The RevTech Stack Playbook:Going from $1M to $100M with SalesLoft's CMO Sydney Sloan

Welcome, welcome. I see a lot of friends in the audience. Thank you for being here. We're going to geek out for the next 20 minutes talking about revenue technology. What is revenue technology? Well, it's a thing. It's kind of a thing that's happening right now that we're talking about in marketing circles and sales circles. And it's really this convergence of thinking about Your technology stack is an integrated stack, not a marketing stack, a sales stack, a CS stack, customer success stack. But how do you bring those together in a way that makes sense to deliver the best possible experience for your customers? So we're going to have fun talking about tech and a couple other things. So my name's Sydney Sloan. I'm the CMO at Salesloft. I've been there for the last 3 and a half years. It's been quite a ride. $15 million to, well, it just— we passed $100 million, so for for all those folks out there. We got our unicorn status. It's awesome. I learned a lot along the way, so I hope to share some of those lessons with you. The last thing is, is this is the first time I've actually presented this particular deck. So if you're in the audience or online, let me know what you like. Ask questions. Since I can't take questions from the audience, I posted the slides on my LinkedIn profile. So @SydSloan, if you go there, you can download the slides directly from my profile. So let's make it a conversation that doesn't end just in this 20 minutes. So first and foremost, when we think about revenue technology or how at your stage, what problem are you trying to solve? At the end of the day, we've talked a lot about sellers and buyers. I was at a session yesterday where we're talking about PLG. And boy, you know, wouldn't it be great to build that perfect product that just sells itself? But how many sellers are in the room or people people that have salespeople on their teams. Okay? There are 10 million salespeople in the technology industry alone. So selling as a thing is not going away, but it is changing. And that is that it's not about the sell. It's about the relationship. And it's about connecting buyers and sellers together to solve problems, not to sell. To build longstanding relationships. In SaaS, it's about the relationship that you have over time. Your second, third, fourth deal is probably going to be bigger than the first deal. So which one is the sell? So think differently about how you're building your systems to support your sales teams, your relationship teams for that long-term experience with your customer. So before we get into the geeky stuff, we actually talk about which tech, because everybody likes a good, like, show me your tech stack. I'm going to go through some guiding principles, and I'm going to start with a story. My father, Sam Sloan, great man, was an architect. 5 years in college to get your architecture degree. Really hard things, tests you have to pass. And he was out and he was building these great buildings, designing the rest stop system for the state of Nebraska and Wyoming. If you've ever driven through there, hey, Sam Sloan, thanks a lot for that rest stop. But what was really interesting is he went on to get his master's degree in psychology. So he was really an architectural psychologist, And you think, huh? For developers out there, you might flip a switch and be like, well, what he was really doing was he was first evaluating the needs of the people and then designing the buildings that would best facilitate how they would work. And different kinds of people want to work different ways. So why not take that same analogy for how we think about designing our revenue technology stacks? What is it that people need first? So when you take the intersection of people, process, and technology, Start with people. Step 1. What do they need? Design for them. Don't just go buy a bunch of technology because I told you to. What do your people need? Then design the processes. Get those mapped out. And it's harder than ever because guess what? It's not linear anymore. Your buyers are interacting with you and your teams. They're on your website. They're on a third-party peer review site. They're talking to your SDRs. It's not linear. So you really have to think about how does the sales process and the buying process intersect so you're giving that customer the best possible experience. And don't tell them what they already know. No. Keep it simple for your sales teams. Point number 3, more technology is not the answer. If you have the opportunity, if you're not a CEO that's doing the selling, sit with your salesperson for a day. How many clicks do you make them, punish them through once you've customized your systems? How hard is it to do their job? How much data reentry are they doing? Remove that from the system. Remove friction so they can actually do their job, which is talk to customers. You want to scale according to revenue. So I'm going to take you through some stages that you should think of as you go from $10 million to $30 million up to $100 million. So we're going to see how sophisticated your, your stacks can be. And then don't forget about this wonderful thing called data. So now more than ever, your systems are collecting every single interaction that your buyer and seller have. Those are signals for how they want to be sold to. Those are signals for the conversations that they want to have. And you need to have someone watching that and studying it. And optimizing your systems ongoing to take advantage of all that amazing data that they're getting. OK, so I had a good friend say, well, don't just tell me about the good stuff. Tell me about the bad stuff. So yeah, there's lots of mistakes. Nobody's perfect. We're, you know, hopefully fail fast in this world, test often. So there's a lot of debate going on right now. It's like, well, do we keep our sales ops, our marketing ops, or do we create a revenue operations team? And if so, where should it sit? Sit. I've seen both. And I don't think there's a right answer. But the— my favorite answer so far is who's most passionate about it and has the most skills to be able to lead the team. Because having a single vision, an integrated data strategy, and a team that's coordinated against the same projects is going to get you advanced versus 3 different teams building their own technology fiefdoms and not caring about what the next handoff is, which creates a lot of friction in the system. An undesirable experience for your customers. So at least create a revenue operations governance if you're not going to go ahead and have a full revenue operations team. And that's bringing your sales, marketing, and CS ops teams and your technology strategy under one. Again, if you're a developer, this should also click for you. Do you have 3 different products? Maybe, maybe your architect that oversees all those products that thinks about integration, same kind of concept here. Shadow IT versus tech strategy. Have any of you added up how much you're paying in those little apps apps lately. I know I have Google Cloud, I have Netflix, I've got, I don't know, $3.99 for the New York Times, my son has all— like all of a sudden my apps bill, a.k.a. shadow IT, is more than my internet bill. So really have to keep an eye on letting people buy whatever they want. And so my advice here, hard lesson learned, because if you go out and start to evaluate, okay, what is out there, you might find there are 5 systems that do the same thing. So if you can put in early a process for when people are acquiring technology that it just— at least you know what's in there and who's responsible for it and how much you're paying for it. And then again, the same thing, administration over automation. Don't over-customize, especially out of the gate. I've seen way too many companies come in where they've customized for their unique situations and have created a CRM that is unmanageable and unusable. And then they just basically have to hit a reset button at $60 or $75 million because they haven't managed it from day one. So be thankful— thoughtful about how you administer it. All right, so let's get into the fun stuff. What is the right tech for each of the stages of growth? So we're going to start with level 1. Up to $1 million, you're out there as CEOs just trying to get your first customers. I know somebody is at $500,000 right now going for their first million out in the audience. And it's like, you don't even need to worry about your tech stack yet. You just need to worry about getting those first customers. Customers on board. But once you get to a million, you might want to start thinking about, OK, what is it that I need? And so on the bottom, we've got kind of the buyer journey that's down below. And at this point, you are going to need something to manage all of your transactions, your system of record, a CRM. And be that Salesforce or HubSpot or another technology that's out there, those are the two most common we see for early stage. And you're going to need some kind of data set. To manage against. So ZoomInfo has pretty much bought everybody by now, um, and I'm not sure if there's other ones out there, but also LinkedIn Sales Navigator is another really good data to get your sales data. So when you're building your CRM, you've got a proper structure around your accounts, contacts in those accounts, and try to keep that as clean as you possibly can. So that's your foundation. I'm not gonna talk about that again, but it's gonna maintain on all the slides. You gotta start somewhere. The next area is going to be, um, how your sellers are engaging and communicating with your customers. So this is the sales engagement. This has now become a must-have. Topo did a study. Gartner's done a study. It's on everybody's must-have list. And so this is where you're going to coordinate all your communications for prospecting, managing through the buying cycle. It does the work, the administrative work that your sellers don't want to do. And it keeps them organized. So this is where you're going to schedule your meetings, do all your conversations, record all the interactions that they're having. And then as a marketer, if you're like, well, my first marketing hire, who should that be? I usually recommend product marketing as your first marketing hire, 'cause they can understand the strategy, they can help you build your positioning, they understand market segmentation, and they may want to, if they're a great writer, then you have found the unicorn product marketer, but they can also manage other people, because at this point in your early stage, you're gonna wanna start creating a content strategy. So this is the marketing side of the house where we're gonna put your unique thought leadership content out there. Um, you wanna have a blog. If you want a lot of people to read it, you can put it on Medium or you can put it on your website. You're gonna need a destination for people to go to, so make sure you've invested in a website infrastructure and start your social, uh, actions going, like get your people out there and interacting on social channels and be able to take that message from your blog and Push it out into the places where your prospects are living. So if you're selling to engineering people, be in their, in their communities. If you're selling to sellers, be in LinkedIn. If you're selling to marketers, be in LinkedIn and other social channels. So if you're just starting, this is what I would recommend, and I recommend it all the time to startups I advise. The point here is that you want to keep it easy to be flexible and test-oriented. Be testing those messages, what you're putting out in your blog. If it's resonating, then that becomes the cadence structure that you're setting for your outbound prospecting. Right. So they all tie together as you're trying to formulate what is that value proposition, what's the conversation I'm going to have, and how do I enable my sellers to be consistent in the way that they're delivering it? When you do that, make sure you're getting them not to send the same message to everybody. Take the time to personalize. So we, we have 5,000 customers that run on the Salesloft platform and they're sending millions of interactions every single day. And we know if somebody actually takes the time to personalize their emails and their phone calls, that they're increasing their connection rates by up to 300%. So don't be vanilla. Otherwise I would have told you to buy marketing automation. Marketing automation sends the same message to everybody by email. Nobody wants that anymore. All right. Make that point clear? I think so. OK. So now we're going to scale up to level 2. Congratulations, you've passed the $10 million mark. You're figuring out your product market fit. You know who you're selling to. You've got multiple customers, and you want to sell to more people like them. So now it's about how do I start to scale my sales team and my marketing team in conjunction with each other? This time we're going to add and talk about marketing first, some of the channels. You're gonna wanna get a little bit more sophisticated in the way that you're communicating to your customers. So be that video on your website or video snippets that you're including in your cadences. By the way, communicating a follow-up from a sales call with a video is so baller. If you take a recording of the meeting you just had, condense it down, include it in the email follow-up as these are the correct steps, I guarantee you that message is gonna get shared with all the people that didn't show up to the meeting. You've just res— taken that one meeting and you've pushed it into your buyer's committee in a much more efficient way. And I would say that millennials are pretty savvy at being able to record a follow-up. Hey, thank you for that call. Let me tell you what— instead of just an email. Like, make it more personal. Personalization matters at every stage of the communication, especially when we're not seeing each other face-to-face anymore. You have to think about using these new channels. You'll be cranking up your SEO and PPC, so you start to build in some of that organic traffic, so you also get an inbound as well as an outbound flow. Start doing events where your people are going. Thank God for SaaStr, we're in person. Let's do more of these. And then you're gonna want— woo-hoo! And then you're gonna wanna start looking at, for my top prospects, how do I break through to them? So gifting platforms are a great way to, Get someone to show up for the meeting if you send them a coffee card. Get them to take your call if you're super thoughtful about a personalized gift that you send to them. I love Cameos. Cameos are like when you can't crack that nut of that person that you're trying to get to, and then you find out who their favorite person is, and that person sends a Cameo recording. You'd be shocked, it actually does work. Okay? So start to get creative with your teams about how they're They're trying to break through and get a response. That's what they're trying to do. At the same time, you're trying to scale your sales team. So this is where you want to start bringing in facilities for coaching. How do I curate the best practices for my conversation recordings and calls and share those with others? I love this. The other day we were talking to the folks at Corporate Vision and she was talking about moving from just-in-case enablement to just-in-time enablement. Just-in-case is train them on everything just in case versus just-in-time. How do I give them access to take that piece of enablement that, gosh, I'm going up to this call and I'm up against this competitor. You know, who does the competitive differentiation the best or who handles objections the best? They get to watch a master do it and then be prepared for when it's their turn to take that call. This is the evolution of just-in-time enablement. You're also starting to invest in your revenue intelligence, your systems, the way that that data flows. So you're gathering information that's going to create a more sophisticated infrastructure as you continue to scale. So here's the tidbit for this section, and it's actually applicable to all, but I see it all too often. And this idea that I put in all this technology, but I'm still just sending emails. We know that if you include multichannel in your prospecting or your communication, that you get a 4.7x lift. Let me net that down for why that matters. If you've got, let's say, an SDR team that's 10 people, your goal is that they're booking 10 meetings a month and they're booking 4 meetings and you can't figure out why. Check and see what tactics they're using. If they're just sending email, They have an opportunity to get better. If they start adding videos, phone calls, and social interactions, they'll be able to get a 4.7x lift. I promise you, this is data. This is real data where it works. So all of a sudden, those 4 meetings that they're scheduling get to 16. You have to take the time to actually do the work. It's a hard job, but you have to take the time. To do the work to get the conversion rates that you want to get. And it just is as simple as going from email to multichannel. It's actually hard, but takes time. All right, so now you're established, you're rocking and rolling, you're past $30 million. Gosh, I remember when I started at Salesloft 3 years ago, we were about $15 million. We had a website, wasn't so good. We were doing events, we were great at that. And we had a rockin' SDR team. Our inbound, I don't even know what was going on with it, honestly. We weren't focusing on it. There were the two people on the SDR team that just got all the inbound. We're sitting on 1,000 leads, and we're like, OK, we can do better. And so we started looking at our systems and those really strong processes of how do we make it so easy for a prospect to talk to us. So this is about as complicated as I'm going to get. I know there's lots— I'm sure my friends out there are like, why didn't you talk about my category? But I want to make sure that we're keeping it simple enough to understand, you know, what are those core pieces that I would recommend. Here's where you may start needing marketing automation. I waited until $75 million to put in marketing automation. I'm not sure that was the smartest choice. Because with marketing automation, you get like program tracking and attribution, so you know what programs are actually working. When you have so many inbounds, you don't know what to do with all those people, they can go in a nurture. So we started doing that and looking at that, and we were able to increase our conversion rates on inbound by over 218%. Now our inbound engine is generating 67% of our net new business. I mean, like, God, I love my team. But, you know, we've really refined those processes and getting those response times down to minutes versus waiting for someone to call them back. So marketing automation does play a role at this point. You may also be looking into account-based. You could have started early if you know who your real target audience is. I could talk about account-based for another 20 minutes, as well, but I only have a minute and 49 seconds, so I'm not going to. But what you want to look at here is like, what are my top accounts, top 150 accounts that I want to go after, and how do I start to orchestrate how I segment these folks, how I send ads to these folks, how I'm tracking my outbound prospecting to those top-tier accounts. And then also, and I think this is the biggest change in account-based, is seeing who's actually in market. Because if your teams aren't using account-based, your competitors are, and they're going to get to them first, and that's not what you want, because then you're playing defense rather than offense. Because remember that buying journey, they're doing all this research, and those are signaling in, and these account-based vendors are capturing those signals and saying, hey, somebody from this company is interested in what you care about. So those are the ones that you should go hard after. Start sending them ads, point your SDRs towards them. That's what account-based is going to give you. And then you're going to start to scale your enablement and training. This is like the Sizemix, the high spots and Showpad folks where you're integrating training into the sales process. And I also want to highlight governance here because at this point, you're probably doing global activities. And so you need to be mindful of how you're managing your data. Are you selling into countries that have GDPR requirements? Yeah, that fun stuff. So you get to have your rev tech team, your rev ops team start thinking about your governance practices. Not fun, but somebody has to do it. And hey, there's people out there that love doing it. So find those folks. All right, content is the last one. And this is where you can start to curate content specifically for accounts. So things like Uberflip and Follows and those kinds of technologies where you set up I'm going to send a customer a bunch of different pieces of content and you actually get to see what they're clicking on so you know what they're interested in. So again, you're making your conversation relevant when you come back. So that's it. Key takeaways, first and foremost, start with the right experience. Design for your customers so they have a wonderful experience with you. Make sure it's easy for your buyers and your marketing teams to serve them. Enable your sellers for what they do best. That's not re-keying information, administrative overload. Like, let them be communicating with their customers. And make sure you've got a dedicated team managing the process. This isn't just something you set in and let it go. You need dedicated people who are super smart on running processes and systems, and you need to staff it, 'cause they're always overloaded. All right, so if you wanna follow up or have any questions, Salesloft has our partners in an ecosystem booth. They're happy to talk to you. So SixSense, Alice, Corporate Vision, Seismic, Vidyard, and our team are there. Thank you very much. Appreciate you.