SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1072 Boston CEO: "I'd think hard about selling for 2-3x ARR"
01 Jul 2018
Chapter 1: What is LeadGnome and how does it operate?
This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn. Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million. I had no money when I started the company.
It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs. We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode.
Chapter 2: How did Matt Benati transition from product management to marketing?
Hello, everyone. My guest today is Matt Bonatti. He's the CEO and co-founder of Lead Gnome, the market-leading reply email mining web service that generates account-specific contacts, enhances existing leads, and identifies sales trigger events.
Matt believes sales and marketing alignment, transparency, and communication optimize revenue generation, and he champions his philosophy in his teams and writings. Matt, are you ready to take us to the top?
I'm ready. Let's do it.
All right. Tell us more about Lead Gnome. People know email marketing.
Chapter 3: What unique challenges does LeadGnome solve for sales teams?
I think you have a unique twist on it. What do you do and how do you make money?
Yeah. So, I don't know, a couple of companies ago, a long time ago now, you know, I jumped into marketing coming out of product management and product marketing. And, of course, lead generation and supporting those sales efforts is what it's all about.
And what I recognize is that inside of autoresponders, right, out of office, left the company, all those kinds of things that come back at us after we send an email, there's a ton of great information in there. And so I would send my team in after it. But that anybody who's ever done it knows that's a real pain.
You know, sales and marketing teams know the data is there, but it's really hard to get at. I look for a solution.
Chapter 4: How does LeadGnome generate revenue and what are its pricing models?
There wasn't one. So I built it.
And this is specifically I mean, give me give me tell me a story right now. But customer name, the customer that's using you and how they're using you.
Yeah. So Steve Richard, most people probably from your, you know, from your show will know the name. He's a inside sales, sales guru. He is a co-founder and CRO of ExecVision. Yep. And their team uses us.
Chapter 5: What growth metrics has LeadGnome achieved since its launch?
And the reason that they're leveraging us is that their sales teams are leveraging the new cadence types tools, right? The yes wares and sales lofts, outreach, those kinds of things.
Aaron Ross made a very impassioned plea for salespeople to not just call but to leverage other tools of the trade email specifically social media and so these cadence systems allow salespeople to do that and part of that email of course, is reply email. And they leverage us to get in deeper and broader within those organizations.
There's sort of this magic number floating out there of seven to close enterprise deals. So gaining and mapping out those new contacts within organizations is critical. The other thing that Steve talks about a lot, and he's coined this phrase, old client, new company, OCNC. And Lead Gnome plays very well into that. So Craig Elias and Steve Richard and I have worked on this concept.
Chapter 6: What strategies is LeadGnome using to expand its customer base?
Craig uses his method of shift selling where he looks for sales trigger events. And LeadGnome specifically looks for some of these very, very early, much earlier than the sales intelligence databases out there.
But it's all on replies.
It's all auto replies. So when you get a left the company, you know somebody's moved on, you need to reach out to that person immediately and start to engage them.
So I can say something like, uh, when I send out my next email blast to my, to my list of, you know, leads, uh, and I always will get, you know, 20 or 30 that are either an out of office and another, you know, call it 20 or 30 that are, Hey, I moved on. This isn't my email anymore.
I can basically, before I even send an email, say, if I get an out of office email reply with this kind of thing, name tag here, right. Got it. Interesting.
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Chapter 7: How does Matt Benati's past experience influence his current business decisions?
So it's almost like, it's almost like reactive based email marketing versus like the initial outreach.
That's right. So so we we provide all this intelligence, including things like new titles. Right. Maybe somebody's moved in a role. One of our best use cases for post sales. Right. The account teams is renewals. So if you know your primary contact has changed titles, maybe they were your end user. Now they're your buyer.
Chapter 8: What advice does Matt have for aspiring entrepreneurs?
That's interesting.
If you have a primary contact left, you've got to get that replacement person, which we provide to you. And now you engage with them to make the renewal go smoothly.
Now, Matt, is this a pure play SaaS company? Pure play SaaS. Okay. What's a customer paying on average, would you say?
So sales folks will pay on average $10 a month.
Okay, got it.
$99.
So you're very much in that. You've got to build thousands, hundreds of thousands, dozens of thousands of customers really to make the revenue scale. Or do you have a few enterprise folks that are in the higher ranges?
Yeah, so we started our primary target were marketing ops and demand generation folks. Those companies are five-figure deals for us. Those organizations, the volume there, etc. Sales, we're just about to launch. We have a lot of salespeople using us, but we're about to launch in Q1, probably in February, a sales-dedicated solution. The onboarding has all been streamlined.
There's some new features in there for salespeople. So we think it's going to be a big hit. And the price point, is killer good at $9.99.
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