SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Rev.Team hits $50k MRR Helping Scale Sales Teams and RevOps, SaaS Next?
09 Feb 2021
Chapter 1: What is Rev.Team and how does it help scale sales teams?
And how many of the 12 are on the 10 grand a month versus 2,500? I think almost half.
I'm just under five. So 4,800 MRR right now.
So it's something like that, yeah. 48,000 or 4,800?
No, it's about 48,000 revenue.
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Chapter 2: What services does Rev.Team currently offer to B2B founders?
Right now, you're only hearing partial interviews. And you'll get interviews three weeks earlier from founders, thinkers, and people I find interesting. Like Eric Wan, 18 months before he took Zoom public.
We got to grow faster. Minimum is 100% over the past several years.
Or bootstrap founders like Vivek of QuestionPro. When I started the company, it was not cool to raise. Or Looker CEO Frank Behan before Google acquired his company for $2.6 billion. We want to see a real pervasive data culture, and then the rest flows behind that. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
There, you'll find a private RSS feed that you can add to your favorite podcast listening tool, along with other subscriber-only content. Now look, I never want money to be the reason you can't listen to episodes. On the checkout page, you'll see an option to request free access. I grant 100% of those requests no questions asked. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Damian Thompson.
He is building a company called Rev.Team. Rev.Team Scaling. He's been scaling businesses since 1999, helping B2B founders grow from 50k to a million in MRR by building high performance revenue. Teams will focus on that today. Damian, you ready to take us to the top? Let's go. So just to be clear, Rev.Team, is this a business like this is a SaaS software you're selling or no, it's an agency?
So it's a service business right now, but we're actually literally building out our first piece of, it's always been, I call it a SaaS SaaS. It's a service as a software as a service business. I'm trying to figure out how to create the software. Right now, the first thing I'll get will be a bit of an ATS, applicant tracking system.
Okay, so let's talk about what it is today. So it is an agency. What is the agency delivering today?
So we work with B2B founders, 80% software people, that's where I come from, that have found product market fit, say $50,000 to $100,000 in MRR, and they want to grow to a million, two million a month, and they know they need to grow a revenue team, but they're product people. So I come in and I help them by building sales, lead gen, the functions, the tools, the team, the tactics.
And how many of them are paying you monthly right now to do this? I have about a dozen people right now. It's a dozen companies I'm working with. It's growing. It was fluctuating around seven or eight, but now I've actually built a team out to actually deliver a lot of it. We've been scaling quite fast the last few months because we've productized, basically, I would say 80% of it.
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Chapter 3: When did Damian launch Rev.Team and what led to its creation?
Um, I mean, what's a tactic you've seen of Slack owner used to really engage the audience really well. That's not like a usual strategy.
Yeah. Um, It's a good question. You know, I think someone who's kind of crushing right now is Sam Thompson. What's his Jetpack? I can't remember what he's calling himself. Jetpack is what he's calling it. And he's done a really good job of engaging. He's pretty young. It's like two months old, something like that. But I found it just ā it felt ā I felt welcome at the very beginning.
Um, in the kind of paid non really slack, um, drew, uh, for trends is crushing it on circle. I really love that community. Like I really feel he does these daily standups and he's kind of gamified it a bit. That's really good.
Chapter 4: How did Damian acquire his first customers for Rev.Team?
Um, and so I find that it's now the community, the community community, the community slack, what do they call themselves? Like the, I forget that they are, and they're very good. I would hope, but, I don't think it's the forum or the kind of the platform as much as it is just how committed you are to it and what you're going to do. And are you trying to SOP it from day one?
Are you trying to do it yourself? Are you engaged? And if you're not engaged, then you have someone that is, right? You have like a true community person. And I know community is that new hotness right now. but you can tell the difference. I mean, I've been in a lot of them.
You can see the ones that are there just because they think they have to be and the ones that actually truly believe there's value.
Damien, five minutes left here. I want to switch to actually what you know best, rev teams, right? So scaling revenue teams. What's the biggest mistake founders do when they hire their first sales rep?
They hire way too soon. So they think that, hey, I want to get this on my plate. I hate this. I don't want to do this. I'm going to hire somebody and they're going to come in and come build it for me. That doesn't happen. That person does not exist. There is no such thing as a Rolodex. Not only is a Rolodex not a real thing anymore, it never really existed even in theory, right?
So anyone that could go build a business for you is going to build it for themselves. So you're hiring an employee. I don't care if they're an expensive employee, but you're hiring an employee.
Should that first sales rep have a quota or no?
Uh, yeah, I mean, well, so second problem to make is you shouldn't have one, you should hire two, always hire two. Um, if you hire one, there's only a yes or no, they just fail or succeed. You hire two, you get fail, one fails and one succeeds. That gives you that third data point.
That third data point is important because now you know whether it's your problem, the process problem, or it's actually a personal problem. So, but yes, absolutely. It should be measured, measured from day one and pushed hard. Salespeople, sales is the one role that even if you're great at it, it takes work ethic forever. It's like going to the gym.
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Chapter 5: What pricing models does Rev.Team use for its services?
And then founders come in. And then once they come in, they don't push them hard enough when they get in. You have to stay on top of them. So I tell people all the time, if you hate sales, you're going to hate sales management even more.
So you really need to have your process. Should the first sales rep get equity in the company?
I think it depends. I mean, I don't know. I've got equity in a couple of companies. I think equity is overplayed. Very few people actually ever capitalize on it. And so I think that sharing in the wealth, absolutely. I do profit sharing. I do bonuses. I think that's absolutely valuable. But equity itself, I guess if you have a plan for an exit, sure. But most companies don't ever exit.
Yeah. All right, Damien, let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book. First, break all the rules. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? CEO, sorry? Yep. You're following or studying. Sorry about that. A CEO you're following or studying.
Yeah, I mean, so I'm a huge, I'm going to show my age here. I'm a Bill Gates fan. He's the gangster.
Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building rev team? So HubSpot. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?
Uh, recently may four, four and a half.
Okay. That's not a lot, man. That's not healthy.
It's not, it's very unhealthy. What's keeping you up? Oh, just, just been busy. I told myself this time I wasn't going to scale out the team until I got to 50,000, um, a month. And, uh, so that was a lot of work, but now I'm scaling the team out. So I'm starting to get some sleep.
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