SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
FiveRings Is Outsourced SDR for SaaS, $360k in ARR
14 Jan 2021
Chapter 1: What is the purpose of FiveRings Marketing?
The average customer would pay us $2,200 a month, but our packages go up to $4,000.
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Hello everyone, my guest today is Shaheem Alam. He is building a company called Five Rings Marketing, really trying to help companies outsource and build their sales teams and sales appointments without having those folks full-time on staff.
He started his first venture at the age of 20 and it learned incredible highs and crushing lows, eating PB&J for every meal, gained a lot of respect for doing door-to-door cold calling and managing a team of 30 commission-only sales reps. After pursuing a few other ventures in that realm, he gained a lot of knowledge about growing sales, building teams, and measuring the success.
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Chapter 2: How did the guest's early experiences shape their career?
And that kind of comes back to that ticket value where each client is not going to bring you as much, you know, bring you 30,000 a year. They're going to bring you maybe 2,000 a year. Then it makes sense for them to go with marketing. So we've had clients that have used our services and then realized that, OK, this might not be the best approach for me. LinkedIn might not be the best.
Let me switch over to marketing and things like that. And then other clients, yeah, they're with us for six, seven months, eight months, and then they'll bring it internally. And then other clients we have, we're their sales and marketing team.
So last year in 2020, total revenue, what percent of your revenue came from people paying $2,200 a month versus your other services like PPC ads and things?
I would say like over 80%.
80% was the $2,200 per month fee? Correct. Yeah, yeah. Interesting. Okay. And when did you get into all this? What year? I'm sorry? When did you get into all this? When did you launch?
We launched in September of 2019, I would say, kind of more officially. And what got you into it? Where are you coming from? So I did three years of door-to-door. That's the experience that you kind of mentioned in my bio there.
What were you selling? Were you a Cutco guy?
Yeah.
It was HVAC. Oh, maybe tougher than that. I think HVAC is probably even tougher than knives.
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Chapter 3: What services does FiveRings Marketing offer to SaaS companies?
Yeah.
Street Context.
Okay, got it. What were you selling there?
So we were selling their product, which was, I mean, back then it was an email security, it's not email security, sorry, email solution for brokerages, like financial brokerages and wealth management firms. So the solution was for like traders. This is like four years ago, I think. Yeah. So it's hard for me to recall.
I don't know where their products developed today, but yeah, it was a fintech product. And then after that, I worked for another startup as an account executive, a startup called Renorun. Runaround, you might have heard about them. I'm not sure. But what they do is construction materials delivery within two hours. They have an app. Contractors don't need to waste time making runs to Home Depot.
They can just order it from the app. They get it within two hours to their job site. So I was an account executive there. And then based on all of that experience, I joined, yeah, co-founded FireMix Marketing, the sales agency side with the CEO, Niloufar.
And yeah, here I am. Very cool. Now, are you building this? You said two SDRs, two AEs, so you have four people, I guess, on the team. How many people total on the team, though? Eight. Eight. So what do the other three or four do?
Yeah, so we have a sales coordinator who provides more supportive activities. So whether it's data collection, whether it's building up marketing reports, collecting all the stats, building lead lists, things like that, that our account managers, they just shouldn't be doing. Then we have myself, CEO Niloufar, and those are three plus the four.
And then we have one digital marketing manager who manages the PPC, SEO, things like that.
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Chapter 4: How much do clients typically pay for outsourced SDR services?
Very cool. Any plans to raise or no? Uh, not at the moment. Very cool. And so what does the, I mean, what do you want to do with the business? Do you think that this sort of outsourced SDR thing can be a big niche? You can grow it to a million bucks in revenue, or are you going to pivot somewhere? What are you doing?
Yeah, I think that, um, so our, you know, we do have competitors that have done this and grown to five to $10 million. Who are some of those? Um, I would say a predictable revenue. They're, you know, a great company based out of Vancouver, Canada. They've done, they've been in the game since email marketing. And then they kind of, you know, they jumped onto LinkedIn marketing.
They're, uh, they do it pretty well. A couple of others. I mean, there's a competitor called growth, uh, Growth lever, they're doing good things. So we definitely see the potential by looking at our competitors, seeing what they've made out of it. And that's definitely the path that we want to go down.
So how do you get down that path faster? What's the next step?
Ramp up sales. So a big, big, big goal for 2021 is to push on sales. We have contracted salespeople that are working with us on a commission-only basis. And that's my expertise, building commission-only sales teams. So yeah, they're helping us push. Before, I wasn't doing the sales. It was Niloufar who was.
But now I'm jumping on the sales side as well because I really systemize the client delivery.
Isn't it hard to get talented reps, though, if you're paying commission only? I mean, the real talented people are getting a big fix and a big commission.
That depends because... It's the people that are confident in their ability to sell that are going to accept a commission-only position because they know that they're going to be able to sell and make their money. If not, they're going to be able to make more than if they were just getting a base plus commission.
So what commissions are you paying out?
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