1/ The days of work-life balance at startups are over. Here is how to get people working hard again:

This post might be controversial. It shouldn’t be. Startups are hard. The most successful tech companies were built by people working long hours as a competitive advantage. 2/ Yet somehow sub 40 hour work weeks, I would argue the bare minimum a startup employee should expect to work, have become the norm under the guise of work-life balance.

How did we get here?

1/ How to scale revenue faster at your startup (and how most startups get this wrong): 2/ Think about your customer acquisition funnel. Identify the biggest bottleneck to growing faster. In the beginning, and most startups never truly solve this, the bottleneck is top of the funnel (demand gen). Apply as much pressure as you can until this moves somewhere else.

10 common mistakes startups make that result in slower growth:

1. Focusing on middle of the funnel when the bottleneck is top of the funnel. Look at reps calendars. Are they busy with multiple customer calls every day? If not, you have a demand (and/or p/m fit) bottleneck. 2. Mass email sequencing people who have never heard of you or your company. You need to be more creative with outbound.

https://twitter.com/samdblond/status/1656712091749826575?s=20

1/ How to do outbound at your startup:

I talk to startups every day about using outbound to generate new opportunities. Almost 100% of them are doing it wrong. 2/ They purchase systems for contact information and email sequencing, write what they believe is a clever message about their company, and blast everyone in their target market. They’re surprised when reply rates are near 0%.

New pod!!

Any founders or sales leaders looking to bring on early customers - this is a must listen. @ExploreOmni was founded 12 months ago and has scaled to 50 companies in trials, 10 paying customers, and 20 employees (3 in GTM) while building one of the most technically… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… @ExploreOmni Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/5DCbtr…

Brex ran the most successful billboard campaign of any tech startup in history. The impact was massive for inbound demand gen, near 100% brand awareness in our target market, improved outbound conversion, and more.

Here is what we did, pics included, and how you can do it too: 2/ I joined Brex in May of 2018. We hadn't launched yet - no PR, no website, LinkedIn's said: Stealth. No one knew who we were. We were planning for a launch in June and wanted to make as big of a splash as possible.

5 things you can start doing today to generate more revenue at your startup:

1. Set up a formal referral program. You should know which customers love you - incentivize them to refer their network. 2. Look through the portfolios of each of your investors. Ask them for intros to the right point of contact at companies you think would be a good fit. Send a list and be specific (John Doe, the Controller, at Acme Corp).

1/ How to increase conversion rates and generate more revenue for your business:

I joined countless sales demos while I was at Zenefits. The most memorable one was with a new hire AE giving one of his first demos. 2/ After the HR leader we were selling to joined the call, the AE kicked things off by sharing his screen and presenting a deck. As the AE was transitioning from the deck to a product demo, his computer background was visible to the buyer.

1/ Two of the biggest GTM mistakes I see startups make that lead to missing revenue targets, declining AE productivity, and, ultimately, layoffs: 2/ I’ve seen this movie countless times. I lived it at Zenefits. Everything is going great - you’re hitting revenue targets, most of the AE’s are over quota, it’s easy to fundraise. Life’s good. Then, slowly but surely, things change.

1/ How to accelerate revenue growth at your early stage startup:

I’ve worked with countless early stage startups through consulting (n = 15), angel investing (n = 25), and now as a VC (n = >100). It’s almost universal the primary bottleneck to revenue growth is demand gen. 2/ If there were more opportunities for us to work, we would be growing revenue faster. The math is simple: if you double opportunities and everything else remains constant, you've doubled sales. And it's far easier to double opportunities than it is to double conversion rates.

1/ How to succeed with founder led sales:

Last week, @garrytan was nice enough to invite me to his home to speak with the current YC batch. The most common topic was founders figuring out how to close the first set of customers in time for demo day. 2/ Depending on the specific situation, my advice was flavors of the concepts I describe below.

First, if you’re an early stage founder doing your best to close your first customers, find comfort this is the way almost every successful tech company starts acquiring customers.

1/ New Pod!! (links below)

Every startup I speak with underinvests in their customer base. Most GTM resources are allocated to new customer acquisition over churn prevention and revenue expansion in the base. This was certainly true at Brex as well. Until we fixed it. 2/ This episode of the @saastr CRO Confidential podcast is all about making customers successful, preventing churn, upsell and expansion with @brexHQ GM of Startups, and close friend, @LucasAFox

1/ Sponsoring events can have a huge impact on customer acquisition and brand. Most companies do it wrong, though. Here’s how to have the biggest impact sponsoring an event without breaking the bank: 2/ In the remote/distributed world, it’s nearly impossible to have a physical concentration of people in your target market. Events solve for this. For Brex, our biggest event was @saastr Annual. The first time we sponsored, here are the 5 things we did to stand out:

1/ How we 3x’d SDR productivity with 1 change at Brex:

80% of Brex’s revenue was sourced through sales outbound. The 2 teams doing outbound were SDR and AE. 2/ SDR’s focused exclusively on creating opportunities through outbound. AE’s created their own opportunities through outbound and worked opportunities to close. Despite spending less time on outbound, the avg AE was generating more revenue through outbound than the avg SDR.

1/ How Brex went from an unknown company to a household name among startups (our target market) in a matter of weeks:

I joined Brex in May, 2018. We didn’t have a website (brex.com read “coming soon”) and there was no publicly available information on the business 2/ We were still in stealth. We were planning for a GA of the product on June 19th of the same year. We wanted to make as big of a splash on the market as we possibly could. Here is what we did.

1/ A common conversation I’m having with founders and sales leaders right now: how do I know the right number of salespeople to have on my team?

Here’s an easy way to do it: 2/ Pull up the calendars of your AE’s. Make sure to click into the meeting details - people put all sorts of things on their calendars. Around half their day (~4 hours) should be spent on customer calls.

1/ The sales tactic that allowed Zenefits to grow faster than any tech company in history (and how you can use it too):

I met Parker for the first time at a coffee shop in the Mission in November, 2013. 2/ He was building Zenefits - an all-in-one hr product that clients received in return for making Zenefits their health insurance broker. The company made $ on health insurance commissions, not by charging for the software, which effectively made using Zenefits free.

1/ Want the best startup VP Sales candidates in the world? Here’s how to get the list of them.

First, some context. Zenefits was the hottest/fastest growing startup from 2013-2016. We were valued at 4.5B in 2015 (that was a lot back then) and we grew the sales org to >500 people 2/ Out of that 1 company we produced the CRO at Brex, the SVP Sales at Rippling, the SVP Sales at Tripactions, the SVP Sales at Gong, the SVP Sales at Modern Health, and more

If I were creating a list of candidates to recruit from for my first VP Sales, here’s how I would do it:

1/ The best outbound campaign we ever ran at Brex (75% demo rate, 75% demo to close):

Brex launched in 2018 as the first corporate card for startups. After launch, when we were still ~30 employees and near 0 rev, we ran the most successful outbound campaign I've ever seen. 2/ We ran a report in Pitchbook to determine seed through Series B startups in the Bay Area that raised a round in the last 6 months. We had a list of ~300 companies. We purchased 300 bottles of Veuve Clicquot at ~$50/bottle.

A simple tip for selling against competitors:

During discovery always ask if they are looking at any other solutions. If yes, who? Before the demo say something like: “you mentioned you were also looking at (competitor). During the product demo I can either focus exclusively on our product, or I can highlight differences between us and (competitor). Which do you prefer?” 99 times out of 100 they will say the latter.