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 gonna 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 three and a half years. It's been quite a ride. 15 million to, well, just we've passed 100 million. So for all those folks out there, we got our unicorn status. It's awes. I learned a lot along the way, so I hope to share some of those lessons with you. The last thing 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 idsloan, 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. It was at a session yesterday, we were talking about PLG and boy, wouldn't it be great to build that perfect product that just sells itself. But how many sellers are in the room or 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 long standing 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. 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, five 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 stack, start with people. Step one, 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. Keep it simple for your sales teams. Point number three, 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 re entry 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 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. Okay, 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 hopefully fail fast in this world test often. So there's a lot of debate going on right now as 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? I've seen both and I don't think there's a right answer. But 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 and an integrated data strategy and a team that's coordinated against the same projects is going to get you advanced versus three 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 and an undesirable experience for your customers. So at least create a revenue operations governance. If you're not gonna 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 three different products? Maybe an architect that oversees all those products that thinks about integrations. 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 lately? I know I have Google Cloud, I have Netflix, I've got, I don't know, 399 for the New York Times. My son has all like all of a sudden my apps bill AKA 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 five 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 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 one, up to a million. You know, you're out there as CEOs just trying to get your first customers. I know somebody's 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 on board. But once you get to a million, you might want to start thinking about, okay, 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 a 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 the against. So ZoomInfo has pretty much bought everybody by now. 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 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. 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 because 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 going to want to start creating a content strategy. So this is the marketing side of the house where we're going to put your unique thought leadership content out there. You want to 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 going to need a destination for people to go to. So make sure you've invested in a website infrastructure and start your social 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 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. 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 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. Okay, so now we're going to scale up to level two. 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 chann. 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 taken that one meeting and you've pushed it into your buyers 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, instead of just an email, 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 Saster, we're in person. Let's do more of these. And then you're going to want woo hoo. And then you're going to want to 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. So start to get creative with your teams about how 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 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 descending emails. We know that if you include multi channel 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 four 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 four meetings that they're scheduling get to 16. You have to take the time to actually do the work. It's a hard job. 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. That'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 Salesloft three 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 rocket and 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, okay, 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 gonna get. I know there's lots. I'm sure my friends out there are like, why don't you talk about my category? But I wanna make sure that we're keeping it simple enough to understand 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 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 and nurture. So. 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 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 base. You could have started early if you know who your real target audience is. I could talk about account base for another 20 minutes as well. 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 base 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 gonna start to scale your enablement and training. This is like the seismics, 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 Uber Flip and Follows and those kinds of technologies where you set setup. I'm going to send a customer a bunch of different pieces of content. 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 and 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 because they're always overloaded. All right, so if you want to follow up or have any questions, salesoft has our partners in an ecosystem booth. They're happy to talk to you. So Sixth Sense, Alice, Corporate vision, Seismic Vidyard and our team are there. Thank you very much. Appreciate you.