Live from SaaStr Europa 2022: Workshops with Red Points and LumApps

those ones that they're stealing the revenue from the brands and the consumers, and we return to them. We're helping them to fight this terrible issue. And how are we doing it? Well, we designed a solution. We put tech, we put tech in a space where there was not technology previously. Of course, there were other competitors, Those competitors, they were doing services, they were doing consulting, and they were doing a lot of manpower processes. We came with technology, we came with a disruptive solution. But we were the newest, we were irrelevant, as I was telling you. So what did we do? What was the key to become the leader in the market? It was a journey, and here's the journey. So, in the first 2 years when I joined the startup, when I joined the initial founder, what we did is to figure it out, no? Figure out how our proposal was going to be successful in a market where there were other competitors addressing the very large companies. And we found a blue ocean. We thought it was a blue ocean and it, well, it turned to be a blue ocean. So, as I was saying, our competitors, they were selling to very big companies, to the larger companies in the world, no? Brands that you all know. But we said, listen, everybody has this problem online, not only the very big ones, also the small companies, also the medium companies, also companies in some verticals that they don't even know it. We just had to surf the internet and find the problem. So we decided to address the SMB market, and it was a blue ocean because no one was doing it. We built our platform in a way that it was very easy to use for those kind of companies, and another thing that we did is, well, we are gonna be so big we're gonna be so global that Spain for us is not the market. The market is the world. We thought very big from the very beginning. So instead of starting from Spain, no, in Spain, we decided to divide the world in industries. So for us, the market were the industries. It was not about Spain, it was not about US, it was not about France, it was about industries. So we wanted to address the toys industry or the lighting industry, we have the list of all the companies and we didn't even care where they were. We were selling to companies in Australia, in Scandinavia, in USA, so from the very, very beginning our company was like very global, no? You'll see that later. And it had all kind of people from all countries in the world. With this, what we did is we proved the market fit, not only the product fit, but the market fit. And this is why in the next years, we decided to fund the company properly to become the market's— I mean, the leaders of the market. Because we always wanted to be that, the leaders of the market. We were thinking big from the very first day. And in 2016 and 2017, we welcomed our investors Mangrove, Norzon, and Aros that funded the company properly to grow exponentially. Well, now it looks like EBITDA is sexier than growth, but back then growth is It was all about growth. And let me tell you something, for smaller companies here, it's still about growth. I mean, when a company is young and is very young, you have to prove the market fit, you have to prove the product fit, you have to grow a lot so you can show that you can be a big company sometime. And you're gonna need funding. Your finance strategy has to be going parallel to your company strategy. After that, we closed in 2019 another fundraising with Summit. So the company was already funded with $42 million. We closed $72 million. This is what we raised, but $20 million went to secondary. This is how we could grow to more than 650 clients by the end of 2019. That was amazing for us, eh? And of course, we had clients in US, in all Europe, Australia, Japan, and we opened our offices in New York and Salt Lake City, later Beijing. And 2021, again, more growth, growth, And now we have more than 1,000 clients and we can call ourselves the leaders of the market, but not only that, the market says we are the leaders. This is how you know you are the leaders, no? Because they address you as the leader. And with this, and I will tell you later, we decided to build a new category. So we are the ones that we are not only building a company, we are also building a category. This came in 2021, but I'll explain you later. The journey was not always easy. Let's start with the wins, and later I will tell you also the mistakes, because we made quite a good number of mistakes too. What did work? What were our wins? Well, the first one, the global approach from the very first day. This is what I was telling you, no? We were thinking big from the very first day. Sometimes when you start a company and when you start your startup and you make your numbers, the numbers are very humble. The numbers are low. I was talking I was talking to a young company in their very first, I mean, in their very early days not long ago, and I was telling them, "Come on, you can do much more. I'm sure you can sell much more. Why are you putting these numbers here? You should be thinking big. Let's think big. Let's think global." And as I was telling you, From the very first day, we thought global. We were not thinking only in Spain. And this is how we built the teams that we built, and we approached the clients that we approached in vertical industries, by industries like I was telling you. And today, 60% of our revenues come from US. And let me tell you something, advisors that we've talked to They say that this is quite rare for a Spanish company, of course, and for a European company that has the headquarters in Europe. 60% of our revenues come from US, and this is because from the very first day, we thought that we could do it, and we went global. The second win, the product evolution. Innovation is in our DNA. We never stop evolving our product. But we focus a lot on execution. We focus a lot on execution. We innovate thinking always about the client, and this is how we've even built a team that is called Innovation, that is transversal, doesn't belong to product or to technology. The Innovation team works together with product, but it works with sales, and it works with operations, and even with finance. And this innovation team, what it does is to cover all the processes and innovate in all the processes. From sales, from go-to-market, to operations, and of course product, no? Product too. But this is something that we've never stopped. We started with one of the infringements, no? That it was anti-piracy. But we soon start building other modules and addressing other kinds of infringements. Because as you saw before, what we do is we address the online fraud, but always from the IP rights management perspective. So we're always building new features, new modules, and new ways to address our clients and to address the problem. And as I say, This doesn't relate only to product. It addresses all the processes of the organization. But what is very important for us is to focus on execution. As I said, we decided to create a new category. When we started with the technology, the market said, oh, these guys are doing online brand protection. Why? Because there was a category called online brand protection and they had to put us there. But we never fit really in the category. Our value proposition, it was very, very hard to explain to lawyers. So a lot of them didn't understand it. And of course, for small, medium companies, it really fit. But when we came to talk to larger customers that they were educated by our competitors, they really didn't understand it. So, we were really working against that situation for years until we became big enough to work on our own category, to change the buyer persona, to address different person in the organization and to start talking revenue. That is what we really do, to help them with revenue. Then they understood it. And of course, what happened with the sales? They exploded. So last year, it was a total record in our company using our new narrative, our new messaging, and addressing the new buyer persona. What we did then, it was to invent the new category. So of course, now we are the leaders of the new category because we invented it, eh? That's easier. But we are also the leaders of the old one. And the name is Digital Revenue Recovery because we help the companies to fight the phantom competitors. And we address the salespeople, the marketing people, the CROs, and so on. They understand it much better. So if you don't like who is buying in your company, in the companies, in the clients, you should think about all of this. You should think about, is there other people in the company that understand better our value proposition? Because this is what we did and we ended up creating a new category. And the fourth win is never give up on core values. So listen, you have the values of your company. Culture is what you do. When no one is watching you, and the people you hire, or the people you should be hiring if you do your homework, are people that they share your values. And those people are the ones who are going to drive your company to success. So if you change the values in the middle of the race, then you end up with a team that doesn't belong to the new culture, doesn't belong to the new values, and this is gonna be failure for sure. You should stick to your values. And let me tell you something, one of the values should be transparency. And why I'm saying this, probably 3 years ago I would have not said this, but we had this 2020, wonderful 2020 with the pandemic. Now we have a new crisis that it looks that is coming on. Now the finance markets are changing. And you need to tell all of this to your team. You need to tell this to your team so they are aligned and they fight for the company and they fight for you and they're gonna do it, that's for sure. But if you only communicate the good news, if you are only, if you're transparent only in the good times, that is not the way to do it. You also have to be transparent not also, not only with your teams but also with all the stakeholders, investors and so on. Also in the hard times. And let me tell you something, it's even more important in the hard times. So transparency should be one of the core values, and of course innovation, as I was saying. The rest of them is up to you. But the message here is that make sure you don't change those values in the middle of the race because then you're gonna lose your people, so then your chances to become a high-performance company company are going to be much worse. And what didn't work? Okay. The first thing— well, many things didn't work, eh? As I was saying, we made a lot of mistakes and if you are leading SaaS companies as a CEO or in the leadership team or whatever, you will know that it's a roller coaster. Some days are very good, some days are really, really, really bad. And what it really shows are the nice stories. We all know that some days are really unbearable. All of us have some of those. And of course we do make mistakes, no? The first one, and this is a summary that I would say is the summary of many, A mistake is to believe when someone tells you, "This can't be done." Over the years, I've heard, "This can't be done," so many times. And, you know when it's been a mistake? The few times that I believed they were right. Because if you really believe that something can be done, it can always be done. You just have to look at a different way to do it because maybe you're trying to do it in a way that is impossible. So the right statement will be, this can't be done the way you're trying, but of course it can be done. It can always be done if you have the gut feeling. Just, you know, fire that brilliant, incredible CRO that you thought that it was gonna be wonderful and is not that wonderful. Or change your go-to-market model that is very hard to realize that you're wrong, or throw away that product that it was gonna be incredible and that release was gonna be incredible and it's shit. And you have to just have the guts to do it. You have to have the guts to do it as soon as possible. But try to do the things on a different way. As I was saying, it's all about the execution. Realize and let me tell you something, don't hide, yes, don't hide, don't hide the pink elephant under the carpet. The pink elephant are those things that we don't want to talk about and when you hide a pink elephant under the carpet, you know what happens? The pink elephant grows and grows and grows, and one day, she just can't do anything with that pink elephant and it may collapse, the whole company may collapse, right? So, you have to be brave to look straight at the things that are not working, analyzing, changing, and executing. The sooner the better. Another mistake, hiring rock stars with big logos on their resume. Okay guys, all the startups, especially SaaS startups, but all of them I will say, we are totally infatuated with some guys that they have big logos in their CVs, in their track record, and we all think, "Oh my God, I have to hire this guy." Well, I've done it several times and some of them have been a complete failure.

Why?

Because the guys, they were not cultural fit. That is what we were saying before. And you feel the pressure, no? Sometimes you feel the pressure that is everybody, "Oh my God, he's so good, look at—" or "She is so good. Look at what she's done in that company." Technically, it's amazing, and then you have this gut feeling there, you know, it's like, "Oh, there's something missing." Never compromise the values or the culture fit because that wonderful guy is going to be toxic for your company and it's going to make much more harm than benefit for your company. This will be another thing, another advice that for us at least, didn't work, no? It's much better— because for us, in our case, our culture and our values are a lot about team and a lot about alignment. So, we have to really take care of that and avoid this kind of mistakes. More. Define clear objectives for the whole company. Well, now think about your companies, think about your startups. Do you think that you can ask everybody in your company what is the North Star and they will give you the correct answer? It's like, what is the North Star of this company? Or do you think that in your company everybody has his or her own North Star? Or every team, because then you have a problem. Everybody has to share the same North Star. And listen, the North Star can change. It can change, like 7 years ago could be one North Star and now it's a different one, but it's one, and the whole team has to know what is that North Star. If the answer is different depending on the person, then you have a problem. And once everybody knows the north star, then you can start working with OKRs in the company and OKRs in different areas or other methodologies. They work really, really, really nice, but make sure that the north star is one. Otherwise you're gonna have this team going this way, that team going the other one, and not alignment. And alignment is critical when you are less than €10 million a year. ARR or dollars ARR is critical. If your teams are not aligned, you're gonna end up without a company. So make sure that everybody has clear what is the current north star. If it is growth over 100%, great. If it is EBITDA positive next August, great too. But you have to choose one and the whole company has to go there. And the second one that, Those two for me are so important. The second one is psychological safety climate. You have to create a climate in your company where everybody can stand up and do all the suggestions that they want to do and have critical thinking. Because if you don't have that, the only thing that you have are followers that they're going to try to fit in, not to make a lot of noise, and, well, to be nice. You don't want that. You want critical thinking, you want people that stand up for what they believe and to talk and to make suggestions, and this is how you're gonna make your company much better, much more innovative, and you're gonna have a high-performance team. By the way, there is a book that talks about this, The writer is Amy— I can't remember her last name, but it's called something like Fearless Organization, if you're interested in all of this because it's really, really interesting. So, to have a high performance company, make sure you have this psychological safety climate. And this is it. What will be the key takeaways? First one, think big. I told you about thinking big, about global, about teams that they're in different places, a lot of nationalities, different verticals. Think big, whatever is the company that you have. Second one, always innovate, but with focus. Innovation by itself is invention. Innovation with execution is what works. Focus on the execution. By the way, we never abandon our value proposition. Our focus has always been online fraud, to fight online fraud. And listen, over the years I heard so many times, oh, why don't you do this? Oh, why don't you do this other thing? Well, with our product we can do price comparison. Of course we can do price comparison. Price comparison, but this is not what we do. We have to stick to what we do. So focus with innovation is incredible. And third, I'm not gonna talk more about values, but never compromise values. If you compromise the values and the culture of your company, you're losing your company for sure. And this is it, and thank you so much.

10 of anything but that's made of gold. A face of cookies is nothing without it, and you close your eyes to see what it's done. Another you, it's gotta be love, they said it. You gotta know, I'm feeling love made of gold. Another lover, another one. I'm feeling love, it's gotta be love, they said it. You gotta know, I'm feeling love made of gold. Another lover. Nothing to see. To find yourself. To find yourself. To find yourself. To find yourself. Good night. Out to a deeper level. Good night. In a deeper sense. Good night. Out to a deeper level. Good night. In a deeper sense. To all that you dream, you find that connection when you dive in deep to find yourself, yourself, to find In a deeper sense, connect at a deeper level, connect in a deeper sense. Good night. Good night. Good night.

Please welcome LumApps VP of Growth Marketing Melinda Cormier and LumApps CRO Alfred Saad.

Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for being here. We know we are— we stand between you and a drink, except this gentleman. I think you already got started. Congratulations to you. So, Melinda, please start.

Hey everyone, Melinda Cormier, VP of Growth Marketing at LumApps. Prior to LumApps, I was at a French-founded company that had a successful exit last year, so I joined LumApps in in June, almost a 1-year anniversary. And I'm very excited to be joined by Alfred.

And I'm Alfred Saad. I'm the CRO for LumApps. We're quite a diverse team, executive team between us. We've lived in 3 countries. We speak 3 languages. And we're not the same sex. So that's quite diverse as a team, I would say. Yes. And LumApps, just for your information, we're in the people business. We enable companies to manage their relationship with their employees and to improve their employee experience and accompany them through the journey. And we borrow a lot of concepts and best practices from customer experiences internally in companies because, as you know, in a very competitive environment today, employees are the most important asset of a company. And more and more companies are waking up to the idea that to manage employees is as critical and their experience with your company is as critical as you are your customer journey.

Absolutely. So today we're gonna talk about 3 big challenges of international growth. That's culture, data, and trust. So we'll hop right into culture. Probably don't have to read from the slide. You guys can do that. Uh, but culture is really that core value. It's what defines your organization. Organization. And for us, it's all about understanding your tribes.

[Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] Yeah, so one big thing, and the word tribes maybe doesn't translate well across everywhere, but if you, if you think of, of this definition by McKinsey, think of it as different groups within your company. And to say it simply, you can probably relate to that if you had, if you're a founder and you have some early stage employees and then some later stage employees, and that relationship between them may be a little different. They have different tribes, different experiences. Think of it as growing internationally. Maybe you started in Europe and you're going to the US, or it's a US company that's trying to grow in Europe. And even just by the different cultural cues and their understanding of how to interpret very simple things, I'll give you a very simple example. If I ask you afterwards, if you're an American, how this presentation was, your response will probably be awesome, right? Thank you. And if you're French, you're going to say pas mal. It's not that bad, right? Which is good. So these little different culture cues, they can be misinterpreted between tribes. And we work really hard at managing these different tribes. And a lot of companies talk about, Creating a one team, one company. You've all heard this before. It's very easy to say, extremely difficult to do as you grow as well. And that's what we're going to talk about a little bit. So for us at LumApps, what we've done is that we've created collectively with Melinda, myself, and the rest of the executive team, you know, a formula that we'd like to use in what we call our winning formula, right? And we talk a lot about winning as a habit. And by doing that, we focus on winning together. And naturally, when you win, you create more proximity, you create the right energy within your company. So first, we celebrate success. So that's something that culturally as well, it doesn't always translate. So if you have Japanese colleagues versus American colleagues and whatever, it's a little bit different. But as we create sales and marketing culture, we really focus on on recognizing success. So a simple example would be a marketing lead that goes to an SDR. A lot of our executives are on copy and we all celebrate that together and create this kind of a winning culture, whether not just with the wins, but throughout the pipeline. Goals, we'll talk about that a little bit later, how we define success. But really we focus on ambitious yet attainable goals. That's important to create the right attitude within your organization. And you can't have definition of goals are different. Oftentimes, you know, you can see from the title of our presentation, everybody's special, right? So, you know, you talk to my French colleagues, they'll say, well, you know, that's not gonna work here. The US colleagues, they wanna do it differently. But you have to find goals that are achievable that you can celebrate those successes together. And then one of the big things that we've learned as we went from Series C to beyond is roles and responsibilities. So creating right roles and responsibilities so that our teams have clear definitions of that and that we're not stepping on each other's toes. You'll find some of the early employees, you know, I'm not going to mention— I'll mention a simple example. You know, one of our founders who likes to, for example, personally provide the email address to the newcomers, right? So that's a nice thing, but you have to ask yourself the question, did we hire somebody to do that already? Is your time best used elsewhere? So that's an example of roles and responsibility. And then finally, it's about hiring and retention. And we're really in the people business and hiring the best people and having the right people on the bus is the difference between success and failure.

So with that, really important is recruitment and retention, where 44% of resignations happen within your first year. So even before you think about onboarding, it's pre-boarding, it's your recruiting process. And this is where you're gonna share who you are as a company, your vision, your values. Are they a good fit from that perspective? Not just can they do the job because they're a great engineer or they're, you know, a really strong sales rep, Do they fit within the team? Can they communicate cross-culturally? Does it feel like they are the right fit for you? And are they the right fit in return? So once you've recruited them, then the onboarding process begins. And people think, oh, they're gonna be up and running in 30, 60 days and they'll be fully productive. No, it takes an average of 6 to 8 months to fully onboard, which is a long time, but it's an incredibly crucial point of doing this. Because this is your opportunity to really engage with your new employees and create an orchestrated onboarding experience for them so they're not overwhelmed their first day. They're not just getting bombarded with information over and over. We've all been it. We've all had those horrible onboarding experiences where you show up, you don't have a laptop, you don't know what you're, you don't know how to get your email. You're like, mm, not a great experience. And that's the most critical time for your new hires is to really show them that they are part of your company. So once you're onboarded, then it's about really clearly in defining their purpose, their roles and responsibilities, and sticking with it. So if you think about it, especially in the small-scale growth startup, you probably get hired with 7 hats. You run marketing, you run sales, and you do everything. But as you grow and as you get more specialized and as your team gets bigger, you have to hand off some of those responsibilities. Like Albert had mentioned, our CTO loves to create the email addresses. He doesn't have to do that anymore. We have a full IT team.

Like, he doesn't have to do that. She outed him. I wasn't supposed to say, but it's okay.

Well, but it's allowing people to do what they love while still kind of really sticking to their purpose and their mission. And then autonomy. It's really empowering your employees to do what they do best and to bring solutions to the team so that they're not, You're not micromanaging them. You're not telling them how to do their job or the next step that they need to take. But when you empower your employees to really think through the problems in the process, they just get more invested into it.

Yeah, so that was— if you think of the last 3 that we'll cover, and mastery is the last, this comes borrowed from a book by Daniel Pink. The name is Drive. So I highly recommend you take a look at that. And basically, on the point of autonomy, what we have in a startup scale-up environment that's incredible is that really by its nature that people are coming with entrepreneurial spirits and they are autonomous by nature. That's why they're joining a company with less structure. They're gonna be part of creating that. And they can be between, especially with the sales team in my opinion, is that already sales is, is a business of being autonomous. It's, you know, you wake up, it's for you to manage your own business. And on top of that, with having the scale up and/or startup, you know, the autonomy aspect of it is really, really important. The reason we talk about it a lot is also it's important to put the guardrails around it. And we'll talk about data and such later so that you're also, you know, you're not, you know, working against yourself oftentimes by having too much autonomy without the right, uh, guide rails around it.

And then lastly, mastery. Uh, and this is just really empowering your employees to do what they do best. So it's that skill development as well as knowledge sharing, um, especially in a growth environment where you might be the expert now, but your team is growing. So you need to share your knowledge and information with your new colleagues, uh, with other departments. Uh, and that plays a lot into retention because if you think about someone starting, say, a sales executive or an SDR, what's their career path? We've had some interesting things where an SDR has moved into managing our field events in North America. We've had another that's now in the partner team, but enabling them to learn from their colleagues and continue to grow within the organization just really solidifies that culture.

Yeah, I think just to add to the last point of the losing an employee and the cost of that of 6 to 9 months, oftentimes when we lose people, We often say, look, they weren't the right people, they didn't have the right skills and so forth. But what we try to do differently, we humbly submit to you guys, we're not always perfect. But for us, if, you know, in a high turnover, even job as sales, when the sales team fails, it's our fault too. So we have to ask ourselves the question, are we creating the right environment for them to be successful? Have we thought about the whole process together? Are we working collectively as a team to support them, to make sure that they, you know, no one is perfect. Everybody has hole in their game and management responsibility is to accompany them. And it's super easy. It's, in my opinion, it's super easy just to say, well, we hired the wrong person. The reality is, you know, when you look at all this data, you know, hiring is the most important thing to do. But then after that is how we accompany them and create the condition for them to be successful.

And that brings us to data. You either love it or hate it. I love it. But for me, data has two points, the lagging and the leading indicators.

Yeah, so don't read all this. But what I will tell you just very simply, it's something that's really critical. Oftentimes, if you're a founder, if you're somebody who's an investor, you're always going to ask the question, what's the forecast? So the forecast is an example of— a very lagging indicator. The damage has already been done months ago, right? And what we try to focus on is to focus on leading indicators, which are indicators that will help you imagine if you have your pipeline, it's really in the top of the pipe and then you manage the business as you go along. An example of that would be how many meetings are booked. So that's a simple leading indicator that later on will tell you how much ARR we're gonna you're gonna do for a quarter and so forth. So that concept is really critical and it's something that, that we focus quite a bit, a lot, and you'll see some example of that later.

So before you make any changes, benchmark where you're at. So reviewing the data, again, it's your friend. Start with performance. So how is your company performing? Are they profitable? How is your team performing? How are the individuals within your team performing? In your team performing? How are they feeling overall? Do they feel that they are connected and involved and motivated? Which leads to the individuals themselves. Who are they? What do they do on the day to day? Do they enjoy what they're doing? This plays into motivation like you wouldn't believe. So review the data, talk to your teams. And then how are they defining success? Different teams define success in different ways. Your company may say you're successful when you do this or when you reach this target. Individually, teams may feel they have different success metrics. So for example, if I have a paid media team and they say they're successful when they've hit 3,000 impressions, is that success? What happens after those impressions? Did they click? Did they convert? What's the pipeline outcome? And it's getting to kind of think through the full process of, yes, you may be responsible for this one particular part of your role within the company, but how is that affecting affecting the larger, broader objectives. And then how are they doing it? What are they doing and why? Those day-to-day activities are incredibly important to understand what's going on and why are we doing it. Asking the why doesn't typically happen. We're like, oh, we need to do this event because it was successful last year. Is it gonna be successful this year? What defined success last year? Why should we do it again? And making sure that everything that we're doing aligns to our objectives. So we don't have sales running off and selling to a CIO when marketing's marketing to a CHRO. Make sure you're in the same path.

Yeah, I think one thing we talked about even today, we were, we were chatting a little bit about the opportunity through an acquisition we had to maybe, uh, focus a little bit about, uh, product-led growth and to see maybe that's an opportunity. And, and, you know, it was interesting that we had the exchange and, and, and Melinda was like challenging me to think about it Differently. And that conversation was important because in reality, sure, I can go off and try it, right? But if I go off and try it, we broke the bond. And the reality is you have temptations oftentimes. And let's not forget, we're talking about expansions outside your geography. Oftentimes you'll have very good success in a certain vertical, in a certain country, and you can't replicate it elsewhere. And the reality is you have to make some really tough decisions at some point to say, Are we going to stick with that? Are we going to go full on with that and try to find the success elsewhere or not? What's the opportunity cost if we do it here? And if we go, are we missing a bigger opportunity? Will these customers drive our R&D in a different direction than what we want? And I think that's where being aligned on objectives and looking in the context beyond just a country, but also globally on the opportunity and to have the discipline to do that, as you said, and to be very data-driven. For us, data-driven means no emotion. So my only marketing class I took— don't judge me, Melinda— but basically what I learned was, in God we trust, everybody else bring data. So emotions are fine. It's fantastic to tell me I like, I think, and whatever. But the reality is the bottom line will come through data that we both agree on. And we move forward with stable hand on the wheel. Real, so everybody's on the same page.

So with that, I wanted to share a couple marketing metrics to consider. Uh, these are just some benchmarks that I've seen really good success with the size of company that I've helped grow. Uh, these will be probably different for you cuz everything's gonna depend on your average deal size, what's important to you, who your ICP is. Um, but the 3 main areas that we focus on in marketing are the website, what our leads look like, and pipeline. Those are the big 3, big, big drivers for growth marketing. When we think about the website, for me and for what I've seen work really well, if you are paying for the majority of your website traffic, you're doing it wrong. There's way better ways to do it. It's called SEO. It's called creating the right brand. It's creating awareness. So if less than 60% of your website traffic is coming in from paid sources, you gotta rethink it. You gotta get better with who you're targeting, your content, your website performance, all of it. Conversion rates. Incredibly important. It's an average of 2.5%, cool, but if you're paying for traffic and it's converting at 1%, why are you paying for that traffic? But if you're paying for traffic and it's converting at 60%, awesome, tell me what you're doing. I wanna know your secrets. But it's incredibly important to deep dive into your conversion rates so you're optimizing each of your channels because a lot of them you pay for. So if you don't have to pay for it, great. And then bounce rate. Especially for a B2B organization, if you have greater than a 40% bounce rate, something's wrong with your site. Either you are targeting the wrong folks, your site is underperforming, the content is irrelevant. Not a good time. So that's your opportunity to make your website that hub. It's the place where everyone's gonna see. It's that first impression. It's like going on a date. Your homepage is that handshake. It's the, "Hi, how are ya?" If they don't like what they see, they'll find someone else. So website, number one priority. Leads, the number one metric we look at all over the, like everywhere, cost per lead. That CPL, we are constantly monitoring because it's a measurement of efficiency, how we're performing against our standards and what we're actually paying to generate business. It builds into all of your models of how many leads do I need to get at what conversion rate to make it all the way down to the bottom of the funnel. When you optimize your cost per lead, Everything else falls into place. But not just any lead. You want high-quality leads. So at least 40% of your leads should be coming from your ICP, your ideal customer profile. If you can get greater than 40%, awesome. But at a minimum benchmark, 40% of all of your leads, regardless of source, whether it's organic traffic or coming in from paid field events, should be at least 40%. And then pipeline. So in marketing, we're always concerned about pipeline. That's the number one metric we'll track against. So what is our lead-to-opportunity conversion rate, and how can we improve that? If you're averaging between 3 to 5%, it's a pretty good rate, but again, depends on the volume of leads that you're converting, what size pipeline you need, your average deal size, all of that. But the last one there, the pipeline-to-spend ratio, I've got it in there as a 30:1. So for every $1 of marketing spend, I'm generating $30 of pipeline. That's pretty darn efficient. When you really think about how efficiency plays into marketing, into sales, if you're generating really large volume of pipeline for very low marketing spend, your marketing teams are crushing it.

Yeah, so the big thing for me, the takeaway is, and advice I would give to anybody who's running any revenue or want to ask questions, it's okay to play the dumb guy, ask a lot of questions, but it's not okay to be dumb. So meaning eventually after the conversation, You have to be smarter. A lot of companies look at sales and marketing and, you know, it's work, handoff, not my problem. That's not the relationship that we have. That's not— I have every right to ask every question, every right to ask my team every question, myself every question. Where is that lead? What have we done? What did we learn? And that's how we improve the machine and working together. What that is a takeaway for me when you're talking about different cultures. So I live in France, she lives in the US. We have multiple people, we have discussions. This takes emotion away. So when we talk about cost per lead, then we can have intelligent conversations about events. We can have intelligent conversations about what we're learning from our engagements, from our digital strategy and such. So it's a foundation to everything in our discussion, and it's a way to manage confusions and cultures, to manage confusions and interpretations. So that was another thing that we've done together in our budget cycle early— excuse me, late last year. One of the things that we've done together was to come to an agreement of what the potential pipeline of every salesperson would look like throughout the year. Now, this is our model. Doesn't mean it's the perfect model. Every company will have its own model. Maybe partners will have less impact for you. Maybe they'll have more. It all depends if you're an SMB or enterprise. But basically what we do is we say this is a balanced pipeline. And this one of the big things of cultural things we had to change in different countries is salespeople having ownership of their pipeline. Meaning that we'll spend a lot of money on marketing. We'll manage our partners very well. Even higher SDRs with a ratio of 1 SDR for 2 salespeople. We'll do all this, but your responsibility is to create pipeline yourself. And the way you're gonna create pipeline yourself is we're gonna have leading indicators that will guide you to be able to balance this equation and own your business as well. So the way we've done it, as we said, every, account executive should have 2 meetings per week that they've sourced themselves. So that's a leading indicator. We've done our math to work through our pipeline because of the conversion rates. And we know which equates to 60+ activities, right? That's a lot. So, you know, again, this is a very perfect model. It works well with our SDRs, with our account execs less so, because imagine the minute they have this 1 million deal deal, all this will stop and they're going to go off and do that. But that's okay. At least at a minimum, we can benchmark in between each other and we know what the pipeline ratios are per salesperson. Again, to remove all emotions out of it and say, look, you're a French salesperson, you're a German salesperson, this is the model that we've created. And our budget is balanced from a marketing perspective, from an SDR spent, from Everything to create this kind of a balanced pipeline. Again, it's kind of a clean room environment. So it's more like a, you know, it sounds more like a nice cafe in Switzerland. Reality is less than that, right? It's a little bit of a war, but that's okay. At least we have a model with leading indicators that we can benchmark people. And then every year we can come back and adjust it, right? If it doesn't make sense, we'll adjust it. We'll say, look, it's one, you know, meeting per month. It's not one meeting per week. It's not two. That's okay. But at least we started somewhere and we have our quarterly checkpoint and our QBRs to align all our tribes to talk about these metrics. And then a lagging indicator. If you get this wrong, then it's too late, right? So the lagging indicator for us is for me and for the team, if we have 50 to 60% of our team on plan, then we've been successful. How many of you guys want at least 50% of your salespeople to be successful? Okay, the majority, right? So, but that's a reality check, right? It's easy to say it's the wrong salespeople, it's the wrong this, it's the wrong that, oh, they're the wrong people. But we have to assume the problem ourselves as well and say, okay, what's wrong in that equation if 50% of my salespeople are not on Plan. There's something wrong in the equation, right? And we have to ask ourselves the question and ask, maybe, maybe you're right at the end, maybe they are the wrong people, that's okay. But it could be also you started an SMB, you're going to enterprise and it's rocky, you know, you have to ask yourself the questions. At the end of the day, you can't say we're in a people business, which we all are, we're selling people, right? That's the people connections. If you're not gonna take ownership of making them successful and just We'll say, oh, you know, it's the wrong guys. Let's hire new people, right? We have to ask ourselves the question and take ownership of it. So that's a lagging indicator we have. And then another one in our CRM, every salesperson at any point should have 4 to 6x in the pipeline versus their target. Not 50, 60% of them get there, but that's the whole idea. We can adjust that based on your business, your win rates, and so forth.

And then lastly, trust. So you can imagine that building trust is not easy, especially cross-culture, and especially if you're taking on a new team or growing into a new geography, working with new partners. But the big important thing there is say what you mean and do what you say. It's actually one of the core values at LumApps. And of course, that big one there of leading with data. So before you make any changes, any recommendations, any— anything, check the data. See where you're at, and then try pilot programs. So in marketing, we love pilot programs, A/B testing, big fan. Yeah? Cool, no hands. All right, so pilot programs though are a great way for your team to build trust in themselves and for you to trust your team. So by allowing them to run pilot programs gives them the authority to run programs that you say, hey, we're gonna go try a new thing. Here's some budget, let me know how it goes. Oftentimes they take full authority of it. They will own it like you wouldn't believe, and the results that come out of it are incredibly valuable. Not only will you find out what works, what doesn't, how to grow, where to make changes in your budget, how to reallocate across channels. Pilot programs are fantastic and highly recommended. For example, content syndication was new for LoomApps. We launched it in the end of last year. It's now producing 70% of our grade A leads or ICP leads. and they had never done it before. They're like, no, we do like Google, we do some paid ads. Great, let's try a little content syndication, see how it goes. They're like, this is awesome. SDRs are happy, BDRs are happy, they're converting into pipeline, but you never know until you try it. And then don't dictate.

Yeah, so the big thing is of course everybody wants to be the smart one, but it's best not to be the smart one and let your team come back with ideas. You know, always, so it's easy to complain. It's hard to come up with solutions. So always encourage them to come back with ideas. Explain to them the problem. Explain to them the parameters of the issues where the constraints are. Maybe it is about budget. Maybe it's— and give them a better idea of the problem. Most of us are not a 100,000-person organization. It's a shame that we can't have them implicated into these decisions and have them come back with ideas. And two of them that don't benefit themselves and see how that works out. You'll be surprised with, with what they come back to with.

And then be humble, be authentic, be yourself. I'm a little quirky and I accept that. But when someone asks me a question that I don't know the answer to, I'm not going to make up an answer. I'm just going to tell them, you know, that's a great question. I don't know. Let's go figure it out together. Let's both of us take a look at the data and then find a solution to this. Because when you are authentic and transparent, transparent and you let people know who you are, it just builds more of that trust, more of that culture that you're not coming in from the outside. You're an outsider. Oh, I'm from the US, you're France. No, just tell me what's up. Just be true.

And then focus on the future. Yeah, I think one of the big things is that you'll find also from the earlier employees, a lot of focus on financial rounds. They talk about valuations a lot and such, and it can be a big distraction for new employees. Again, the dynamic of where you started in a country to go to a different country, it doesn't translate. Nobody cares. It's better to be focused on your mission and where you're going and the fact that you're really trying to transform how people do business, how they, in our case, how they treat their employees, how their employees feel about being part of their company. I always tell the team, it's better for us, don't pretend to care, just actually care. So spend the time with your team, get them involved in your culture and focus on that. Don't focus too much on, you know, the rest will come if we do today right. And let's focus on it one day at a time and not be distracted by a lot of the conversations where, you know, are really all about like rounds and funding and such that are really a distraction in my opinion.

So lastly, key takeaways here. First one around culture. So when you create an innovative and inclusive and empowering culture, everyone feels it. You become part of the organization. You love it. You breathe it. When someone asks what we do, we're excited to tell people what we do and what we stand for and what our product or platform does. And when you hire people that have that same value, it translates. And when you start growing internationally, when you have a really strong culture, it's incredible. The employees feel it. Your customers will feel it. Your revenue feels it. So at the end of the day, culture is incredibly important.

Yeah, the revenue comes and the data. I think for me, the big takeaway is that it takes emotions out of the conversations and it creates a credible conversation on a business plan and we take away emotion. Again, in God we trust, everybody else bring data.

And then lastly, again, on trust. So when you yourself become a trustworthy leader and a colleague, it makes everyone feel again, that they can trust you, that they can believe what you're telling them because you've relied on data. You're sticking with your mission, with what the company stands for from their values. Uh, and especially when you're breaking into new markets, if your partners trust you, if your customers trust you, they become your best advocates. So trust is the foundation of how you grow.

And with that, we have 1 minute. You'll have 1 extra beer. Thank you guys so much for being here and for paying attention the whole time. Have a good one.

I don't think I can stand it. I don't know. I don't know. Late nights. No demands. In the midnight army. No demands.