SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Scaling enterprise sales with digital transformation for a niche industry
23 Oct 2022
Chapter 1: What insights were shared from the Founder 500 event?
Hey folks, hope your Q3 and Q4 is off to a good start. We just wrapped up Founder 500 in Austin, Texas. Hundreds of bootstrap founders showed up. It was an amazing time. I loved meeting so many of you.
This interview today is a recording from that session, which you're gonna love because now we have visuals, we have the founder teaching, and I made every single speaker include their revenue graphs and real artifacts in their presentations. Without further ado, let's jump in.
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
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Chapter 2: How has Rallyware achieved significant revenue growth?
It's like a big Excel sheet for all these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. We've got George Elfund from Rallyware, whose revenue is north of $5 million. Give it up for George, everybody. Thank you very much, everyone. Really appreciate seeing you all here. 9 a.m. on Friday. I know it's on the second day.
It's not that easy to come in that early, but really, really good to see everyone. So my name is George Alfond. I'm the co-founder and CEO at Rallyware. And we'll talk today about a couple of things. First, like I'll start, like I'll talk about the revenues. We'll actually, we're at around slightly above 7.5. And
as you can see the revenues interestingly like the growth is has been uh actually accelerating rather than decelerating over the years and if you look at 2000 before 2018 it probably took us as many years as it took us to grow to get to that number and the reason for that is i'll be talking about uh we are in the uh primarily like we do a lot of work in the smaller niche industry and it takes a long time to actually establish yourself to build the reputation to
get to the right place with it. And some of the lessons, some of the rules when you're operating selling into a smaller industry are very different than when you're selling like what is being taught like for startups that are selling like into a very large broad market. So I will talk about a couple of things.
One, I'll talk about the sales and niche industry, as I said already, how we transformed our messaging to help us accelerate the sales. What are the must haves of conquering a smaller industry and lessons for quick and sustainable scaling. I'll then switch the gears and talk about the importance of core values.
Because you could build sales, you could do a lot of great things, but what we learned is the team is the key. The people are the most important assets you have. And a lot of people keep saying that. But as you grow more, the more you actually feel it and the more you realize it. And how it comes to the point when it's important to have the core values.
Not just because someone said that, but because you're actually... feel that's the way how your team should be operating and how you how you succeed and the third one i'll talk about the case study how the actually our core values uh helped us uh like this is the case in point how core values helped us in a very specific very tragic very difficult situation
We had a big part of our team in Kharkiv in Ukraine on the day that the invasion started. So we'll talk about that and that will be another part, very emotional part of the presentation. So let's go right in it. So let me start, before even I go what we do, let me start into what is our overall broad mission statement is.
Rallover's mission statement is to provide an opportunity for every member of any distributed group to feel connected, engaged, and valued within the overarching community to unlock their full potential. A lot of great words, a lot of how we feel, what we want to change, but How does it transform into the marketplace?
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Chapter 3: What unique challenges do niche industries face in sales?
And we said, okay, so what our product does, it's rather where we invent enterprise training by connecting learning activities with operational and performance data. And this, as a result, delivers great significant KPI improvements for companies with remote and distributed workforces. A lot of interesting, great words, great insights.
What we learned from it, like when we went to the marketplace and tried to sell it, like we've faced quite a few obstacles. And the obstacles were we saw that this is not specific enough for the industry pains. There is a lack of emotional connection with the buyers, with the industry. It sounds interesting, but what's in it for me? Very often we were getting that question.
Not enough credibility with existing industry players. Is this mission critical? That's the question you'll always be getting regardless whether you are mission critical or not. And there are very few instances when you can actually prove it without, before getting into a customer. And we were getting low conversion rates on our funnel as a result.
So we went back and we realized, okay, we're getting most of our sales in one industry and that industry is getting a lot of value. So instead of being overly generic and trying to conquer the world, why don't we actually focus on that industry and focus on the language for that industry?
It's an industry, it's a relatively smaller industry that's called direct selling, like companies like Avon, Herbalife, etc. And it has its own rules, it has its own structure and everything. So we had to really build the language and build the messaging right for that industry. So we introduced the Ralleware.
suite which is connected as a field performance enablement platform and it's an end-to-end software software suite purpose built to maximize the user experience engagement and success of direct selling field teams across their entire selling life cycle very specific very language that really fits into that industry that really resonates with the pains that they're having
Then we were very excited to talk about the metrics that we've got. So it was great, like the numbers are tremendous, like could change the world. Still didn't really resonate as much with the industry. So we went back and really went specific on that industry. So what is Rollover? Like we talked about like years of experience in specifically in the direct selling industry.
what we do, that we are trusted by a large number of the largest brands in that industry. And the most important, like the specific capabilities and the most important is the specific ROI numbers on the specific metrics in that industry. So be as specific as you can be with the industry. Don't worry about...
Not being broad enough, you can start small, you can focus, and then you can conquer the rest of other industries or you can expand within the industry. So as a result of these efforts, we were able to get great customers that are leaders in the direct selling industry.
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Chapter 4: How does establishing core values impact team dynamics?
Like, for example... A lot of direct selling is an industry, but it's also a way, it's a channel, it's a way of selling. But a lot of companies within direct selling sell cosmetics. So after we've developed amazing results, amazing case studies with the companies in direct selling and a lot of our customers happen to be cosmetics, we're like, okay.
We can go into retail with the cosmetics use case and really proving the value through that. So there's lots of opportunities. Don't think that the niche market is small by itself. What's critical is really showing, especially if you're in the enterprise, is showing the meaningful quantifiable ROI. And here I don't mean just showing the usage metrics or engagement.
And that's what most of the software companies do. Like to really prove your value, you need to prove and show how it affects the business of your clients. It takes time sometimes. Sometimes it takes, especially in the beginning, non-scalable methods, like doing a lot of those calculations by hand and then productizing them. But the value you're bringing with that, like don't underestimate it.
And, of course, the Rockstar team, especially in sales, that operates based on values.
for that like hire only the best people people that have within the niche industry that have the reputation that that other people in the industry know well and trust them and also very importantly especially with the enterprise sales when you're selling based on roi based on the increasing kpis it's very critical that it's very critical that you bring the sales leaders that not only just build relationships and uh
can shake hands and ask for the order, but really can challenge the customers that you have this problem and here's how you solve it and this is the best solution. Those are the types of people that make the difference for you. So when you're doing some of the awards, feel free to be memorable, feel free to do what you care about when you're accepting them.
For example, for me this year, I'm from Ukraine originally, a big part of our team is in Ukraine.
We happened to get the industry award in direct selling very unexpectedly for us when we were in the audience and I had a Ukrainian flag right with me so I didn't know what the reception would be but I knew we were doing this for the team and while a lot of people were being bombed right at that moment It was very important for us to stand the Ukrainian flag.
We got a standing ovation and everyone, people were coming up and everyone was really, really touched. And that actually helped people remember us better and really not just fulfill what we felt really strongly about, but also build an impact for the business. Case studies, of course, have numbers, have quotes, have very, very specific information, as specific as you get.
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Chapter 5: What strategies can help businesses connect with niche markets?
We started with the key beliefs to founders. We want to do good things, be with people, lead by example and so forth.
hire people the same way but as you scale the beliefs don't scale by themselves so we decided we need to introduce the core values and our core values are go all in we make things we go all in we make things happen and we grow together very important uh for us and uh we've been doing a lot like as we realized like a lot of the traits a lot of uh a lot of the qualities come from them.
So recruiting, goal settings, onboarding, performance evaluation, all of these are utilizing our core values and we've realized that it's a really good way to see how people are performing and where they're going. I want to jump on the section about the war. That's where our core values came into play on February 24th, 2022, this year, our lives got changed.
And we had 82 people in Kharkiv, Ukraine, 20 minutes from the Russia border. It's been crazy. We knew something was going on the weeks coming in, but we didn't know what. I personally didn't believe in the war happening, but it did. But as a CEO, we had to prepare. How do you prepare for the war? They don't teach it at business school. They don't teach it at accelerators.
But what we did, we looked at a lot of plans. Some of them said, one of them said, like, at 10 a.m. after the invasion, we'll all get at the bus stop and we'll get evacuated. Good luck doing that. This is really, really tough. When the war starts, everything changes. So instead of that, we decided, okay, we have core values. We'll develop a set of operating principles that we'll operate by.
We can't provide you a detailed plan, but we can tell you how we will be making the decisions when we do that. So what we did, we did this as a brief outline of our plan. We said, we can confirm to everyone physical safety and security are the most important things. We'll help you with accommodations, we'll help you with evacuations, but we don't know where, how, what, like we will be...
What we're promising, we will be making the decisions as there is a need to come in. We'll be very quick to make those decisions and we'll take everyone's interest into account. We started really... Working very close. Oops, what happened? Okay. So as the war started, the attack changed everything. We got the two days before we told people to evacuate. Only 20% did.
The rest were really having a hard time for the next at least two weeks because you couldn't get out of Kharkiv. People were staying in the office because that proved to be the safest location with kids, with friends.
with Pets, with everyone, and our team was getting just stronger, you know, like all the, you've seen all the articles, all the press about it, and we, one thing I wanted to say, we split the team, Rallover became basically three teams.
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Chapter 6: How did the war in Ukraine affect Rallyware's operations?
One is the team in Ukraine who was told don't work, don't worry about work, don't worry about anything, we'll take care. Crisis management, myself and a couple of other leaders in the company were 24-7 figuring things out for the team. And then business continuity is the rest of the executives and the teams in the US and the rest of the world.
We're actually taking care of business, which worked out very, very well. We didn't have any disruptions, any problems with the customers. It's actually, as you've seen, the business has been growing this year despite all the craziness. So here's some pictures from our office, 24-7 operations. It's been insane. Now we only have three people in Kharkiv out of 82.
Everyone else left the city and the country since then. As I said, business continuity went great. We relocated people out of Kharkiv first, out of Ukraine, and then we found the permanent relocations. We actually ran a... rescue operation for this guy. He was 50 days in the outskirts of Kharkiv. He was in the village that was taken by Russians on day one. They lost electricity.
They lived in the basement for 50 days. We've been trying for all that time to figure out how to get him out and we ended up hiring international rescue agents to get it. This is a story for a movie. It's been incredible. He is now in Toronto. We're very excited to have him.
um our customer gave us a house in germany just said please guys live there we really want to want you to be well so really people reacted and have been great with us uh new offices toronto and barcelona we extended our toronto created barcelona as a new european location and we're looking forward for good times to come back as i was listening yesterday to a presentation about the
global retreat for the for the team like i'm like that's what we're doing next year after after we win and after ukraine gets gets its place back so thank you very much guys thank you for your support and
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