will actually connect to your salesforce.com system. And automatically find the people that are most important to you, follow them on Twitter, and then email you with updates on those people. So it's an email alert system for the tweets of the most important people you care about.

Got it. I love it. I love— good thing I didn't miss that question. All right, so Kyle, first of all, thanks so much for doing this. Everyone, this is Kyle Porter from Salesloft. If you have a sales team, you better make sure you check out Salesloft, otherwise you are missing out. Thanks, Kyle.

Eric, thanks so much for having me. You're doing a great job, and keep it up, man.

Thank you.

An offer for all the subscribers and people watching this, if you sign up for the free version of Salesloft Prospector, you'll get an autoresponder from me that says, hey, thanks for signing up. If you hit reply and say, Kyle promised me some free shit, then we'll give you 50 free credits for being a part of this show and for watching this presentation.

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