The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:34:00 · Carles Reina, Harry Stebbings
[00:34:00] S0: But you need to help the team. Right? It's like, what I don't buy is, like, sales leaders that are essentially the leaders. Right? Like, you don't know the pain. You don't know essentially what it is actually your team is suffering. And it goes back to your questions like, truly, if you go to a meeting and the numbers are not in the right, maybe the problem is you, that you don't understand how the sales process happens, the product that your team is selling, and the pain points that actually they're going through. So maybe, like, you need to fix that first. [00:34:25] S1: Totally get that. If we just go back to this meeting, because I'm so... Wanna kind of extract everything I can from this. Is it just retroactive review, or is there any element of forward planning? Do we get the end, spend fifteen minutes, go, okay, for the next four weeks, we're gonna do this? How do we think about that? [00:34:40] S0: Yeah. So usually it's like as part of, like, the presentation for the account execs, every single one... Even in the CSM side, it's like, what are they forecasting to actually be closing over the next thirty days as well? And essentially, what are they going to be doing to actually close them? [00:34:53] S1: Okay. Fantastic. What is your advice to me, a sales leader or CEO who's not as experienced and brilliant as you, on the right way to forecast? Is it like be optimistic, be realistic, be negative? How do you advise on that?
00:34:53 · Harry Stebbings, Carles Reina
[00:34:53] S1: Okay. Fantastic. What is your advice to me, a sales leader or CEO who's not as experienced and brilliant as you, on the right way to forecast? Is it like be optimistic, be realistic, be negative? How do you advise on that? [00:35:05] S0: Be as negative as possible. So I always like advice theme on if we are now setting a deal that is gonna be $500,000, fantastic. Just put me that like you're gonna be signing it at $24,000 I don't want to put an unrealistic number because if you think it's going be $500,000, the most likelihood is going be 100 ks. So let's just not inflate the pipeline because then essentially account execs are incentivized to inflate as much as possible so that it looks better. I don't like that. So let's put the lowest possible number. That's fine. We'll fix it later. But at least we're underestimating what it's gonna look like. But we do it also for the board. When we put the board eggs and we tell them, Hey, this is the pipelines, this is the contracts, all of that stuff. We put the lowest possible number because otherwise it inflates. And if it inflates the numbers, also investors will ask more questions and be like, Hey, by the way, you put me this account over here that it was gonna be a $2,000,000 account, but it seems you signed it at like 100 ks? What? And it just raises such a number of like awkward questions that like it doesn't make sense.
00:35:05 · Carles Reina, Harry Stebbings
[00:35:05] S0: Be as negative as possible. So I always like advice theme on if we are now setting a deal that is gonna be $500,000, fantastic. Just put me that like you're gonna be signing it at $24,000 I don't want to put an unrealistic number because if you think it's going be $500,000, the most likelihood is going be 100 ks. So let's just not inflate the pipeline because then essentially account execs are incentivized to inflate as much as possible so that it looks better. I don't like that. So let's put the lowest possible number. That's fine. We'll fix it later. But at least we're underestimating what it's gonna look like. But we do it also for the board. When we put the board eggs and we tell them, Hey, this is the pipelines, this is the contracts, all of that stuff. We put the lowest possible number because otherwise it inflates. And if it inflates the numbers, also investors will ask more questions and be like, Hey, by the way, you put me this account over here that it was gonna be a $2,000,000 account, but it seems you signed it at like 100 ks? What? And it just raises such a number of like awkward questions that like it doesn't make sense. [00:36:07] S1: One of the fastest ways, I think, to create distrust, you know, obviously, when you have investors at your company, obviously, you share pipe often of what you expect it to be. Yes. When we do reference calls, all investors do with friends who are CEOs of those companies, I do, we'd never spend more than 25 ks on this, and they've got it in for $2.50. Fastest way to lose credit.
00:36:25 · Carles Reina
[00:36:25] S0: Correct. Correct. And there is another item in there, it's like, if you always underestimate or undervalue your pipeline, it means that to reach the numbers that you had, you need to have a higher pipeline. So there is a lot of consequence of all of this. You'll end up working twice as hard because your pipeline is not big enough for the year end number or the quarter end number that you needed. So you just kind of it's the forcing mechanism to have the right culture in place. We went through this cultural change earlier this year because I actually got obsessed. We were doing the majority of deals. Like 90% of the deals were mostly inbounds, right? And as the team keeps growing, I was getting extremely worried that we were not building the right mentality in the team. It's like if at some point the pipeline dries up, then you essentially end up dying, right? So I put a goal saying like, We need to migrate to 50% outbound, 50% inbound by the end of the year. So I kept humming absolutely everyone. I still put together a report every single week with every single account exec and SDR in the team, telling them like, You've achieved your target on a weekly basis. You haven't achieved it. And if people don't achieve it, then I call them out. I did it so often that I ended up getting... People make jokes about outbound, outbound, outbound. It's like, I'm the outbound king. Yes, I love it. And people know that if you are on that list of people that are not doing their outbound, I'm gonna call you out. And if at some point I call you out too many times, then we're gonna have a problem. Right? It's a cultural thing. And we end up, like, migrating from, like, these 10% outbound sales that we're doing to 40% that we do today.
00:38:03 · Harry Stebbings, Carles Reina
[00:38:03] S1: You're 40% outbound. Wow. And when you say outbound, just to clarify specifically, this is not picking names from a PLG list. This is direct outbound. Direct outbound, yes. Wow. What's the primary channel for that direct outbound? [00:38:15] S0: Most of it, we use a company called Lemlist, which is fantastic for sequencing. Yeah, it's fantastic. Those guys are doing super well. We use LinkedIn, and there is a lot of cold calling. The traditional method works. And it depends on the market because You literally call cool. 100%, yes. I was in the office yesterday and early today, and I had some of my team members actually cold calling. I was so happy. I was smiling. I was actually listening to the conversation because I was so happy. I kind of felt like these guys are hustling. They are building the right pipeline with the right mentality. But in LatAm or in India, cold calling works, but the best method is WhatsApp. It's a different culture. Like, in India and LatAm, like, they use WhatsApp all the time for absolutely everything. So you just need doing WhatsApp.
00:38:15 · Carles Reina, Harry Stebbings
[00:38:15] S0: Most of it, we use a company called Lemlist, which is fantastic for sequencing. Yeah, it's fantastic. Those guys are doing super well. We use LinkedIn, and there is a lot of cold calling. The traditional method works. And it depends on the market because You literally call cool. 100%, yes. I was in the office yesterday and early today, and I had some of my team members actually cold calling. I was so happy. I was smiling. I was actually listening to the conversation because I was so happy. I kind of felt like these guys are hustling. They are building the right pipeline with the right mentality. But in LatAm or in India, cold calling works, but the best method is WhatsApp. It's a different culture. Like, in India and LatAm, like, they use WhatsApp all the time for absolutely everything. So you just need doing WhatsApp. [00:38:59] S1: See, this is why I disagree with you on the remote preference. I get you in terms of needing to be with customers, I understand that. But I think you learn so much from hearing your friend who's also in sales have that message work really well, and you're like, god, I could use that, and he... His messaging is much better than And then you see support over in the other corner, and everyone is talking about the same challenges that they're having, and you're like, god, okay. I could actually talk about that as one of the core problems that we solve. And actually, you get so many of the multifunctional benefits from being in the office. But I agree with you, you need to be with customers. It's a nuanced thing, to be