Grow to 10M Using Unorthodox Methods with Nadja Komnenic

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Welcome to the live Better Sell Better podcast with your host Kevin Dorsey of Inside Sales Excellence, the number one Patreon group and YouTube channel for tech sellers and tech sales leaders where we dive in deep for tactical advice on how to book more meetings, close more deals faster and lead sales teams to success. But we don't stop there. We also focus on the person in salesperson. We talk about mindset, goals, time management and so much more. So thank you for listening and if you're interested, head on over to patreon.com InsideSalesExCexcellence now with that, grab a notepad, get ready and let's dive into the good stuff. But first, a quick shout out to today's sponsor, Vidyard. If you aren't using video in your sales process, I promise you you are leaving money on the table. I personally have been using Vidyard with my teams for years now and we use it everywhere. Top of funnel to book more meetings via email and LinkedIn. Middle of funnel to improve show rates, to demos, post demos to do proposals and follow up and close deals faster. Using video allows you to connect better with your prospects, bring your personality, energy and enthusiasm across every single time and they have a much more impactful and memorable experience for your buyer. So again, if you're not using video, you need to be. And if you are using video, you should be using vidyard. Check out vidyardyard.com and with that, let's get back to the show. What up everybody? Welcome to another episode of the live Better Sell Better podcast. This is your host Kevin Dorsey AKA KD and I am so excited for the topic and guest today because we are going to be talking about a few topics that I really enjoy. One cold emailing which I believe is something that still is underutilized and most STRs don't do the right way. Social selling, how to combine but then also some outside the box ways of building running a team. Because if you are not familiar with the company called Lemlist you should be. Because I think Lemlist and Unorthodox go hand in hand. They have built a company the complete opposite way. Many people say to build a company raised millions of dollars. They raised no millions of dollars. Do everything in the office. They've done it remotely. Only focus on one thing. YouTube doesn't work. Social doesn't work. They have done everything the opposite direction most people would and they are succeeding like none other. They've gone from 0 to 10 million completely bootstrapped in under four years and I Have the leader of that sales org, Nadja Kamaranech, with me today to talk about the mindset, the actions, the tactics they've used to grow from 0 to 10 million. No funding in under 4 years. Nadja, welcome to the show. Let's do this.

Thank you, Kevin, for an awesome introduction and lovely to be here. I've been following your journey for a long time now. You've been one of my silent mentors, I would say, in my growth as well. So very happy to be here today.

And I love it. So Nadja and I connected a little bit offline and it was funny because I've been following Lemless Journey for a while now when y' all first started putting YouTube videos up and it's like, wait, a SaaS company's doing YouTube videos and like declining funding and all this? And so I've been watching because it's been different. I love unorthodox. I love thinking outside the box. And so let's start with that part of this year, right? You said, you know, the way that we run our org, the way that we run our SDR team is a little bit unorthodox. It's a little bit different. Let's start with that. What are some of the things that you do differently with your team that you've seen lead to this success?

Definitely. And one of our mottos that we have in Onlist is do things that you shouldn't. So that's actually our headline. That's the motto of our company, the way that we function since the beginning. And that is the reason that I believe we've been successful so far, thinking about all of the startups in the world that exists and how hard it is to kind of get to that first million and then from 1 million to 10 million, the percentage is crazy and the stats are really not that optimistic. So we really thought from the beginning we need to do things differently if we want to succeed. As you said, we actually refused $30 million investment year. So it was something very unorthodox for everybody out there. And we decided to remain bootstrapped for one reason only, and that is that we want to make sure that we are actually always able to do things outside of the box and that we are not being overlooked by investors and being said what it is that we need to do. We wanted to test things, we want to fail, we want to see what is working.

And.

And one of the ways that my sales team is to go back to your question, one of the ways that my sales team right now is functioning is very unorthodox. So we do have a couple of things and projects that are going on currently. One of them is that my sales team, all of the sales reps that I'm leading and coaching, all of them have LinkedIn as part of their KPIs, meaning that they all need to be active on LinkedIn and build their personal brands, not only for the company's sake, but we genuinely believe that this is something that can help them long term their future as well. And on top of that, obviously, we create like this small inbound engine for every sdr so that even if they're doing prospecting, even if they're doing outbound, and if they're about to hop on a call with the prospect on a demo, they're seen as credible and they're really the ones who are bringing in inbound leads to them. So today my SDRs, 50% of the time, they don't even have to go count for leads, they simply come to them on their LinkedIn. And this is something where we avoided the whole mess of doing prospecting in the outbound itself. So this is one of the things that we've been doing and really focusing on today. Our team actually reaches more than a million views on LinkedIn simply because every person is very active and people really know them all the time. On LinkedIn, on the other hand, we've just started a very unique project, again, something aligned with what you said being completely unorthodox. So we've actually been thinking this summer, so just to go back, we are actually very small team, so we have under 40 employees. We grew so fast. And the fact is we are competing against. Our market is crazy saturated and we're competing against some crazy big tools out there.