How to Build Go-to-Market Efficiency in SMB Sales with Owner.com CRO Kyle Norton

How to Build Go-to-Market Efficiency in SMB Sales with Owner.com CRO Kyle Norton

really excited that this week we have Kyle Norton joining us he is the cro of owner.com and his topic today is walking through how to build go to market efficiency specifically in SNB sales Kyle welcome thanks for joining us thank you for having me excited to chat with everybody today so I’m the cro of owner.com so we’re a series B vertical SAS software business we target mom and popop restaurants so think of like your local pizza spot that you order from on Friday nights that’s our ICP I run sales Partnerships customer onboarding enablement revops and whatever else hangs on there and been with the company about two years so joined shortly after their series a and I’ll talk more about our growth trajectory as a frame up for the content we are going to talk about building efficiency and go to market uh a little bit about me I’ve been in sales for 16 years leadership for 15 tech for 10 this is my second early stage startup I joined around 3 million AR at owner uh and previous to this I ran a quarter billion dollar go to Market unit at Shopify being in big companies small companies my first startup was Enterprise this is SMB I believe in range I David Epstein from his book called range so I I like to do a little bit of everything from a learning and growth perspective and so what I’m going to show what I’m going to talk about today is some insights about how you can build better efficiency into your go to market motion the title of the deck is about SMB this isn’t necessarily SMB oriented only I I’ve run midm market and Enterprise teams a lot of this content is very much applicable there but we’re going to do it through the lens of owner which is an SMB motion and so there’s three topics to focus on so one is the importance of staying focused and how to say no two is we’re going to get into ways to scale that don’t include rampid inefficiency and um and then three we’re going to talk about how to build operational excellence into your organization at different stages in the growth curve you obviously can’t manage with the same rigor when you’ve got a small handful of reps and you’re the cro direct as the manager versus later stage when you’ve got support teams and other layers of leadership but we’ll talk about that maturity curve and in terms of audience so who I’m really speaking to here is Founders and revenue leaders from companies that are post product Market fit so you’re winning some non-friends of founder deals there’s some repeatability but it’s not a system but you’ve got some patterns you as the founder the revenue leader Revenue exec have some patterns that look like they’re repeatable and you’re just endeavoring to to build that repeatability everything from that onwards to series BC potentially Beyond is applicable here okay little bit about owner because this is going to frame up the the journey I’m going to try to keep this as real world and as practical as possible so we’re going to talk about the the owner Journey this also helps frame like why do I feel like I’m qualified to speak on this topic in my opinion it’s because I’ve done it really wrong I’ve made a bunch of the mistakes that uh I think we’ve all made over the last four to six years in this bull market than zerp era and now I’m starting to learn I’ve learned some of those lessons and I’ve started to make some of the right decisions at owner and so I joined in June 22 we went from 3 to 6 million in that sort of half year we went 6 to 16 last year we strung together a bunch of 10% month-over-month growth months so we’re we’ve just broken through 21 million in ARR in 22 months so more importantly than that so that’s a bit of the growth story we’ve done it while consistently improving productivity we’ve reduced Cal pretty significantly and we’ve operated with a one or a sub one burn multiple which is really where everybody’s trying to get you burn multiple is just for every dollar of Revenue you acquire how much did that cost you and if you’re burn multiples two takes you $2 to spend to acquire $1 Revenue not a super efficient business if you’re 0. five very efficient you could probably spend more money so a little bit about the journey I inherited this team with a one manager four reps and early churn was a massive drag on efficiency so it was a it was definitely like a cleanup and a reboot job I I had to exit two of the four AES within my first I think 45 days and we really needed to get our hands on early churn which is going to be the first topic I touch on so that 2022 was a just a foundation building year we had to redo how we use Salesforce we rep platformed our sales acceleration tool brought in some new infrastructure it was Foundation Building in 2023 we grew that team from 6 to 10 reps so pretty modest growth and we also built an SDR function we we started like a small SDR pilot at the end of 22 it was giving us good good Market feedback and then we grew that function from one and two bdrs to a team of 10 and 12 and now we’ve got over 20 bdrs and you’re like man that’s a lot of bdrs that must be inefficient it is not and I will tell you how we’ve done it and so we grew 2 and a half X last year while operating in an L TV CAC of a 4 and a half to one and the growth rate was actually better in Q4 2023 than it was in q1 so more efficient growing faster and I’m going to walk you through step by step how we got there and then this year the goal is to find the outskirts of rep capacity I keep thinking that we’ve the capacity of what a rep an AE can handle and they handle it really well they keep crushing the win rates stay pretty consistent so this year is all about really finding how much more efficient we can make the AE team now that we’ve really nailed the demand genin Playbook especially on xdr okay so now let’s Zoom back to 22 this is when I started now that you’ve got the story arc things were not so peachy but the product crushed with the right customers there was a huge group of people using the platform who got tremendous value we were shipping product fast but the culprits for a very leaky Revenue bucket were were bad or no targeting on prospects we were closing a lot of poor fit customers there was a a lot of misset expectations from sales and handoff was like sketchy at best and so this led to fairly unsustainable levels of churn of early turn So within the first 90 days we were losing way too many customers for us to feel like we wanted to put a bunch of money in the top of that funnel and so the first lesson here is about learning to say no and for us it was about saying no to a lot of customers culprit number one was deal quality and we had a growth plan and I basically paused on it I said until we get uh churn in a better place I don’t want to add a bunch of reps I don’t want to spend a bunch of money in marketing let’s just dial in the economics and get to a sustainable place to feel like the machine was working before we added gas to it and this is the exact mistake that I made six years prior when I was had of sales for my first startup we got early signs that we were closing some deals and Reps were now starting to figure things out so we fired a whole bunch of reps we had way less figured out than we thought then we spent all this time hiring and ramping reps and we W spending that time on figuring out um how to win with repeatable gr economics and so counterintuitively trying to scale made us scale slower and and so saying no to growth is one of the important things and focusing on customer quality before you focus on jamming in as much quantity as you can and a lot of this is it has to be data oriented and I’ll walk you through that and so to give you a flavor for it we said no to about 40% of prospects who we uh 15 days prior would have gladly close one so fun fact my the month I took over sales at owner we did less closed wins than the month before I arrived and the month after that we did even less closed wins than that and then I went into a board meeting the next uh month and felt really good we had cleaned up deal quality the customer quality was way better we started to see good signs Jason Lins on our board and who I’ve read and looked up to for a long time and he just he basically said to me sounds great none of it’s showing up in your Revenue number so let me know when that’s when that happens and like bit of a Terri moment for me as the new cro but it really reinforced that we had to find a fast path to making sure that the improvements we made on efficiency then showed up in the revenue number which it did and board meeting number two was a lot better and so let’s get into the data so you got to figure out who to say no to and a lot of that is it has to be data oriented and I partnered with our bizops team to understand like what a high quality deal looked like so what were the what was the digital footprint of a highquality customer that then turned into high quality revenue and the guy’s name is Jonathan shankman he’s a whiz we could not do this without him he figured out what a customer looked like from their digital profile and built a machine learning scoring mechanism called expected gmv and that indicated based on for us it was like their review quality web traffic their thirdparty Marketplace volumes we sell the restaurants so how many orders they how many reviews they get each month over month on a third party indicates order volume and so we built a tool that then we could point at our our ecosystem our Tam of potential prospects and you can see that highlighted on the right hand side that red and green chart there so these are the different bands of expected egv of expected gross merchandise volume so you’ll see when the volume is higher the churn is green it looks really great you would dump money into an SMB business that has that profile but smaller customers turned at a rate that we didn’t like and we basically got rid of all those customers but it made it so now we understood really carefully what made a good customer we understood then the digital footprint of that those customers so that we could go find them in demand gen Marketing in outbound and we shifted 100% of our time and energy to those higher qual customers and your sales team might not be super pumped you’re taking away a lot of ICP or a lot of Tam in quotes and it’s an education exercise and then it’s your job as a revenue leader partnering with your data team revops or whoever to fill their funnels with high quality leads and so this so learning to say no is is question number one and I just I generally say take on less segments Less customer types less reps just do less and just nail one small niche of a of a market before you hit the gas to scale we we always take on too much as Revenue leaders like I think we’re and Founders too we’re all optimists oh like we can go we’re crushing an SMB let’s do midmarket we’ve got this restaurant this like takeout restaurant customer let’s do it for dinin restaurants that’s a lot of the time maybe most of the time like the wrong move staying focused for longer is is a great way to nail your economics so now that we knew what that customer looked like we want to be able to Target them so this is big takeaway number two invest way earlier than you think in Prospect data and there’s a few folks on the call that I’ve had individual conversations about this topic with and I know how much of an impact it’s made on their business this is one of the biggest takeaways from today’s session spend the time figuring out spend the time figuring out how you can equip your team team with really good Prospect data because typically like a bdr an outbound bdr wastes like half their time calling bad leads you like having to do research of their own to enrich the leads that they’ve been given and we don’t uh have our bdrs basically do any lead research if they get a lead and it’s partially filled out or it doesn’t have a mobile phone mobile phone number they just punt it back to the Garden of Eden and we re send that through our our enrichment flow because you’re basically saying to your bdr team hey just work two and a half days a week that’s okay if you give them bad leads and it’s that impactful I did this analysis when I got my first head of bdr rule at a software company that that was Enterprise and 40% of their time was basically wasted I did the same analysis to Shopify less because it was more inbound but still lots of inefficiency if you can get great Prospect data good things will happen um essentially if you go from like us from 40 % data accuracy because we sell to restaurants super challenging data market we went from 40% accuracy to 85% accuracy your bdr team overnight doing nothing else gets twice as efficient we we our bdr team was unsustainably inefficient we would not have scaled it in its original iteration we figured out the data thing and now each bdr cranks out like over 80 over $60,000 in close one AR every single month so highly efficient and so you just have to Triple click on this data strategy there’s good providers out there now you can hire somebody internally hire somebody on contract AI makes this way way easier but spend the time on this and so we had a system where we took a an entire restaurant database pulled it into our snowflake instance ran a bunch of web scrapers and enrichment tools filled in a bunch of the data that didn’t exist then we would have there was a confidence score on it to let us know if we think the data was accurate or not then we apied into people data labs to pull a mobile phone record and we did all of this stuff which now we use a vendor for called Data Lane who’s incredible and I just can’t stress how important this was you like it’s it don’t bother iring more than one or two bdrs until you figure out this data piece because just the economics won’t make sense and this is a picture of how that impacted Connection rates so the little red purple bar on that top right chart is connect rates and that’s the connect rate of when we use this like upgraded enrichment flow so we originally had a 3% call to connect rate so a rep making 100 calls would talk to three prospects really tough to make that work from from a scale perspective and now it’s hovering around like 14 to 16% DM call it to DMC decision maker connect rate you can definitely scale a team like that data is your superow here spend the time on Prospect data it will make everything Downstream better because if they’re having more customer conversations they get better faster they put up better results you build a culture of winning the economics are good it’s I can’t stress it enough okay so we figured out what a good customer looks like we found the digital footprint we enriched our database like crazy to make our bdrs efficient you can also feed some of that information to the ad platforms less directly impactful but possible now let’s fast forward to 2023 and we’re we feel like the economics of this base pilot team work and we want to scale so how do we scale without rampant inefficiency sort of exploding so going back to this topic of focus less is more we’ll talk about the importance of of single-threaded ownership this is a slightly contrarian take but something I believe in and then we’ll talk about infrastructure I’ve talked about this uh a little bit already we made this mistake at my first startup we had one rep closing a bunch of deals we thought we figured it out and then we hired a bunch of reps and it just wasted our time hiring wasted our time ramping and we ended up having to lay off like 25% of that team and basically burned like six months six months chasing our taals and I I always I say frequently to my team to anybody who will listen to Founders I work with slow as smooth and smooth as fast take on less and go deeper with it and you’ll have more success and this is one other point I’ll say on this less is more because I think is one of the most common mistakes we make you probably don’t need as many reps as you think the way that we the way that we build our growth models the financial model is the sell for the number of deals per quarter is always like reps times quota and you’re like that’s how many deals come out of it but that’s not really how A business works or else you just keep dumping reps into it reps can that math only works when there’s the proper pipeline to make those reps successful and so I would say 80% of the time companies that I work with have a pipeline problem and not a rep capacity problem and and in fact if you just do the calendar test this is something that Sam blond talks a lot about who was a early echosign guy so I’m assuming got it from Jason but just look at your reps calendars and if they don’t have three or four customer facing meetings on their calendar every single day of the week you don’t need more reps and I bet if we all looked at our reps calendars today it’d be like two one to three you have a pipeline problem it seems counterintuitive to have double the number of bdrs to AES but the bdrs are half as expensive and you have a pipeline problem so it’s in my opinion better to just go spend the money on building more opportunity volume for your team than expanding rep head count this is a massively common mistake you’re also better to have less reps and pay more for them in my opinion just get better reps take your you had six allocated only hire four give them more Pipeline and hire better reps pay pay a little bit higher in the market I think that works out pretty nicely we had this experience at owner we paid way above SMB Market I went and got to hire only top 5% president Club performers from all over the place because they’re like wow this is 30 grand more than I’m making today and everybody’s hitting quota this sounds like a sweet deal it’s expensive in quotes but those reps are way more productive and way more impactful for a business than hiring more slightly less qualified reps all right so topic number two under scaling smart I think sales I think single threaded ownership is really smart for SAS companies you’re seeing it more and more and what I mean by this is having your sales leader own post sales and I could do probably like a 20-minute talk on just this on just this issue it’s hard for sales leaders to think beyond the thing that they’re targeted on and paid for and so I’ve seen this multiple times in my own experience when I inherit post sales teams I’m automatically way more interested in making sure those post teams work really those post sales teams work really well and I’m way more concerned about the quality of deals that go from sales to to onboarding or launch we made this decision in October 2023 and we saw an immediate Improvement in Deal quality immediate Improvement in rep responsiveness collaboration it really starts from the manager down if you bring the managers into much closer contact the AE managers and the launch managers or if you’re in a smaller company all of those people being in one one channel at the IC level things just start to resolve themselves because you build a more human connection and people inherently want to take care of each other and this is a great way to to drive that shared objective this also makes the customer problem your sales leaders problem which means there’s no more finger pointing and I think that’s really valuable so I’m a big believer in single threaded ownership make your post sales problems your sales leader problem somehow all right I’m GNA move on from this topic all right so now you’ve got the basics here you’ve got the basics of Economics that makes sense you you’ve got some replicability in your bdr motion or your pipe gen motion now you got to get busy on infrastructure and so the two goats in this picture refer to my director of revops and my director of of enablement there’s like the engine of our business Steve who runs revops has been with me for eight years this is our third stint together which goes to show like my Reliance on him and finding budget for this can be challenging cuz you’re like man this is a big cost to layer on top of like only four reps but you want to have these problems figured out before you hit the gas because those inefficiencies as you add reps just stack and stack so I encourage people to find creative ways to solve this problem so for us it was about hiring these two leaders on contract so they were both from in my network I could do it with a lot of trust and they started doing contract work with us like 10 hours a week then 15 then 20 until the team was big enough and our AR run rate was big enough to afford them without it blowing up CAC and I think this is a smart move if you can find really high quality fractional folks in this area it will make a night and day difference on your team because you want to have a bunch of this stuff figured out before you hit the gas or else it just becomes chaos and so the only takeaway here is likely hire and invest in revops and enablement earlier than you think buy it off the shelf find contract help but try to find a way to do this would be my advice here and these will be two of the most important hires you make for sure okay now we’re going to go into pillar number three we’re fast forwarding to late Q2 2023 we’ve built a bunch of these foundations we’ve got some repeatability we’ve got some good Systems and Technology in place so now I want to talk about how to operate the a team with slightly more scale with rigor and as your team gets bigger and as there’s more managers between you and the team if you’re the founder or the revenue leader things are just going to start to leak and break down because it’s harder to communicate the feedback loop isn’t as tight so you need instruments in the business to make sure that things can move really smoothly so there’s three tools here that I’m going to talk about the monthly business review I’m going to advocate for very tight Performance Management I going to talk about my love for documentation these are very boring topics and Incredibly critical in my opinion and don’t need to be super complicated and if you’re taking advantage of these three things like you’re really getting the paral principle of the high impact stuff and then all the fancy operating rigor Downstream of it is important but if you can do these three things you’ll be in a pretty good spot this is like a screenshot of the MBR template if you guys want this template I’ll publish it I’ll just strip it out in our notion and publish a copy for folks to use each team has a section the manager there’s like a prompt in each section as you can see in the right hand section that the managers of those teams fill out and then the revops team is in charge of supplementing of providing the data and charting for everybody to use so this is a forcing function that happens every single month it’s within four days of the month closing depending on when the month closes to pause and think structurally about your business it’s really hard to get out of the weeds and view things from a a wider scope unless you put this into your calendar and so you spend a few hours on it thinking about operations strategy like inspecting the data really closely and everything gets more clear in in in my time and the prep work is key here so we’re a remote company uh and so asynchronous we strive to be Ayn in a lot but I actually think this is a framework that works for all companies so I’ll give you like a little bit of a framework for prep so one you got to have you got to have your template you can use mine you could use a slim down version depending on on your level of like size and sophistication but just like decide as a group what are the most important questions you want to answer every single month what’s churning in why is it churning what’s the rep performance and what’s the stack rank look like what are just like the key questions questions and as you get bigger and the business is more complex you will over time add more and more to this but sitting down and agreeing to the framework is number one number two revops populates this data for everybody we try to have that done two days before the meeting then the leaders of of each of those teams first or second lines will answer the questions that You’ framed out based on that framework and based on the information repops has published then everybody has like a 60 for me it’s a 90 minute block in the calendar before the MBR to review the deck and all the comments so everybody goes in and reads every other section of this MBR deck it’s a it’s a notion page and then people use comments to ask questions talk about things that they see as opportunities and then what we’re talking about in the MBR meeting because it’s a very expensive meeting you have a bunch of senior leaders everybody has to get on one call we only pull out the most important discussion topics do not read the deck in MBR this is like the old way of doing it revops build a deck they spend 60 Minutes flipping through the deck telling people things you don’t ingest the data as much as as much as you should to make or to have thoughtful discussions in my opinion so this pre prep process where revops populated managers answer questions everybody reviews then pull out the discussion topics that flow will allow you to get uh a lot more insight um and it also makes it so that people who are not as Brave or as extroverted in that synchronous meeting also have a chance to provide thoughtful thoughtful impact thoughtful feedback because they’re doing it asynchronously and again if you want the template actually don’t email me I’ll just send it out I was going to say email me and I’ll send it but I’ll just do a public notion page and you guys can grab it if you want okay so now that we’ve got our MBR process let’s talk about Performance Management this is another really important efficiency driver so this is part of MBR in MBR every function gets a stack rank that looks something like this it could be this is like a simple version but you could have your win rates your close one attainment you could have deal quality as a part of your AE framework this is like an this is a an older one it’s a simple one but it’s important that you have the Rhythm that you’re looking at a stack rank consistently because especially as a small company as any company the cost of mediocre Talent is very high especially in this market because you’re giving them valuable leads salespeople are very expensive and so the and there’s a cultural impact to letting mediocre performers hang around so you have to maintain excellence in order to drive a highly efficient growth so you need to manage a bottom performance pretty consistently even if they’re doing okay if people are only okay but they show up in the bottom of your stack rank you just got to move them out because the talent Market is really good right now for startups there’s a lot of there’s less companies competing for talent so you can probably go replace that person with somebody better and for us it’s like the cost of Entry to being a part of the owner team is Excellence the standard is the highest performance so I’d encourage people to like pretty tightly performance manage it’s uncomfortable to do but you got to find the rigor and doing it dispassionately in this MBR is a good way to do that all right last thing I’m going way too long so documentation is a pillar for scale I love documentation it’s a great way to force really clear thinking for me as a revenue leader and it also publishes all of this information so that people can get answers without a bunch of annoying slacks and questions and slowing people down great documentation will let you onboard folks faster it’s really challenging to find the time to do this but just force yourself to do it put in like a a calendar block for an hour or two hours a week and just make this your documentation time could be how-to guides a training framework could be content to that your reps can give to the market the best the only thing I’ll mention here is my favorite Hack That I Used significantly before I had revops or before I had an enablement team and folks helping I would do one-on-one trainings with reps and and so cold calling so I would go through my cold calling framework I had really crappy notes for it flip through a couple slides and then I would take the recording of that training I would pull out my part of the transcript you can use any transcription tool but pull out my part of the transcript dump it into chat GPT and just say this is the recording from a training exercise turn it into a how-to document turn it into a training guide and your your prompt can be that vague and it will still work you’ll have to do a cleanup but I can I could produce content at probably like 2 to 4X the speed doing this because it’s easy to talk and just like riff especially as a salesperson you’re used to just like talking so you can just riff or I do this on my phone like on the pelaton I’ll just Riff on a topic drop that transcript into chat GPT have it clean it up for me and then that becomes a training training page just find a way to document virtual assistance like whatever just document it’ll it’ll give you some it’ll give you scaling superpowers all right those are the three pillars one more bonus tip for the revenue leaders if you want to make the leap to being like mediocre to great you have to build p&l fluency it’s the like massive missing ingredient for Revenue leaders today you need to be able to focus and and think outside of just your like close one number and Founders need to hire for it and Coach it and if your head of rev doesn’t have have this today you got to find a way to give them exposure to it obviously saster has like a whack load of really good content on this this is how I learned in my early days now there’s way more courses out there that are great Pavilion is the one that I send my folks to revenue architecture school is I have a manager mind in it and he like knows how SAS works now and he like really understands how this thing functions so C School Revenue architecture school Pavilion I would highly recommend those courses and if you’re having frustrating conversations with your Revenue leader and they don’t get it send them down this path they got to be p&l fluent okay that is all I had for Content we learned about how to stay know power of focus some lessons on scaling smart the importance of data infrastructure single my opinions on single threaded ownership and some light Frameworks to operating with Excellence on that growth curve I know that was a crap load of content but Jason before we get hey Jason the others hey thanks for doing this yeah no problem owner is doing well it’s well funded but we are as you highlighted through this we’re in an era of more efficiency so for someone that’s even an outlier how are you thinking are you thinking any differently about quotas comp what percent of the how payment works let me step back maybe I’m rambling are you thinking any differently about sales rep compensation specifically in this environment than in the past any new insights or learnings on compensation yeah so I ratcheted back our sales comp over my sort of 22 months here we just wanted to pay for the best talent we could upfront you’re dropping into a very ambiguous challenging Market in an early stage startup as you build more and more structure comp should match sort of the complexity of that role we’ve got scripts and playbooks and training and people you can learn from now and the product is so proven and so we’re finding more efficiency by rightsizing comp and there’s a lot of I haven’t changed comp significantly in the last six or nine months but we’re thinking about how do we tie the rep to the customer outcome more tying them to the size of the customer through that scoring model I talked about egv the activation rate should probably be a part of that model yeah I I don’t want to over complicate rep comp that’s not what I me no maybe I think it’s always a a question everyone’s fascinated with is comp right maybe a different a more strategic way to think about it is and it goes to your earlier point about and Sam Bond’s point about slightly fewer reps doing better higher performing right do you have higher expectations for attainment for yield for bookings per rep in the current world do you owner has a decent ACV but it’s still selling to smbs right so in the old days we aimed for 3x would be a nice nice place to skate to in the old days an SMB rep really didn’t make much right sometimes they still don’t and we’d hope they’d bring in 3x are you driving that up in any ways or how are you thinking about that that metric in terms of the E efficacy or attainment yeah so I I mentioned in one of the first slides 2024 is really about making the Reps beg for mercy is the joke that I say internally so like how far can we take rep capacity this year and so we’ve been pretty modest in adding AES we’ve basically doubled the bdr team and so I’m actually reworking our growth model as we speak based on new conversion rates and ENT attainment and really trying to find the balance point like seems crazy to have two bdrs for every AE in an SMB business but if your bdrs are generating six to 10 to 12 Clos wind deals cold every single month because we figured out the data piece it’s a compelling product then it’s kind of it might feel weird but it that makes total sense yeah no I want to L other question for what it’s worth I don’t think it’s unusual I think some of it’s Market dependent but actually some of it’s the skill set of the sales team I’ve two for one there was a moment I’m dating myself I don’t know there was a moment where outbound had its Second Coming okay maybe I don’t know 2016 2015 sales acceleration days yeah and then actually a lot of folks did the two to one model because outbound seemed to work for everybody right outbound and now you actually have to be quite good at it yeah for the most part in 2024 but it wasn’t unusual and then I would talk to different leaders that were great like you and they some of them had none some of them it was like you would share an SDR but two to one may sound crazy but I think if you’re good at if you’re truly good at outbound which is harder today like you are two to one’s a great place to skate to yeah right don’t be scared if it’s if it works don’t be scared of it yeah and so we’ve more than doubled per month bookings like aggregate per month bookings and the size of the team has basically stayed constant yeah and that’s because rep productivity has increased through training and the enablement and then better better pipeline going to them we’re trying to automate away as much of the rot sort of manual admin tasks now I gave a shout out to momentum earlier on the call that’s a tool we’re using for it so yeah and and in my model the per rep attainment has gone up the the newly revised model the per rep attainment is gone up in every single segment because we’re seeing it’s possible and and we’re seeing the Reps get better and better and productivity keep keep growing so I’m bullish on it I don’t know what the limits of capacity is we have to find out I thought I knew and the Reps keep keeping up if it if you really can get to a two call close or 1.5 call close and you have a high energy team you can be surprised what the ceiling is and helps have a good product and a compelling problem to solve for sure did you do this type of outbound at Shopify did you learn it on the fly at owner how did you get let’s assume let’s stipulate you’re good at it okay but a lot of folks aren’t and a lot of Founders and VP sales they’re either there was a whole thread on LinkedIn this week about outbound not working from Mark from Outreach right one of 10,000 threads on outbound yeah it doesn’t work but it but but I I don’t quite agree with that and you don’t agree with that either but you don’t disagree with it how did you get good at it did you learn it did you screw it up an owner for the first 12 months what’s the learning what’s that process to get good good at outbound we got good at it at League that was probably the thing we did so my first role in Tech was in soft in the software industry was to run Global bdr for a Enterprise company and so we I think I like 5x per brr output because I eliminated all the like silly activity we got super targeted on ICP I rebuilt I love I come from a boiler room so I think that’s why I’m good at it I come from well that’s a good Insight you come from a boiler room right yeah like my first job I had a phone a stack of paper leads and a pitch book on my desk and emailing was for bad words emailings for like sissies and so that’s how I learned to sell and so I think that’s been with me and in the super structured nature of that cold call that that Boiler Room I people don’t like to be scripted they’re like oh I don’t need to just read off a script I’m not some like phone monkey no scripting is awesome scripting is like the most powerful thing you could do so just thinking about it hey Jeff yeah scripting is I think really critical and the more tightly you can get people onto what we call Golden script the better they’ll perform because then you can smartly AV test what’s working what’s not do you think learnable yeah that’s the last question I’ll have I could spend the whole time on questions on this it’s very in generally speaking there’s always exceptions you started off in a boiler room right and I think so many Revenue leaders I know that are good at outbounds started off door to door in a boiler room with the Yellow Pages generally speaking if Founders are trying to make a bet generally speaking can you learn it late in life learn outbound oh that’s a good question if you’ve grown up and you’ve been great at wherever I would say primarily an inbound model can you learn it as your first VP sales of serero gig or is it almost hopeless I wouldn’t say hopeless but I was saying it’s not very likely if you want to run an out if you want to run an outbound model and you’ve got a VPS sales who is being in 80% inbound models it it because for them to to for that person to really grock outbound you have to do it and I know you’ve talked a lot about VPS of sales not wanting to get in front of customers and they’re afraid to go and Pitch I I’m very strong agreement on that and so they’re not going to pick up the phone and make Cod calls they’re not going to figure it out themselves so I I never say never but I just hired a VPS sales whose first job was door knocking selling solar at Tesla Solar City I like those ones I’m a Believer yeah yeah you’ll like Brad all right let some other questions in thanks for those Insight yeah yeah thanks Jason uh thank you Jason that covered a lot of the questions actually thank you so much great great week this week great content great interaction so thanks everyone for joining and of course a big thank you to Kyle for sharing all thanks for having

How do you build GTM efficiency in SMB sales? The CRO at Owner, Kyle Norton, shares his learnings and strategies for building better efficiency into your GTM motion at Workshop Wednesday, held every Wednesday at 10 a.m. PST.

While this title is SMB-oriented, the advice applies to Mid-Market and Enterprise, too. The three topics we’ll focus on are:

The importance of staying focused and how to say no.
Ways to scale that don’t include rampant inefficiency and burn.
How to build operational excellence into your organization at different stages of the growth curve.

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