Podcasts about echosign

Dave is joined by Jason Lemkin. Jason is the founder of SaaStr, the world's largest community of SaaS executives, founders, and entrepreneurs. Before SaaStr, Jason founded EchoSign, which was sold to Adobe in 2011.They discuss:Why Jason started SaaStrWhat makes a great VP of Marketing in SaaS and how to hire oneHow tech and SaaS have changed since 2020CROs vs CMOsImportance of alignment between the CEO and marketing teamTimestamps(00:00) - - Intro (07:26) - - Understanding the Importance of Revenue Goals (10:50) - - Evolving Motivations and Changing Perspectives (14:56) - - From Solopreneur to Founder: The Journey of Exit Five (18:52) - - The Challenge of Transitioning from Solopreneurship (20:51) - - Insights into Jason's Content Creation Process (23:35) - - Efficiency in writing: a five-minute rule (30:34) - - LinkedIn: A Haven for Text-Based Writers (32:00) - - LinkedIn's Good Community and Marketing Potential (36:36) - - Importance of Building Relationships in Business (41:21) - - Marketing Essentials: Brand, Field, Demand, Growth (43:58) - - Finding the Right Fit: Aligning Marketing Roles with Company Vision (47:03) - - Finding Alignment: The Role of Marketing in Company Leadership (51:15) - - CROs and Marketing (54:04) - - Balancing Heads: Sales, Marketing, and Post-Sales in SaaS Leadership (57:24) - - Event Planning (59:19) - - SaaStr: Connecting Founders and Revenue Professionals Send guest pitches and ideas to hi@exitfive.comJoin the Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterCheck out the Exit Five job board: https://jobs.exitfive.com/Become an Exit Five member: https://community.exitfive.com/checkout/exit-five-membership***This episode of the Exit Five podcast is brought to you by our friends at Paramark. You've heard it before – every B2B marketer's top pain point is marketing attribution. It's complicated, messy, and too often leads to fights with your CRO over whose lead deserves credit.That's where Paramark steps in. Their platform makes it simple to understand what's driving results (and what isn't) with tools like marketing mix modeling and incremental testing. No more relying on outdated click attribution or chasing UTM links. Instead, Paramark gives you actionable insights across channels, campaigns, and geographies to help you grow.Paramark's founder & CEO Pranav has been in your shoes as a B2B marketer. He's so passionate about solving this problem, he's offering listeners a free brand assessment. Pranav will personally analyze your brand's performance and share his insights—an opportunity you don't want to miss.Slots are limited, so act fast. Head to paramark.com/brand-consult to claim your spot. Trust us, this is worth your time.***Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production.They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast.Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest.Visit hatch.fm to learn more

SaaStr 743: 9 Easy Sales Concepts So Many Get Wrong with Sam Blond, Former CRO Brex Sam Blond, the former CRO at Brex with 15 years in tech sales, took the stage at SaaStr Europa 2024 to share nine easy sales concepts that so many get wrong. Sam got his first job in tech sales as an SDR for Jason Lemkin's company, EchoSign, which later sold to Adobe and launched his career. These nine sales concepts, when done correctly, will greatly improve your sales and sales teams: Don't Outsource Recruiting Focus on Demand Until You Have Too Much Do Things That Stand Out Leverage Happy Customers to Generate New Ones Distribution Is As Important As The Announcement Be Prescriptive On How To Buy Your Product The Presumptive Close Meet Prospective Customers In Person Obsess Over Implementation -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SaaStr hosts the largest SaaS community events on the planet. Join us in 2024 at: SaaStr Annual: Sept. 10-12 in the SF Bay Area. Join 12,500 SaaS professionals, CEOs, revenue leaders and investors for the world's LARGEST SaaS community event of the year. Podcast listeners can grab a discount on tickets here: https://www.saastrannual2024.com/buy-tickets?promo=fave20 -------------- This episode is sponsored by: Northwest Registered Agent Get more when Northwest Registered Agent starts your business. They'll form your company fast and stand up your entire business identity in minutes. That means business free domain, business email, website, hosting, address, mail scanning, business phone app, all within minutes. Visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/saastr to get a 60 percent discount on your next LLC.   This episode is sponsored by: Remote.com Are you overwhelmed with paperwork managing overseas contractors? Say hello to efficiency with Remote's Contractor Management solution! Seamlessly handle invoicing, fixed payments, and compliant, localized contracts. Kickstart your free trial today at Remote.com.   This episode is sponsored by Pendo, the all-in-one product experience platform. Pendo helps your users do the things you really want them to do. You can try Pendo for free at Pendo.io/saastr and check out Mind The Product, the community for product people like… us.  

Dave is joined by Jason Lemkin. Jason is the founder of SaaStr, the world's largest community of SaaS executives, founders, and entrepreneurs. Before SaaStr, Jason founded EchoSign, which was sold to Adobe in 2011. They discussWhy Jason started SaaStrWhat makes a great VP of Marketing in SaaS and how to hire oneHow tech and SaaS have changed since 2020CROs vs CMOsImportance of alignment between the CEO and marketing teamTimestamps(00:00) - - Intro (05:14) - - Understanding the Importance of Revenue Goals (08:38) - - Evolving Motivations and Changing Perspectives (12:44) - - From Solopreneur to Founder: The Journey of Exit Five (16:40) - - The Challenge of Transitioning from Solopreneurship (18:39) - - Insights into Jason's Content Creation Process (21:23) - - Efficiency in writing: a five-minute rule (26:31) - - LinkedIn: A Haven for Text-Based Writers (27:57) - - LinkedIn's Good Community and Marketing Potential (33:23) - - Importance of Building Relationships in Business (38:08) - - Marketing Essentials: Brand, Field, Demand, Growth (40:45) - - Finding the Right Fit: Aligning Marketing Roles with Company Vision (43:50) - - Finding Alignment: The Role of Marketing in Company Leadership (48:02) - - CROs and Marketing (50:51) - - Balancing Heads: Sales, Marketing, and Post-Sales in SaaS Leadership (54:11) - - Event Planning (56:06) - - SaaStr: Connecting Founders and Revenue Professionals Send guest pitches and ideas to hi@exitfive.comJoin the Exit Five Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterCheck out the Exit Five job board: https://jobs.exitfive.com/Become an Exit Five member: https://community.exitfive.com/checkout/exit-five-membership***Today's episode is brought to you by Apollo.io. If you share a pipeline goal with your sales team, then you care about the deliverability rate of your team's outbound emails. No email visibility means no meetings. This is the “silent nightmare” for marketers. You often don't even know this is happening. And the most common cause of it? It's actually an easy one to fix: you're not using the right tool. That's why 100s of marketers at companies like Mutiny are switching to Apollo.io. Apollo has every tool you need to power your entire outbound and inbound motions (yes that's right, I said inbound emails too - you can see how Ashby does it on Apollo's site).Marketers using Apollo have seen email deliverability jump from 62% to 98% after making the switch... 98%! That means more replies, more meetings, and of course, more pipeline.Want to see what type of results you can get? Head over to apollo.io/exitfive and start using it completely for free. You don't even need a credit card to get started.***Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production.They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast.Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest.Visit hatch.fm to learn more

SaaStr 733: Advice Every SaaS Founder Needs to Know in 2024 with Sam Blond and Jason Lemkin At SaaStr Miami, former Founder's Fund Partner and CRO of Brex Sam Blond — host of the SaaStr CRO Confidential Podcast — sat down with SaaStr CEO and founder Jason Lemkin for a fireside chat about finding success as a SaaS company in 2024. They discuss Sam's learnings at Founders Fund, what the 2024 playbook looks like, hiring and motivating sales teams, and a handful of audience questions.  Sam just finished 18 months at Founders Fund after joining in mid-to-late 2022. We were coming off an environment where startup funding was as fruitful as ever. With personal experience from EchoSign and other high-growth companies, he was spoiled when it came to those companies raising money from exceptional VCs.  What he's learned on both sides of the VC table is that the bar is really high for most VCs. Higher than he imagined in terms of the founder quality bar and, the stage of the business, and growth and efficiency metrics.  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SaaStr hosts the largest SaaS community events on the planet. Join us in 2024 at: SaaStr Annual: Sept. 10-12 in the SF Bay Area. Join 12,500 SaaS professionals, CEOs, revenue leaders and investors for the world's LARGEST SaaS community event of the year. Podcast listeners can grab a discount on tickets here: https://www.saastrannual2024.com/buy-tickets?promo=fave20 SaaStr Europa: June 5-6 in London. We'll be hosting the 5th SaaStr Europa in London for two days of content and networking. Join 3,000 SaaS and Cloud leaders. Podcast listeners can grab a discount on Europa tickets here: https://www.saastreuropa2024.com/buy-tickets?promo=fave200 -------------- This episode is sponsored by: Northwest Registered Agent Get more when Northwest Registered Agent starts your business. They'll form your company fast and stand up your entire business identity in minutes. That means business free domain, business email, website, hosting, address, mail scanning, business phone app, all within minutes. Visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/saastr to get a 60 percent discount on your next LLC.  

Jason Lemkin created and runs SaaStr, the world's largest community for B2B/SaaS founders, and is the managing director of SaaStr Fund, a $90 million venture capital firm specializing in early-stage enterprise investments. He is also the mastermind behind two major tech conferences each year—one in the Bay Area, drawing in over 15,000 people, and another in Europe, with a crowd of more than 3,000 SaaS executives, founders, and entrepreneurs. Before SaaStr, Jason wore many hats: CEO and co-founder of EchoSign (later bought by Adobe), vice president at Adobe Systems, co-founder and president of NanoGram Devices Corp., vice president of NeoPhotonics, and a senior director at BabyCenter. In our conversation, we discuss:• How far you should go without a salesperson• Signs it's time to hire salespeople• Why you need to hire two salespeople• How to compensate your salespeople• How to interview salespeople• When to hire a VP of Sales• How to prevent their flaming out• How to scale your sales org• How to improve the relationship between your sales and product teams• Much more—Brought to you by:• CommandBar—AI-powered user assistance for modern products and impatient users• Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security.• LinkedIn Ads—Reach professionals and drive results for your business—Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/building-a-world-class-sales-org-jason-lemkin-saastr/—Where to find Jason Lemkin:• X: https://twitter.com/jasonlk• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonmlemkin/• Website: https://www.saastr.com/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Jason's background(06:18) The importance of sales in B2B businesses(11:23) Signs that you should start hiring salespeople(14:19) Attributes to look for in early sales reps(19:08) Hiring a VP of Sales(26:43) The role of a VP of Sales(30:06) Interviewing salespeople(45:16) Determining sales compensation and quota(53:34) Transitioning from 100% commission to a smaller percentage(56:58) Indicators of a hard-to-sell product(59:39) Scaling the sales organization(01:05:26) Understanding sales roles and titles(01:10:02) Product involvement in sales, and vice versa(01:20:32) Thoughts on product teams taking on P&L responsibilities(01:27:23) One thing founders can do to become better at sales(01:31:02) The ideal trial length for a free trial sales team(01:39:50) Closing thoughts(01:41:43) Lightning round—Referenced:• Marc Benioff on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcbenioff/• Snowflake: https://www.snowflake.com/en/• Yamini Rangan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yaminirangan/• Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/• HubSpot: https://www.hubspot.com/• Twilio: https://www.twilio.com/• Cloudflare: https://www.cloudflare.com/• GitHub: https://github.com/• Columbo: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1466074/• What is Davos and why is it important? Your guide to the World Economic Forum's annual meeting: https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/01/15/what-is-davos-and-why-is-it-important-your-guide-to-the-world-economic-forums-annual-meeti• Adobe: https://www.adobe.com/• Satya Nadella on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/satyanadella/• Glengarry Glen Ross on Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/Glengarry-Glen-Ross-James-Foley/dp/B002NN5F7A• The Wolf of Wall Street on Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/Wolf-Wall-Street-Leonardo-DiCaprio/dp/B00IIU9FQY• A step-by-step guide to crafting a sales pitch that wins | April Dunford (author of Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch): https://www.lennyspodcast.com/a-step-by-step-guide-to-crafting-a-sales-pitch-that-wins-april-dunford-author-of-obviously-awesom/• Pipedrive: https://www.pipedrive.com/• Sam Blond on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-blond-791026b/• Gong: https://www.gong.io/• Zendesk: https://www.zendesk.com/• ZoomInfo: https://www.zoominfo.com/• Apollo: https://www.apollo.io/• Daniel Chait on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhchait/• SAP: https://www.sap.com/• Lessons on building product sense, navigating AI, optimizing the first mile, and making it through the messy middle | Scott Belsky (Adobe, Behance): https://www.lennyspodcast.com/lessons-on-building-product-sense-navigating-ai-optimizing-the-first-mile-and-making-it-through-t/• VistaPrint: https://www.vistaprint.com/• Procore: https://www.procore.com/• Matt Mullenweg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattm/• Wordpress: https://wordpress.com/• SaaStr University: https://app.saastruniversity.com/collections/20252• From Impossible to Inevitable: How SaaS and Other Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue: https://www.amazon.com/Impossible-Inevitable-Hyper-Growth-Companies-Predictable/dp/1119531691• Pavilion: https://www.joinpavilion.com/• Top 10 Learnings about Free Trials with Tomasz Tunguz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfQNJpnxmMw• The Terminal List on Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/The-Terminal-List-Season-1/dp/B09HYNH8TK• Top Gun: Maverick on Paramount: https://www.paramountmovies.com/movies/top-gun-maverick• OpusClip app: https://www.opus.pro/• OnePlus Open smartphone: https://www.amazon.com/OnePlus-Dual-SIM-Unlocked-Smartphone-Hasselblad/dp/B0CHN7M531/• SaaStr conferences: https://www.saastr.com/events/• Marketo: https://go.marketo.com/about-marketo-landingpage-emea.html• Zoomtopia: https://zoomtopia.com/• Money20/20: https://us.money2020.com/• Shoptalk: https://shoptalk.com/• Jeff Lawson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffiel/• Eric Kwan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erickwan/—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Jason Lemkin is the Founder @ SaaStr one of the best-performing early-stage venture funds focused on SaaS. In the past, Jason has led investments in Algolia, Pipedrive, Salesloft, TalkDesk, and RevenueCat to name a few. Prior to SaaStr, Jason was an entrepreneur, selling EchoSign to Adobe for $100M where it is now a $250M ARR product. Rick Zullo is the Co-Founder and General Partner at Equal Ventures. Prior to co-founding Equal Ventures, Rick was an investor at Lightbank, Prior to Lightbank, Rick worked with investment firms Foundation Capital, Bowery Capital, and Lightview Capital. In Today's Episode We Discuss: 1. Why Venture Capital Needs It's Jerry Maguire Moment: Why does Rick believe that VC needs it's "Jerry Maguire" moment? What needs to change? What needs to stay the same? Why does Jason believe we will see even more mega funds in 2024 and 2025? 2. Unicorns are So 2019: Why does Jason believe that "unicorn investing is mostly dead for bigger funds and none of them are looking for a $1BN outcome anymore?" Why does Rick believe that multi-stage fund investing at seed simply does not make sense? What does Rick believe many founders need to know when they take multi-stage money at seed? Of the over 1,000 unicorns created over the last few years, how many of them do Rick and Jason feel are actually unicorns today? 3. Efficiency and Growth: We Need it All: Why does Jason believe, as a founder you should be embarrassed if you ever had a RIF (reduction in force)? Last year many founders got a pass on growth as they were more efficient. Is that pass over? Do they need to get back to growth? What is the single biggest reason that companies do not scale from seed to Series A? What happens to the many companies with years of runway but no product-market-fit? Are we entering a new age of efficient company building or will we go back to high burn environments and excessive spending? 4. Entering the World of LPs: If Jason and Rick were to advise LPs today on how much to discount the value of their venture books, what advice would they give? How have markups completely corrupted the venture ecosystem? How does LPs being incentivized by paper-marks make the industry even more screwed? What are the single biggest misalignments between GP and LP?

This episode is brought to you by Netsuite.com/scale Today's guest is my good friend, Brendon Cassidy. Brendon graduated from Saint Mary's College of California, started his career in Recruiting, and then transitioned into sales where he eventually landed himself at LinkedIn in 2005 as employee #15, and LinkedIn's first ever Head of Sales. Brendon's next move was one that would change his life forever. He went to work for Jason Lemkin as the VP Sales at Echosign, which was eventually acquired by Adobe for an estimated $400 million. After Echosign Brendon went on to be the VP Sales at Talkdesk, now valued at over $3 billion. Then started his own consulting firm, Cassidy Ventures, where he helped found Gong,, and most recently co-founded CoSell.io where he works as the Co-CEO. He's a frequent speaker at SaaStr and other large sales events. This is his story. This episode is brought to you by ⁠Netsuite.com/scale⁠ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/uncharted1/support

Sam Lessin is a Co-Founder and Partner @ Slow Ventures with a portfolio including the likes of Airtable, Robinhood, Slack, Solana, PillPack and many more unicorn companies. Prior to Slow, Sam was a VP Product at Facebook having sold his company to Meta. Frank Rotman is a founding partner of QED Investors, one of the leading fintech-focused venture firms investing today with a portfolio including the likes of Klarna, Kavak, Quinto Andar, Credit Karma and more. As for Frank, prior to QED, Frank was one of the earliest analysts hired into Capital One and spent almost 13 years there helping build many of the company's business units and operational areas.  Jason Lemkin is the Founder @ SaaStr one of the best-performing early-stage venture funds focused on SaaS. In the past, Jason has led investments in Algolia, Pipedrive, Salesloft, TalkDesk, and RevenueCat to name a few. Prior to SaaStr, Jason was an entrepreneur, selling EchoSign to Adobe for $100M where it is now a $250M ARR product. In Today's Discussion on Why Seed is Broken We Discuss: 1. The Seed Model Was Broken and What Comes Now: Why does Sam Lessin believe the model for seed of a "factory line" was broken? What does he believe will replace it? Why does Jason Lemkin argue that this might not be the case for SaaS and enterprise? 2. Round Construction: YC, Multi-Stage Funds and Party Rounds: Why does Sam Lessin believe we have seen the end of party rounds? Why does Jason Lemkin disagree and we will see more than ever? Why does Sam Lessin believe the factory model of YC churning out companies is over? Where does Jason Lemkin believe the value lies in the YC model? Will the multi-stage funds remain in seed? How has their entrance and deployment changed the seed market? 3. VC Value Add at Seed: Is it BS? Why does Jason believe all talent arms in venture firms have failed? Why does Sam believe that no VCs provide value? Do the best founders really need help? Why do Jason and Sam disagree? 4. What Happens Now: Why does Jason believe that every manager can write off their fund from 2021? Who will be the winners in seed in the next 10 years? Why does Sam believe if you want to bet on AI, just bet on Meta or Microsoft? What will happen to the many companies with no PMF but 10 years of runway?

Jason Lemkin is the Founder @ SaaStr one of the best-performing early-stage venture funds focused on SaaS. In the past, Jason has led investments in Algolia, Pipedrive, Salesloft, TalkDesk, and RevenueCat to name a few. Prior to SaaStr, Jason was an entrepreneur, selling EchoSign to Adobe for $100M where it is now a $250M ARR product. In Today's Episode with Jason Lemkin We Discuss: 1. WTF is Happening At Seed Right Now: Why does Jason believe seed is more active than ever? Is the pricing of seed rounds impacted since the downturn? Why does Jason believe it is not only not the end of party rounds but just the beginning of them? Why does Jason believe you cannot fail if you have $1M in ARR and an amazing founder? Why does Jason believe that seed investors cannot participate in "hot seed rounds" anymore? 2. Is Series A a Dead Zone: How does Jason analyze the Series A and B environment today? What has changed in what investors expect and want to see in potential Series A and B investments? What happens to the many companies who raised pre-emptive Series As and have 10 years of runway but no product-market fit? Why does Jason believe founders should offer to give the money back when it is not working? What happens to the Series A and B market in the next 18 months? When does it come back? 3. Growth: People are Too Negative! Why does Jason believe that growth is more active than many are giving credit for? What are the ARR benchmarks required to get a good growth round term sheet today? Why does Jason believe that VC DD is a load of BS? Why does Jason believe that every VC has fraud in their portfolio? Will they come out? 4. Ring That Bell: IPOs and M&A: Why does Jason believe 2024 will be an amazing year for IPOs? Why does much of the IPO market rely on Stripe and Databricks? What is needed for an amazing 2024 IPO market? How does Jason evaluate the M&A market in 2024? Will regulation get in the way? 5. Jason Lemkin: AMA: Why does Jason Lemkin believe this generation of workers will never work hard again? What is the only way for seed funds to make money investing in serial entrepreneurs? What does Jason know now that he wishes he had known when he started investing?

In this week's episode of CRO Confidential, host Sam Blond wraps up the founder-led sales series with one of the most accomplished sales leaders in the world, Ben Cassidy.  Cassidy was Blond's VP of Sales at Echosign and, before that, was one of the first sales leaders at LinkedIn. Post-Echosign, he was the first sales leader at Talkdesk, valued at $10+B. Cassidy is now a co-founder at CoSell, a.k.a. the relationship platform designed to organize your intro efforts.  The point of CRO Confidential is to help startups acquire customers, and Cassidy provides a unique perspective on founder-led sales as a current founder and highly talented sales leader.  So what secrets has Cassidy learned over the past decades of building businesses and acquiring customers?  Let's find out.  Watch the video: https://youtu.be/3m5s7tskuB4   ***** SaaStr Europa is back! And this time, we're heading to London for 2 fun-filled days of content, networking, and SaaS. Join us June 6th and 7th for SaaStr Europa 2023. Use code FAVE100 for $100 off tickets at saastrlondon.com.   ***** Want to join the SaaStr community? We're the

The question is: "are VCs still investing?". Today we are joined by Jason Lemkin; one of the OGs of SaaS of the last decade. As the Founder of SaaStr, he has inspired more SaaS founders than one can imagine building “The World's Largest Community for Business Software.” Jason also invests out of the $100M SaaStr Fund and in the past Jason has led rounds into TalkDesk, Pipedrive, Algolia, Gorgias, Salesloft, and many more incredible companies. Prior to founding SaaStr, Jason was the Co-Founder of Echosign, an early e-signature business, funded by Emergence Capital and that was acquired by Adobe for $100M. In Today's Episode on "Are VCs' Still Investing" We Discuss: 1. What Does it Take To Get Funded Today: Early-Stage: How has what VCs want in early-stage investments changed in this new environment? Should startups prioritize growth? Profitability? Capital efficiency? How long a runway is sufficient enough for founders to feel comfortable? Why does Jason believe most founders are still deluded that they are fundable? Growth Stage Companies: Is the growth stage totally dead? What will we see happen to all the companies that raised $50M+ at large valuations that have very little revenue? Why does Jason believe that any operator who joined a $BN company in the past few years will not make any money on their equity? What should they do now? Will we start to see down rounds and structured rounds at the growth stage? If so, when? Public Markets: Why does Jason believe this is a time unlike any he has seen before? Are we in full recession now in Jason's mind? In Dec 2023, will this be better or worse? Which are the most under-priced assets in the public markets today? Why does Jason believe VCs investing in public markets are losers? 2. Micro Funds Will Be Decimated and LP Behaviour in 2023 Why does Jason believe that micro-funds in 2023 will be decimated and unable to raise new funds? How will the majority of LPs approach new fund investments? How will LPs approach re-investing in their existing managers? How has what they need to see changed? 3. Marketing and Sales: We Need To Change Budgets and Targets How should CEOS be changing their marketing budgets in 2023? What are the single biggest mistakes CEOs are making in this downturn with regard to their marketing budget? How do sales targets need to be amended in the face of changing buying patterns? How do the best sales and marketing leaders respond to these changing budgets and targets? How do the worst respond?        

Jason Lemkin is one of the OGs of SaaS of the last decade. As the Founder of SaaStr, he has inspired more SaaS founders than one can imagine building "The World's Largest Community for Business Software." Jason also invests out of the $100M SaaStr Fund and in the past Jason has led rounds into TalkDesk, Pipedrive, Algolia, Gorgias, Salesloft, and many more incredible companies. Prior to founding SaaStr, Jason was the Co-Founder of Echosign, an early e-signature business, funded by Emergence Capital and that was acquired by Adobe for $100M. In Today's Episode with Jason Lemkin On Algolia We Discuss: 1.) Meeting the Unicorn: Algolia: How did Jason first come to meet Nicolas (Founder) and Algolia? What specific elements of cold emails make the best attract Jason's attention? What do they have in them? What are the most common mistakes people make with cold emails? What is the single biggest mistake Jason made when making the deal with Algolia? How did Jason lead their seed round when their round was "oversubscribed"? 2.) Competition and TAM: The Reasons To Say No: Competing with Free: How did Jason analyze the competitive landscape Algolia was facing? How did he gain comfort that they could compete and win against free and open-source? TAM Analysis: The TAM at the time for Algolia was $2M. How did Jason analyze the TAM at the time? How did he get comfortable with such a small TAM? What are the single biggest mistakes investors make when analyzing competition today? What are the biggest mistakes founders make when presenting the competitive landscape? What are the single biggest mistakes investors make when analyzing TAM today? What are the biggest mistakes founders make when presenting the TAM and how it breaks down? 3.) Investing Lessons Transition from CEO to VC: Jason has previously said one of his biggest lessons is "bet on what you know when you go from CEO to VC"? What did he mean by this? How can one keep this operator knowledge and mentality when one is a VC for a long time? What are the biggest pieces of advice that Jason would give to operators becoming investors? What are the biggest mistakes that Jason made in his first 3 investments as a VC? How did he change? 4.) Mastering the World of Venture Today: Why does Jason believe that he has become a worse investor with the rise of "remote investing"? Why does Jason believe he is a worse investor without having a partner in SaaStr Fund? Why does Jason believe that even the best founders do not want hard feedback anymore? Should we as VCs still give it to them? What has Jason learned here? Will we see great LP churn and many LPs leaving the asset class? What will happen to the existing incumbents with massive AUM and reduced performance?

Gadi Shamia, Replicant CEO and co-founder, has been delivering innovation to help customers have better service experiences for more than a decade. He helped grow and sell Echosign to Adobe for $400M in 2011 then went on to lead Talkdesk which most recently raised $230M at a $10B valuation. Gadi's a serial entrepreneur and a deep thinker who believes in the power of AI to make people better. Listen and learn:Why we hate calling customer support... and how AI is making the experience betterWhy automation beyond IVR is saving contact centersWhat happens when AI makes bad decisionsWhen it's ok to "nudge" users to work with the bot... even when they ask for a humanThe ethical implicatio ns of bots pretending to be human What new careers  will be created when call center agents are replaced by botsReferences in this episode:Replicant on TwitterThe Replicant blogThe Open Ethics AI initiativeKrishna Gade from Fiddler on AI and The Future of WorkJohn Oliver's riff on automation

Jason Lemkin is the Founder and Managing Partner @ SaaStr, a social community of 500,000+ SaaS founders and a $100M venture fund. In the past, Jason has made investments in the likes of Algolia, Talkdesk, Pipedrive, and RevenueCat to name a few. Prior to SaaStr, Jason was the Co-Founder and CEO @ Echosign, backed by Emergence Capital, Echosign was bought by Adobe and is Adobe Sign as we know it today. In Today's Episode with Jason Lemkin You Will Learn: 1.) Origins into Venture: How Jason made his way into the world of venture having sold EchoSign? What were some of Jason's biggest lessons from his first 4 investments being unicorns? 2.) The Importance of Ownership & Multi-Stage Funds How does Jason assess the importance of ownership today? If companies can be $20BN, does ownership really matter? How does Jason advise founders who have offers from multi-stage funds at seed? Why does taking multi-stage money at seed result in less pressure for founders? Does Jason believe that signaling risk from large funds is real, when investing at seed? 3.) Building Your Sales Team Does the founder have to be the one to create the sales playbook? What are the nuances? Should you hire a Head of Sales or sales reps first? What should you expect from each? What are the one criteria that you must look for when hiring your first sales reps? What are the signals that a sales rep or leader is a 10x hire? What works when hiring sales reps, 80% of the time? 4.) Boards and VC Value Add: Why has Jason changed his mind when it comes to boards? Why are some inefficient and some very efficient? How do the best founders manage their board? How do they bring in their exec team? What is the right documentation to prepare for board meetings? Why does Jason prefer slide decks over Notion and Coda? How can leaders use board meetings to direct and goal set with functional leads? Item's Mentioned In Today's Episode with Jason Lemkin Jason's Most Recent Investment: Owner

On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Jason Lemkin, Founder at SaaStr, and Justin Kan, Co-Founder at Fractal.is.   Justin co-founded Kiko Software, a Web 2.0 calendar that pre-dated Google Calendar by four years; Justin.tv, a lifecasting platform; Twitch, a live streaming platform for esports, music, and other creatives that was acquired by Amazon for almost $1 billion. More recent roles include Partner and GM at Y Combinator and CEO of Atrium, a software-powered law firm for startups. He is now a general partner at Goat Capital as well as his work at Fractal.   Jason co-founded NanoGram Devices: nanotechnology to dramatically enhance the performance of power sources for implantable medical devices, which was acquired for $50 million just 13 months after founding; EchoSign, the web's most popular electronic signature service which was acquired by Adobe; and now SaaStr, the world's largest SaaS community and $70+ million SaaS venture fund.   In this session, they'll share “sage advice” that VCs give startups and deconstruct the biases.   Specifically, they discuss: 2:10 - A warm intro to investors - what if you don't have one? 3:37 - The type of cold emails to write 5:20 - Why now is the best time ever to raise money  8:45 - Giving up control of a company 10:59 - The biggest issue that founders face 13:09 - The consequence of having no accountability 14:55 - How many investors till it's considered to be too many 19:38 - Big funds writing small checks 23:37 - Why you should update your investors regularly Learn more about the Traction community at http://tractionconf.io    Connect with Jason Lemkin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonmlemkin/   Learn more about SaaStr at https://www.saastr.com/   Connect with Justin Kan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinkan/   Learn more about Fractal.is at https://www.fractal.is/   This episode is brought to you by: Each year the U.S. and Canadian governments provide more than $20 billion in R&D tax credits and innovation incentives to fund businesses, but the application process is cumbersome, prone to costly audits, and receiving the money can take as long as 16 months. Boast automates this process enabling companies to get more money faster without the paperwork and audit risk. We don't get paid until you do! Find out if you qualify today at https://Boast.AI. Launch Academy is one of the top global tech hubs for international entrepreneurs and a designated organization for Canada's Startup Visa. Since 2012, Launch has worked with more than 6000 entrepreneurs from over 100 countries, of which 300 have grown their startups to Seed and Series A stage and raised over $2 Billion in funding. To learn more about Launch's programs or the Canadian Startup Visa visit https://LaunchAcademy.ca Content Allies helps B2B companies build revenue-generating podcasts. We recommend them to any B2B company that is looking to launch or streamline their podcast production. Learn more at ContentAllies.com

On this episode of the Traction podcast, host Lloyed Lobo of Boast.AI welcomes Jason Lemkin, Trusted Advisor at SaaStr.   Jason, who is often regarded as the godfather of SaaS, shares 10 things you can do to grow 10x faster in 2022.   Jason runs SaaStr, the world's largest SaaS community and $100M+ SaaS venture fund. Previously, Jason founded the web's most popular electronic signature service, EchoSign, which he grew to over $100M in revenue and sold to Adobe.    Prior to EchoSign and SaaStr, he co-founded one of the only successes in nanotechnology, NanoGram Devices, which was acquired for $50M just 13 months after founding.   Specifically, Jason covers:   7:53 - Jason's backstory 19:37 - Top things founders miss that can help them grow faster 32:38 - In what order do you hire execs between zero to $10M and $10M to $100M? 41:02 - How to navigate challenges in hiring and recruiting in 2022 with so many well-funded SaaS startups 51:12 - Key mistakes seen en-route going from $10M to $100M ARR 55:59 - When to add a second product and when to become a platform company 1:07:30 - How to raise funding faster in 2022   Connect with Jason Lemkin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonmlemkin/   Learn more about SaaStr at  https://www.saastr.com/   This episode is brought to you by: Each year the U.S. and Canadian governments provide more than $20 billion in R&D tax credits and innovation incentives to fund businesses, but the application process is cumbersome, prone to costly audits, and receiving the money can take as long as 16 months. Boast automates this process enabling companies to get more money faster without the paperwork and audit risk. We don't get paid until you do! Find out if you qualify today at https://Boast.AI. Launch Academy is one of the top global tech hubs for international entrepreneurs and a designated organization for Canada's Startup Visa. Since 2012, Launch has worked with more than 6000 entrepreneurs from over 100 countries, of which 300 have grown their startups to Seed and Series A stage and raised over $2 Billion in funding. To learn more about Launch's programs or the Canadian Startup Visa visit https://LaunchAcademy.ca  Content Allies helps B2B companies build revenue-generating podcasts. We recommend them to any B2B company that is looking to launch or streamline their podcast production. Learn more at ContentAllies.com    

For Chief Information Officers (CIO) trying to make their enterprises more agile, eagerness to partner with cloud computing startups can be strong. But it's not always clear how to decide which are worthwhile investments for enterprise IT, or how to successfully partner with startups.One of the world's most prominent cloud computing startup advisors, Jason Lemkin, shares his advice for successful collaboration between enterprise information technology and startups.Our conversation includes the following topics:-- About Jason Lemkin and Saastr-- How can CIOs be successful in partnering with startups?-- The “social contract” between CIO and startup-- How to make the enterprise / startup relationship work effectively?-- The enterprise startup maturity lifecycle-- Challenges startups face when selling to large companies-- How to remove friction from the enterprise / startup relationship?Jason Lemkin started the world's largest community for SaaS/B2B founders, SaaStr.com, and the world's largest gathering for them, SaaStr Annual | The Biggest SaaS Event on the Planet. In addition to doing his best to help run SaaStr, he is a hyper-founder centric VC with $90m to invest in the top SaaS founders. He served as CEO and co-founder of EchoSign, the web's most popular electronic signature service, from inception through its acquisition by Adobe Systems Inc.

Brendon Cassidy graduated from Saint Mary's College of California, started his career in Recruiting, and then transitioned into sales where he eventually landed himself at LinkedIn in 2005 as employee #15, and LinkedIn's first ever Head of Sales.  Brendon's next move was one that would change his life forever. He went to work for Jason Lemkin as the VP Sales at Echosign, which was eventually acquired by Adobe. After Echosign, Brendon went on to be the VP Sales at Talkdesk, now valued at over $10 billion. Then started his own consulting firm, Cassidy Ventures, where he helped found Gong, and most recently co-founded CoSell.io where he works as the Co-CEO.   This week's episode was brought to you through the support of Headspace. You deserve to feel happier, and Headspace is meditation made simple. Go to Headspace.com/uncharted for a free one-month trial with access to Headspace's full library of meditations for every situation. Sign up here --> Headspace.com/uncharted Meet Novo, powerful and simple banking made for you with no hassles and no hidden fees. Sign up here -> https://banknovo.com/uncharted --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/uncharted1/support

The B2B Cloud industry is projected to grow from $350B in 2021 to $800B+ in 2025.  This will mean a lot of new companies and the need for many more VP Sales to lead the revenue team.Brendon Cassidy has been part of early-stage B2B enterprise sales organizations as the VP Sales for companies including LinkedIn, EchoSign (acquired by Adobe), Talkdesk, and then as a founding advisor to Gong.  Now Brendon is the co-founder and co-CEO at CoSell.io.Based upon Brendon's tenure and success at leading B2B SaaS companies, who better to discuss the journey and keys to success for an early-stage B2B SaaS VP Sales.First, we discussed any common themes or trends that Brendon has identified over his start-up journey experiences.  A very common theme, at up to 80% of companies Brendon has worked with is that companies have a hard time defining the "problem they are solving".  This is critical before you can start to build the messaging the sales team will use to explain who they are, what problem they address, and the benefits of solving the problem.Establishing Product Market Fit requires every company to understand and market validate the problem they are solving and why a company will invest time and money to solve it.Next, we move from what is required to acquire the first few customers to the next one-hundred and beyond.  Brendon recommends that the founder lead the first 5-15 deals as the "sales lead" and then hire 2 salespeople BEFORE they hire the VP Sales.  Hiring the right "FIRST" VP Sales is a common challenge that the majority of start-up CEO's face. In fact, Brendon believes that over 90% of companies do not hire the right VP Sales the first time.  Hiring a "hybrid" VP Sales who manages a small team, but also is responsible for direct sales with their own quota is a mistake that many first-time founders make. Why is the average tenure of a B2B Tech VP Sales only 14-18 months? One factor is the belief that hiring someone from an established, successful company like Salesforce is the best approach.  Unfortunately, 95% of the job of an early stage VP Sales is not an experience gains at an established, larger company.  Secondly, finding a VP Sales that actually has experience and success in growing a company from the very early days to some level of scale is quite rare.  Four potential early-stage B2B Cloud VP Sales profiles that a founder will need to interview:-Been there done that with success- Been there, done that but not successful- Been there done some of that- Big company experience, not done that Defining how much pipeline is required to close "x" deals is one of the first metrics that an early stage VP Sales should measure, understand and act upon.  Input metrics to this will include average contact value, sales cycle time and win rate are critical to determining the required pipeline.Other metrics, such as CAC Payback Period, CAC Ratio, Customer Lifetime Value, etc. are not valuable metrics for early-stage VP Sales, as there is not enough operating history to make these metrics valuable or insightful for decision making.If you are responsible for driving sales in an early stage B2B Cloud company,  are considering hiring your first VP Sales, or have a goal to become a first-time VP Sales in an early-stage start-up, this conversation with Brendon Cassidy is a great listen.

Poya and Robby interview Brendon Cassidy, who returns to the show as a Co-CEO and Co-Founder of CoSell, a company that helps organizations leverage referrals to find and accelerate sales deals. Prior to founding CoSell, Brendon was the first head of sales at LinkedIn (acquired by Microsoft for $26 Billion), a VP of Sales for EchoSign (acquired by Adobe), and Talkdesk (valued at $4 billion). Connect with Brendon: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendon/ Connect with Poya Osgouei: https://www.linkedin.com/in/poyaosgouei/ Connect with Robby Allen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robbyallen/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/uncharted1/support

Guest: Brendon Cassidy, Founder of Cassidy Ventures In this episode, we cover: How Brendon became one of the first 20 employees at LinkedIn during the company's early days — and how he helped LinkedIn monetize its recruiting services. (3:17) ... The sales leadership lessons Brendon learned at LinkedIn and his departure from the company in 2008. (10:29) ... 'I'm betting on me': How Brendon became VP of Sales at Echosign as one of the company's first employees after working at LinkedIn. (15:34) ... Startup number three: How Brendon helped build Talkdesk's sales operation as the company's first United States employee after working at Echosign. (20:26) ... Why Brendon looked for drive and commitment in new sales hires when building a team at Talkdesk. (23:58) ... 'Don’t quit; don’t give up; be solution-oriented': Dealing with failure and hardship in business. (26:31) ... Hiring a VP of Sales: Brendon's take on stretch VPs and why "a diverse search" is key to the right hire. (38:58) ... How Brendon defines grit. (49:00)

Brendon graduated from Saint Mary's College of California, started his career in Recruiting, and then transitioned into sales where he eventually landed himself at LinkedIn in 2005 as employee #15, and LinkedIn's first ever Head of Sales. Brendon's next move was one that would change his life forever. He went to work for Jason Lemkin as the VP Sales at Echosign, which was eventually acquired by Adobe for an estimated $400 million. After Echosign Brendon went on to be the VP Sales at Talkdesk, now valued at over $3 billion. Then started his own consulting firm, Cassidy Ventures, where he helped found Gong,, and most recently co-founded CoSell.io where he works as the Co-CEO. He's a frequent speaker at SaaStr and other large sales events. This is his story.

Jason graduated from Harvard University and Berkeley Law, he started his career as a Corporate Counsel, and then transitioned into various technology leadership roles, eventually leading him to co-founding EchoSign which was later acquired by Adobe. Jason then founded SaaStr, a social community of over 500,000 SaaS founders & executives and over 3M content views each month. If you haven't discovered it already, checkout SaaStr.com, it's loaded with content and resources that's great for anyone in SaaS. Jason also co-authored the book From Impossible to Inevitable with Aaron Ross. This is his story.

Jason Lemkin was co-founder & CEO at EchoSign, sold it for $400M to Adobe, went on to create Saastr - the largest community in the world for Saas entrepreneurs. On this episode Jason speaks directly to his fellow Saas CEO and shares the mistakes he made (and saw other people make) on the road to assembling a world-class sales team, starting with the VP Sales. How to find & assess a great VP Sales, how to improve conversion rates thanks to micro-PR, how to build a hiring routine - a must-listen for CEOs & sales execs building their sales teams. Follow Jason here on LinkedIn! And let's connect and continue the conversation here on LinkedIn too!

We talk to Brendon Cassidy, who was the first head of sales at LinkedIn (acquired by Microsoft for $26 Billion), a VP of Sales for EchoSign (acquired by Adobe), and Talkdesk (valued at $2 billion). Brendon's greatest asset is his ability to create highly cohesive and scalable sales power-houses, and we are fortunate he shares some of his playbook and actionable advice on this topic. Give it a listen, you won't be disappointed! Connect with Brendon Cassidy: LinkedIn Connect with Poya Osgouei: LinkedIn Twitter (@iampoya) Email: poyaosgouei@gmail.com --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/uncharted1/support

Esta semana charlamos con Juan Zamora sobre cómo Signaturit se ha abierto paso como un referente en la firma digital, facilitando la digitalización de los negocios. Signaturit es un híbrido entre una empresa legal y una plataforma tecnológica ya que su valor principal es dar certeza de que alguien ha aceptado algunas condiciones. Juan nos explica que hay distintos niveles en la firma digital y que por lo tanto hay distintos modelos de explotación tecnológica. En concreto Signaturit, se centra actualmente en un nivel de firma que se puede utilizar en contratos de trabajo o de otro estilo y aprovechamos este podcast para anunciar una alianza entre Signaturit y Factorial para que los empleados puedan firmar de forma legal todos sus documentos directamente a través de la aplicación de Factorial. Juan también nos comenta cuál es su visión sobre otras empresas que hay en el sector como EchoSign de Jason Lemkin (adquirida por Adobe con Adobe Sign) o DocuSign. Video: https://youtu.be/cWPNtwAd_Ww Suscríbete al canal: https://cutt.ly/itnigyt

From Impossible to Inevitable: How SaaS and Other Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue 2nd Edition by Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin  Click here for show notes! https://www.salesartillery.com/marketing-book-podcast/impossible-inevitable-2nd-edition-aaron-ross Break your revenue records with Silicon Valley’s “growth bible” “This book makes very clear how to get to hyper-growth and the work needed to actually get there” Why are you struggling to grow your business when everyone else seems to be crushing their goals? If you needed to triple revenue within the next three years, would you know exactly how to do it? Doubling the size of your business, tripling it, even growing ten times larger isn't about magic. It's not about privileges, luck, or working harder. There's a template that the world's fastest growing companies follow to achieve and sustain much, much faster growth. From Impossible to Inevitable details the hypergrowth playbook of companies like Hubspot, Salesforce.com (the fastest growing multibillion dollar software company), and EchoSign—aka Adobe Document Services (which catapulted from $0 to $144 million in seven years). Whether you have a $1 billion or a $100,000 business, you can use the same insights as these notable companies to learn what it really takes to break your own revenue records. Pinpoint why you aren’t growing faster Understand what it takes to get to hypergrowth Nail a niche (the #1 missing growth ingredient) What every revenue leader needs to know about building a scalable sales team There’s no time like the present to surpass plateaus and get off of the up-and-down revenue rollercoaster. Find out how now!

What company do you think of when you think of SaaS? Tune in to hear Eric Siu share his list of the most influential and revolutionary SaaS companies of the decade like EchoSign, Adobe, Salesforce and Amazon AWS. Click here to watch the full YouTube video Leave Some Feedback: What should I talk about next? Who should I interview? Please let me know on Twitter or in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, leave a short review here. Subscribe to Growth Everywhere on iTunes. Get the non-iTunes RSS feed Connect with Eric Siu: Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @Ericosiu Instagram @Ericosiu

Todays episode of Digital Rage features Programmer turned Lawyer Jonathan Tobin to discuss automation, as well as legalities content creators run into. We talk trademarks, training videos, Calendar automation, and Jeff has a cold.

Steven Benson is the Founder and CEO of Badger Maps, the #1 route planner for field salespeople. After receiving his MBA from Stanford, Steve’s career has been in field sales with companies like IBM, Autonomy, and Google – becoming Google Enterprise’s Top Performing Salesperson in the World in 2009. In 2012 Steve founded Badger Maps to help field salespeople be more successful. He has also been named one of the Top 40 Most Inspiring Leaders in Sales Lead Management.  WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS EPISODE: Inspiration story of Jason Lemkin -"The Godfather of SaaS" model All-In-One: Steve's biggest success and failure How to use Storytelling techniques to overcome Sales objections   SHOW NOTES  [00:11] Intro [01:09] Welcome Steve [01:31] Business success stories that inspire him [01:40] Jason Lemkin : creating SaaStr [04:00] GPS analogy [04:50] Sales experience [05:20] How Steve got into sales [06:45] IBM training program [07:20] Sales roles at Google [08:10] Challenges faced while switching career path [09:01] Failures [09:20] Badger maps [09:50] Lacking vision [10:07] Choice of Technology industry [10:45] Dynamic nature of the technology industry [12:34] Competing in software/app world [13:37] Stories that excite his customers [13:44] Application of Badger maps in sales [14:38] Field sales [18:05] Being efficient with time [19:00] Having success stories with statistical details [20:05] Leadership circle [21:25] Identify a problem and find a solution [22:00] Objection handling [23:20] Challenges facing today’s sales leaders [25:21] The art of storytelling [26:17] Contact info [27:40] Outro   SHOW TRANSCRIPT There's so much information and so much to do and so little time today in a way that there hasn't been before, and I think it takes people's focus off things. It makes it harder to accomplish things.Speaker 2:                    00:14 This is the storytelling for sales podcast, a show about leveraging the power of storytelling to ignite your sales performance and grow your business.Ed Bilat:                        00:25 Hello, this is Ed Bilat, we have a very cool guest for you today. Steve Benson, the founder, and CEO of Badger maps, the number one route planner for field salespeople joining us today after receiving his MBA from Stanford. Steve's career has been in the field sales with companies like IBM, our autonomy, and Google. And actually, he became Google's enterprise top performing salesperson in the world in 2009.  In 2012 Steve founded Badger maps to help field salespeople to be more successful. Steve has been named one of the top 40 most inspiring leaders in sales lead management. Steve Benson, welcome to the show.Steve Benson:               01:11 Hey Ed, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here.Ed Bilat:                         01:13 Oh, absolutely. I can't tell you how thrilled I am to have you on the show! I listen to your podcast and I watch your videos all the time, so I can't wait to hear your story all the way from San Francisco. But before we do this, let me ask you a traditional question, which is “what business success story inspires you and why?”Steve Benson:               01:35 Well, um, you know, I guess one of my big inspirations, uh, running Badger is Jason Lemkin. I'm not sure if you're familiar with him, but he's the guy that started EchoSign, which is kind of very select DocuSign if you're familiar with that company.Ed Bilat:                         01:50 Oh yeah. Yeah. We use DocuSign all the time.Steve Benson:               01:53 Okay. He started EchoSign, which, uh, is a very similar product I guess, but they sold it. They didn't take it public as DocuSign did. They sold earlier too. Adobe, he was one of the early people that made a SAAS business and built it up from scratch and took it all the way to a very nice exit. That's what he's first known for. But then after that he started just writing blogs and kind of communicating with the world of people that start software businesses and just writing down and created some really great thoughts and content around how to do every element of running a software company like his challenges that he faced, ways he'd overcome things, and he talked to other people about how they were overcoming things in very clear, simple explanations. Yeah, two-page articles would create vast value if, from my perspective, they taught me a ton of things, and that content strategy then grew into now a huge business that's called SaaStr. Yeah, when it was just all started, he wasn't even monetizing in the beginning. He was just kind of writing about his experiences and be like, Hey, I know a lot about this and I'm just going to share my thoughts. He's a really humble guy, a really inspirational guy for me. The company that I run is based on ideas that I learned from him, Ed Bilat:                        03:11 So this was a blueprint for SAAS companies with no expectations to monetize this whatsoever and it turned out into something really, really big.Steve Benson:              03:19 Right, which works out sometimes. I don't actually know if he had the plan to build the whole SaaStr Fund staying on top of what he was starting off with. I actually suspect he just had a blog and was creating content and then so many people were following it. He was like, oh, I should have a conference. I should. All of them. They do it now. But really it just started out creating great content for what ultimately came to his user software executives.Ed Bilat:                        03:49 We're gonna circle back to that. Let's turn the spotlight on you. Now our podcast listeners know, and I think today this will be particularly relevant. I like to use the GPS analogy. Then I'm, you know, you and my guests, right? You are in this world. I know Badger maps is for sure using GPS and, as you know, in order for the application to locate you, you need at least three towers. So each tower makes a circle, triangulation technique, and it'd been able to pinpoint yourself or precisely. So then I looked at your awesome experience. I see those three circles, right? I see the sales circle, right? I see the true passion for technology in this tree, which is your circle two. And I also see your leadership drive, which is circle number three. So let's talk about all three of them. Shall We?Steve Benson:               04:48 Sounds great.Ed Bilat:                         04:49 All right, excellent. Circle one is sales experience. I look in, you've been in sales roles for many, many years. IBM, HP, Google, and currently you are founder and CEO of Badger maps and which is very unusual for a CEO. You actually host your own podcast outside of sales talk, which I think is awesome, but not many CEOs are actually doing this. And look, not many CEOs actually record sales training videos for their reps. And you do. So how did you even get into the sales world?Steve Benson:               05:22 Well, you know, originally it was because of a friend slash mentor of mine. I was in business school at Stanford looking at a bunch of more traditional roles for students coming out of business school types of things that most of them do, you know, consulting and finance, jobs like that. And I was looking at them and interviewing with them and kind of exploring the different roles that are there's, you know, tried two years away from graduation, still figuring out, you know what? Early in my time there and trying to figure out what path I would take, this guy I know it was a friend and a mentor was like, you know, you could be a consultant and he had been a consultant before. He was like, you should be a consultant in finance. We can do any of these things, but ask yourself, “are you going to be the best guy in the room? Best guy or girl in the room at this job?” And because I don't think you'll be the best finance person, I don't think you'd be the best consultant. You might go into sales and you might be the best salesperson in the room and that's kind of a natural fit for you. And everyone always focuses on showing up their weaknesses. But really in a career, you kind of want to play to your strengths.Steve Benson:               06:32 I think your strength might be the interpersonal side, the leadership side, the sales side of the business. I was like, oh, that really makes a ton of sense to me.Ed Bilat:                         06:43 Okay.Steve Benson:               06:44 So I started looking at the jobs of that nature and I ended up entering IBM that has this program where they, uh, which is like a year-long training program.Ed Bilat:                         06:54 Yes. Steve Benson:               06:55 Pretty cool. It was like, so right after business school I went into a year-long sales training program and they're kind of grooming people to be at their company for the long term, I think is what they're looking for. And they stay, invest a ton up front trying to make you a great salesperson. I didn't end up staying there after the year was over. I ended up, uh, with a software company called Autonomy, which subsequently was purchased by HP. And then I ended up, uh, moving into a sales role at Google because they're kind of on the cutting edge of SAAS.  I'd seen some SAAS that, so software as a service to shift to doing software on the cloud as opposed to traditional software. It's downloaded or solo CD, it changes the whole business model and stuff. And I, and I saw that at Autonomy a bit. We were dabbling in that model. Okay. One of the companies leading the space, Salesforce, Workday, a few others, but a Salesforce is where Google is in a really great job at that point. And so I went to them and it was kind of a part of growing very early SAAS businesses out. And so I was there for years and then I started Badger.Ed Bilat:                          08:02 And what was a major challenge early on like for sales specifically when you were rolling through the training at IBM? Steve Benson:                08:18 Well, I think some of the biggest shots, it's really not. It's been taught to you before like everyone has the natural sales abilities that you learned from when you're a small kid, you try to sell your mom on buying you some sugar. But you learned to sell and learning to influence and learn to educate others. I was fairly highly educated, but I hadn't been educated in this at all. I felt like it was a natural fit for me, but that being said, I had to kind of build all these skills from the ground up and the types of things that really differentiate great salesperson from other types of business leadership.Ed Bilat:                         08:59 Sales suddenly going to be challenging and can be stressful. Do you have a favorite failure of yours? Like, anything will happen, which was a good lesson in the retrospective?Steve Benson:               09:14 Yeah, I'd say the biggest failure of my biggest successes, the company that I run now,Ed Bilat:                         09:22 I love it.Steve Benson:               09:25 Long term, it was successful, but in the short term there were a million failures that I overcame building the business. I'd say that one of my biggest failures was not realizing how long and hard it was to get a business of this nature off the ground and going.  Everything took three times longer than I thought it would and was three times harder than I thought it would be. The failure there is, I mismanaged how long and difficult things would be and so that, that causes all kinds of problems. But then long term it did end up being a successful company here, but it was very good. But harder to get going than I thought it would have been. And that was definitely a failure of oversight.Ed Bilat:                         10:06 Let's talk about the Second circle: The technology this is your passion and commitments. Again, IBM, Google, HP and you stayed with technology for many years and yet your undergraduate degree is actually in geography. Right?Steve Benson:                10:31 I was actually looking at a bunch of industries that would be interesting. I figured out, oh, I shouldn't be on the sales side of things. There were other industries that I was also looking at the reason. So that to me was because of how fast it's changing and how dynamic it is and how it's compared to most industries. It's just having an outsized impact on the world. That's changing how things are done in business and in people's lives all the time. I mean, if you think about even 15 years ago, people didn't have cell phones or they had very basic, wasn't even have cell phones. People are just living differently. Technology has changed, business has changed people's lives a ton in the last 15 years, and it's happening really fast and quick change tends to create opportunity, my opportunity to disrupt incumbents and it's just exciting and interesting. So I think, yeah, that's how I ended up in technology, right? It's less that I've always been interested in speeds and feeds the computers or something, but more that I'm interested in the change that technology enables, and I'm interested in being a part of exciting, dynamic things.Ed Bilat:                          11:42 Uber is The largest Taxi Company in the world and they do not own any taxis. That's right. Yeah. The largest media company in the world does not write any content. I am talking about Facebook. Hospitality provider does not only new hotels, right? So like 10 years ago, if you would tell somebody, let it, a business like that would exist. They will just laugh at you saying like this is not possible. it's just physically not possible. But that didn't happen. So specifically for the mobile APP World that isn't it like really hard to compete in this space today?Steve Benson:               12:23 Yes. The bar for creating new technology is relatively low today. 16 year old can code up an APP but to build enterprise-class software is very hard if you're building something that a business is going to be using for business critical things. And if you're making that kind of application, there's a lot to it and you've gotta be able to integrate with their existing systems. You've got to be able to work perfectly solve their problems. There are a lot of apps, there are a million flashlight apps and those are easy to build, right? There are far fewer companies that are building applications successfully and software successfully that's used in business. There's a lot more today than, there used to be. There's got to be 5,000 companies that make marketing technology and 5,080 sales technology. But really it's hard to compete because there is so much going on and changes so fast. But it's easy in that if you solve a key problem that a large group of people has, you can really create a lot of value with technology very quickly. And so even if it's hard to compete and you've gotta be on your game and you can unlock a ton of value of people and therefore create a great business.Ed Bilat:                         13:36 So for your customers, like what type of stories excites them? , what do they do with the application?Steve Benson:               13:44 What Badger does is we have an application for field sales teams. We take their territories, their customers, and we put them on a map for them. We allowed them to use our tools to figure out which customers they should focus on. We give them the capability to build routes and schedule out their time when they're in the field and meeting with customers, we provide them with new leads. So we showed them where businesses are, so if you want to make this a real example, think about a company that sells something to dentists and their 800,000 dentists or whatever in America. And this company's goal is to let all these dentists know, hey, we have a cool new way of cleaning people a little bit better. We have a new thing that does that. Exactly. And then they already have a, a very large sales team. That's their business, right? So that's a field sales is a sale that occurs in the fields, right? You could also just sell it online. I mean, what if you were a new dental company and you just, you created a really nice website, put your new tool online. Maybe no dentist would show up and look at your finding new tools. So how would you get them to do it while you send out field salespeopleSteve Benson:               14:51 could also use inside sales where you're calling them on the phone, but with certain types of buyers, the best way to get in front of them is by actually going and meeting with them and explaining why your new way of doing something is better or why what you have is this and that they should start using instead of something else. It could be selling wine to restaurants or something, you know, it could be medical devices to doctors or pharmaceutical drugs, pharmaceuticals are sold this way. But the point is that we help that kind of salesperson who goes and meets their customers face to face, uh, we helped them do a whole bunch of things and they're a very mobile group of people. Obviously, they're out in the field and so our software works on, it's an application on their phone. It also works in their computer. We enabled them to do a bunch of things. We just solve a bunch of problems that they face.Ed Bilat:                         15:44 They would drive us to downtown and just dump final seven people on the street. Right. Then you have three streets that way and the fourth streets that way. And um, you know, I would take the elevator to the top of the building and then be just walking down the stairs until securities you will run out, uh, cell phones. Yeah. So it was basically finding anybody who would be interested in cellular technology, in the wireless. Right. And remember, once you have an appointments, we'll always do a T- call means that you go to the left, you go to the right and you go to the back of the business, which you just visited and say like, Hey, I was just talking JNK right next door to you. So would you be interested in this as well? Right? So like, I'm sure your software is way smarter, uh right now. So, because that was like very, very basic instincts and they actually based a lot on psychology. How, how would they feel after that appointment? Right. As if it wasn't like stressful. If they told me to go, I would be very hesitant to go to another location, you know, I would need a cup of coffee or lunch.Steve Benson:               16:57 . Most of the people that we sell cell phones, especially tricky because everybody could use those. It's very hard to filter, but like if you're selling heart stents to cardiologists, that's much more specific. Or if you're selling, you know, organic beer to organic restaurants are, and Vegan restaurants, that's much more specific. Our customers tend to be not trying to sell something to everyone, but they're selling a specific high-value thing to specific people. And so it's more about, okay, I come up with my territory, there are 800,000 dentists in the country, but my territory is just, you know, Manhattan north of you know this street. And so there are 500 dentists, this area, those are the 500 that I've got to talk to. Or they'll cover like western Kansas or something and there are 500 dentists there. And so they cover a specific group of people in a specific area.Steve Benson:                18:02 So a lot of it is about focus and knowing when to follow up with them... when it's a good time setting meetings and then being efficient with your time to kind of create value for those customers and not, not just kind of walk in and not many of our customers are kind of that early in the sales process where they're just kind of walking in and saying hi. Sometimes we see that though we do see that some, but it's especially in my experience, a hard job. If you're selling something that kind of anyone can buy like water's hard or cell phones or anything, insurance, business insurance that every business could buy. So it's like if you walk up and down Main Street USA and every single company on the street could buy your thing. It's nice because you have lots of customers, but it's also harder because you have lots of prospective customers,Steve Benson:                18:52 Well, you're having a great story that communicates how you help your customers is one of the most important things that you can do. People remember stories. You want to have those success stories about your customers. Like this customer got 50% more meetings, you know, a month because they started being organized with our product. This customer was able to sell 20% more because of the focus they were able to use in the new leads they were able to get with our product. A key thing is having statistics in your stories if you're in the business like have real numbers and the real people if I can tell another dental company that they know and compete with is using our product. I use them, she has an example because they have a bunch of customers there. It's uh, we got our first big customer there a long time ago, but then I was able to go and tell that story to other companies in that industry that don't necessarily sell the same exact thing as them, but also sell things to dentists or doctors. If you can give a very specific example of a specific company unlocking a ton of value because of your product or service. That's really one of the keys to sales is having that story.Ed Bilat:                        20:06 So let's talk about the last circle. The Leadership circle, cause obviously is the CEO of the company. All right, so you're not just a leader, you also coach and the teammate. You transition to that role and being the leader. What stories come to mind that actually helps you grow as a leader?Steve Benson:                20:26 I think great leadership. It's easier for most people that understand that great athletic coach versus a crappy, crappy athletic coach. We'll tell their basketball team, for example, you got to score more points. That's not being a good coach to yell at you and say you guys aren't scoring enough points. You've got to score more points, more baskets. A great coach is someone who is able to pull a player aside and say, Hey, I noticed on your crossover dribble on your left hand that you're leading with your foot like this. If we were to switch it to leading with your foot like this, you'd get an extra half step on the defender and that would allow you to get around them and make the layup. Here's a drill that you can practice, you know, 20 times tomorrow and really engrain doing it this way instead of that way and you'll be able to feel it. That extra step that you're going to be able to get a great coach identifies problems like that and then brings a solution and helps the person learn and uplevel their game. And that's really what I try to do. I don't just set goals and say, hey, I want know numbers to increase x percent by x date. I try to work with all the different teams and have ideas with them and listened to them and figure out where they can get that extra half step.Ed Bilat:                         22:01 When you take a specific objection when the customer says I don't have any money, like how do you deal with this? Like do you just freeze? When do you ignore it? What do you do? Because objections will come like whether we like it or not with objections will come and if you're not prepared, well guess what? Like it was going to be very awkward.Steve Benson:                22:23 Right, exactly. Yeah. I have a whole series of videos on sales skills and they just, if they're available for free on Youtube, Youtube Channel, Badger maps, it's the sales tips and tricks playlist and there's like 10 videos. They're all 10 minutes long or so, so you can, we'll get there. I'm pretty fast, but it's, it covers things like objection handling. I think we have three or four videos on that and that's everything from the way you should anticipate objections, the different types of objections you're going to run into and how to head them off and how to handle them and uh, if you're interested in that sort of thing.Steve Benson:               23:24 I think the biggest challenge is what a noisy world. It's everyone's so busy, you know, their attention being told a million different directions and it makes it harder to get things done. Makes it hard to take the next steps, getting people's attention right originally and letting them know, hey, I do x, Y, z. It creates value for people like you by doing B. C is that interesting to you? To learn more about or and getting them aware that you are a solution like you even exists is one problem. Because people have so much going on, and this is for a lot of reasons. I mean, one we productivity per employee is, has raised a ton over the last 30 years. Pay hasn't really grown for a, for most people that productivity has. And so we're basically, we're doing a lot more with less. That makes people a lot busier. I do also blend technology, right? The frantic nature of today's world. 17 hoses of information coming at you. Like I remember when I was a kid, my dad, you'd get the Chicago Tribune and read it. That was like his one hose of information. But if you, if you look at, you know, someone today, they have three social media sites and you know, 14 news aggregators and you have TV and Netflix and their phone blowing up, you know, there are eight communication applications on my phone, each one can have messages flowing into it from different types of things. And Yeah, I think it makes it a very noisy world. And I think that's the biggest challenge for selling to new people. I guess the biggest challenge to leading a team is that they're all attracted. I think it's the, it's the, it's the hardest thing about managing yourself is that you're distracted. There's so much information and so much to do and so little time today in a way that there hasn't been before. And I think it takes people's focus off things and makes it harder to accomplish things. You really have to actively combat that.Steve Benson:                25:24 The Art of storytelling is the art of communicating with whoever you want to communicate with. Doing it through stories is doing it with examples. It's about connecting to people, to connecting to the person that you're trying to communicate with. Giving rich examples, whether it's yourself or people like them, it just makes the message that you're trying to get across through the story a lot more effective and a lot stickier in people's minds. And so that's what the art of storytelling is to me. It's really the art of great communication. And I think that in general, in the modern world with low attention spans and all the distractions of the world, it's harder to have truly great communication.Ed Bilat:                          26:16 I appreciate your time. So for our listeners, what's the best way to connect with you over your brand?Steve Benson:                26:21 Um, best way to get ahold of me for your listeners, probably Linkedin search, Steve Benson at Badger I'll come right up. My podcast is outside sales talk and you've got to listen to that. If you were in hearing new sales strategies and learning new things about how to be a great salesperson, it's less me talking and more, I been on best sales leaders from around the world, thought leaders and that sort of, those sorts of people.New Speaker:                26:53 We'll make sure to include all those links on sources. Um, again, thank you so much for coming to the show, is an absolute pleasure. Steve Benson:                27:00 Yeah, I think what I can offer your listeners is,  if they are interested in sales, you get in touch with Badge.r Just let people know that you, that you heard about podcasts here, we'll give you two months free of Badger. So if you're in sales and you want to check it out, that's a reward for listening to all my, uh, my blathering here.Steve Benson:                27:38 Thanks for having me, Ed!

This week we recorded our podcast (in English) at the Point Nine Capital Founder Meetup in Sitges and talked to Jason Lemkin, CoFounder/CEO at EchoSign. We ask him his story. How he got where he is, and what was his first contact with the business world: co-founding two startups, selling them, creating a blog to tell his mistakes are some of the things he talks about. He does not consider himself a good salesperson so we ask him how to lead a sales organization even without being good at sales. We finally ask him to compare life as an entrepreneur and life as an investor. Video: https://youtu.be/_WaMOfgjYzU

Sam Blond is Chief Sales Officer @ Brex, the startup that provides corporate cards for startups. To date they have raised over $57m in funding from the likes of Y Combinator, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, Yuri Milner, Elad Gil and many more incredible names. Prior to Brex, Sam Was Chief Revenue Officer at Rainforest QA. Before Rainforest, Sam saw firsthand the hypergrowth scaling of Zenefits as VP of Sales where he saw the company grow from 18 employees and $1m in ARR to over 1,800 employees and over $70m in ARR. Sam got his start in the SaaS industry with Jason Lemkin @ Echosign as Director of Sales. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How Sam made his way into the world of sales and came to join Jason Lemkin with his first role in sales at Echosign? Why does Sam believe that more sales reps does not always equal more revenue? What are the benchmarks that suggest founders really need to add to their sales team? Does Sam agree Founders should be selling up to $1m in ARR? How does Sam assess who is the best person to hire for the role? What have been Sam’s lessons on what it fundamentally takes to attract the best talent? In the early days how does Sam think about both role allocation and whether to hire the young jack of all trades vs the more senior executive? Why does Sam believe that founders need to spend more time on top of funnel? Why does Sam believe that not all opportunities are created equal? How does Sam think about the right structure and time it should take to pass from lead to MQL to SAL to opportunity to deal? Where does this most commonly breakdown? Why does Sam believe the key to success in SaaS sales teams is “urgency”? Literally, how can reps instil a sense of urgency in their current pipeline? Why does Sam disagree with the conventional wisdom and say discounting is a great tool? How does Sam determine the right level of discount to give? How does Sam assess pilots as an alternative approach to getting leads over the line?   Sam’s 60 Second SaaStr What does Sam know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning? Quality or quantity of logos in the early days? Sales rep productivity, what does Sam believe is good? Read the full transcript on our blog. If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr Sam Blond

Jay Abraham, founder of the Abraham Group (and departing COO of CloudCraze, acquired by Salesforce in March), joins the AppChat to discuss his fascinating journey from nuclear physicist and submariner to highly-sought-after startup consultant, as well as what goes into a great (read: productive) relationship between a COO and CEO. Also addressed is: defining scale and how an organization prepares for it; how to know your organization needs a COO; and mistakes Abraham learned from in the trenches at CloudCraze and in his career. Here are the key topics, with timestamps, as well as the full interview transcript: Key Topics 00:00-1:56 Introducing the AppChat and our guest, Jay Abraham (formerly of CloudCraze) 1:57-4:35 Abraham's early career as a nuclear physicist and submariner before he held multiple COO positions 4:36-7:40 Experienced gained from handling the outsourcing of American Express' IT infrastructure 7:41-9:53 Transition to becoming COO of CloudCraze 9:54-16:42 The relationship between COO and CEO, and creating processes to delegate responsibilities 16:43-18:42 Defining scale and how an organization prepares for it 18:43-22:46 The cultural shift that happens when processes are defined and put into place 22:47-25:44 At what point does your organization need a COO? 25:45-31:02 How a CEO begins a great partnership with a newly hired COO 31:03-33:56 Giving power to employees to help identify and solve problems cross-functionally 33:57-36:37 Mistakes that Abraham has learned from 36:38-37:31 Closing out and how to get in touch Full Transcript Intro: 00:01 You're listening to the AppChat. A podcast focused on SasS growth strategies, plus successes in the Salesforce ecosystem and beyond. Here's your host, CodeScience CEO, Brian Walsh. Brian Walsh: 00:13 Alright everybody, welcome back to the AppChat podcast. And thrilled to have with us today, Jay Abraham, who is coming to us most recently from CloudCraze, and they're fresh off of their acquisition by Salesforce, which actually just closed last week. Welcome, Jay. Jay Abraham: 00:28 Welcome Brian, thank you very much. Brian Walsh: 00:32 Yeah, absolutely. Jay, before we get into you, give us a little bit of background, who was CloudCraze, talk about the acquisition, just what happened there? Jay Abraham: 00:41 CloudCraze is, I'd say, one of the foremost B2B e-commerce platforms. It's built natively on Salesforce, so it's tremendously helped our growth and scale, and obviously that was recognized by Salesforce by their recent acquisition of us; and I congratulate them on our acquisition and I think they're gonna have a wonderful future in the years ahead. Brian Walsh: 01:02 Fantastic. I think another statement of how amazing the Force.com platform is to be able to support an application this complex, as CloudCraze across so many large enterprise companies. Jay Abraham: 01:14 That's true, I think one of my team members on the product management side, was very appreciative. She came from one of the competitors, and she said that the biggest thing she recognized is that she didn't have to worry about the backend. But she had to worry about customer facing issues, giving them the capabilities they wanted, and that relying upon the Force.com platform allowed them to leverage everything they could -- and there's a whole team at Salesforce, obviously, building upon the Force.com platform. Brian Walsh: 01:47 Yeah it's such an efficient capital spend to not have to worry about that part of your infrastructure, the pager, all of those headcount just to manage what servers are up. Jay Abraham: 01:56 It is. Brian Walsh: 01:57 Awesome, so let's actually back into you, in your role getting there. So I mean you've done the COO role dozens of times in your life? Jay Abraham: 02:07 Officially as a COO, this is probably the first time. But I think I actively fulfilled the role as a Chief Operating Officer in many projects, both working at company's directly as well as being brought in as an executive troubleshooter. When people think about a COO, it's somebody you can give the mess to. The stuff that nobody wants to deal with, that's the COO. Brian Walsh: 02:34 I love that tagline on your LinkedIn profile, executive troubleshooter, because that's always been my experience of "Yeah, yeah, I got that. I'll take over." Jay Abraham: 02:43 Right. Brian Walsh: 02:44 But let's go way back in time. You actually were a nuclear physicist. Jay Abraham: 02:49 I was. That's what started off my career. I went to MIT. To think I built fusion power plants at the time. It was a really long time ago, 1983. When my professors convinced me to build one. Assuming all the technical details were completed and I figured out it would cost two billion dollars in 1983 dollars to do it and we'd have all the problems that we had with fission. The length of time that I would have to teach and do research before I could actually build the power plant would be 40 years and I'd be retired by that time. So I decided I'd do something else. Brian Walsh: 03:26 But it didn't end there. You actually became a submariner to practice at first, like hands on. Jay Abraham: 03:32 I did. It was kind of interesting to me. It started off at undergraduate school as a theoretical physicist and now to become a submariner you have to become a practical engineer. It was probably the genesis of my experiences being a Chief Operating Officer, because being on a submarine, you're responsible for everything that happens. And you need to, as Officer of the Deck or Engineering Officer of the Watch, you basically need to know how everything works. Even though you may not be the expert, you've got a lot of enlisted people who are -- the reactor operator, the electrical officer -- you need to be able to synthesize all that information and say, "This is what's important." And I think that's helped me a lot in my career going forward. Brian Walsh: 04:14 I can imagine. Does it also give you a whole background of jokes to say of "Hey guys, this is not nuclear physics." Jay Abraham: 04:22 I try not to say, because it was silence service in the submarine service. Everybody talks to me about telling all the stories and I can't really talk to them about it. Brian Walsh: 04:36 And I think when I was first starting to get to know you, the story that really broadened me of just the scale of things that you've done, was handling the outsourcing for American Express of their IT infrastructure. Jay Abraham: 04:48 That's true. It was an interesting project. We came in and the CFO for the technology group needed somebody to kind of lead point on financial evaluation. You go in and the technology team really wanted to outsource, which is very different in most companies. Most companies, the technology team would actually like to keep everything in-house. In this case, American Express had aggressive goals on reducing technology costs. I think the technology team felt like they wanted to step out of the way and give it to someone else to do and we said "Before we do that, let's figure out actually how the economics work." We can't just ask somebody to come in and give us a cost and say, "It's lower than what we're paying today, that's great." We build a model to kind of predict what we could actually, as American Express, reduce costs to. Then, each of these vendors bid against those costs, so we could compare, you know. These were, in the old days, we're talking about main frames, mid-ranges, desktops. We came up with unit pricing on each of those in MPS or server units or PCs and said based on various categories and scenarios of how things might play, here's how the cost would look for every vendor, as well as the internal vendor, and that's how we compare them. Brian Walsh: 06:10 Now did you have a big IT background at that point? To understand all of those individual units and how that built up? Jay Abraham: 06:18 No, I didn't have that IT background at the time. I had some technology background with my prior career with Mitchell Madison, I was a partner there. We did a lot of strategic sourcing and this is somewhat similar to strategic sourcing -- you need to understand base economics of both the vendor and yourself to see what lever needs to be pulled. My team had that background. I gave that direction on how to build it. We talked to technology people within American Express to say, "What are your parameters and what can't you do? What can you do?" And we helped them think through it. I think, a lot of this, people talk about technology being too complex to understand. My general impression has been that people think too much about what they don't have information from as opposed to what they do. Brian Walsh: 07:11 Yeah. Jay Abraham: 07:11 I mean, you can take whatever you have information on, make assumptions, simplifying the other type of things that you do have -- or you don't have -- and use that to be able to create a model or create a hypothesis that you can test against. Brian Walsh: 07:25 That's amazing. So my take away is you're a savant. Jay Abraham: 07:31 I think most consultants have got an ability to be able to synthesize and take useful data from a mess of information. Brian Walsh: 07:41 Yeah, that's exactly right. I know that it worked well for you as you transitioned to CloudCraze, because you had known Chris beforehand, right? And he was bringing you on just to sort of manage a couple of the pieces outstanding? Jay Abraham: 07:56 Right. Chris and I had known each other from marchFirst days, which is about the tail end of the time I was a partner in Mitchell Madison, which was a consulting firm. They got acquired by a company that Chris was part of and he and I knew each other. He was on the technology side. He'd always come by and borrow my people to help sell some of his engagements because we had this strategic mindset. Chris had always wanted to get me involved in some of the companies he'd done. His prior company, Acquity, which didn't work out because I had some projects going on at the time and was just too busy to get involved with it. At this point, with CloudCraze, he asked me to get involved and I started off helping him with certain areas in pricing. Went to contracts and poked into different areas until they said, "Well, you've been doing a lot of stuff. Why don't you come on as the Chief Operating Officer." Brian Walsh: 08:47 Yeah. And at that point it truly was just 20 hours a week. Jay Abraham: 08:55 Right, yes. It was just an ethic. They didn't have a clear role for me. I kind of defined my role as helping them set up the parameters so they can scale. You talked about what a Chief Operating Officer would do -- I think the most important ability for Chief Operating Officer is to help set you up to scale. A lot of people don't think about that until they start running into problems, and if you get a Chief Operating Officer early, then they'll start thinking about those things. The other thing I think is kind of risk management, which when you're growing a startup and are an entrepreneur, you're not really thinking about downside risk. But think about why you hire lawyers. Brian Walsh: 09:36 It's never for the great moments. Jay Abraham: 09:40 Right. It's to protect you from those moments you didn't really think about. That's the other thing the Chief Operating Officer should be helping you with, is to think about -- what are the things to scale and what are the things that can come bite you and to stop that from happening. Brian Walsh: 09:54 Yep. So Jason Lemkin, who founded EchoSign which Adobe bought and that's their Adobe sound product now. Sasstr fund, he runs the Sasstr conference. He tweeted recently, "A COO's job is to make the CEO's life easier." Jay Abraham: 10:16 I'll agree, that's probably true. If you think about a COO or Chief of Staff for President, et cetera, that's pretty much effectively the same role. You are to make everything easier for the president or the CEO, and get rid of all of those details. COO's should think about strategy division. COO should be thinking about, "Well, how do I make that vision a reality?" Brian Walsh: 10:35 Yeah. So how much of that is the chemistry between the CEO and the COO? How much of that is strengths and weaknesses? Because I can imagine that COOs play a different role depending on the strengths of the CEO then. Jay Abraham: 10:50 I think that's probably indicative more about what a CEO specifically focuses on, as opposed to what they do. I've talked with many CEOs, in my role as COO at CloudCraze, I had responsibility for all the back office functions, all the technology areas, etc. What it didn't have was kind of a front customer facing, but I've talked with a lot of COOs in other companies where they spent most of the time on the front in the sales end. I think that's just a matter of what role is needed in that company at that time. It could be, in our case, Chris focusing on strategy. We had Ray, who was our Pricing and Chief Customer Officer. They all worked closely together with each other from Acquity days, so they all knew how to work. Chris trusted me, so basically brought me in, said "Run with it. Decide what you want to do. Let me know if you have any issues or what you need." Brian Walsh: 11:59 Got it. I know that in my case I hired my COO back last summer. It was the very first time in my professional career where a new hire made my life better in two days. Like I turned around and said, "Oh my gosh, it's gotten that much better." And what I realized is that it freed me to actually think about two things. One, where I applied best. What was my skill set? And two, allowed me to truly focus, because up until that point, I was doing 300 different things and it can peel down. And you're right, stepped in and said, "Hey, I'm going to help you troubleshoot these areas and start to fix them, prepare for scale." Jay Abraham: 12:38 Right. You have to have that chemistry between the CEO and the CFO, and Chief Operating Officer and the rest of the executives. They have to be able to trust you to be able to go in and say, "These are the areas that are critical to fix right now and here are things we can defer." But also don't be defensive about a Chief Operating Officer coming in and saying to people in your areas, "Oh you need to change your human metrics. You need to start tracking and collecting this type of data." Brian Walsh: 13:10 Right. Jay Abraham: 13:12 Because you're not going in there to try to rip apart their organization, you're trying to come in there and say -- even in the sales area, which wasn't my responsibility -- I'd come in and say, "I want you to start collecting this type of data because that will help us tell what our conversion rates are. What's the cost per lead in various forms." And those are things that are important and will help the entire organization. Brian Walsh: 13:34 Yeah, and I found it is essential to have that second set of eyes, to really look in and say "Hey, you're already successful, but I think we can do a little bit more and let me collect data to help prove that." Jay Abraham: 13:48 Right. That's one of the things, but I think the other thing, it's real good, it goes back to scaling. In a small organization, everybody's working intuitively, in a lot of respects. For example, when we're making decisions on a contract and how much we're willing to give off of our list price, or what risk we're willing to take, those are done by the Chief Executives and they're making that as sort of, "Can I take that level of risk?" You're not quantifying it because it's a small organization and you can figure that out as you go through. Brian Walsh: 14:27 And you also think in your mind, you're thinking, "Hey, I'll be there to fix it if it goes wrong." Jay Abraham: 14:31 Right. Exactly. What goes on later is, as you bring more people into the organization and start to delegate some of those responsibilities, they don't have that same intuitive feel in business that you may have had. They may be doing things the same way you would have done them, but not doing the same exact thing. That starts to become a problem when you start scaling because you really want people to follow consistent processes at that point in time. Right? Because especially if you go to a funding event or a liquidity event, the lawyers and other teams are going to say that, "Well, what's your standard processes? How do you do this? What are all the exceptions?" And if you don't have a systematic way of doing that, it's going to be very hard. Jay Abraham: 15:19 Simple one for me was setting up processes say, well if you want to give a discount off of the price, up to certain level, it can be done by VP of sales. At a certain level it's got to go to the president. If you're taking on levels of risk that haven't really been defined yet, it needs to go to the board or certain other people to figure out how that should be done. It could be things like, what's important to you? Is it margin? Is it revenue? Is it risk? Brian Walsh: 15:54 Do you find yourself putting in that process, or do you find yourself asking the questions to assist other people in putting together that process? Jay Abraham: 16:02 Well, in most of my stuff, I think I've had to put in the process. I actually drive that to have other people think through it, and then we actually have to put in the process, say, "Ok, well this is how it's going to work when the contract comes in." I will come up with a table that says, "Here's various permutations of this." I'll give this to my legal counsel and say, "Hey, now when you talk contract to a salesperson, if their negotiation points on these five areas, then you know how to handle those five negotiation points." And there are exceptions and you can go to various people to get approval for those exceptions. Brian Walsh: 16:43 Got it. You've said the word "scale" five or six times now and I agree completely and that's one of the things we're embracing right now is we're growing so rapidly. How do you define scale? Why is it different than other parts of the business? You were truly on escape velocity for scale. Like, how do you define scale and how does an organization prepare for that? Jay Abraham: 17:05 I think I define scale as both velocity -- which is how rapidly you're growing -- and the size -- how big you are. My experience has generally been, the more you can think about standard processes and procedures -- and this goes back to my Navy nuclear submarine background, which is we would practice every single drill, possible, everything that could go wrong, so we would be prepared for it if it actually did -- that's what really helps a company out. When you're young and you're five people, it's hard to think about those things; then, you're 20 people and you're still going rapidly. Again, it's very hard to think about it. If you think about it then, and start making some standard processes, even if it's white boarded out -- take a little picture, say "This is our process." It will start progressively getting more difficult and then you'll get to a point where you're racing along and you're a race car, and now you're having to rebuild the chassis and the wheels while you're going 200 miles per hour. The earlier you start the processes of setting up standard processes, the easier it is. Obviously, if you wait until you get a Chief Operating Officer to do that, then it's usually too late to help out immediately. So it becomes harder. Brian Walsh: 18:43 I would imagine there's a huge cultural shift that happens. When we're a small startup, it's truly just art. There is no size to it. Right? It's just art, we're making it up as we go. We're making up these rules, we're just disrupting the market -- in your case it was B2B commerce, and all of a sudden we're going to put process in, we're going to define things. Did you find that there was this real pull with the organization for people who had been there a long time of, "Oh my gosh, we've never done it this way. Why do we have to define it all?" Jay Abraham: 19:10 I think that there are always people who object to that, but I think in general, my experience has been, putting the processes in actually made people feel like they knew where to go. Especially the new people. Some of the people that had been there and had all that intellectual knowledge in their head about how the organization works and could do it; they were very few and far between. There were a lot of people who were just, "I don't know where I can get that information. What can I discount the price to? How do I solve this issue with Salesforce?" Part of the steps of the process is, you have in that document of knowledge, so that anybody can go access it, as opposed to you always having to go to the one individual and they talk to you and that individual is doing a thousand things and they don't have time to talk to you. Brian Walsh: 19:10 Right. Jay Abraham: 20:11 And so I think, you do have people who say, "I don't want to be that rigid Fortune 100 company that takes forever to get things done." And I don't think putting processes from scale necessarily will lead to that. You still need to be flexible, you still need to be entrepreneurial, you still need to be able to make decisions in a collaborative environment without having to have 20 committees. You can still provide the processes and the tools that allow people to say, "Oh I know exactly where to get that information." Or "I know exactly who I need to go to get something approved by." Brian Walsh: 20:51 Eric Ries who wrote The Link Startup who has such great writings was recently on the First Round blog with an article around gatekeepers. And I think he's addressing some of those things of, those areas where they become gatekeepers, whether it be legal counsel or finance or admin, to actually bring them to the table to collaborate, rather than leaving them to the last minute. Because that just creates roadblocks and delays, so actually bringing them into the process so they become part of that decision-making process and everybody gets informed through it. Jay Abraham: 21:25 No, I think that's very important. A perfect example I can give with our teams is the sales team would not necessarily bring my engineering team into a sales pitch until well after they promised certain capabilities and certain things we were going to deliver. And then the engineering team would come in and say, "Well, how did you promise that? That's a very risky environment, right?" And I don't think they understood that they could do that. But on the converse, I kept telling my engineering team, "What have you provided the sales team to come say, 'Here's the sweet spot.'" This is kind of the like the boundary areas of what we should be playing in and to go outside, I call them green sweet spot, but yellow, you should be cautionary about doing anything like this. At the time, if you go into the yellow framework, that's a good time to call product management engineer and say, "Let me hear your thoughts on whether this works or not works." And then there's the red area, where things we shouldn't be playing in because that's not our core competencies. Brian Walsh: 22:34 I can't believe that sales would ever sell something that doesn't exist yet. Jay Abraham: 22:43 Right, when you're doing enterprise sales, you can always promise to do that. Selling a product? People expect it to work. Brian Walsh: 22:47 That's right. So if you're a CEO or you're on a board, when do you know your organization needs a COO? At what point? I mean, is it ARR? Is it number of employees? At what point is it like, "Holy crap, we need to have a COO in here to start helping." Jay Abraham: 23:02 Well, it depends on how you define your COO. So if the COO is just a responsibility that one of the other members of the executive team has, then I think you should start it pretty early in that mix. That responsibility is to set you up for growth, right? Brian Walsh: 23:19 Yep. Jay Abraham: 23:19 Okay, the President, Chief Customer Officer, the Head of Sales, it could be engineering. But somebody's got that role to go over and above their normal role and to set up processes and standards, right? Brian Walsh: 23:33 Yep. Jay Abraham: 23:35 You can do that. The other area is, you know you'll have a COO if you do. You haven't set up those standards and processes, and things start breaking or your growth stumbles or your people start leaving or your technology is always behind schedule, right? Some issue is going to come up and say to you, "Hey, I need somebody to get a handle on this." And that's when you know you've got a COO. But I'd say that's probably the wrong time to bring in the COO because it's going to be expensive and it's going to be hard and it's going to be culturally difficult. But the easier time is to bring them in well before you need it. Brian Walsh: 24:11 Yeah, I mean it's always easier to see it after the fact. Jay Abraham: 24:17 Yes. Brian Walsh: 24:17 It's hard to have that foresight to say, "Hey, we're about to run into these problems in there." Did you participate in fundraising? I mean, were you just running the business while Chris was out fundraising? How did you help the organization during that process? Because you raised some incredibly large rounds there as CloudCraze grew. Jay Abraham: 24:38 I wasn't very involved in the fundraising aspect. Chris, Paul our CFO, and Matt our CMO, were the primary investors, they were the ones who were primarily focused on the fundraising. What I was able to help with was, the very fact that we set up quarterly business reviews and gave key metrics to every department we were supposed to track -- that allowed them to provide that information to investors in a much easier format without actually having to scramble about. Then this latest round, when Salesforce acquired us and went through the due diligence process, we had prepared most of the material they were looking for. So it's easy for me to just pull it around and go and say, "Okay, we already have this." As opposed to going and creating this. Brian Walsh: 25:26 Got it. That must have made that process go much, much faster than for everybody involved. Jay Abraham: 25:32 I don't know if it made it go faster. At least easier to pull the information from our side, and we didn't have to have much disruption to our normal business. Brian Walsh: 25:45 That's good because in the end, they're acquiring a fast growing business and they want that to continue. If you're a new CEO, and you have a COO that you've just hired, what would be some guidelines that you would offer both parties? Like how do you begin working together? How do you begin that great partnership? Jay Abraham: 26:08 I think the CEO has to be honest about what's worrying him. What are the things, that if he had time, he would be doing? Brian Walsh: 26:21 Yeah. Jay Abraham: 26:23 And then what are the areas he says, "I just trust the people to do this and never checked on this." But it's probably worth somebody checking on it. I think we even consider trust. Trust but verify. And I think that goes for a lot of things. I see executives getting into trouble when they trust but don't verify. Or they may say something at a high level and their direct reports may tell them things are working at a very high level, but nobody asks the detailed questions I think. Something that a Chief Operational Officer has to be able to do very well is to helicopter -- go from seeing the big picture strategy to going down to the levels of detail to say, "Does it actually work the way that I think it's going to work?" Brian Walsh: 27:11 Got it. I know you definitely got down to the details. At one point, you were actually answering all the customer success e-mails, right? Jay Abraham: 27:19 I wised up when my product support team manager quit and we lost several people. I was helping out by going through and helping my team to be able to look through things and help them fix some of the issues. It was actually a good thing for me because I got to see a lot more of the problems that customers were raising about the product. Things from documentation, from implementation, installing the application, uninstalling the application. And I was able to say, "Okay, well, let's start a project to fix the documentation. Let's create an installer. Let's start collecting data that allows the customer success team give the engineer product management team to say, 'Here are the problems that the customers are raising. Here are various areas of the product it's impacting. Let's put more resources on those areas to fix those issues so we reduce the number of product calls or reduce the issues that our system integrators were having.'" Brian Walsh: 28:25 It's always amazing that you never actually get those insights until you experience it first hand. Jay Abraham: 28:30 That is very true. Previously in my career, I used to run a consent order for one of the independent foreclosure reviews. I came into this project very late in the game. By the time I went down to the real core issue, which was how they ran and did the actual reviews of these projects, I started saying, "Let me try to answer the questions that we're asking all of these mortgage underwriters to do -- myself." And seeing what questions that come up in my mind. Then you can start saying that people write processes, but they never try to run it through themselves. Until you run it through yourselves, you don't really know what gaps there are. One of the things I would tell my teams is, "After you've run it through yourself many times and you've figured out all the answers and you've actually put in the answers and filled it out, just like someone else you're asking to do would do it, then find somebody else who's brand new, who doesn't know anything, and make them go through it and every time they come and ask you a question, you know that's an area where you actually didn't put enough thought. Brian Walsh: 29:48 Right. Recently our Senior Director of Delivery, Kim, was out for spring break. One of her direct reports, Jake was out as well. And so our COO, both report up that way, basically had to fill both of those shoes. He came back every single day with "Oh my gosh, I had no idea everything they did." And it was this uncovering process of "I now know what we can fix over the next two months." Like, if we knock these things off, we become so much more efficient. Jay Abraham: 30:18 It is. It's very helpful for senior leadership to experience that. Because what you typically find is middle managers, they know what the problems are, but they're so used to it happening that way. Brian Walsh: 30:32 They don't need to solve them. Jay Abraham: 30:34 They don't need to solve them. And they also figure out that's the way it goes. They don't have the authority to fix it. And it's only when somebody in executive management goes and says, "Why are we doing it that way?" And they're like "I thought that's what you wanted." And you realize that "Well I don't need that information or I don't need it done that way." You're the only one that's going to be able to get that perspective and saying, "Operating across multiple departments or multiple silos, here's how we can think about it." Brian Walsh: 31:03 Do you think it's possible to create a culture where middle managers do feel empowered to make changes like that? To look inside? Or is that a skill set you develop over time? Jay Abraham: 31:13 I think you can empower middle managers to raise questions and to challenge, but it's also a skill set. But it's also time and perspective. When you are a middle manager, you're working in a functional area, so it could be sales, right? Brian Walsh: 31:34 Yep. Jay Abraham: 31:35 And you're the account executive doing things. You go and say, "I'll need this information. I need this." You may be able to say, "I got problems getting that information." You don't know why you don't have that information or why you might have limits on things. You may be saying "This is what I've gotta do," but you don't have the perspective of what the sales team is doing. And so part of it is, you need to be higher up in the organization and have a perspective over multiple areas. Brian Walsh: 32:04 Right. Jay Abraham: 32:04 That breadth of experience is what helps you say, "I can solve things that middle managers can't because they don't see the whole picture." Brian Walsh: 32:11 It's that tee in leadership or tee in management where the more senior you become the wider breadth that tee has to become. So you see more and more groups and how they interact. Jay Abraham: 32:24 Right. And that's very important. That's why I think when people get afraid about going into big companies, because that tee is so high level, they start worrying about how long it takes to fix things. And because they go up in silos, until very senior level, you don't get that perspective to be able to say, "You really, actually, don't need to have those silos." And that's a cultural thing, because as you go from a small company to a medium size company to a really large enterprise, you have to be able to give people that authority. Not just even just the authority, but I think you want them to have the willingness to be able to challenge those things and go across silo boundaries and say, "Think about it." And talk to people in other organizations that, even if you might not have the authority to fix it, as long as you guys talk you'll be able to identify the issue. Brian Walsh: 33:24 I find especially in large organizations, working with some of our gigantic clients, that cross functional ability can be so rare. To actually think, "Hey, I'm only in the product group. I don't know what's going on in sales, or enablement, or finance." But those that do, are the rising stars. They work so quickly and assemble teams that actually get stuff done. Jay Abraham: 33:44 Yep. The very fact that many people don't do it well is really why I've had a very successful consulting career, because of that ability. People hire me just for that. Brian Walsh: 33:57 That's awesome. So any mistakes that you made over your time at CloudCraze that you're going to learn from and not make again. Something that you can share with everybody. Jay Abraham: 34:08 I think the biggest mistake I made with CloudCraze initially was, I didn't dive deep enough into the engineering team and the way they work. It took me three to five months until I figured out that the amount of resources we were putting against engineering was insufficient to do what we really needed to do. Because there were a lot of things core to the product that actually needed to be fixed, and I only heard that after my Product Support Manager quit and I had to start hearing those calls. I started saying, "Why are we focusing on creating all these new features when we have all these fundamental features that were broken that it wasn't sexy to sell?" Understanding that was a paradigm shift to say, "We need to stop creating all these new features. Fix the foundations, then we can set it up to scale and say, 'Here's the new feature we want to focus on.'" Brian Walsh: 35:16 I was always blown away by just how small your product and development teams were. Jay Abraham: 35:23 They're a great team and they were stretched immensely to do a huge job. I mean B2B e-commerce is a very complex system to be able to do, and building different capabilities into the platform -- which is what sales was doing -- those teams, my teams, were actually aggressive about saying, "Okay, sales says we need this and we're going to go do it." One of the things I had to coach them on was, "But you knew all these things were broken, why didn't you say something?" They say, "Well I did." And I said, "You gotta say it in a much louder voice or jump on the table and say, 'No, you gotta fix this.'" The security's important, scales important. We can't do this without doing that. And so getting down to culturally field it, it was also their job to decide what was important. It was a big part of what I worked with them over the last year. Brian Walsh: 36:21 Awesome. Well, I am absolutely positive that wherever you end up next will be the luckiest company on the planet to get your skill set. Now, if somebody wanted to get ahold of you, what's the way to get ahold of you? Because you're not another Jay Abraham online, are you? Jay Abraham: 36:38 No I'm not. I'm not the multi-level marketer, a lot of people recognize me as that. LinkedIn is obviously the best way to do it, but I have my own consulting firm. It's j.a@abrahamgroup.biz. So that's the easiest way to get ahold of me. Brian Walsh: 36:59 That's awesome. So abrahamgroup.biz to find you and obviously LinkedIn, you're not the one with the beard. Jay Abraham: 37:05 I'm not the one with the beard. Brian Walsh: 37:08 Fantastic. Well Jay, congratulations on the exit at CloudCraze. I know you played such a significant role to prepare them for scale and accomplish the hurdles, and I look forward to keeping up with you and see what you do next. Jay Abraham: 37:21 Thank you, Brian. Brian Walsh: 37:25 Alright, thanks everybody. Again, Appchatpodcast.com or you can find us on iTunes. Have a great day. Outro: 37:31 Thanks for listening to this episode of the AppChat. Don't miss an episode. Visit Appchatpodcast.com or subscribe on iTunes. Until next time, don't make success an accident.

Aaron Ross is the #1 best-selling author of "Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into A Sales Machine With The $100 Million Best Practices Of Salesforce.com" (called the “Sales Bible of Silicon Valley”). He cofounded PredictableRevenue.com, a software & consulting company that accelerates outbound sales, based on the Cold Calling 2.0 outbound process that added $100M+ in extra revenue at Salesforce.com. He graduated from Stanford University, lives in Los Angeles with his wife and nine children, and (usually, but not always) keeps a 25-30 hour workweek. His latest book, with Jason Lemkin, is "From Impossible To Inevitable: How Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue" details the hypergrowth playbook of companies like Zenefits ($1 million to $100 million in two years), EchoSign ($0 to $144 million in seven years and acquired by Adobe), and obviously Salesforce.com, now the fastest growing multibillion dollar software company.   In this episode you'll learn: [02:50] What's Aaron's approach to teaching cold email? [04:40] What does Predictable Revenue consultancy do? [08:30] How to tackle the pain of niching down? [10:40] What are the advantages of starting a consultancy? [12:55] How did Aaron end up in sales consulting? [15:45] How did Aaron learn to optimize outbound projects? [17:10] 2 reasons why companies struggle [20:10] What did Aaron write "From Impossible To Inevitable"? [21:20] What were Aaron's first hires when he was scaling his own agency? [24:14] How does Aaron manage his CEO?   Links mentioned: From Impossible To Inevitable: How Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue Predictable Revenue   Brought to you by Experiment 27. Find us on Youtube here.   If you've enjoyed the episode, please subscribe to the Digital Agency Marketing Podcast on iTunes and leave us a review for the show.   Get access to our FREE Sales Courses.

Today's interview features EchoSign Co-founder and CEO Jason Lemkin, who built EchoSign's annual revenues to over $100 million and sold it to Adobe. He's now a Managing Director at Storm Ventures, a top business contributor on Quora, and writes a wildly popular software-as-a-service blog, SaaStr, reaching 500,000 visitors every month.  Even while a corporate VP of Adobe, Jason knew he wanted to share his journey to success with others. He launched SaaStr and grew it to 500,000 visitors each month with a mission to teach others how to do it better than himself. Click here for show notes and transcript. Leave some feedback: Who should I interview next? Please let me know on Twitter or in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, leave a short review here. Subscribe to Growth Everywhere on iTunes. Get the non-iTunes RSS feed Connect with Eric Siu: Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @ericosiu

Jason M. Lemkin is a hyper-founder centric VC and out of a $90,000,000 fund, he leads $250k-$5m initial investments in great SaaS or enterprise startups. Jason has co-founded two successful start-ups selling to the enterprise. Most recently, he served as CEO and co-founder of EchoSign, the web's most popular electronic signature service, from inception through its acquisition by Adobe Systems Inc.   He then served as Vice President of Web Services at Adobe, where he oversaw the growth of EchoSign and Adobe Document Services to $50,000,000 in ARR in 2012 and $100,000,000+ ARR in 2013. Prior to EchoSign and Adobe, he co-founded one of the only successes in nanotechnology, NanoGram Devices, which was acquired for $50m just 13 months after founding. The technology, built into implantable power cells, has gone on to help extend the lives of thousands.   In this episode you'll learn: [01:12] Two ways Jason used to recruit his co-founders in the past [03:01] Why did Jason settle for the SaaS vertical? [04:45] Why having the pressure off as an entrepreneur is not all good? [05:29] What's the difference between pressure in big companies and startups? [06:51] What has Jason been up to in the last 5 years? [07:27] Reason why Jason calls one of his companies 'half a company' even when it's doing 12 million dollars in revenue [07:59] What drives Jason when he could've easily retired 5 years ago? (2 reasons) [09:53] What did Jason learn from having millions of views on his content every month? [11:18] Why is Jason doing an in-person event? [14:02] Things that didn't work at SaaStr [15:48] What did Jason learn from building a team for SaaStr? [16:58] Why no one was allowed to quit their job in a startup Jason ran before SaaStr? [19:12] What roles were the key hires for the annual event? [21:45] How to be rigorous about budgets when running a low margin business? [22:32] Why did Jason start a CoSelling space? [26:00] Would Jason ever expand his investing criteria outside SaaS? [27:05] Is entrepreneurship fun or not?   Links mentioned: SaaStr.com Jason on Twitter Jason on Quora   Brought to you by Experiment 27. Find us on Youtube here.   If you've enjoyed the episode, please subscribe to the Digital Agency Marketing Podcast on iTunes and leave us a review for the show.   Get access to our FREE Sales Courses.

Gadi Shamia. He’s the chief operating officer at Talkdesk, the world’s leading call center software platform. It’s backed by DFJ, Storm Ventures and Salesforce Venture. Talkdesk has grown 8x over the past 2 years and has over 250 employees along with their thousand customers including Box, Shopify, Dropbox and Weather.com. Prior to Talkdesk, Gadi founded a company that was acquired by SAP and now generates $5M in global business. He was also a senior VP at SAP and a general manager at ReachLocal. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – The Innovator’s Dilemma What CEO do you follow? – Marc Benioff Favorite online tool? — Gmail and Slack How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6.5 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Gadi wished he knew that he would be fine so that he could stress less about it   Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:44 – Nathan introduces Gadi to the show 01:26 – EchoSign was acquired by Adobe 01:31 – TopManage was acquired by SAP 01:53 – Talkdesk is a cloud-based call center solution 01:58 – It is fully-integrated 02:26 – Talkdesk charges users per license fee 02:44 – Talkdesk is a SaaS company 02:54 – Average pay per customer varies 03:01 – A company with 50 users would pay $5K-7K a month 03:28 – Per seat cost is around $65-125 depending on the subscription 04:02 – Gadi joined Talkdesk 3 years ago 04:16 – The call center space is an interesting market 04:22 – It is still dominated by all players such as Avaya, Cisco and Genesis 04:35 – Talkdesk already has a proven product 04:41 – Talkdesk has a couple of hundred customers who like the product and has been using Talkdesk for years 04:53 – Tiago, Talkdesk’s CEO, was one of the reason Gadi joined Talkdesk 05:14 – Tiago is the co-founder and his co-founder left Talkdesk after 4 and a half years 05:50 – Gadi believes that co-founders leave because they might not feel as excited as they were in the early stages 06:01 – Co-founders staying is also devastating for the company 06:10 – When a co-founder can say that he’s leaving and he has done his job, it’s a healthy company 06:44 – Talkdesk has broken the million ARR 06:57 – Talkdesk had 50 people when Gadi came in 07:17 – Tiago was the only salesperson at Talkdesk when he started it and he was able to get remarkable brands to use Talkdesk 07:43 – Gadi met Tiago through Gadi’s friend from Storm Ventures 08:06 – Gadi and Tiago met in 2014 several times 08:38 – Talkdesk currently has 1200 customers 08:48 – There are around 50K seats 09:06 – Average MRR 09:43 – Alot of Talkdesk customers are e-commerce customers and they are seasonal 10:32 – Talkdesk is at a net negative churn 11:00 – Talkdesk talks to their customers about their seasonal needs and adjusts the annual licensing fee 11:42 – Talkdesk respects Workday, Salesforce and works with ServiceNow 12:48 – The best companies will get 110-120 in aiming net revenue expansion 13:03 – Most companies that have worked with Talkdesk benefit from it and grow 13:10 – DoorDash grew from 40 seats to 800 13:38 – Talkdesk currently has a team of 250 people 14:40 – Talkdesk’s growth is mostly from new sign-ups 14:56 – Talkdesk has raised a total of $24.5M 15:01 – The last round was in 2015 15:15 – Talkdesk is neither raising rounds or talking to Salesforce 15:34 – Talkdesk focuses on building a real business 16:24 – Talkdesk is still burning cash 16:53 – Most of Talkdesk’s customers pay annually upfront 18:13 – The Famous Five   3 Key Points: When a cofounder leaves, it means he’s done his job and the company is healthy Be in a company where you believe in the product and know that you can accelerate its growth. Building a real business is about the service you provide your customers in helping them achieve growth.   Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences Hotjar – Gives Nathan a recording of what is happening on a website or where people are clicking and scrolling on the website Organifi – The juice was Nathan’s life saver during his trip in Southeast Asia Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Freshbooks – Nathan doesn’t waste time so he uses Freshbooks to send out invoices and collect his money. Get your free month NOW Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

David Rodnitzky is founder and CEO of 3Q Digital, a leading digital agency that was acquired by Harte Hanks in 2015. Prior to 3Q Digital, he held senior marketing roles at several Internet companies, including Rentals.com (2000-2001), FindLaw (2001-2004), Adteractive (2004-2006), and Mercantila (2007-2008). David currently serves on advisory boards for several companies, including Marin Software, MediaBoost, Mediacause, and a stealth travel start-up. Loretta Jones is the vice president of marketing at Delighted, the fastest way to gather customer feedback and put it into the hands of those who can act on it.  Prior to Delighted, Loretta's marketing programs grew Insightly, a CRM for small business, from 100,000 users to over 1.2 million users. Prior to Insightly, Loretta worked at Adobe Sign (formerly Adobe EchoSign) and grew the EchoSign brand to $25 million. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: Should all companies invest in SEM? How does SEM differ for SaaS SMB businesses vs enterprise SaaS businesses? How much of a role should iterating and testing play with regards to SEM? What are the strategies that can be used to ensure for maximal dollar efficiency? David has said before that ‘no demand channel is an island’. How does SEM work together with the other channels (SEO, display ads etc) to form a cohesive marketing strategy? As LTV takes a considerable time to figure out and can be inaccurate, should startups focus on their CPA (cost per acquisition) more than any other metric? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr David Rodnitzsky

Jason Lemkin, prior to becoming a VC, was the CEO of EchoSign, a digital signature SaaS vendor that Adobe acquired some years back. This was an excellent discussion and offers very concrete pointers to where you might look for white spaces in the cloud computing space to do new ventures.

Jason Lemkin is the Founder and VC @ SaaStr, or more accurately put Jason is a 2x founder, 1x VC, and constant SaaS enthusiast. He led or sourced the first VC investments in many leading enterprise/SaaS start-ups, Greenhouse.io, Pipedrive, Algolia, Talkdesk, RainforestQA, Automile, and more. He is also an advisor or smaller investor in Showpad, FrontApp, Influitive, BetterWorks, and other SaaS leaders. Jason has co-founded two successful start-ups selling to the enterprise.  Before SaaStr and VC investing, he was CEO and co-founder of EchoSign, the web’s most popular electronic signature service, from inception through its acquisition by Adobe Systems Inc. He then served as Vice President, Web Services at Adobe, where he oversaw the growth of EchoSign and Adobe Document Services to $50,000,000 in ARR in 2012 and $100,000,000+ ARR in 2013. Prior to EchoSign and Adobe, he co-founded one of the only successes in nanotechnology, NanoGram Devices, which was acquired for $50m just 13 months after founding. Other than SaaS he is like me, no known hobbies. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Jason make his way into the world of SaaS and come to be Founder and VC @ SaaStr? ACV: What levels of ACV and characteristics suggest potential for a unicorn? How does Jason look to help founders attain higher ACVs? Why is stay focused horrible advice with regards to increasing your ACV with differing customer demands? Does Jason believe that founders always undersell? What advice would Jason give to founders that are nervous to ask for more? What customer response would excite Jason and what would make him concerned? Jason has previously said that ‘founders have to be 110% committed to sales’. What does this mean? How does this look when assessing a founder? Should founders be happy to pay their sales hires more than them? How quickly should the payback period be on these reps? Jason has also previously said that some founders financials are ‘simply ridiculous’. What makes him say this? What financials are fundamental to have very accurately pin pointed? Why is 100% gross margin impossible? 60 Second SaaStr Why does Jason like it when startups have clients that are not in tech? What does Jason know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning? What should SaaS founders look for in their investors? Why does Jason only invest out of the SaaStr community? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr

Jason Lemkin is the Founder and VC @ SaaStr, or more accurately put Jason is a 2x founder, 1x VC, and constant SaaS enthusiast. He led or sourced the first VC investments in many leading enterprise/SaaS start-ups, Greenhouse.io, Pipedrive, Algolia, Talkdesk, RainforestQA, Automile, and more. He is also an advisor or smaller investor in Showpad, FrontApp, Influitive, BetterWorks, and other SaaS leaders. Jason has co-founded two successful start-ups selling to the enterprise.  Before SaaStr and VC investing, he was CEO and co-founder of EchoSign, the web’s most popular electronic signature service, from inception through its acquisition by Adobe Systems Inc. He then served as Vice President, Web Services at Adobe, where he oversaw the growth of EchoSign and Adobe Document Services to $50,000,000 in ARR in 2012 and $100,000,000+ ARR in 2013. Prior to EchoSign and Adobe, he co-founded one of the only successes in nanotechnology, NanoGram Devices, which was acquired for $50m just 13 months after founding. Other than SaaS he is like me, no known hobbies. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: How did Jason make his way into the world of SaaS and come to be Founder and VC @ SaaStr? ACV: What levels of ACV and characteristics suggest potential for a unicorn? How does Jason look to help founders attain higher ACVs? Why is stay focused horrible advice with regards to increasing your ACV with differing customer demands? Does Jason believe that founders always undersell? What advice would Jason give to founders that are nervous to ask for more? What customer response would excite Jason and what would make him concerned? Jason has previously said that ‘founders have to be 110% committed to sales’. What does this mean? How does this look when assessing a founder? Should founders be happy to pay their sales hires more than them? How quickly should the payback period be on these reps? Jason has also previously said that some founders financials are ‘simply ridiculous’. What makes him say this? What financials are fundamental to have very accurately pin pointed? Why is 100% gross margin impossible? 60 Second SaaStr Why does Jason like it when startups have clients that are not in tech? What does Jason know now that he wishes he had known at the beginning? What should SaaS founders look for in their investors? Why does Jason only invest out of the SaaStr community? If you would like to find out more about the show and the guests presented, you can follow us on Twitter here: Jason Lemkin Harry Stebbings SaaStr

Jason Lemkin is the Founder of SaaStr and was the Co-Founder/ and CEO of EchoSign. As a VC, Jason has been behind many investments in SaaS startups like Talkdesk, Algolia, Greenhouse, Automile, Betterworks, RainforestQA, and others which are collectively worth over one billion dollars. We talk to Jason about the evolution of SaaStr, company stages and successful SaaS growth strategies. For transcripts and more on the Subscription Economy, head over to www.zuora.com/podcast

Gretchen DeKnikker. has been launching and growing enterprise SaaS startups and platforms since way back in the last century. She also and infrequently write a blog called Enterprise is Sexy ('cause it totally is). She previously cofounded SocialPandas, launched LivePerson's (LPSN) Apps Marketplace platform and was an early employee at Genius.com (acd by CallidusCloud), EchoSign (acq by Adobe), and Revere Data (acq by FactSet). Basically, Gretchen rocks and has a lot of experience in marketing SaaS companies. I think you'll love this episode. If you'd like to be interviewed on SaaS Insider - feel free to email me.

In this episode Fred hosts Saastr and EchoSign founder Jason Lemkin. Fred and Jason talk about Jason's favorite tool, what it is that makes a great tool great, and the importance of authenticity. The post Ep. #1, Feat. Saastr’s Jason Lemkin appeared first on Heavybit.

In this episode Fred hosts Saastr and EchoSign founder Jason Lemkin. Fred and Jason talk about Jason's favorite tool, what it is that makes a great tool great, and the importance of authenticity.

Jason Lemkin is Managing Director at Storm Ventures focussing on early stage SaaS and enterprise startups. Jason is an acknowledged thought leader in SaaS through his creation of the SaaStr community, connecting thousands of SaaS entrepreneurs and generating upwards of 1,000,000 views a month around core SaaS topics, with a particular focus on accelerating revenue and early-stage SaaS sales and marketing. Prior to Storm, Jason served as CEO and co-founder of Storm Ventures-backed EchoSign, the web’s most popular electronic signature service. Jason led EchoSign from inception through its acquisition by Adobe Systems Inc. in 2011. He then served as Vice President, Web Services at Adobe, where he oversaw the growth of EchoSign and Adobe Document Services to $100,000,000+ ARR in 2013. In Today's Episode You Will Learn: How Jason made his way into the SaaS and VC industry? What actions did Jason do to get his blog to 1m+ page views per month? What advice would Jason give to founders thinking of selling to large companies? What type of entrepreneur does Jason like to invest in? How does Jason see SaaS valuations, with recent enormous rounds from Zenefits? What areas of the SaaS industries are neglected or undervalued?   Is the 40% growth rule broadly correct and can this be applied to early stage tech companies? What is Jason's pre-investment meeting approach like? What makes a founder insane in a good way, rather than a bad way? How are SaaS companies innovating to acquire new customers? Quick Fire Round: Apple: Hit or Miss Most exciting SaaS companies and sectors Jason's favourite book and why? Items Mentioned in Today's Episode: SaaStr: Jason's Blog Jason's Favourite Book: The Lion Who Shot Back Mark Suster: Both Sides Follow: @saleshacker (amazing content from VPs of Sales @ Top Tech Startups) Emergence Capital: Joe Floyd David Saks: Yammer Slack: Stewart Butterfield, Zenefits: Parker Conrad  

This is the first "official" WordPress interview for the podcast (in terms of interviewing someone who uses WordPress for their business) and it was a TON of fun! I connected with Carrie sometime last year online (I'm thinking maybe it was twitter?) and knew instantly she was someone I wanted to get to know better. Not only was she sharing valuable Genesis tips but you could also tell that she was a down to earth person (I gauge this by how someone writes, what they share and how they share... I'm wise like that! ;-) ). Then we exchanged a few emails discussing possible ways we could collaborate (which I'll share more of at the end of this post) and once I had the podcast up and running I thought she would be a perfect guest to interview. Yep... I was right. She was great. I'm not kidding when I say I was laughing out loud when listening back to our conversation for editing, it really was that fun. Carrie shares her journey of how she ended up creating her business CarrieDils.com, (the question of "how did you get here" is absolutely one of my favorite pieces of the interviews I'm doing). There's something powerful in hearing other peoples stories. The decisions they made that took them down a completely different path than the one they had intended, the lessons they've learned along the way and what that means for their business today. You'll love the story of the indoor s'mores cafe' that turned into a 9 year detour with a huge company, which also became an invaluable resource for learning about business (and why she knew she did NOT want to open the brick & mortar business that inspired this detour). She awarded me 1000 internet points. You'll just have to listen to the interview to find out what that's all about, but my vocabulary surprised even me (she still hasn't told me where I can redeem my points... maybe it's like Chuck E. Cheese and I can turn them in for a Whoopee Cushion or giant Pixie Stick?). I think one of my favorite questions for Carrie was when I asked her how she markets her business. Her answer is such a testament to everything I've been talking about these past few months (and one of those lessons that we all hear and when we finally implement just "get it"). Her big secret to marketing? She doesn't have one. She gives the best service possible, connects with her clients, creates great work and is simply herself. Aah... Music to my ears. ;-) I think a common fear among a LOT of people with online businesses is that you don't want to come across smarmy or sales pitchy (pretty sure pitchy isn't a word). There's a learning curve when it comes to putting yourself out there, sharing what you do and promoting your products and/or services. What Carrie is doing is the ideal way to step into that space. At some point you have to 'feel the fear and do it anyways' and ask for the sale or make the offer. My biggest recommendation is that you do it sooner rather than later (asking for the sale or making the offer).  Often times the longer you wait the harder it is and you don't want to set a precedent that what you're doing is just a hobby (unless in fact it is just a hobby). Collaboration Time! Off the record I asked Carrie if she would be interested in doing a live Genesis class with me that helps those of you who are past the 'beginner' stage and she said absolutely! ;-) So you can keep your eyes peeled for a "Beyond Beginners" Genesis class! And I'm sure after you listen to the podcast with her you'll be that much more interested in taking the class because not only is she wicked smart but I'm sure the class will be a lot of fun too. Make sure to check out her site and connect with her via social media. *Note* The product I mentioned (but couldn't remember the name) where you can get digital signatures on invoices (the free account gets you 5 a month) is EchoSign by Adobe. The link is in the 'Links from this episode' below. Links from this episode

Show Notes: 1. EchoSign App for iOS: Sign documents online, including contractual agreements, with this Adobe app for the iPhone and iPad. And, not to worry, authentication and fraud protection are built into the app. Twitter: @EchoSign 2. MITx: MIT will no longer be exclusive to those who love the idea of a 'rager' that involves chalk boards and unsolved formulas...a la "Good Will Hunting". Soon, everyone will be able to take online courses at this prestigious university. For a certificate. For free! Um, where do we sign up? Twitter: @MITNewsTips, @MITNews 3. Republic Wireless: $19 for an unlimited data/voice and text plan with the help of the internet as opposed to a cell network. Exactly what this company will offer. It's still in beta, but we have high hopes! Twitter: @republicwrless 4. Cloud Copy: Feel like copying something from your iMac and pasting it into your iPad or iPhone? Sounds practical, right? Much more so than, say, copying the content on the clipboard, pasting it into an email, recopying the content, and re-pasting it. This brilliance courtesy of Ductus IT Solutions. 5. "Scoop" by Quirky: This company just does not disappoint. One of their latest products is a measuring spoon that turns into a knife. So, scoop up that cream cheese and spread it on your bagel with glee. Twitter: @quirky Happy New Year! G + Kyra show notes - http://thebit.tv/episode42 twitter - http://www.twitter.com/thebittv website - http://www.thebit.tv facebook - http://link.thebit.tv/thebittv youtube channel - http://link.thebit.tv/ip4sUL