SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Billion Dollar SaaS Founders Rely on This Secret Sales Strategy
05 Nov 2021
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Oh, I don't share revenue, man, to be completely honest with you. You just did, right? So you're above $9 million in revenue because you told team size and 70K is minimum. Yeah.
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Hey folks, my guest today is Garrett Mayer-Goot. He's building a tool and a company called directconsulting.com. It's the customer generation agency for SaaS.
Chapter 2: What is the Customer Generation Agency for SaaS?
He's running it as CEO. It's an award-winning performance marketing agency for software companies headquartered out in Irvine, California. Launched in 2014, the company has expanded to a team of 2095 people across three global offices, LA, New York City, and London. Garrett, you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, man. Let's have some fun. Yeah. Yeah. This is interesting.
So, so what got you into this? Were you sort of a, you know, a top sales rep at one of these SaaS companies and then left or how, what got you into SaaS?
No, man, I never did anything with SaaS actually. Um, I was selling $5 social media calendars on Fiverr. Um, Yeah, honestly. So I was selling $500 social media calendars. And then I got my first client was like a shawarma shop. And I helped them out. I was like, I didn't know anything about search or digital yet. I was mostly just doing like Yelp and Facebook pages.
And then from there, essentially, I just tried to do my best. I came back to get paid on the 30th day. He said, come back tomorrow. And the whole place was boarded up. So that was our very first client. And then I got a hookah shop, did their SEO. He asked me, I did a website. He's like, hey, can you do SEO? I was like, I'd never done it before. I'll figure it out.
I ranked him number one for everything in a couple months. And then from there, I just kind of kept plugging, brought my best friend along. What year was that? That was probably 2014. 2014.
And guys, I don't want to bury the lead. I don't want you to stop the episode now. The reason I brought Garrett on is because he's now working with some of the brand name SaaS companies, whether it's Sendoso or post IPO companies like Blackline, even folks like Bill.com. Obviously, you guys heard Alex Bean come on from Divi right before Bill.com bought those guys, Sumo Logic.
We're going to dive into all of that today. So Garrett, fast forward to today. How are you helping somebody like Zach Lee or Sendoso or ZoomInfo?
Yeah, so there's a big problem we're trying to solve in the market that every marketing leader is getting their butt kicked by, which is most SaaS organizations exist today because they solve a specific problem in a specific niche. And search, which is the default, I have 100 grand, I'm going to spend it, let's go to Google Ads, is somehow this default mentality.
But the problem with Google Ads is it has intent, but not firmographics. and so what happens is it's very difficult to scale while controlling your lifecycle stages down funnel and so what happens is people try to go to linkedin but then the problem with linkedin is it has firmographics but it doesn't have intent and so we developed our own methodology here called customer generation
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Chapter 3: How did Garrett Mayer-Goot get started in the SaaS industry?
So like all the kind of the top marketing softwares you think about, they're either in our pipeline or they're clients of ours. Amongst other industries, right? A lot of cybersecurity, a lot, frankly, everywhere. I think we have about 125 accounts and they all are, you know, over 100 employees, 25 plus million in fundings.
Okay, so if someone's listening right now with under 100 employees, you're probably not going to be the right fit. They need $100 million in funding and more than 100 employees. $25 million in funding.
So we do help series A type companies, but they're usually, let's say, the it companies, if you know what I'm talking about. They usually have a little bit more funding. They have a little bit more maturity in their marketing organization. But the results wise, I can just use myself as a case study. I think it's more appropriate because I actually do this for myself.
I think if you're going to hire an agency, you should hire someone who can do it for themselves.
Can we hear it? So I really, so I just, I disagree with you there. I really want to make this episode valuable for software founders listening. And if you give an example of how a software company works with you, they will take them. They will learn from it. Even if they don't ever pay you for anything. Can we, can we use a software company as an example?
Yeah, I'll use this like a metaphorical one. So the, the, with software, um, the way we like to look at it is kind of short-term and long-term at the same time. And so most software companies have actually a blessing in review sites. And so most of companies have to try to grind out for years to kind of become number one or number two or number three in their category.
But what review sites let you do and what most people don't realize is you can essentially pay to be number one. And so what we help do is we help to look at it holistically because the buying journey requires multiple, a lot of times in SaaS companies, a buying center. So you have to figure out how do you get someone from apathy to action. So on LinkedIn, we're running convo ads.
On review sites, we're positioning them. What's a convo ad? Yeah, so a convo ad is a new ad unit on LinkedIn. And so convo ads are really, really special. You can only send it, a LinkedIn user can only receive one ad every 30 days. Now the problem with Convo ads is they recommend the default bids to be like 30 cents.
And so a lot of people send them, but they never get received because they get outbid. We don't ever do a bid for less than $5, for example, because it's this valuable real estate and it's about 70% cheaper than sponsored content. It functions like a lead gen ad, but the key to this is gift cards.
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Chapter 4: What unique challenges do SaaS companies face in marketing?
have too small of a budget for amount of verticals and personas they're trying to target. It's like the number one plague is killing them. And so essentially what they do is let's say they have a $50,000 a month to spend. They'll then want to spread that out across healthcare, government, whatever those industries are, right? Let's say five industries.
And then we all have this lie that we've been told that we need to market to decision makers. And that's BS. So the biggest problem in SaaS is they all think the C-level and the V-level is how you market digitally. And it's actually not true. I have a saying that I believe the champion is more important than the decision maker.
So what we help our clients do is we'll go through their client list, we'll work with their finance organization, their sales organization, and we'll start to pull out which vertical has the highest close rate, which vertical has the best gross margin, which vertical has the largest LTV. Cool. Can I go through your clients and see who your point of contact is in all those engagements?
And then I'll enrich it with their title. Now, all of a sudden I've started to get who's truly they're your persona because it's never what the marketing and sales org thinks. It's always, you know, we sell the, it's like bill.com. They would always sell the CFO. The truth is your, your, your, your person's actually the accounting manager. It's not the CFO.
But everybody- That's valuable. Give a couple more examples of that. So who did Sandoso think they were selling to and who did you discover they were actually selling to?
Ooh, I don't know that one, to be honest. I mean- What about Sumo Logic? So I don't know.
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Chapter 5: How does customer generation differ from traditional lead generation?
I mean, I've got like 150 employees, man. I don't run the campaigns personally all the time.
I mean, can you give one or two other examples of SaaS companies?
Yeah.
Yeah. So let's say Zoom Info. You might think at Zoom Info that maybe the sales org buys it, but you might find that a lot of your buyers could actually be the IT org because they're the ones actually doing the data mining. So another way you can figure this out if you're an organization is you can use the LinkedIn pixel.
Mm-hmm.
And so what the LinkedIn pixel does is you can put that on the footer of your website, even if you're not running ads and you can set up your event tracking and you can start to understand which personas and titles and functions are actually buying from you. It's another way to do it.
But my favorite way is just going through your client list and then try and identify who your point of contact is.
And then it's a lot easier to buy. Okay. Tell me more about you as a founder. How do you make money doing this? What, what, what do brands pay you to run this?
Um, you know, we, we have pretty decent rates. I'd say right now we're about a percent of spend. So it's like, let's say 15% of spend. Okay. Um, but you know, average engagement, you know, it was probably 150 grand plus over what period of time? One year. We only do annual engagements.
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Chapter 6: What results did Garrett achieve for Sendoso?
Um, I'm not a huge money guy, but I'd probably say like 2016, 2017. Okay, cool. And what did that feel like as a, as a founder? Was that a big moment for you? Have you done this many times before? Oh, no, I just started this straight out of school, man. I never done really anything. I had like five jobs. I was like, take this in your head, 2016, 2017. How'd you feel?
motivated i don't know man i'm not like i'm not nearly where i want to be so i'm like a pretty driven dude so i i still work you know all day every day to be honest like for eight years straight like i mean i tore my achilles twice and i'll go to work the same day after surgery i'll go and lead the exact team like i'm not one of those like people who like my whole thing is i'm here to become a better man and individual and leader um you know like if i wanted to go make a bunch of money i could probably just go to independent consulting and charge a bag of money
whoever i wanted to so to me it's not really all money related it's more like culture and leadership related so like i'm more proud that like knowing that my organization makes less than 70 000 you know we have 100 healthcare we have really really really strong um values that are fully integrated to the rest of the organization. To me, the money is just a signpost. It means you're doing well.
The problem is a lot of people in the agency world, they like to make their blog, they like to make their brand about how successful they are. But the money you make as an agency is indifferent from the results you drive for clients. And they're usually not correlated because the quickest way to make money in the agency is you just kill your people.
Essentially, you just increase your capacity, but that creates burnout. You have poor retention. How many people do you have today full-time? I think we're at like 135. Yeah. Like, but I think I've hired 150 people in the last six months.
I mean, it's pretty like, wait, sorry, I'm confused. You're at 135 full-time right now, but you hired 150 in the past 12 months. Well, cause you have like churn. You don't get to keep everybody. Unfortunately. I wish we could. Oh, interesting. That's a lot of churn though.
Uh, how many 150 minus 15? I don't know.
You said four, you have 450 right now.
No, I only have 135 and I've hired like 150 in the last six months.
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Chapter 7: How does Garrett's agency determine the right target audience?
Okay. Okay. Yeah. So I'm just missing part of the story here. Got it. So you are, how many people did you have in 2019? 40, 35. Okay. Got it. Got it. Got it. Got it. Okay. There's been a lot of growth in the past 12 months. Yeah. In the last, since March. I see. Okay. What happened post COVID? Everyone has budget now?
Yeah, COVID was tough. I was about like 60 to 75 people in 2019, 2020. And then we downsized in COVID right in the beginning, but then we held really strong. We grew about 1% last year. And then this year, We're up. Jeez, I have no idea. It's an insane number. Mostly because, like I was saying, our methodology is different.
Everybody's getting their butt kicked on LinkedIn, and they can't scale on Google Ads. Genuinely, it's a really, really bad problem. Because what everybody's doing on LinkedIn is they're still slinging asset downloads, and then they're trying to send MQLs to SDRs.
Yeah, I totally agree with that. So I want to keep focusing on you because we get it. I mean, everyone listening understands like they're wasting money on LinkedIn and you have a better way. So I get that. But so you scaled down to 45 during COVID. You're scaled back up to 135 today.
Will you guys be profitable this year or you break you and you're going to reinvest everything back in the business?
No, so I usually run us a little leaner on purpose because we spend so much on sales and marketing. I think that's what's kind of cool. I don't know. In my world, agencies don't actually spend on advertising despite that's what they're supposed to be good at. So for us, we reinvest almost all of it, but we're kind of starting to go into that next phase where we have to kind of prepare ourselves
to have the right trailing 12 months, the right trailing 24 months of EBITDA. And so, you know, for us, we are profitable and we have a really nice business model. It just depends on how aggressive I'm pursuing top line revenue. And that also depends on our capacity, our recruiting function, the job market's hell right now, to be honest, like it's really, really difficult.
And so most of what we're doing right now is building for 2022 and then restaffing and reorging because we scale so fast. Got it. And it's not like, you know,
That makes sense. We're running out of time, but just to be clear, 135 people and you said everyone makes more than 70K and you're profitable. So 70K times 135 is about 9 million bucks in revenue. Is it fair to say you're doing more than that? Yeah, definitely. Okay. And what do you think you'll break in 2022? Oh, I don't share revenue, man, to be completely honest with you. You just did, right?
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