10 learnings on High Velocity Sales to SMB with Gorgias' CEO and VPS (LIVE Workshop Wednesday)

Great long weekend if you are US-based. Thank you so much for joining on July 5th. We do really appreciate it. And as I say week after week, we are here rain or shine, July 5th or not. So thank you for joining, and we are going to get things kicked off today with Romaine— excuse me, I'm clearly having some July 5th issues— Romaine and Asif from Gorgias. We will be discussing 10 learnings on high-velocity sales to SMB. I'm excited to get things kicked off today, and welcome to my friends Romain and Asif.

Thanks a lot for having us, Devine. We're excited for this conversation.

Yeah, thanks so much. We're excited too. We are, as always, tight on time on these. I feel like every week it just gets longer and longer, the Q&A portion. So remember to drop your questions in early in the chat. I will be messaging you and asking if you want to ask your questions out loud. So put those questions in the chat early so we get to you. With that, I have a few questions to kick things off with Romain and Asif. Are you two ready?

Let's do it.

Ready.

Alright, first question. How would you define what you do in your day-to-day role? We can start with Romain on this one.

Sure. So I'm CEO at Gorgets. Good morning, everybody. So on my part, I think I have two primary responsibilities. Number one is to set the direction in which we are going with the company and make sure it's the right one. And then the second one is make sure we have the best possible team to execute on the vision that we set for ourselves. So that's recruiting, but also growing internal talent. So yeah, that's my job.

Great, okay. And then Asif, what is your job? We have the CEO here to fact-check what your job is, so make sure you're right.

So I'd say there's two functions. So the first one is sourcing pipeline through our partnerships channels. And then the second part is making sure we're closing that pipeline. So yeah, title is VP of Sales and Partnerships, if you didn't figure it out from that first part. Yeah, and really just making sure that we're doing what Roman said there, organizing a good team, making sure that we have a good plan from quarter to quarter, and that we can execute on what we set forward.

Great. Okay. And then our next question, we'll see if you both align on this answer. What project are you working on today you're most excited about?

Zeef, you want to go?

Roman, you want to start with? I'll let you start. I think there's one overlapping one and then there's maybe one not overlapping one. So what do you got?

So on my part, I'm working on the $250 million AR vision for the company. So we are at $43 million in revenue today. And so we thinking about like, what is it that we wanna focus on next year? What is it that we wanna focus on the year after that? And so I think it's pretty exciting because it's a little bit like working at Saastr, I would assume, is like you, You like see where you are, you look around, like you see like what are the different things that people do, like doing enterprise, doing multi-products, that type of stuff, like going in new verticals. And then you assess like what makes the most sense for the company. So yeah, that's the thing I'm working on right now.

Awesome. Really exciting time. Asif, how about you?

Yeah, so definitely some overlap, especially on that multi-product side. I think it's creating a lot of excitement. And then another project that I'm really excited about is building out a pipeline where we can see our partners' TAM. And that's going to allow us to generate more referrals from our partners and kind of reshape the way we think about and work on, on partnerships.

Great. Okay. Last question. In the last 12 months, what's the hardest thing you have worked on?

Oh, for me, that's definitely been taking over partnerships. So as we'll find out as we go through here, I spent the first 4 years at Gorgias in just in sales, and the last year I started working on partnerships, and it's, it's very different sourcing pipeline versus closing pipeline. A lot of very specific things to the industry, to the vertical of partnerships that it's it's been a little bit harder to catch on to than I had initially expected, but it's been a fun challenge. And I feel like every time you feel like, okay, I've learned everything, it's like, oh, there's a bunch more stuff that I still need to learn. So it's been a challenge, but it's been fun.

Yeah, love the honesty there. I'm sure we'll have questions on that in the chat. All right, Roman.

Yeah, and by the way, I'm seeing lots of people from the e-commerce ecosystem on this call. So hey, everyone that we meet at conferences once in a that's why it's cool to see that this e-commerce SaaS world is emerging. On my part, I think it's hiring leaders. As CEO, my job is to make sure we have the best possible exec team. And so I spend a large amount of time on speaking with everybody in the space and hiring. I think what's interesting about it is a little bit like, it's not high velocity sales, it's more like slow velocity sales, but you still speak with a decent number of prospects and close some demos and then move them through the pipeline. I think what's interesting is that you get to meet some really smart people and learn about what's working at other companies. But it's hard, it's pretty intense, and I need to be right when you make the hires. So I would say that's the hardest part of the job.

Yeah, I am sure lots of questions are going to come in on that as well. Well, with that, I will hand it over to you both to start your presentation. As a reminder, everyone, keep your questions in the chat. I will be responding to you and Q&A will come at the end of the session. But with that, 10 learnings on high-velocity sales.

Awesome. Thank you, Caitlin.

Of course.

Okay. So let's jump into it. I think just some general background before we get into it. Uh, Gorgeous is a company that provides a customer service platform for e-commerce merchants. We start— well, Roman started about 8 years ago. I joined onto the company over just over 5 years ago. And then we're gonna talk about what we've done to build out our sales team, some of the things that we've done just as a company in order to get to where we're at today and kind of where we're going a little bit and based on those, those learnings that we've had. So yeah, looking forward to going through the presentation. If there's terms in here or anything that might be too industry specific, Like Caitlin said, just put the questions in the chat and then we can go through and clarify. Roman, do you have anything you want to add before we jump in?

Nope, all good.

All right, cool. So I'm Asif, I'm VP of Sales Partnerships alongside Roman, who is our founder and CEO. So today we're going to talk about the 10 learnings of high velocity sales. We have focus, hiring, making superheroes, deal stages, keeping things simple, and then listening to your sales leader. That might be a little controversial one, but we'll talk about it. Tracking everything, close rates, and then experiments and knowing your levers, like which ones you can pull and when. Uh, so let's, let's jump right into it. So focus is one of the most important things that I, I've learned over the last 5 years here. And it was really painful at first, especially I see a lot of people from the ecosystem, like Roman said, when you, when you want to go after the entire market, it's easy to get really excited. And so you need to know what are the problems you're solving, who are you solving for, and then continue to keep refining it so you have a very efficient funnel. And this is not just having a focus on your TAM or your customers. So the first one that I think all businesses should really question is the pain. What is it they're trying to solve for? And is, is it a problem that's hurting enough for people to change solutions, to go through switching costs and to pay for? And if you're not focused here, you might have your engineering team working on various different integrations for various different platforms. And if, like, if you're in e-commerce, there's 15 different platforms you can support. The next one is the industry. So again, if you didn't focus on, on the pain, you don't focus on the industry, now you're really going to be all over the place. And for us, it's not just e-commerce that we're solving for, it's e-commerce and customer service. And then from there, narrow down a little bit more so that way your entire team is, is focused, which also includes your P&E team. So that's gonna be platform. Let's focus on Shopify. Let's focus on all of our partners, many of which are in this call, building integrations with them that are going to deliver more value or, and unlock more potential features so you can solve more of that pain that's at the top. And then again, finally, the persona. So for us, we decided let's focus in even smaller. Let's talk about just the customer service manager, maybe the director of e-commerce, depending on how big the company is we're selling into. And then finally, what's not mentioned on here, but I think most companies do already, is the segment. Are you SMB? Are you mid-market? Are you enterprise? Don't try to go through and tackle everything at once because it's going to just have too many irons in the fire and you're going to end up spreading your team thin. It'll create fatigue, burnout. And so keeping a good focus on where you're going and the market that you're serving is one of the most important things that I've noticed. And I know a lot of people are thinking, oh, that's a tiny TAM, but it's better to get traction and have efficiency in your system when you have a smaller TAM than it is to spread yourself too thin. Roman, is there anything you want to add on this one?

Nope, sounds good. I think, yeah, you nailed it on the focus piece. Like on our part, like we have this tiny TAM where we have like really high market share, like around like 30% market share. And so the fact that we had a pretty strong focus on this market made us successful in the early days with the right partners, for example.

So that leads to another one. I'll leave this one over to Roman since he hired the first AE, which was me. So he's got some good insights here.

Yeah, so fun story here is like the first AE was Azif, and I think one of the key benefits is that you grew with the team and therefore we had like a pretty strong alignment. We'll talk about this in a later slide. But one thing I want to stress is, so here the topic is high velocity sales, which is very different from like typical sales in SaaS where you you hire like industry veterans who are like really good at selling SaaS products. In our case, like the ACV is 3.5K, which means like if you wanna make the quota math work, you need to have your AEs like close like 25 to 40 customers a month, which is like a lot of demos, like typically 80 demos per month. So that's, if you just do the math on like 20 workdays, that's quite intense. So that means that we hired a specific type of, of AI. So you can see on the slides like our values for, for Gorgets, which are, which are pretty specific to us. But then in terms of profile, like what you would expect typically is to hire for experience. In our case, like we hired for energy and ability to ask questions to customers. What's interesting in the case of Gorgets is that even though it's very high velocity, our customers loved to speak with people who understand the product. And given that it's low ACVs, you cannot afford to have a solution engineer, like an SDR is gonna qualify the lead. It's like you need everything to happen with one person. So that means this person needs to be pretty savvy and understand the merchant quite well. So that was a strong requirement. So we hired people who were more like on the selling is helping approach of, hey, I'm gonna understand the problem of my customers that I can provide solutions to these problems and not so much on the like being a pure, like somebody who's really good at convincing. I think we would rather have people who are really good at asking questions and understand problems than people who are really good at convincing. So I think that was a good learning on top of the full stack elements. So we hired people who have a pretty good understanding of the product and all the different features we have, but also of the industry. And I think one thing that helped here is also to go to trade shows and events so that then AEs can have exposure on the whole ecosystem and can then become quite full stack. One thing I want to talk about is the last point on this slide, which is the not required SaaS experience. Again, it might be quite contrary, but our best AEs, like I think the number one AE used to sell boat tours. The second best AE was selling juice in a shop. Like it's like very, very different from what you would expect. But I think I think one thing that was really specific about them is that the— speaking of the AE who was selling juice before, like he was the one who knew the most about all the types of juices they had in that shop. And so he was like very product savvy, asking lots of questions, very driven. And that's the type of attitude you need if you wanna be taking like 80 demos a month and having like all these conversations with customers that it requires like a level of intensity that's almost like direct-to-consumer-like. And so we optimize for that type of profile that has been working quite well for us. And so that means you also need to invest on the coaching afterwards because obviously these people don't know the industry. So that's why going to events is helpful and coaching them on knowing the product, knowing how to answer to the most common support questions was quite important, specifically in the early days. So yeah, we went completely unconventional here and that has served us quite well from the first few AEs we have to the 20+ AEs we have today.

Yeah, I completely agree with everything Roman just said there. Sometimes the, the people that are doing things just in an industry that might not be the same are going to unlock a lot of value. And when you give them the tools that they need to be successful, which we're going to talk about on the next slide, they're going to take everything they've learned in previous places, and it can be quite surprising to see what they're able to produce. So the next thing is, is using your tech stack to make your AE superhero. So as Roman mentioned, it's 20 to 40 deals that AEs are closing every month. And so if you take a typical AE in the mid-market, they're likely needing 5, maybe 10 deals a month in order to hit a quota. And so what we had to do was find ways to continue to automate and make the lives of the AEs as easy as possible and give them as many tools as possible so they can fly through demos, provide a good quality demo, a good quality follow-up, and then get somebody to the next step. And so for us, we use data and found out that the most likely step to get somebody to convert is to get them a trial and then to plug in certain channels and to use the product. So automating as much as you can, especially in the early days, is going to help with this. And what we did is we actually hired somebody on our growth ops team and rewind 5 years ago, they, they sat next to me and it was everything I was doing. It's like, okay, how can we make this more efficient? And it was building out automated email follow-ups that would send a notification as a reminder to somebody to come, building out templates for post-demo follow-ups, building an outbound engine is something that I think is really important. And so, so many teams are hiring SDR, BDR teams and It's, it's really tough to make that work in SMB sales. The unit economics don't really line up. And if you have a $3,000 ACV, you have to find ways to become more efficient. And so there's lots of tools out there that will allow you to enrich your CRM, take the variables from your CRM that you want to inject into your email copy and put them into a mass outbound campaign and sequence. And then instead of calling everybody that's in there, Call the ones that are engaged with your emails, call the ones that are, are opening your Loom videos, um, call the people that are clicking on links and maybe not converting. So rethink about how you do some of the things, especially outbound, to build a machine that's going to generate all of these demos for your AEs and don't necessarily have them sitting there outbounding everybody, especially if you can't predict which plan or what amount, uh, a specific deal is going to close on. And then the deal stage movements is something that I think is very important as well, which we're gonna talk about on a few slides. But make sure you're doing and automating as much of this as possible, because it's going to allow you to capture that data, and that data is going to be super useful when it comes to making decisions, writing your retros, and building a path for the next quarter. Roman, anything you want to add on this one?

Yeah, I think you nailed it. I just want to maybe stress the importance of this. The reality is like when you have 4 demos a day and then you spend like 3, 4 hours writing emails, like if you on top of this need to do lots of mundane tasks, it's just exhausting. Like you're gonna do it for like 3, 4 months and then you're gonna get tired. So I think it's pretty important that we have this partnership with us that, as Yves was mentioning, to automate as much as possible. And I think one of the things I learned personally at the beginning here is that sometimes you have your Salesforce admin who's gonna do some initial setup and then the setup is up and running and you're happy and you're gonna use it Is it for good? And I don't believe as much in this approach because I think it's more of constantly refining what is it that AEs are doing that's taking them time and finding ways to automate those things. So I would strongly argue for having some pretty strong tech enablement here to service what Azif just described.

Absolutely. So these next two slides are kind of the dos and don'ts, I would say, from my perspective and opinion. For when I talk to other people that are starting companies and they're trying to build out their sales team, make the first sales hire. And so we're gonna talk about deal stages and making process simple. So the first one on the deal stages, deal stages should be as objective as possible. There should not be a negotiation between a manager and an AE on which stage a deal should be in. And for SMB sales, this works. If you're in mid-market or enterprise and there's many stakeholders, it probably won't work. So for us, we have these 5 primary deal stages. The first one is Demo Booked, and this means that somebody has scheduled the meeting— sorry for the sirens in the back— somebody has scheduled a meeting, but the meeting has not been held. Internal Review means the meeting has been held, but they have not created an account, which we've defined as the next step we want them to take. Account Created just means that they've created this account. Deals can move forward, but they can't move back. And closed won means the paid date is known and closed lost is manual. So everything in here is automated. So there's not these long conversations and pipeline reviews with managers and AEs going through their pipeline saying, oh, I think this deal belongs here, it should go there. And it, it avoids that, which tends to be something that bogs down a lot of sales leaders and also ICs. So I definitely recommend creating objective deal stages. Use your properties in HubSpot or in Salesforce to capture the info that you want and that you want to use, but don't make everything a deal stage. Use this to, to find out, gather data and find out what exactly are the steps that customers take in order to close. For us, that main one was account created and, and push people through the funnel and then work with your enablement team to get people to go from one to another. So this is something that I strongly recommend. Roman and I put this in place 5 years ago. I don't think it's changed much since. And that leads to the next point. But before I jump to that, Roman, is there anything you'd like to add on this one?

Yeah, maybe just one thing is we can talk about the deal stages that did not work. So here you have like the final product of like what's working with our sales team. We tried a stage called a contact layer where like the AE would like put the deal for a while and say, hey, like I know I've been in touch with them. But I think I can reignite the deal. And so while in theory it sounds like a good idea to say, hey, like I'm an AE, I'm gonna keep some pipeline warm and I'm gonna try to like reignite this pipeline. I think one of the issues we had with that is like we just assumed ownership of those deals that we had lost or that were work in progress still or taking more time. And we thought we were in a good spot, but the issue was more like It was almost like a dead zone where we sometimes, somebody would follow up with some of these deals and resurrect some of them. But because of that, we didn't do a good job at nurturing the deals and keeping them engaged in a programmatic way. And again, we're talking about high velocity sales, low ACVs. So that means it's really hard to actually do your 80 demos plus engage with your dozens or hundreds of deals that you've lost or that are still on hold. So I would strongly recommend that After the deal has been through the sales cycle, like there might be some exceptions, as you can probably speak to them better than I do, but like maybe the very large deals, you still want the AEs to remain engaged with the person. But for like the 3K, 5K, 6K deals, like these ones that you want to have like some marketing nurture on them to keep them warm, invite them to your events, invite them to webinars like this one. So yeah, I think that's another thing we learned about the stages that don't work.

We have a question in the chat. I'm going to interject quickly about account created. Can you go over exactly what this means? In this case, a user action versus an internal sales process action. Just some questions clarifying what that means.

Yeah. So at Gorgeous, account created means they've created a trial, which then gives them a subdomain. So they have an account. Because now the conversation becomes more of getting the 5 checkboxes in there. Like, did they connect an email? Did they connect the chat? Did they connect the social channels? So on and so forth. And so once you've done this, you, once they've created the account, now the conversation switches to getting them to connect the things that you found value in during your discovery. And so it just tells us they've taken an action on their side. So the prospect side in order to try to experiment and learn from the product.

Great. Okay. If there are any more questions on that, please let me know, but I will let you get back to it.

Yeah. One other thing that just to cover on this slide, as Raman was going through it, I thought about is having clear SLAs on each of these, so service level agreement from your, your AEs to your sourcing partners. So on demo book, for example, a deal should not be in demo book for more than 2 weeks past demo date. So if the demo happened, you're following up with them, you're, you're, or if the demo did not happen, the AE should follow up with them. There should be complete ownership there in order to get them rebooked. On internal review, we say it's if you did not get the next meeting booked, you need to contact the prospect every 3 days. And then for account created, it's same as internal review. And then close lost is the one that's manual there. So you would just move it. There's not an SLA on that one. Alright. And the second part of the dos and don'ts that I see so often when I'm talking to other folks that are trying to get sales started, that like kind of their first 100 customers. So the first thing is make it easy, especially for your AEs, for the customer. So allow monthly subscriptions. I know a lot of people have strong feelings about this. I think monthly subscriptions is validating, especially if you want to find out if you have product market fit. Fit. If people aren't using your product, maybe if you have some problems on your onboarding side or success side, it's going to allow you to, to see those faster. Allow people to pay by credit card. I know there's fees that go on top of this, but early on, I think it's really important to make sure you allow people to pay in which, like, a way which is easier to them. This also avoids going to other stakeholders. So if somebody has a limit on their card, which is $1,000 a month, That's, that's fine. You can close this deal. But now if you need to go to finance because they need to wire money or go through whatever procedure they have internally, you can kind of avoid this step. So make it easy for the customer, make it easy for your AEs. The second thing is comp plans. So AEs, they obviously are motivated by their compensation. And so usually people have a 60/40 split or a 50/50 split on the base to variable. So you need to make it easy for them to know how much they're going to make from a deal perspective all the way to like if they hit a $100K on a $60K quota. So making it clear to them, reviewing it with them on their monthly so they know exactly where they stand, what the expectation is, and then what they're going to be compensated on each is very important. And then implement an accelerator. So it's maybe 15% on every dollar closed of AR. So doing this is going to allow them to become more motivated and it's going to push them. So once, once they've hit quota, they're not gonna roll anything into a second month or a third month or a fourth month. So just build a plan that's going to incentivize people to, to close all the deals that come into the pipeline and work above and beyond just to, to make sure that they're getting there. And then the last thing, this might be more for marketing, but reducing your fields on your intake form. So Uh, we've put so many different fields on the intake forms, but every time we do it, we remove a few because when we add too many, we'll find that the drop-off becomes higher. And then that's going to result in SDRs or AEs making a ton of calls. So when you build an efficient stack, you can take advantage of that efficiency by having AEs do the discoveries with everybody. There's no need to have an SDR jump into every single call if you're staying focused and you've built a high-velocity sales engine. So use tools to track your drop-off for sure. And if you find that it's too high, reduce the number of questions that are there, or maybe make them very simple and drop-down so people can go through it quickly. And then don't leave everything to the SDR. Pass things to the AE so they can get a swing at it and they can find out, like, maybe if it's not the right decision maker that's on, they can just reposition and say like, oh, can you bring this person from a quick LinkedIn search? Roman, do you have anything on making it simple? I think we've probably worked on this 5 years. There's a lot I'm missing here.

I think all good. Yeah, I think it's about iterating on the questions that you ask and forcing yourself not to have too many questions. Yeah, absolutely. Because again, it's high velocity, so you need to make sure it's high impact.

The next one here I'll leave for Roman, but this would be the third of the dos and don'ts. I find so many people that Well, go out and hire a sales leader and then they don't listen to them at all. And I think it's very much a two-way street. So Roman, I'll let you take this one.

Absolutely. Just before we dive in, just answering some of the questions we had on the chat. So one of the questions was what's happening with self-service, like people don't speak with sales. So what we do is we have a bot that gets assigned to the deal and then sometimes the AE would pick one of the deals that's assigned to the bot. Like let's say in our case, like Glossier, is signed up, we want that to be assigned to an AE and make sure that they pay attention to it. Then there was another question in terms of how we do scoring. So we score, that's a little bit like what Azzy was saying at the beginning, we enrich the domains based on whether or not they're on Shopify in our case, and then based on how much volume they have on their website, that type of stuff, so that we are able to see which are the deals with the highest potential. So that's how we do it. I don't believe we do it based on product engagements, but Azif, correct me if I'm wrong here.

It booted me out there just for a second. I just came to correct me if I'm wrong. Oh yeah.

I was wondering on the lead scoring, we just do it based on what we know about the company, right? We don't do it based on the behavior of this company in the product today.

It's on both. So once somebody has gone to account created and if they're assigned to self-service, if they've taken the step to connect their email, then we'll work with them and it creates a flag to the SDR that paired with the company data.

Perfect. Cool. And there was the last question on the value of annual deals. So we see roughly like 10 points of extra IRR on annual deals. So people paying annual, So obviously, like, we want to leave people buy the way they want, like, to Azif's point, like, keep it simple. But we still see, like, a pretty strong benefit here. And also, I think that also incentivizes us to have a CSM who builds a long-term relationship versus something that's only for a few months. Cool. All right. So with those things being said, let's talk about the relationship with the sales leader. So I've been fortunate to work with Azif those last 5 years. And I think one of the things that have been valuable and that helped us be successful is the relationship we've been able to build and the level of trust we've had. So it was pre-COVID, so we spent a lot of time together in the office. And I think one thing that's specific about us at Gorgias is that we very much into the data and the automation. And that's not something that you find in candidates very often. So either you hire really well, you find the people who exactly have what you're looking for, which is hard, or you hire people who are curious to learn, which I think is easier and it's more of an investment upfront, but then pays big dividends over time. So in our case, the first thing we did with Azif was to spend a ton of time together building this engine over the years. And I think that allowed us to align on the way we think and on the principles we used to operate, which was pretty powerful. Second point is to have a lot of trust so that obviously the person who leads sales here feels empowered to do what they think is best. So that was like setting up the CRM the right way, like different things we talked about, like testing different types of pitch, testing different types of motions here, testing do we need SDRs, do we want to try outbound, like you want to empower your sales leadership to do all these things. And then another area is that I think there are 2 types of VP of Sales to CEO relationships. The CEO can be super hands-off and say, "Do your thing, I trust you," which I think is good, but I think you get the most benefits when you have some challenge between the two. So the VP of Sales pushing the CEO to do more, to take the company in a certain direction, and then vice versa on the VP of Sales, the CEO challenging the VP of Sales to try new experiments. And I think like one of the things that has been good in our relationship is that we constantly like speaking with folks in the audience or folks in the ecosystem to learn about like what is it that they do that's successful. And so that allows us to like bring new ideas to the table and then try them for our sales process, which I think has been quite healthy. So yeah, I would insist on the value of the VP of Sales to CEO relationship. That's where I stand, but as if Uh, yeah, anything to add on your side?

I, I completely agree with what you said there. And one, one other thing that I— it sounds like it's like, oh, this perfect symbiotic relationship where like the, the communication needs to be good, but there should be a little bit of friction. And I will say like Roman always is challenging me. And, uh, one, one of the first examples of this is in the early days, I, I was like, Roman, I feel like you're never listening to me. Like this, this this needs to change. And Roman would say like, oh, you need to provide data to back up your arguments here. And so this again was before COVID so we just got some pizzas and beers and then we sat there for 2 hours. You taught me how to write SQL queries and then, you know, it made the relationship much more smooth because every time I was like, oh, I have a hunch, I validate my hunch with the data and then I provide a dashboard. It's like, I think we should do X, Y, or Z and here's the data to back it. So Also invest in your leaders. Like if there's something that's very specific to you, like for Roman, very data-driven, work with them to be data-driven and like get them to where you want them to be as well. And I know that's easier in earlier stages, but I think that's something that created a ton of value early on in the relationship.

Yeah, absolutely. Cool. We have a few questions, so I think we can take them as we go. So one of them is What is your sales tech stack? So I'll let you take it, Razif.

Okay, so the CRM is going to be HubSpot, and then we use Chili Piper for our demo booking. We use Gong for listening and call reviews. Again, going back to the automate everything, you can create listeners, I believe is what they're called in Gong. So when certain things are mentioned, it will update properties in your CRM to again make your AE superheroes. And then from there on the backend, we track everything in a BigQuery database. From there we use DBT, I believe it's called, to build out specific models. So that way it's easy for folks like me to build a query in a dashboard and look at the information clearly and visualize it on a tool like Periscope. So I'd say that's like the, the high level of the tech stack. And what am I missing there, Roman?

I think you covered the most important points. Cool.

Okay.

Alright, so next slide is going to be about tracking. So as you just mentioned, the importance of data, it's a high-velocity game. So that means you need to know a lot about your customers and given there are so many of them, the best way to know about your customers is to collect data about them. So on our side, We use Playbooks. So as Yves just mentioned, we use HubSpot. So HubSpot has some forms that the AEs can use to fill as they interact with merchants. And so these are the things we track. So we track the need of the customer. We try to understand why they are coming to us. That's super helpful because in our case, we have two common scenarios. One of them is they're looking for their first helpdesk because they have too many support inquiries to manage in Gmail. Some of them want automation. Some of them want to drive revenue from some support, but that's more not as frequent. So it's helpful because that informs the way we're going to market our products. And we also understand like where demand is coming from. Then we have like the most more traditional things, company size, persona, title, that we try to automatically populate. Expected close date also is important because that creates a sense of timing. So we know like when to hold the AE accountable for closing that deal. We also know how to plan for the quarter based on that. Closed loss reasons, we track certain product features. So in our case, that's statistics, that's stability was one of them a couple years ago. Now I think we resolved some of that. WhatsApp, phone. So the benefit of this is that we were able at the end of the quarter to say sales closed, let's call it like $4 million and we lost $400K to not having good enough statistics or not having phone. So that helps us prioritize features based on AR. Which was valuable. And so then like once you collect all this data, you want to refine how your machine's working to spot opportunities. So if we were to do a better job for merchants that are using Gmail and increase the close rate by 30%, this is how much AR we would get. So we are able to spot like how should we refine the pitch, how should we like refine the go-to-market for certain types of customers. And I think like an example for Q2 that just ended, before this nice holiday weekend is that on our side, we saw an increase in time to close. So the fact that we were able to collect all these properties showed us like, hey, like the deals that are slower to close are the $7K+ deals on our side. So then we are able to say, okay, like let's investigate here, listen to the calls, understand like, are we like asking for next steps as often as we should? That type of stuff, so that allows you to get more visibility into what's happening in the engine. Yeah, as if you want to add to that.

I think you covered most of it there. I would just stress that the using playbooks to measure everything. Actually, here's a good example is sales is the most measurable of any department in the company, I would say. And if you want to create more accountability, this is something we've tried. So thank you, Roman, for pushing this. You can give your product team a quota. So for example, if we lose X amount of AR to not having a certain feature or a phone or whatever it may be, you can then say in Q now plus 1, when this feature is shipped, we're going to pass a quota to the product team, which is going to say the sales team is going to use this feature, we're going to win or increase our close rate by 2%, and it's going to reduce the amount of AR we lost to not having this feature by I don't know, $200,000, for example. So it creates more alignment on your, like, across the company and not just your go-to-market when the product team can see the results of the impact of their work, and then you can pass them a quota. So I would say that's an example of how tracking everything can provide value to the entire business and not just the go-to-market. All right, the next one is calculating the right metrics. So if you're tracking everything, The question is, is it too much information? Is it not enough information? How do you use the information? And so there's one thing that I feel really strongly about, and I feel that everybody calculates close rate the wrong way in high velocity sales. So I wanna show you how we calculate it. If people wanna challenge this, I would love to be challenged. But most people, when I ask them, what is your close rate? They give me their win rate, which is the number of deals that are in closed won divided by the number of deals that are in closed won plus closed lost. So just those that have completed the, their full sales cycle. And I think that's great and it's something you should track, but that is a lagging indicator of where you are going. So for us, we calculate close rate this way. So the count of deals closed, one divided by the total number of deals created for that specific date range. So if we take a look at, at what I have on this chart here of May, we have 40% close rate, roughly 40, 42 on a total of 800 or 400 deals created. And so then you take this and you aggregate it by a date range and then you cohort it by a timeframe. So this black line here is a 6-week close rate, which you see. And then I could click the box on the bottom for the 2-month or the all-time. And it's going to allow you to see 2 different lines. One is and, and as those lines get, like the gap between them gets larger, that means your time to close could be increasing. So this tells you a, a leading indicator on close rate. So is your 1 week trending up or down? And if you wanna dive in deeper, I have this chart aggregated monthly. I could look at it weekly. And so as soon as the next week passes and all deals in that timeframe have completed 7 days, I'll know that that number cannot go any higher. This 6-week one, for example, I know 6 weeks passed May, that number will not go any higher. And so it allows you to get more insights and know like, okay, maybe something is going wrong. Let's go dig into the funnel. Let's go dig into some of that, that information we're capturing in playbooks so you can get ahead of the problem. So I would push everybody to calculate close rate this way. Won deals versus all deals, not just won versus lost. It's going to be a leading indicator. It's gonna allow you to be a little bit more proactive. And then once you've done this, track everything. I encourage you to build dashboards for everything you can think of as well, but then find out which ones are most important for sales managers to know, which ones are most important for AEs to know, and then create a— I don't want to use the playbook, the word playbook too many times here, but create a playbook. So when AEs and managers are having their weekly meetings, there's specific metrics that they're looking at. It could be time to close, it can be close rate, things that might fit the current problems that your business is facing right now. And then have them review those constantly so they can stay top of mind, and then you can prescribe solutions in order to reduce those. So if it's time to close, maybe you're working on building a business case earlier in the sales cycle. If it's setting next steps, maybe you're going through different talk tracks on how you can get these next steps scheduled. So calculate the right metrics and then make sure your team is being given the metrics that they should be looking at, not necessarily all of them. You don't want to confuse them. You don't want to bog them down. So just give them the ones that are the most important for you and the business in that quarter. Roman, anything specific you'd like to add to this one?

No, that sounds good. I think one of the challenges we had here is that we wanted to like see, yeah, how fast we were closing. And so like sometimes we were at the beginning of the quarter or beginning of the month and we were like, hey, something's weird with close rate. And so we wanted to see like percentage of cohort that closes after 1 week or 2 weeks. So like things that are super leading. So I think that that's how it helps us is we want to have, we want to have a life first on the pipeline.

Exactly. All right. And then the next one here, which is the last slide, and then there's just a couple of quick examples of how to use data, is knowing your lever. So sales is a very simple equation. SaaS for the most part is a pretty relatively simple equation. It's about optimizing it continuously. So The number of deals you have times your close rate times your ACV equals your AR. And so a lot of times we get very lost in all of the different things that are happening. And then you're looking at these micro trends and you may not be connecting it to the bigger picture. So like, here's just a basic example. You generate 1,800 deals in a quarter, you have 41% close rate, $3,200 ACV, you should end up with like $1 million, $1.05 million. And so when things are not going according to plan, It's like going back to basic algebra class in like middle school where it's like solve for, solve for the missing piece. So going down and did we have a drop in deals? So plug in the number of deals that you had times the previous quarter's close rate times the previous quarter's ACV, and then see what the outcome would have been. And so use this to figure out which area of the business you should be focusing on. So if you had a drop in deals, like 2 quick things to go look at. Check channel performance. Are your channels performing the same way they were in the previous quarter? Maybe you have a lift on outbound, but you have a drop in organic. What happened this quarter to lead that? Check your conversion rates and inputs. Maybe you had a lot of people going to events, but now the number of people converting from event, like event attended to a demo given is very low. So go through and go one layer deeper on that. Next is your close rate. So if close rate is dropping, the typical tendency is just to panic and be like, oh, we need to change everything. We need to restart, we need to build a new sales methodology, we need to input a new sales methodology, we need to hire a consultant. And I would say before the panic, go check, are the deals qualified? So AE should be able to mark if something's qualified versus not. Check your attendance rate. So is your attendance rate staying up? For example, last quarter, I know many of us struggled when Google released the new update to their calendars. We saw attendance rate drop a little bit, so make sure you get ahead of it and you can put solutions in place. And then finally, I would say check the, the stage progression. Are people moving from internal review to account created? And then from there, look and see like, okay, if they're moving to account created, are they connecting all of their channels? And then from there, you can prescribe a solution before hitting the panic button. And then drop in ACV. So this like is also, I would say, something I see all the time. Oh, ACV dropped, we're not closing enough big deals. That's not always the case. You could just have way more smaller deals and you could be closing the same amount of big deals. And so what that results in is a drop in ACV, just going off of the averages. And then the other thing is, if that's the case, are you not sourcing the big deals? Are they not closing? Two different conversations. So Understanding those, knowing which levers to pull, and then building your plan for the next quarter. So if you, if you have all of this information, you should be able to build strong plans from quarter to quarter. And I would actually recommend doing a quarterly or even a monthly retro to look at the overall status and performance of your sales team and then know where you should be focusing. When you have so much data, it's easy to get sidetracked and go on to a bunch of different tracks and paths. So next is just a couple of slides here on like how you can prescribe a solution to a problem, so to speak. So the first one, so knowing your levers. So you can see here on this graph, potentially pacing for a miss, AR has been relatively flat, but what we see is a bigger gap in the ACV between starter plans and not starter plans. So That tells me there could be more people going on a starter plan and that ACV is falling overall. And so need to dig in and find out why. So then if you go down the typical path we just talked about, where are we not getting these deals from? And so here we can see there appears to be fewer advanced and enterprise customers. So it was the first example that we talked about just a moment ago. And it also appears to be a few, a bit fewer pro customers. So pro for us is the It goes basic, pro, advanced. And so now we would go and dig a little bit further. And this is why it's important to have all of this information. And so what is happening with deal creation? Is it a top of funnel problem or is it a closing problem? And so the deal creation from the advanced and enterprise here, it's picking up pretty evenly across all of the channels. So what you see there on those little squares on the right are each channel. And so where that revenue is or where those deals are attributed to. That, that's really important because you don't want to just be like, oh, we're not getting enough advanced plans, and then you could have 5 different teams focused on doing this, and maybe it's just one channel, maybe it's just outbound. So next, digging in one step further. So what's happening with these deals? Where are they going? And so based on this chart, the light blue that you see there are deals that are being worked by AEs. The red is the number of deals that are going to self-service. So It seems that there's more going to self-service, but it doesn't seem, doesn't seem huge. And then going one step further, what we talked about qualification attendance. Okay, we can see in May Google ships their new calendar. We see the attendance rate drop a little bit. And so that seems something we should definitely fix. So, and then we, I guess the 80% is covering it, but the qualification rate is flat. And then you go one step deeper again. This is the close rate, the one that you should be using, not your win rate. Um, and close rate has fallen from 43% to 33%, and the trend is continuing, though what we see here for June is not had enough time to complete. So percentage completion is just the number of deals that are still open. And then now you start to, to break that down and prescribe a solution. So you need to ask, is your sales cycle getting longer? Are you losing more of these deals, or is it both? So we can see only 66% of deals created in April have reached a completed stage. And so it's, it's a little bit early to tell what's going to happen there, as sales cycles could be getting longer. And then you go to the last part of the Advanced Enterprise deals lost, where are they going? This is where you pass product and OKR. And so here, for example, we can see most of the revenue that's lost on the Advanced Enterprise side is due to sales, which is the greenish-blue color. Product is going to be the red one. That's why it's important to use your playbooks and disposition for closed loss. And then you build an actionable outcome. So this is just a mini retro we did. So we need to increase close rate and reduce time to close on Advanced and Enterprise plan to generate X million dollars in ARR. From there, how are we going to do it? Some examples: put Mutual Success Plans on 80% of Advanced and Enterprise deals in Q3. Work with your enablement team, but want to have them validate, to host some enablement sessions on price positioning, quantifying business impact, or implementing an ROI calculator, and then having negotiation and contract buyout training. And then let's say, for example, we find out that deals with more stakeholders have a higher close rate. So we would put a KPI on there that says let's have 3 or more stakeholders involved in 80% of, of these deals. So that's just a quick example of what, what happens when you connect everything that we just talked about in a high-velocity sales process, using those playbooks to gather as much information as possible, knowing what to do with that information and data to build a good plan that you can go from quarter to quarter with, and then how you would go about creating a plan that's actionable for your team. So that's, uh, That's the gist of the 10, 10 learnings there. So let's jump into the questions.

Yeah, if you want to stop sharing your slides so we can see people's faces as they pop up. Thank you for that highly tactical, great session. Really appreciate it. I know we've been answering some questions throughout the session, so if your question has not already been answered, feel free to bump them back up just so I see them again. But the question we are going to start with comes from Ryan Bostic. If you want to unmute yourself.

Sure.

Thanks for the presentation today. I got a lot out of that. We're a small PLM disruptor and it's just me and an SDR. We've got solid sequences that seem to be working. They're getting demos and we're converting the demos into paid trials. So we're at the very beginning of having to create all those reports you just showed, which makes me sick at my stomach. But all that being a positive, the question I had was about the partnerships role that you took on in the last year or so, and kind of what that looks like. We, we have the fortune of knowing a lot of industry experts, but we haven't really figured out how to sequence that. Are your partnerships adjacent softwares that can recommend you? Are your partnerships old contacts? And how are you managing that as a pipeline, if you will?

Yeah, so I'll split that into 2 questions, the pipeline one and who are the partners. So for us, we service e-commerce stores and we have 2 types of partners. So you have your tech partners and agency partners. So tech partners are going to be ones that are partners that build, let's say, tools for customer service. I'm sorry, reviews. It could be things for loyalty points. It could be any app that is integrated that you're using on your Shopify store. And so building an integration where there's value to the, the persona that's using your tool. For us, it's customer service agents. So for an agent, knowing how many loyalty points somebody has or what kind of reviews they've left creates value to the agent. So that's an example of one tech partner working with them to then source deals. So let's say it's, I think there's Matt in here, for example. So Okendo, If we take Okendo, they might have some deals that come in when their AEs are learning about the problems that their merchants are facing and they hear somebody say customer service, they can then send those leads to us. So scheduling, we call them lunch and learns with our partners where we're going to their go-to-market team, we're educating them on what Gorgias is and how it can solve problems for the merchants will result in some leads coming our way as long as, you know, we're reciprocating for them as well. And then the other type of partners we have are agency partners. So when people are migrating from a Magento to a Shopify, for example, they'll oftentimes work with an agency to do that replatforming for them. And so building a relationship with them to get them to send those leads over to, to us for a help desk is something that we found a lot of value in. And then on the pipeline side, one of the things that we do is client mapping. So we'll go to our partners and ask them, can you go through your, your customer list? And if they have, let's say, 600 customers, they'll, they'll put that list together, we'll add it to our CRM. And we know, okay, if we need influence on this deal, we can go to this specific partner. And that way, we can get a little bit more tactical with our playbooks on the partnership side.

Great. Okay. Thank you for the thorough answer. Our next question comes from Sonakshi, if you want to unmute yourself and ask. Yeah, hey, so my question is for Romaine. So Romaine, hey, I had heard one of your Saastr talks which, you know, talked about a tool called Store Leads. And, you know, and after the talk, we started using it to, you know, build our database to reach out to Shopify customers, Shopify brands. And, you know, to our surprise, we realized that out of, let's say, 100 accounts that we take out from store leads, only 80 have contacts available in Apollo, their phone numbers. Rest— sorry, 20 have available phone numbers, rest 80 do not have it. And we feel the stage we are at as a company, we are not ready to spend money on advertisements. So what should be your ideal advice to reach out for those pending 80% of accounts? How should we go about that?

Aha, okay. So first of all, it seems like you know the space quite well. So for people who are not in the e-commerce, just to explain a little bit what we're talking about. So Shopify is a tab of 2 million stores. And so there are vendors like Store Leads that are similar to BuiltWith, ZoomInfo that give you the list of stores. And then from the list of stores, you can buy the contacts. So that's Apollo. And then from Apollo, you can do email sequences to reach out to the merchants. So to answer to the question, the question is like, what do you do? When you don't have the contact info. So I think that there are a few things. One is we outsource some email discovery to contractors on Upwork, and I think we were able to get a boost of something like 25% by doing that, but Apollo remains the primary vendor. From there, I think that the challenge is that, Shopify specifically, is that even though you have 2 million stores, you have roughly 20,000 stores that are on Shopify Plus, Then you have like maybe 30,000 stores that should be on Shopify Plus but aren't. And then you have like 50,000 small stores and then the rest of it is like a long tail that's gonna be hard to get as customers on anything else than a free product or $10 a month product. So I think the answer is not so much in trying to get everybody's email address. Like if you can't find it, there's probably a reason that they probably are too small. Like maybe you can do like 20, 30% better, but that's, that's the extent of it. So I think at some point you're gonna end up in a position where you have diminishing returns in what you do. So I think the answer is more in exploring all the channels for this audience. So on our side, we have a pretty vast mix of channels. I agree with your analysis of saying like paid is not gonna like save this whole mix and make you successful. I think paid can help, but it has a limit to its capacity. I think on our side, it's something like 15% of the revenue but not more. So the channels I would look at are the ones that Azif was talking about, so what he puts, which is partnerships. So for us, partnerships is about half of the revenue. So I think having a similar approach and— so something that we've done with Azif, which is quite interesting actually, is we find that the ACV of our merchants is $3.5K, but the ACV, so to speak, of an agency is more like $15K. $15K because an agency is gonna refer like let's say 4 customers to you. And so therefore you have a play where you do like agency to customers. And so we use the same tactic to discover agencies, score them, get the best agencies to work with us, and from there get them to refer leads. So I would look at that. I think another play is something we're testing right now is a scaled ABM approach. Where the ABMs typically like to go after a few hundred accounts. In our case, like ATV is too low to afford like people being focused on accounts full-time. So we have more of an approach that is how do we combine all the channels. So maybe you send an email, then you invite these accounts to one of your events. On our side, like we've been quite successful with events. I think we have something like 200 events a year. And so that's a good opportunity to funnel some of your like email traffic to events and get them further down the funnel. So yeah, you can— so to sum up, like you can amplify by 20-30% what you have with better enrichment, but at some point you're gonna end up facing diminishing returns. And so then the answer is more like new channels or combining channels together, or we could talk about this if there's another question, like how do you generate a different type of demand for your product?

Understood, Roman. Thank you so much for that.

Of course. Thanks for watching the talk.

Yes. And as always, we are at time, run out of time every week. So thank you again for all of your questions and a special thank you to our speakers, Roman and Asif. That was amazing. We really appreciate it.

Thanks a lot for having us. Great to hang out with everyone.

Of course. All right. We will see you all next week. Have a great rest of your holiday week.