SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How to turn your sales playbook into a revenue machine that adds $Xm in new ARR per quarter
26 Mar 2024
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Kind of interesting to have a really, really deep tactical sales conversation on the finance stage. But hopefully people will find this a little bit entertaining and maybe a bit useful. So my name is Michael Burns. I'm Chief Revenue Officer at a company called VFairs. A little bit about, if I could get the clicker to go. Yes, no. Yeah, no.
OK, I'll talk about myself, and then we'll go on to the next slide. So I've been in go-to-market leadership positions for years, about 20 years.
I started early in my career as an individual contributor in sales, and then did a startup in 2006 with a couple of colleagues, a business information and business services startup, which was great and very relevant to today's topic, because we grew super fast from 2006 to 2008, and then super not fast for the next couple of years.
And that was a great lesson in my career of how to pivot and deploy a playbook. Over the intervening years from my exit in that startup back in 2015 till today, I've really focused more on scale-ups than startups.
So I was with a MarTech ad tech company that we took from 50 to 80 million in a year, an event technology company that I took from 20 to about 100 in two years, litigation services company that we doubled revenue within a quarter. So my bag, as it were, is kind of coming in. rolling out a playbook that's very practical and gets to repeatable revenue fast.
So what I'm going to talk about today is some fairly tactical stuff. We're not going to really talk about the total strategy of the playbook. all the different dashboards that you need to use and the different acronyms that I'll roll out. But I wanted to focus on a few actionable things that I think are relevant to what's happening right now in the economy.
Again, this is a lot of lessons from 2008, 2009. So what we'll talk about is how to diagnose the gaps in your playbook, if it exists. And we'll talk a little bit about the data that I like to look at. I'll look at one thing in particular, strategy gaps around messaging, and then process gaps from a selling process standpoint.
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Chapter 2: How can you diagnose gaps in your sales playbook?
I see Guy in the back. I'm going to steal one of the lines from his presentation, which is, it doesn't matter what your sales methodology is. Just roll one out, which is absolutely true. And I'll show you mine. I'm not a huge fan of Bant. I think it's a little bit simplistic.
Use med pick, whatever it is, but you need a sales methodology because you need a common framework and a common language to be able to talk about deal risk with your reps. If you don't have that, then you're really relying on a lot of subjectivity. And then validation is important.
And I think this is probably the overarching tactic that I'll recommend is there's no substitute for getting in there. You can't drive performance through spreadsheets. You need to get in there and stress test the deals. So I spend a lot of time with my line managers teaching them how to do stress testing against the sales methodology, and then sat in on a lot of pipeline meetings.
So it became really a change management process that was super, super hands-on. A lot of hearts and minds conversations, but there's no substitute in this economy to really get in there and move the needle with your reps and show them by example and be a little bit prescriptive, to be candid. So some examples here. So what you see here is basically a reimagining of Medpick called Co-Impact.
This is not genius. This is nothing different than Medpick or Medic or anything like that. The reason that I roll this out is because it's a different acronym, and it forces people to learn different words, and therefore engages their critical thinking skills. If they use Medpick at their old company and the adoption was poor, they're going to be like, yeah, yeah, I know it. I know it.
Or they use BANT. Yeah, I've been doing BANT for 20 years. That's fine. No, this is new. This is new. What's new about it? Well, the letters are new, but we're going to position this a little bit differently. So just the act of teaching something new does drive the behaviors home. And I'll talk a little bit about the important things here.
So there's some things here that I really, really care about right now and some things that I care less about. The most important thing for me right now is identifying needs. And I'll stop and dive into this for a second. How many people have taught sales teams to sell the pain points, identify the pain points, and sell the pain points?
How many people here have asked for a new piece of software recently or had somebody ask them for a new piece of software and we said, no, deal with the pain because it's not the time to be spending? I have, for sure. So, yeah, a guy has. So pain points are nice to solve. And when things are going well, you look for solving pain and overcoming pain.
But in tough times, you tell people to get tough. Buck up. Deal with it. I'm sorry it hurts. work a little more. Not that I'm that blunt with my team, but you get the concept. So in the identifying needs part of co-impact, what I'm really getting my team to do is identify objectives and saying, look, no one's going to care about solving pain points right now, but everybody needs to hit goals.
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