00:08:49 · Guillaume Moubeche, Carles Reina
[00:08:49] S1: US That's insanely fast. [00:08:51] S0: Exactly. But because we had a log, like, truly, what is the messaging? How does it work? All of that stuff. The third person that we hired already sold the contract within, the first ten days. Like, the fourth person was already in the same bracket. So it became kind of a challenge. Everyone was like, okay, now you need to actually, like, sell a contract within the first week. So, like, there was all of these, like, kind of, like, motivational elements of, how do you gamify all of these things? Because if people see that they can actually close deals very quickly, quota doesn't really matter. Whether you're actually, like, asking for 20 x quota or you're actually asking for, like, less or more, it doesn't really matter. I need to see momentum. And people were actually... People that see momentum by themselves, especially on the seller side, they like kinda like go deeper. Right? And that's fundamentally what's trying to bridge. [00:09:36] S1: What do you feel was like the unique selling proposition that kind of helped ElevenLabs like go off the chart? Like, what does make a product sell so quickly? I mean, of course, you have, like, the process to hire, like, great salespeople, etcetera. But, you know, in some cases, it's just hard to sell, you know, like, in some markets. But it feels like you have kind of, like, found something that just sell by itself in some way. So what was kind of the value prop that you had that really worked out well?
00:10:05 · Carles Reina
[00:10:05] S0: So for for the first nine months, it was me trying to convince companies of a future. And that was very simple. Like, because like anyone could sign up like $500, like monthly spent. That that was very simple. How do you convince companies to actually start spending like 2,000, 3,000, 10,000, 20,000, all of that stuff? And all of it was all about like, this is what I do think the technology is actually going from an LLM perspective and generative AI. And this is how actually it is applicable to your business. So it was much more like consulting based, giving them ideas of the trends of what I was actually thinking in the business, how they could take advantage of all of that stuff, and then saying, hey, by the way, like, I think your business could be on this path. And this is the technology that we can provide to actually help you navigate all of that. And we will help you in along the way and everything. Right? Once we found that product market fit, it was fundamentally about like, and we found it really quickly on, or like we found it during that period on companies that actually were building like tools by themselves. It was much more on side, less on the big enterprise side and much more on developer ecosystem that, like, we started tapping the right set of people that were building applications and understanding really well the entire market. So essentially, like the next account execs that I ended up hiring were selling on that developed ecosystem framework that already started seeing like kind of growth and really had a pretty good idea of like how other companies were doing it. Right. So we started replicating that. And then at some point the following year, said like, well, actually now we need to go into like the proper enterprise. Let's knock on people's doors, on company's doors. Let's go after the banking segment. We could go after telcos. Let's go after like creative platforms. Let's go after all of those ones that are gonna be bigger companies. It's still gonna take us a little longer, but we also need to commit them. And that's how we started, like telling banks and telling telcos and telling like utility companies saying, hey, like, this is the future that we see. It's gonna take a little bit of time for you to materialize it and see it on a day to day basis, but we wanna help you be part of it. Right?
00:12:06 · Carles Reina
And so essentially, it's very similar to, like, when you're trying to find, like, design partners and those design partners, they they like you as a person. They don't have, a full a 100% clear idea of, like, how much value you can bring to them. But if you opt and do things right, then you can essentially commit them and they become like partners over the long term.
00:12:25 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:12:25] S1: Yeah. Definitely. Talking about it, it's funny because ElevenLabs, I think, is one of the few companies that has like a Slack channel with the the lemlist team. Because you guys are, like, leveraging the product to the highest extent. Actually, like, I received this photo from from Stan earlier Stan. Because he has, like... We send him, you know, like, swag with the lemlist logo, so it's funny. And yeah, I was really shocked, you know, by how much the team is leveraging, like, all this AI feature. I think you were one of the first company, like, few months ago to really dig in how to use the MCP, leverage like lemlist directly from Claude, and you've built so much stuff around lemlist. Like, I'm curious, like, how exactly within the team, because I'd say that the common mistakes leaders or sales leader like do or say, it's like the sales team is not technical enough, they don't like tools, etcetera, etcetera. But in your case, whenever we just look, you know, at the usage numbers, etcetera, for ElevenLabs, it's just insane. So I'm wondering, like, how exactly do you put in place this mindset of everyone just being the best that they can with the tool that they can have to really, outperform pretty much any sales rep?
00:13:40 · Carles Reina
[00:13:40] S0: We love Lemlist. And I I I don't don't get paid to say this. I was like like, ElevenLabs, we pay you guys. So it's like... Look, I found like I found Lemlist like super useful when I was starting. So I ended up like kinda like pushing into the wider team. You actually had two layers on all of these things. One was like a forcing function. Right? And another one was fundamentally like much more of like a psychological factor. Like psychologically, because I always keep telling everyone, like every single day, like since the beginning, and I repeat it all the time, it's like no one gets fired for actually like spending money, company money and failing. Right? No one. Like, if we don't like experiment, all of the possible things that we could do, then we need to get everything else right all the time, which statistically is not possible to get everything right. Right? So the only option that you have is like experiment as much as you want, experiment with everything, experiment with like the personas, the type of industries, the type of platforms, pretty much everything that you would want. Right? You're not gonna get ever in trouble for experimenting. We need that. I only need one idea to work well out of a 100 for the next $100,000,000 in revenues. And I only need one. Right? Only one. It doesn't need to be more than that. Right? So that is one factor. The other factor was like this concept of like, we were still very reliant up until like end of like twenty twenty four on many inbounds. Right? So I ended up forcing everyone. I put a number. I was like, okay, by the end of twenty twenty five, we need to be in a situation where like 50% of the revenues are actually outbound and the other 50% inbound. And I told them like, hey, I'm gonna monitor this on a weekly basis, and I'm gonna start publishing a report every single week and calling out people that are not doing it. So everyone had to do a minimum threshold of outbounds because I knew that, like, you know, like, sales is a numbers game. You do a number of outbounds, and then essentially that converts into, like, a number of meetings and that converts into, like, contracts and all of that stuff. Like, it's a numbers game. There is nothing else if you have, like, a good organization. So literally, like, I started doing that. And, of course, like, people initially were not doing it.
00:15:41 · Carles Reina
Later on, they realized, like, I was gonna be the actual bad cop in there. And I was essentially, like, pointing fingers being like, you haven't done your job. You haven't done your job. You haven't done your job. You've done a really good job because you caught up on everything that you want. Like, so all of that stuff. And then essentially, like, when you look at all of the different tools out there in the market, the only tool that actually seemed like really good, that was giving us results, and we tested pretty much everything, that was giving us results, that was easy to use, and that people in the team actually wanted to use on a day to day basis was Lemlist. So, like, literally, we kept adding more and more and more seats, and then we became, like, essentially, everyone had an account in there. But there is a third layer to all of this, which is, like, from a rev ops perspective, the team read really well on how do we integrate Lemlist into the entire tech stack so that we're able to track pretty much everything that's happening. Right? So like when you have like those three layers operating at the same level, and then it is actually being pushed and the teams also like the product, it just becomes insane. And, like, I can I can tell you, like, we tested everything out there? Like, everything. No one really worked for us. That's why, like, I'm a big fan of, like, your product guys because it is the only thing that actually works.