Slice's CRO on "The Secrets to Selling and Scaling in Vertical SaaS"

People are just getting connected right now. Welcome everyone. Welcome, welcome. We have a great Workshop Wednesday in store for everyone. Glad to see so many folks in attendance again, and we have Jason back after annual, um, with a great guest. So Jason, passing it over to you.

Okay, thanks everybody, um, watching or listening live on X, LinkedIn, YouTube, later reading the blog post. Um, we have a great guest today, um, Lauren Padleford, who we'll dig in with. Lauren is now CRO at Slice, been there coming up on 2 years or something like that. Does that sound about right?

No, Slice? Yeah, I'm in month 6.

Month 6. Oh, actually, that'll be pretty interesting. Okay, I'm gonna add that to our question list. How about month 6 and a new CRO goal? I know Lauren just a little bit, but enough over the years to be a super fan. He's OG Saastr. He had multiple roles at Shopify, in the startup to scale-up days, including owning Shopify Plus and the whole group that took the more enterprise. I think for a while he might have really been the only folk person doing traditional sales at Shopify in his team. I think you were brought in to do sales in some ways at Shopify, right? Albeit in a different way, right?

Yep.

And always had a lot of interesting views on what we now call PLG, what sales should be doing. Did the whole Shopify run, I think pre-IPO, post-IPO for the whole enterprise and upmarket and sales and more there. Then great runs as I think CEO at Podium and very senior role at Bill. So if you look at those, all very SMB, all not quite, maybe Shopify is what we call vertical SaaS, I think e-commerce. And now it's Slice taking some of those lessons, which I want to dig into on what might seem to outsiders as a narrow play, right? Slice, I'm going to misdescribe it because I'm only a know it from the outside, but you know, vertical SaaS for pizza. But this is actually one of the, I think the single largest segment in one of the largest segments of our economy, right? Which is some of the thing that makes vertical SaaS work. So now Ciro, so Lauren, thanks. Thank you for joining us. I'll ask some questions, but then we can open it up to AMA for others. It's supposed to be an AMA, but I had like 4 or 5 questions I want to ask, but thank you. Thank you for joining us and coming back to Saastr.

All right. I love being here. Love what you guys do and it's nice to see you again and yeah. Excited to talk.

So help me understand, I almost, so for folks, I think a lot of folks will know about Slice a little bit. They see Ilya, if that's his name, the CEO on social media. We've seen the ads in the old days with that pizza guy. A lot of stuff, they'll think they know a little bit about Slice, but ground us a little bit. What does Slice do today? How many customers and how does the business model actually work?

Right. So Slice serves independent pizzerias. So just on that, there are somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 independent pizza shops in the United States. If you combine Domino's, you know, Pizza Hut, Papa John's together, there's about 20,000 shops. So independent pizza is a larger market than like big pizza. We provide software and services that help the shop run better, gain insights into their— like, help the owners run the shop better, help them gain insights into their shop, help them engage their customers through marketing. We sell them pizza boxes. So it's not just software. There are also services involved in this. We do marketing on behalf of the shops. So we really vertically integrate the shop. We're looking at all the problems and jobs to be done that a shop has and how we can help them do more making great pizza and do less running the shop. We are helping them run the shop.

So yeah, so, and so it's the full ERP for the pizzeria. It's essentially, right?

Essentially.

That's what I think a lot of people miss in vertical. I'll ask you next if it's, if it is vertical SaaS, as that's somehow become a trendy term, but I think to win for SMEs, a lot of times you need to be the whole ERP. You need to own the whole operation stack for them to achieve the ROI they need.

Yeah. And that, that's exactly right. So in those pizzerias is $50 billion a year worth of order flow and spend.

Yeah.

So when people are like, oh, pizza can't be that big of a market, that's $50 billion worth of TAM in a single vertical in the United States alone. Got it. Globally, it would be far larger. And so like, of course you can go vertical SaaS because if you verticalize the experience, if you consume the vertical, there is a huge amount of work being done and spend and orders in that vertical. And so you can build very large businesses, which is what Slice is doing. We're over $100 million in revenue. We're growing. We've got tens of thousands of customers in the platform and we're extremely early, right? We're scraping the surface of it. So like, yeah, vertical SaaS is absolutely a play, but you really do have to think about it as how do you, how do you, instead of viewing the shop as like, how do I do POS for the shop?

Yeah.

Which is horizontal SaaS. It's how do I solve all problems the shop has over time? Right. And You know, and that creates a massive TAM opportunity, which you can take advantage of.

Yeah. There's a classic story that Bessemer tells when they invested in Toast that basically everyone passed and they barely did the deal, even though I think it was half incubated in their offices because they didn't think it made sense to build the point of sale themselves. They felt like you just can't do it all. They're like, just do one little thing. The classic Paul Graham advice, do one little thing well. But I don't know that that is the perfect answer in vertical SaaS today. Is it?

No, and it's not that it's— I don't think it's binary like that. Each vertical is a little bit different in like what's the surface area you can solve. A pizza shop is a very straightforward idea. It is not rocket science. It's not that complex of a business. So you can chip away at the jobs to be done and really give them world-class solutions because that entrepreneur is not technically sound very much. They're not out there looking at software all the time. They don't really do well if they have to find the point solutions for everything. They want partners. This is why you see Domino's be so successful, is Domino's is vertical SaaS. It is a tech company masquerading as a pizza shop, right? It has given their, their owners, right, the, the franchisees, a massive technology stack and a complete unfair advantage.

Yep.

And as a result, Domino's is the most dominant pizza shop in the world. That's the same idea. That's what we're trying to do, except for independence. Why does Domino's get a corner on like unfair advantages? We will build all of that same capability and just hand it to independent operators so that they have the same advantage.

But you have to look at the whole shop. And that's from the outside, that's the value proposition, right? Why can't you have the same technology stack that Domino's has We will empower the small, the independents with that same— you can get everything, ordering, mobile, website, tech, the whole stack for you. Right.

And then go further.

Yeah.

Is why can't you get the order, the orders of magnitude discounts on buying supplies? I can like Slice can.

I see. I didn't know about that piece. You can source, you do group sourcing for the, for all that piece. Yeah.

So we're, we're giving, we're selling pizza boxes to shops because we can lever up thousands of shops volume and get a discount and give it back to them. Right? We can lever up the marketing dollars of thousands of shops and apply it in a more effective way than any individual shop could. And so that's the verticalization of it. It's not just the software platform, although everything is software-enabled. It is looking at the shop and saying, how do you give this— an individual independent shop the leverage of thousands of shops?

Got it.

Right. And doing that creates a verticalized, vertically integrated business that is highly valuable to the shop owner who's just trying to make awesome pizza, but also because of the sheer volume of stuff moving through, whether it's orders or purchasing or whatever, is also highly valuable as a business area that you can consume. And so it's a virtuous cycle that then also benefits SMBs and local communities and all the amazing things that come with helping entrepreneurs versus the enterprise.

And I don't know if it's published, and if it's not, I'm not pushing you. No, you can just pass on the question. But is the average pricing that you're able to get for all these services— do you— what is that? Or is it published? Or is it— or is it— or is it less published? How much value are you able to obtain?

It's not— it's not published, but it's aggressive because, again, you know, if you go to any vendor and you're a single shop, they're going to be like, hey, you— what do you want, 100 of those? Like, that's— we're not giving you discounts. If we go as Slice and I'll like, yes, I'll have a million, please. Right? They immediately are just like cutting deep discounts into their model for volume. We just give that back to the shop.

Got it.

And so it is an advantage of looking at it as a full shop and a full vertical versus even what you were describing is I think some horizontal SaaS platforms are like, oh, we're gonna go vertical SaaS. It's like, we're gonna sell POS just to pizza. It's like, yeah, that's not exactly vertical though, right? That is vertical in a department. The true vertical would be the whole shop. And that's what we're doing.

Yeah, I think that's underdiscussed. I also think, I don't know what you just think on this in general. When I, when I step back a little bit and I think about vertical SaaS for SMBs, which for some reason is of more interest today, right? Probably when Slice started, it seemed goofy. Today at $100 million, it seems people, people get it. I think if you do the math, it, you, you almost have to earn at least $10K a year from these very small businesses to make the math work. That's where Toast has gotten to go. And I think if you just sell a POS, like, I don't think you can make that much, right? And I don't think the TAM pencils out. So I feel like there's like, you need to do it all. The merchant want, the vendors want it all, right? The customers, but you almost need to earn $10K from these small customers to make the math pencil out. Does that, Does that sound about right to you?

I think, I think it sounds right. I mean, this is the development we've gone through, the cycle where, yeah, PLGs were a thing and ads were cheap and ROAS was high and like, you can't do that anymore. Basically, like very few companies can pull that off, which drove all of the SMB economic model and all and most of the SMB sales models were built on a PLG set of math. And it doesn't exist this way. And so you have to make more money to justify the sales process now than you ever had to do. And so you have to look at the customers and say a lot of what was driving the first generation of this has— is rapidly commoditizing, right? Where the customers are like, I'm no longer paying for this, and everyone's chased each other to the bottom to commoditize it. And so where is the value curve for the customers? What do the customers actually value versus what has— what have we spent a lot of time and effort building? These are now no longer like perfect overlap. They're now— the Venn diagram is actually starting to pull apart where a lot of what tech has built is no longer the high value curve because we were good at building it and we made it a commodity. And now we're stuck in like, well, what's the next value curve that generates enough revenue to justify the machine?

Yes.

All right.

So are you— Beyond what you've learned at Slice, are you jaded on the point solution? Do you think it's death of the point solution, or how do you come out on that? What you're learning from that?

I don't think it's— I'm old now. And so my hyperbolic—

You're leaning into this.

Yeah. My hyperbolic kind of this or that version of reality gets kind of crushed over time.

Yeah, me too.

There's far more gray. So I think there are extremely high-value point solutions. I think once you find one of those and you build a big business in it, other people enter the space, create a lot of optionality, and it starts to create commoditization of these high-value spaces.

Yeah.

If your business is only hedged to one, right, you risk the commoditization curve. If you're early enough, in it, hey, you can get a long way. But I think what we're seeing now in kind of all businesses, including Slice, is no single thread, especially in SMB, is probably high value enough, right, to be alone, for you to do alone and like create billions of dollars of return.

Yeah, that's what I see too. One thread isn't going to be enough, right?

Yeah. And so it's like, Hey, you know, whether it was starting an online shop very easily, or the payment mechanism for the shop, or the financial services of the shop, or whatever it was, it was like no single one of those threads could have built Shopify. No single— like, if you're POS only, like POS will get commoditized to zero. And basically already is. Most POS companies alone are making all of their money on the rake of the transaction and not, no one's like the hardware is now zero. The like, so you have to start like—

Yeah, Toast loses money on hardware, right? Toast loses money on hardware.

So I think you have to start looking at other things in the vertical of that space you're in and saying, hey, where else can we add value that is not really well done where the shop wants the integration? It's the sum of parts becomes a really interesting play. You can make 1 plus 1, 1 thing and 2 things equal 4. And when you're vertical, you can just focus. It's just like, I'm not building this for restaurants. I'm building it for pizza shops.

Yeah.

So even the POS of a pizza shop is not the same as a POS of the restaurant because pizza shops are quick service most of the time. They operate differently. So you can just really focus down on the problem set at a level of depth and care that you would never get to horizontally because you're trying to serve so many masters, right? It's like when there's one master, you can just like solve problems. So, and so really to come at that a different way, fundamentally, I think Slice is in the business of trust. The shop owners are entrepreneurs. This is not a company for them. This is their identity. This is their life. This is their— what is happening in that shop is not abstracted business operations. It is a manifestation of the owners themselves. So the care required to do it well and to build solutions that will actually work requires it to go deep. You have to think about it as the whole shop because they don't think about it as POS. They don't think about it as e-com. They, they think about it as their business.

Yeah.

So when you show up with a single point solution and you clearly have not paid attention to the shop, The shop owners are like, you don't understand, I don't trust you. But when you bridge the trust gap of like, I only do this for you, I am you, right? They start exposing other value component areas that are usually much higher value to them that you can start to access and return value on. And that really broadens your opportunity. That's where the TAM becomes like nearly exponential.

Yeah, let me, on the TAM thing, let me ask you a question. I was thinking and going deep on the vertical we had at SaaS. This year I had Andrew Bialecki come from Klaviyo, right?

I mean, I love Andrew.

He's so good. And he was, he made a good challenge, which is we talked about TAM and market share and the fact that the reason Klaviyo is growing so quickly to a billion is they have north of 50% market share. And he said, look, we could debate whether Klaviyo is vertical SaaS or not, but it's definitely vertical-ish, right? It's focused, right? He's like, if you, if you own a space like you're talking about, you should own the majority market share. That should be your job as, as, as leadership. Not none of this 10 or 20% stuff and horizontal stuff, right? You should own majority market share. And it was kind of a kick in the ass to me because we used to talk about this in the old days and then things got so big for a while, 2019 through, like no one cared what your, what your market share was as long as you were a unicorn. Because there were like 11 unicorns per category, right?

Yep.

Is that a goal? Do you think about— can we— you got $100 million from pizza shops. Do you want 60% market share? 80%? Do you think about it that way?

I want 100%.

100%. Yeah. I don't think it's ridiculous.

Well, I don't think it is when you were taking the approach that we're taking. Right. Which is I'm going to— I'm solving for the whole shop, not a component of the shop.

Yeah.

And when there's $50 billion rolling through that shop, That's your TAM, $50 billion, right? In one vertical, in one country. It just, how do you get to it, right? Like, you know, what will you have to do? What do you have to build to solve for that shop's problem set?

Yeah.

And so I absolutely, but I think there are those verticals. I think pizza is a really good example of one, which is why Join Slice is, there are verticals where they want to adopt a single solution. This is why Domino's is such a good proxy for this, is Domino's is a $6 billion revenue company off 9,000 stores. 9,000 stores.

Yes.

Right? Right now we have more than 9,000 pizza shops on Slice. We're at $100 million. Our ramp is massive, right? Yeah. Our opportunity is enormous. And there are 30,000 to 40,000 independents in the United States. Which means there is the opportunity to build a very large business in that narrow space. You just got to start absorbing and doing some of the jobs and problems that traditionally SaaS has avoided. Service work because of margin compression and like all fine financial engineering arguments, but in the grand scheme, Domino's doesn't trade like a restaurant, trades like a tech company.

Yeah, you gotta do it all. You gotta do the low margin stuff and the high margin stuff and the mid margin stuff.

Because it's valuable to the shop.

Yeah.

And then the shops just, you know, what you'll, what you'll get to is every shop that opens will just open in your platform.

Yeah.

They won't even think about anyone else because you solved all the problems. It's just like, yeah, I'm gonna, instead, you know, you can open a pizzeria and immediately install the unfair advantage that Domino's has for your own local shop.

Yeah, I love 100% market share as the goal.

Yeah, well, what would be the other goal?

Well, I just think if you're building another marketing suite or if you're, you know, if you're trying to take on a horizontal player, you can aim for it. But, you know, even Salesforce doesn't have 100% of its core markets, right?

Sure. And I think, you know, there's a— I do think there's an opportunity in highly specific verticalized businesses like Slice to get to very high percentages of it. I think as you come out of that a little bit and you do something like Klaviyo, which is, you know, vertical horizontal a little bit, it's like, hey, we are email marketing and CRM for software, which is kind of horizontal in a vertical. It's a little bit harder, but even then, you know, one of the things we used to say inside at Shopify was I don't want 10% of the enterprise ecom market. Right? I want to make the enterprise ecom market half the size that it is and own it all. Because the predecessors, the belief was, y'all did it wrong. You tried to do a thing which was inaccurate because you didn't have the tech or the ability or whatever. It's like the average enterprise deal in ecom at that time in history, you had Salesforce doing deals at $800,000-$900,000 a year that we could do at $50,000. And so I was just like, why would I chase them into $800, $900? I'll just blow them out of the market and then just own the whole space. So I think my point on the 100% is just, I don't know, I like winning. And so Bezos' quote, "In your margin is my opportunity." It's like, okay, I'm just going to find out where all of you make money and just take it away. And that I think you can do in vertical because you can look at the vertical. I can look at pizza in a way that no one's going to look at pizza.

Yep.

And I can do things that no one's gonna be willing to do. And this was also what Shopify was doing things, is doing things that no one's willing to do. No one's willing to make the bets Toby was willing to make. No one's willing to make the bets that, uh, Elyr is willing to make. Um, because it flies in the face of general belief on what software markets are. And it's like, yeah, great.

You know, And you guys have, it wasn't on my question list, but do you guys have, it is a great push in learning. Do you guys have a gross margin target or even at $100 million, or do you let the chips sort of fall where they may? Because when you look at Toast, the gross margins are quite low, but the multiple's still great, right? Shopify's like 50% gross margins, right? I think that's about right, plus or minus. I think Toast is in the 30s, right? Which we wouldn't even think as a software company, right? But they needed to do it, right? Do you sweat it? Do you ignore it as long as the bottom line's fine? Any meta learnings there?

We're early, so we're still a startup, right? $100 million is still a growth startup company. So we are very oriented—

It depends on your perspective, but it is good to hear. Sure.

All right, fine. I think I don't care much about valuation because I'm always like, cool, tell me what your revenue is. Like, your value is fascinating, but Do I care about margin? Yes, as an interesting component of the story, but not as a driver of the business. The driver of the business is still growth, right? We have so much space to grow. We want to drive it profitably, right? We don't want to— like, I don't want to have to take money if I don't want to, you know, that kind of stuff. So the whole basket of metrics matters, but Ultimately, the driver of the growth is, um, you could think about it as orders. It's like, there is $30 billion of order flow moving through independent pizzerias. How much of that is moving through Slice?

Yeah. Is that the number one KPI? How much of the order flow do you capture?

Yeah. North Star. Because if you are consuming the job to be done that is driving order flow, Yep. It is cascading through all of the revenue, all the takes, all the profitability, that kind of stuff. But if you're not driving that, right?

Yep.

You are ultimately at some point starting to decline, right? Because all things are fed from the growth of the shop itself, right? And so like that has to be our master. Got it. With the constraint of like, hey, I could drive lots of order volume by making everything free. That is a bad strategy because the company will be bankrupt. So, you know, you balance it. It's a basket of metrics that are checkstepping the other metric along the way. And margin's in the basket, but it isn't— it's like the back of the basket. It's like, yeah, that's interesting. But we're too early to run the business on a margin profile when there's so much growth opportunity.

That's a good insight. I'll try to just take 5 more questions. So folks have questions they want to ask, throw them into the chat or the Q&A or whatever we have, but I've got a few more I want to get to. I want to talk about your role as CRO, but I just want to ask one quick meta question to help folks that I think is obvious. But is there any downturn in your space? Is there any macro effects? Is it okay to go to the board and say things are down because there's a downturn? Where do you see it slice? Is there any downturn?

[Speaker:BRAD_STONE] So the shortest answer is there is no macro downturn in pizza. The thing I love about pizza is pizza is social fabric. We eat it when we're happy, when we're sad, we take it to good events and negative events. It is everywhere all of the time. Now, it is also an entrepreneurial endeavor. So you have cyclical entrepreneurial behavior as not every pizza shop owner is going to be great. And so you have a natural kind of every year some of them fail, but every year some of them start. So last year, as a fun fact, was the, the top year for pizza shops growing— sorry, pizza shops opening ever.

Really?

Now we're digging into why, right? It may just be people are like really excited by pizza. I don't know. Right. Who knows? We're figuring that out. But macroeconomically, It is somewhat quote-unquote recession-proof, downturn-proof, because like when things are bad, you order pizza. When things are good, you order pizza, right? Funerals, pizza. Weddings, pizza.

Oh man.

Right? Like I was saying to the crew before we got on, I was like, there is such a fascinating reality is like Celine Dion got off of the Eiffel Tower after singing. The very first thing she did was eat a pizza. A Tour de France winner, the very first thing he did at the end of the stage before he was even off his bike, yeah, pizza. Pizza just exists in a way nothing else exists. So it gives us legs. So it's hard to go to a board and argue macro on pizza while they're all eating pizza. So no, I think the challenges are more, do you solve the problems? Do you have an efficient motion? Do they trust you? Are you engaging them in the right way? Which is kind of like the challenge of sales and marketing and product building everywhere.

Yeah. All right. I appreciate that. There's sometimes, that's what I see across my portfolio and the founders I work with. But if you're too, if you're too locked into this classic B2B2B world, you think the world has ended the last, the last 2 years when all your budget went to AI or disappeared. But if you look at folks tied to the real world, Right. You know, Toast, Klaviyo, Shopify that you know well, others, you know, Samsara, Servit. I mean, they're just, they're all, there's no macro impacts. Monday.com, there's none, right? There's none.

I think there is a, my belief in this is kind of like the craft of selling thing is there have been good times and bad times. Forever. And there are always companies that go through in every industry that seem fine, that defy the logic. And I think I've just come to the conclusion, it's like, yeah, most of the others are just making excuses. Like, figure it out. Either you didn't have the product and the downtime just showed you that you didn't, you don't have the processes, you don't have the execution capability. But I've always felt like, I've always felt as a sales rep, I was always like, who's the top sales rep? And I would just watch them and it didn't kind of matter what the macro was happening. They always smashed their number and it was like—

top reps always do, don't they?

And why? How is that possible? If the rest of the team's like, the market's a disaster, it's like, I'm sorry, they're doing something different. Go find that out. Right? Because if there's one doing it, everyone can do it. Might sound crazy, but like, it just is somewhat the truth. And I think that's where I would love to be able to go. I think my job is not to go to the board and make excuses. My job is to go to the board and say, hey, you know, here's where we are. Here's what our math says. Here's what we can do. Here's where we're going to get to and like draw a line and a story that can help them understand what we're going to become. But if I show up and I'm like, I don't know, the market's hard, I literally would hope they'd be like, yes, and? The crap answer, like, how will you solve for this problem? It's like, yeah, that is my job, is to solve for that problem. Now, luckily, I don't really have that problem at Slice. So, you know, but previously, it was like, yeah, we find a way, you find a way, or you realize that, you know, you weren't one of the top 3 in the market. Now it's a hard, it's a hard place to live.

Yeah, I want to get my last question and dig in on what you're doing to Sierra. But those are such I've made those points myself over the years. Those are such great insights, right? One, if things are tough, one, you may have fallen out of product market fit as a vendor, right? You may no longer. So you got to be honest there and either fight for it or give up. It's up to you, right? But market doesn't need number 6 today in tough categories, right? Fight for it or give up. And then two, it's— I've said this before, but I'm going to use you as an underline, bold, italics. Because this is such a great cheat if you are going through tougher times. 90% of the time there's 1 or 2 reps still killing it.

Yeah.

In the tougher— and they're in fact a lot of times they're doing almost as well as in the good times, like a smidge worse, like 90% of how they were doing when it was easy, but not even half. Like they're doing almost as well. And if you're a leader, founder, CRO, anyone, you've got to be like, go to that moth to light and figure out what are they doing right? And reproduce that because there's something that's still working in that top rep, right?

Yeah. And most businesses that I've seen and most sales orgs that I've seen almost always fall under a power law, which is most of the business is being driven by a small number of people.

Yeah.

And yet the company continues to add headcount and spread it out. And it's just like, stop doing this, stop doing this. Over-index on the people who actually perform on a regular because they just know how to perform. Stop hoping that more people is your solution to anything.

Yeah.

And it's just hard to believe because we went through a cycle where the, the adage was add headcount at all costs. We're gonna grow into it. We're gonna do— and it's just like, but when you dig into the details of how the motion works, it almost has—

it—

that has almost never been true. It's almost always still a power law. 20% of the reps doing 80% of the number.

Go. And do you think Oh, sorry, go ahead.

No, no, no. I was just like, go index on those 20%.

And do you, this is my one thing I'm all over today and I'm just curious to get your thoughts. Then let's talk about being CEO of Slice and let's open it up for questions before I burn all the time. But do you find that those, especially in today's world, those top 20% are product savants? Like they know the pizzeria cold because they can walk into a pizzeria and talk with Lauren and Jason's pizza and they don't just trying to sell you software or boxes. They walk in and they say, hey, and you know Elaine's Pizza down the road, Pete's. Let me tell you what we did with her. It looks pretty similar. It's a little different. I can see you're struggling here or there. I've got the solution. It will return itself in a week. Don't worry about that. I can solve— here's what I can do with you. And they're just these savants in applying the solution to the problem. I think you— I think you almost have to be to win, to be those top performers. Maybe, maybe you see it differently, though.

Oh, no, I would say it slightly differently. But same idea. The barrier to entry to success has always, in sales, has always been the same thing. Work, right? That's the barrier. The barrier is you gotta work your butt off. It was not actually supposed to be easy for everybody. Not everybody was supposed to win. Not everybody was supposed to make it. Not everyone was supposed to get paid. Not every— that was never the case. It has never been the case in sales that, that it was supposed to work out for for everybody. Sales' greatest filter is brutal work, right? It is the greatest filter. It's been removed in the last 15 years from most orgs, that filter, because of the internet. And we could spend an entire session on this topic. But what you're describing, I wouldn't call them savants. They just work harder. They learn more. They want to under— they're more curious.

They're more curious.

They grow more. They spend more time in the product. They recognize that they are part of the product. There isn't the product and the salesperson. This is all the product. And so how you talk about it, how much you know, how much you know about the industry, how much you know about the other customers is part of being a great sales rep. All the great sales reps behave like this.

Yeah.

Because that's the way it works. And that's what you unlock. It's we have made the middle group of sales reps believe they know what they're doing because we fed them leads and we fed them all this stuff and it was easy for a while. And now that it's hard again, the separation is far more obvious. But it's always been the case that those top reps just studied more on their own, read all of the books, listened to all of each other's— they're all their friends' calls, right?

Yeah.

Did demos over and over again, had every product at their house downloaded onto their laptops and were dogfooding it on a regular basis. Right? New shop owners personally, like, that's always been true. It's always been true. And when people are like, well, you know, they're just, they're special. They're not special. They worked harder than you. Sorry. That's always been true. Right? Now, some people might be like, there might be the few, but I spent my whole career trying to find this Michael Jordan level sales rep. Yeah. And what I've found is Oh yeah, right. No, Michael also shot 1,000 free throws every day.

It's true.

So that's what I was actually looking for is who's the kid shooting 1,000 free throws every day. Yeah. And the answer is there's one of them out of, out of every 10,000. Yeah. I guarantee that person's gonna crush.

Yeah. Unfortunately we can't hire just one rep out of every 10,000. No, no humans. That's one challenge. But it's, it's the right point. It's good.

Yeah. It's work. The barrier to entry is work.

Alright, so let's use my— and then I do want to make sure we take a few questions so I don't— because I love the conversation. But tell me about your role as CRO. What is it? Is it sales and go-to-market and marketing? Is it just sales? Is it what? Just tell me what your team's like, what you're doing, what you— what your KPI and goals are.

Yeah. So it is all go-to-market, sales, marketing, account management, customer support, the whole the whole gambit. And, you know, most of my job is in the foxhole with the team, right? Like, looking at spreadsheets, watching input values, watching output values, right? Looking at the math, drawing trend lines, working out process steps, talking about how we improve the conversation, looking at decks that we're sending out, deciding where to allocate marketing funds to, like, drive lead flow because It's a B2B business. So like, it is a lot more, I think people see the title and they're like, oh, the title is like leader of team. And it's like, yeah, by doing the stuff, right? By being in the weeds with everybody. And that's what I enjoy. Like, that's where I think the magic is, the magic, like sales and marketing, go-to-market is not magic, it's science. And if you don't know the math and you don't know your trend line and you don't know progress and you aren't evaluating multiple components at the same time and you aren't in those details, how do you make any choices?

Yeah.

And so that's my job is to help the company understand what its potential is and draw a line that says this is how we can grow from a bottom-up perspective. Come top down and try and pressure test that and see, can you bend that curve? But then really know what the levers are in the process. What really makes differences when you mess with it versus, you know, what might seem like it. So I'll give you the prime example. Everyone wants to talk about revenue. Everyone's like, let's talk about revenue. I've said this from day one. I fundamentally believe no one wakes up and does revenue. That's not their job. Revenue is an output of what people do. What do people do? I don't— they make calls, they go to meetings, they do presentations, right? They write copy, they do ads, they write blog posts, they do— that is what they're doing. Well, not all of those have the same levered effect on your outputs.

Yeah.

So you have to be very clear what your levers are so that you're not spending a whole lot of time tinkering with a thing that's gonna have a 0% impact on anything. It might be an important step in the process, but like, that's not the lever. So figuring out levers is like, when I get into a company, it's kind of like, I just try and go deep fast, is like, show me all the data, show me all the spreadsheets you're afraid to show people. Right? I want to see them all. I want to ask a bunch of questions on how it works. I mean, like, I have an engineer mindset to sales, which is like, I want to know how it works. Show me the Weird pieces and the moving parts and all that kind of stuff. And then I wanna start talking about what the levers are, right? What are the things that if we put our finger on it, it materially affects an output somewhere and can we get good at that? And then can we make process improvements? Like, I think I'm a process engineer, uh, by heart. That's the job of a CRO is you're a process engineer. Yeah. Is like breaking all the things down to their component pieces, understanding the math and the metric, understanding the leverage. And then like better, better, better, better. How do we do it better? How do we do it like, let's incrementally better, incrementally better, incrementally better. Just over and over and over. Because if you do that across a lot of different things, your outputs start to change.

Yep.

And I mean, I think that like, that's 99% of what I do.

Yeah. Make everything a little bit better. Okay. One last question on the, on, on that, on that role and then I will open up to questions. I just, we just got a great, great—

You keep threatening the question thing.

I know. I just, I'm just, you're, you're very, just very good. Last one. Cause sometimes it's not, these are interesting answers and non-obvious. What works going to these pizzerias? What works from a marketing perspective? One thing that usually doesn't work in my limited experience is a bunch of email cadences, uh, written by an SDR or AMP. It's just because pizzerias, pizza, small businesses don't have general— small businesses aren't in front of their email all day like IT professionals and folks doing real work in, in, in, in, in e-commerce store and stores, let's call it, let's include pizza like in the set of things called stores. They, they, they, you're lucky if they'll respond to a text, right? Yeah. But they're certainly not opening up cadences, right? The breakup coffee emails, maybe they are. Now you have a brand and that input. I'm just curious what works, what doesn't for actually getting these busy non-IT buyers. How do you just reach them?

Yeah, I don't know yet. Because you're, you're so, Look, we're trying lots of things because you're describing a very hard problem set, which is totally true. Entrepreneurs are busy. Enterprises are not. Right? Now, what I mean by that is the enterprise decision makers are, but the people most sales orgs spend time with have nothing better to do. Right? And so, you know, but entrepreneurs are. So this is why building for entrepreneurs is really hard. It's not obvious how you're going to get them to talk to you. So we have We have outside sales reps who are just walking into shops, right? And so I'm a big believer, I learned this at Shopify, which was create more value than you take. So part of it is this is the— we are in the trust business. If you just show up and jam product down their throat, immediately they're gonna be like, who are you and why are you in my store? Like, why do I listen to you? Community is a thing. Trust is a thing. Value is a thing. Time, you're in a long game with them, especially vertically. It's like, hey, you know, you can't pressure them. But the real thing is value. How do you show them value before they have to make a choice?

Yeah, right.

And that's hard. And there's a lot of ways to do it, right? There's a lot of community events to go to. There's a lot of community support to provide so that they start to see you as this— Shopify did this exceptionally well. It's like entrepreneurs building for entrepreneurs. And so it's, I'm you, I'm with you. Like, I'm here forever. Like, it'll be fine. You don't have to say, I'm not selling you anything. Like, I just want to talk. I want to, like, can we help you in some way? If the answer is no, it's okay. It's okay to say no to me.

It's okay.

It's okay. Like, someday I'm going to come with something. You're going to be like, ah, that's interesting. Let's talk about that. But until then, I want to create value for you anyways. Can I connect you to someone else? Do you want, are you curious about another shop in your town? I happen to know them. Do you want a connection over there? Right? These are like the long— it's almost weirdly like long tail marketing. It's like you are planting seeds for trees that won't grow for years, but you need them in years just like you need them today. And so, you know, entrepreneurs don't have time, so you better be there with something valuable. That email better be valuable, right? It better tell them, teach them, help them, connect them. If it doesn't, why would they read it? Right? The marketing campaign you do, why would they look? If you can't answer these questions, you probably shouldn't do it because they're not going to look. And so I think we're learning, we're running a bunch of experiments, we're learning what this is. Because you're right, we have tried what I'll call blasting them. Right? And some of them worked. But a lot of them were like, never talk to me again. I don't have time to manage your nonsense. Right? And so like, yeah, okay, so that doesn't work. Right? And so it's like, yeah, we're gonna learn and you learn by trying a bunch of stuff. But a lot of it, I, I would say community is a big one, being involved in their community, creating value without asking them for stuff, right? That, you know, that could be content, that could be aggregation, that could be information, like that could be access. Lots of things there. You know, one of the things we know is they're very curious. They're entrepreneurs. They're very curious about others.

They are, right? What are they doing? What are my peers doing or competition?

What's the market doing? Yeah, right. And like Slice sits in an interesting marketplace where it's like, oh, do you want to know the aggregate behavior of tens of thousands of shops?

Yeah, you got great data.

Yeah, we have great data. So data is an asset you can use to create trust and create a conduit to talk. That is value to them more than it's value to you. Right? So I think we're learning on how to do this, how to really create trust with our customers that we can build on over time.

All right. Let's— I got more, but Taylor and Amelia, let's open up to questions. I love that insight though. I love so many of your insights. It's not that enterprise sales is easy. It's not easy, but they do have time, but they have time. They're not running the pizzeria. They're drinking coffee and they're buying one new product a year, maybe two. And if they want, they could evaluate 100 or they could evaluate zero, but their time is very elastic. They have goals, they could get fired, but they're not that busy, are they?

Well, and you're talking to the owner.

Yeah. So busy. You're working 20 hours a day, including mindshare, right? Yeah.

15, 15 hours. You have the enterprise has set up entire organizations and processes to evaluate stuff. So they're always evaluating stuff. The average entrepreneur has zero processes to evaluate anything. They're literally just trying to keep it going every day. Yeah. And so when, like, sales is at best interruption science, no one woke up and was like, you know what I hope happens today? Sales reps call me. Yeah. Right. It's not that you don't add value as a salesperson. You do immense value. It's just you have to understand that you are interrupting them. They are busy, so you better interrupt them with something valuable because if you didn't, what did you just tell them? I don't care at all about you.

For sure. Yeah, for sure.

Right. Which good luck building that relationship when your first interaction was all about you. Yeah.

Cool. Listen, this is great, guys. Let's open it up. Taylor and Amelia, maybe we take some questions from the team, but love it.

Yeah, thanks so much, Lauren. We are getting a lot of comments on some of your messages as well. Denise was saying how impressed she is with your success with SMBs, specifically restaurants. It's tech adverse, change adverse. It can be so hard. So thank you for getting really tactical about ways to connect with those folks. That definitely answered some great questions. I'm gonna get us kicked off with a question from Ish, who's not able to ask, so I'll just ask for them. And Ish is coming from the founder perspective.

They'd like Is that me? No.

Okay.

Oh, um, some red flags to look out for.

Okay, you broke up right as you asked the question, so I didn't hear.

I'm sorry, guys.

No, it's okay.

Hurricane Helene has done a number on my Wi-Fi this week. Um, we— can you guys hear me now?

Yeah, we can hear you.

So Ish is asking from a founder perspective, for a new CRO in the first 6 months, what can they expect? What are some KPIs they can expect, some metrics they can expect to see? And also, what are some red flags that they should look for with a new CRO?

Yeah, okay. So I have a couple just like very specific thoughts there. Be sure you want a CRO. Okay. The number of companies that say they want one, but what they actually want is a VP of sales is wild. Um, it's okay. Like, as a founder, just be honest with yourself. What do you really want? A CRO is covering multiple departments. Is that what you want, or do you just want someone to fix the sales org, right? Just be, be sure. Um, don't overhire for no reason, um, because both people are going to be unhappy at that point. Um, so that's one. But if a CRO, they walk in the door, I mean, first, if your CROs are not deep inside the org very quickly, like just asking questions, learning, looking at spreadsheets, understanding the motion, and with the— and talking to customers, like talking to customers, listening to calls, all that kind of stuff, like red flags, just immediately start throwing red flags because what else is there? Like literally what else is there? So that's the first is I think, you know, expect them to go get into the details. You don't manage any sales org at any size from your corner office. It does not work. So go deep fast. And then kind of what I was talking about is like, I think as a founder, I would be asking questions like, what are our levers, right? You gotta give them time to learn it and watch the process happen. But like, what are the levers, right? What do you see that are the levers? What's the driving metric? Really input-oriented. It's very easy to talk about fancy vanity metrics, right? Like, you know, revenue and stuff like that. Don't get me wrong, revenue is important, but it is an outcome of a bunch of other things. So I'd be very curious, and I'm very curious when I start companies, like, hey, show me the distribution of performance of all the reps by input, right? Not because it's like the end-all be-all, but it tells you a story. It's like, how many meetings do they take a day, a week, a month? What's the conversion rate between steps in the sales process? So it's like, oh, you make a call. The point of the call is to get to the meeting. The point of the meeting is to get to a proposal. The point of the proposal is to get to a deal, right? In between those are conversion metrics, right? How many calls did it take to get to a meeting? How many meetings did it take to get to a call? The conversion metrics are the most interesting of the math in that process because you will see, because the binary number itself is interesting but is easily skewable, meaning you could have a rep who does 10,000 calls and you're like, oh man, that rep's awesome. If their conversion rate is 0%, they are not awesome. And you could have a rep who does 10 calls, you're like, oh my God, they didn't work that hard. What if their conversion rate is 90% and then the next conversion rate is 90%, and the next conversion rate is 90%. Like, those reps might be awesome. So it allows you to neutralize the absolute number. So that's one. The other thing is immediately kill anyone who talks about averages. Like, if they show up, they're like, the average performance. Oh, the average performance. Cool. You know, that's pulled both directions by your worst rep and your best rep. So if you have a rep who's like 10,000% of number, your average means nothing. Your median means everything. What is the median rep attainment? What is the median rep performance? What is their median call rate? What is the median? It's not that averages aren't interesting information. It's just you, the only way to make an average work is to cut the outliers out, right? Is to cut the top end and the bottom end out. Which is also not telling you that much information. So I just think like medians are an immediate adjustment to make, is like, it's a far cleaner number. It has its own problems, but it's a far cleaner number than an average, because an average is almost always getting pulled by outlier behavior, which is not a good way to build. Don't build anything based on outliers. If a CRO shows up and is like, um, Oh, we had one rep who did 5,000 deals last quarter, and so we're going to make the quota 5,000 deals. Start asking a ton of questions about how that math's out in any logical way. So I really think it becomes how, like, you want them to go deep, you want them to be in the weeds, right, with the teams, listening to calls, what— looking at data, understanding the levers, and then be able to give that back to you. Tell me the story of the sales org. Tell me the story of our marketing spend. Tell me the story of conversion rates. Tell me the story of these things. As a, do you understand it deeply enough to know where we can make change and where there's opportunity?

Thank you, Lauren. Those were great answers. And thanks for getting into specifics. I'm going to pull up Paul next. He has some questions about growing within vertical. So Paul, you're up.

All right. Thank you, Taylor. And thank you, Lauren, for being here. Great conversation. Going back to the vertical SaaS model, and this idea of owning the entire operational stack, a very lofty and admirable goal. But as an early-stage company where resources are limited, how do you think about sequencing the offers or the products you're going to build and bring to market to get to that 1 1 4 compounding value equation? Yeah, problem, right? Like you, it's knowing, being deep with the customers. And listening to them and asking them questions, right? What is the biggest challenge that you have or the biggest opportunity or the biggest thing you want to improve? And just asking that question to hundreds of customers over time starts to show you the path, which is like, so in pizza shops, what is the first thing they will talk about?

Orders.

I want more orders. That makes sense. You're an entrepreneur. You want the business to grow, right? And so it's like, well, where, so for us, where did we start? Things that affect orders, online store, in-store point of sale, phone, all like, we are led by the customer's problem set is the kind of only way I've ever seen it really work. You can lead by like what makes you money. I think the challenge with that sometimes is that can run out on you. It's like eventually it's, if it's not a valuable enough problem, right? So Toby had this construct that I've always kind of loved, which was the job of the company is to make products that solve problems for the customers so that the company can make money so that it can make products that solve problems of the customers. Never reverse 1 and 2, right? And I think to me, that's the answer. It's like, go to your customers, ask them, if you could solve one thing, what would you solve? Right? They're gonna tell you. Now, if they tell you something that isn't in your space, that's maybe a challenge. But if you're in the vertical, I'm gonna, in theory, over time, I'm gonna solve them all. Cool. Start with the biggest one, the one that's gonna impact them the most because it creates value for them. And so for, like I said, in ours, it was, you know, we started in orders because that's what they wanted to talk about, right? They're like, how do we increase orders? How do we make more of them? How do we make them bigger? How do we make them more often? And so we're just chipping away at this set of things. And it's like, great, what's second? And it's like, oh, labor. Yep, for sure. Hiring people, hard. And so it's like, can we solve any of the labor challenges? And like, just working through that progression. But really being customer-led is what I'd say is like, your early products should solve a very obvious problem for that customer that that customer agrees is a problem that they wanna solve. Because usually those are also the things they're willing to pay you for.

Thanks so much, Lauren. Thanks, Paul, for your question. Up next, we have a question from George about dealing with objections from customers. George, I'll let you chime in.

Yes, uh, hi. It's amazing to be here today, guys. Just love it. So I have a short question. How do you deal with objections from clients who prefer on on-premise solution over SaaS?

How would I deal with an objection to on-prem versus SaaS? Man, you're taking me back to enterprise land now. Okay, I guess a couple thoughts. I think an objection is simply requesting more information. What you've got is someone who doesn't they don't totally understand what you're talking about yet. That's why they're objecting. It's like most objections are just a fundamental misalignment of value or impact. They don't get what, what you're trying to— so I think it's an opportunity to ask them more questions. What is this objection? What is it about on-prem that is valuable to you? Why do you want to go down that path? What do you think you get out of that path? What do you think about the same thing in SaaS? Like it's really the best salespeople are highly curious regardless of the role, founders or sales reps masquerading as something else. So, you know, the best thing is to be curious. You may not win, but you will know more. And it's also, I think it's important to remember that in any one year, only 30% of the market's buying something, right? Because last year they bought something. Or the year before they bought something. So people don't buy new stuff every single year. So you're gonna get objections that are totally legit, which people are just like, I don't want to right now. Okay, great, move on. But curiosity helps a lot if someone throws the on-prem object, because at this point, let's be just, you can talk about this 'cause it's an important component of, you are already on-prem. Your company is already, or sorry, you are already in SaaS. Your company's already using SaaS. In the cloud you are afraid of, right? You are personally, you are in the business. There's just no way to avoid it now. So the curiosity allows you to unpack what about this system are you nervous about having in the cloud, given that your own bank account, right, all of the bank accounts of the company and everything are already in a SaaS environment. So what is it that's your objection to this? I think so. Curiosity rules in objections all the time. No matter what the objection is, ask more questions. Help me understand. What are you afraid of? What is that fear? What do you think you get that you don't get here? You know, and then you either can solve for that or you can't. And if you can't, high-five them and be like, thank you for the answer. Thank you for the time. Move on. Because they will probably become a pipeline opportunity next year or the year after, which you will also need.

Okay, got it.

Thank you.

Thank you, sir.

Yeah, pleasure.

Thank you, Lauren. Um, and thank you so much for joining us. We are out of time. Um, but everyone, thank you so much for your questions. Jason, thanks so much for leading the great conversation. Um, Lauren, so many good tidbits. Um, I just loved so many of your quotes that we had throughout. So I know, um, we are excited to continue to share this. If anyone did have to drop, you're able to watch this on our YouTube channel. Um, and then Lauren, we will see you soon. And I think you've inspired a lot of us to go eat Pizza today.

Yeah, it's National Pizza Month, right? It's National Pizza Month. Go eat pizza. Go buy from local shops. Don't buy from the—

local shops.

Go buy from local shops.

Local shops.

Yeah.

Thank you for having me. Thank you. It's been a lot of fun.

Thanks so much.

Thank you, Lauren. Really appreciate it. Thanks guys.