SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Richter Hits $4.5m Fine Tuning Sales Process For F500 Brands
06 Oct 2020
Chapter 1: What challenges did Richter face in 2019?
2019 was about three and a half. That was actually a really tough year for us, to be honest. We were actually down. You know, we typically do around four or something, you know, four or better. And it was a rough one for us.
What did you do in 2018?
2018 was about four.
Okay. And what do you think you'll do this year? Just under five. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka. Now, if you're hearing this, it means you're not currently on our subscriber feed. To subscribe, go to getlatka.com. When you subscribe, you won't hear ads like this one. You'll get the full interviews. 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 Bean 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.
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Chapter 2: How did Richter initially land major clients like AT&T?
I think in that scenario it was $200,000 or $300,000 or something like that. It wasn't all for that, but it was part of that went to training.
What else goes into that? If they pay you a quarter million bucks, what else do they get?
You know, some of it's just a la carte, to be honest, different divisions that need different things related to sales enablement. But it could be, like I said, it could be from marketing, sales, training, and customer experience.
So for example, we might be building out, when you look at the sales journey, we might be mapping out their sales process and arming the team with everything that they need to help follow up and follow through and nurture the sales cycle. We found that on average, people follow up about three times, but it takes 18 plus contacts to actually close a deal.
So there's a big discrepancy between those two. And you start looking at it and go, well, why are they not following up? And you start finding that they're running into call reluctance, they're running out of gas.
So these large companies are spending a huge amount of money on driving the lead in the first place, but then they're not really supporting the sales enablement side enough to actually see it through and get a closed deal.
So we start creating content, whether it's decks, case study material, experience trailer content, all the different things are going to help win confidence and give them tools to stay the course and close the sale.
And in a given year, like 2020 here, it sounds like you work with what, between like 10 and 20 customers, something like that.
Well, right now, I mean, you know, we have 200 projects going at any one time. And right now we, we have many, many customers. We don't have like a large agency where they only have 10 or 20 customers that are working with. So we actually have quite a lot more than that.
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Chapter 3: What services does Richter offer to enterprise clients?
And I think that those kinds of things, I think as an entrepreneur, when you're teaching children, I think that it's important to challenge them and get them thinking in the right ways so you have the mindset to build a company.
And as you start shifting your mindset, then the ideas start coming in, as I'm sure you know, and that's gonna help them be looking at things and asking themselves questions.
I'm not a father, so I'm bi-curiously living through you, but one of my good friends, who's very successful entrepreneur by any way you'd want to measure it, recently shared with me, hey Nathan, like we were just casually chatting, he says, I'm so excited because his son had finally asked for like this, I guess it was a pair of pants that, my founder parent would not buy for the child.
So his response, he said he loved the fact that his kid asked for that because he could then bring up the money conversation and say, well, son, if you want to go buy that $90 pair of jeans, and I'm only willing to spend 20, you've got to go figure out a way to make 70 bucks. And he said he could feel his son's sort of brain start going.
And the next picture he put on Facebook was his son mowing lawns of his neighbors. Yeah. So like, is that important to your kids thinking about entrepreneurship? Don't they have to sort of desire something they can't currently have? And then as a parent, you have to create the gap and let them go figure it out.
Yeah, I definitely think that. I think that all of us are a little different as well, and I think that you have to understand each character, each person, the same way with your employees, how each one is different, and you have to understand what they respond to. I respond to certain things, but then I think that some people respond to different things, and I think that's true.
I think that's a great example. If you're ambitious and there's something that you want, and then you back into it in terms of figuring out how to get it, then that's going to help them. But I think other characters are a little different as well, and you have to figure out what is that thing that they want or what's going to get them to understand that lesson.
But I do think that everybody's not the same, and so there's not necessarily a one-fit-all type thing. And so I think the first step as a good parent and certainly as a good leader is to understand your people and understand how they respond and how they learn and then how you need to teach them to get there.
Robert, as we wrap up, let's circle back to your business. So you'll be just shy of 5 million this year. I mean, what are some of the key metrics you're tracking as you're growing the agency? Is it sort of billable hours and what you bill at rate versus your cost? Or what are some things you're tracking?
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