B2B SaaS销售：每日联系客户习惯将MRR从$230提升至$10K

Good afternoon, micro comps. Hope you had a great lunch. All right, so today I'm going to be talking to you about engineering your sales machine. Now, when we started the conference, we kicked off with our why. Why do we wake up every day in the morning, do the hard things we do? Now, my why is not my cat. It's my family. Here's my wife and my two kids. We live in beautiful Copenhagen, Denmark. you're welcome to visit, come by.

Um, and it's through learning how to sell and building sales machines that I've been able to afford my family some financial freedom and flexibility. So therefore, this is a really personal topic for me because getting into sales, building sales machines, learning how to sell has given me the thing that's really important, which is stability for my family. Now, we're going to go through this in a little bit of an autobiographical way when I talk about how to build a sales machine.

And I'll be sharing my experience of how I've learned sales from working in sales teams at Facebook, AWS, the businesses that I've created and also my experience with failure as well. Over the last six months, I've also been a tiny seed mentor. I've spoken to a few of you in this room and a lot of this talk is actually inspired by the conversations I've had with founders over the last few months. We're going to talk a little bit about, you know, my journey, how it relates to you, of course, some checklists.

There'll be some real life examples, some data, maybe a few jokes in there. And from it, you're going to learn how to engineer a sales machine. Are you ready to talk about sales?

All right, my favorite subject. First, let's kick off with this cover. Does anyone remember this 2006 Business Week? All right, so the com era had o was over. There was a big lull in the tech industry in the early 2000s. And then around 2006, this came out. It was all about Kevin Rose, the founder of Dig, who created a a website where you could share links, a bit like Reddit. Reddit was their main competitor, but Reddit ended up being a lot more successful than Dig.

I saw this article and I was like, I need to quit my boring consulting job in the city of London and I need to start a startup. So, this is where I started my journey. I created a an online news site, citizen journalism website called Scribbleheet and was written about here in TechCrunch and it allowed people to write blogs and articles a bit like Medium exists today and I thought I'm going to go out there and create this huge success.

Less than a year later, we wrote our own obituary here in TechCrunch after the failure of the business. And so after this failure, I was thinking to myself, okay, it wasn't clear to me what to do. I need to figure out what should I not do if I want to, you know, build a sales machine and have success. So my first lesson was don't create a business with an adupported business model because this was an adupported business model.

But sometimes it takes a while for people to actually learn from their mistakes. So I actually created a second business with ads supported business model which was a job board. Has anyone created a job board before? Jobboard. It's like a common one that everyone wants to come up with. Anyway, this one failed pretty quickly, too. But I also learned a second lesson here when not building a sales machine, which is don't go into declining markets.

This is actually a declining market because we were doing a job board for political and nonprofit agencies. And the market was not so good and it was declining. So, that business didn't work out either. But then someone gave me this interesting idea actually that if I wanted to create something that would work, I should call into the market and try and extract some ideas from the market. So I first started calling property managers and asked them, okay, what's your problem?

How can I help? Can software help your problems? They said, can you come up with some software that helps people pay their rent on time? I said, not sure I can do that. So then I went on to a new market, started contacting roofers, people fix roofs, and I said, what's your problem? How can I help? And um most of the time they were actually on people's roofs so they actually didn't want to have a phone conversation. So I was unable to come up with software for roofers.

But then I finally came on to financial advisers and they said yeah we got a problem after the 2008 financial crisis. We kind of needed to have a better understanding of our clients risk profile and we should create some software around that. So I created a company called Pocket Risk. Around this time actually, this is when I got into the microcom community and started to learn from Rob and Mike Taber and others on how to build a software company.

One year into the business, I'd quit my job and it wasn't doing so well. I had about four customers, $230 a month in recurring revenue. I' done about 46 sales demos and I'd spent about $39,000 on my living and business expenses. So, it was not this was not a side project. It's like a full-time thing I was working on. So this was not going so well. But then I started to learn from that mistake and say what was the issue that I was having with pocket risk.

The issue is that actually I wasn't really speaking to customers very often. As you as you saw in the previous slide, I spoke to about 46 customers in a year. So it's like you know less than one a week and I had to change that. So my epiphany was like why don't I try and speak to a customer every day and maybe that could change my whole sales process. So two years later um we got to about 137 customers. Did about 10,000 MR.

I did about 384 sales demos and of course we became break even sustainable. It started to work. It was like kind of working. I was quite pleased with myself as you can imagine. Uh and the only difference was that I just tried to speak to a customer every day. Apart from that I did the same thing every day. I did sales demos. I got leads in. I spoke to the customers. Tried to solve their problems and I closed them. And if anyone wants to talk about how to do webinar demos and the whole sales process around that, I'm happy to talk offline.

I just repeated what worked and then about 5 years later, the business was acquired. Here's me signing the uh asset purchase agreement here with my daughter. I thought I'd try and get into entrepreneurship at a young age here on holiday. It came through and uh yeah, we signed the paperwork. You can't see the acquisition amount in that. So, but we're looking too close there. Um, and so I learned another important lesson in building a sales machine, which is that you shouldn't give up too soon.

Um, this is actually one of the first businesses ideas I actually stuck with for more than 18 months. And it was that ability to stick with it. The fact that I didn't give up after a year that made it more of a success. So now I had a win under my belt and I was thinking, what am I going to start next? Now I wanted to do a new a new business because I just love creating businesses. It's a lot of fun for me. It was 2017 now and I was thinking hm what is a good hot market to go into crypto.

So I said let's create a business around crypto. So I end up creating a digital marketing agency for Bitcoin and blockchain events and I'd help people essentially just sell tickets. This business was in a hot market so it did well pretty quickly. We had about 44 customers in the first year. Did about a million dollars in sales. Uh and it was very profitable as well. About 8,000 profits. Um I ended up selling my share in the business to some partners.

But something interesting happened which is that of course Bitcoin crashed and uh the people I sold the business to while my partners were like, "Oh, we're not so happy about this thing, John, because we've gone down in customers. Revenue is down to 240. It's not really working so well." And then