Board members as BDRs 🤝
A source of substantial enterprise introductions, the gut-feel-to-data-driven path, and relating an emerging market's unique SaaS story.
Welcome to the 72nd edition of The SaaS Baton. A fortnightly newsletter that brings you hand-curated pieces of advice drawn from the thoughtful founder-to-founder exchanges and interviews taking place on Relay (curated with 💛 at Chargebee for Startups) and the interwebz. So, stay tuned!
In this edition, you’ll find the following instructive and inspiring pickings:
#1: Roam’s founder and CEO, Howard Lerman, advocates for an uncommon yet superbly sensible old-hand addition to the enterprise sales process: setting up focused advisors and board members as BDRs/SDRs.
#2: ScreenCloud’s co-founder, David Hart, marks out the progression (as an org grows) of both the availability of data and the corresponding team habits that can (ideally) follow.
#3: Runa’s founder and CEO, Courtney McColgan, on narrating the incomparable potential and complex scale of a still-unfolding SaaS market in Latin America.
🗞 Recently on Relay:
Heuristics and Hunches (April 28th) — Pivoting from a Promising Idea, Getting to Default Alive, and Building for/Selling to Developers with Onboardbase’s Founder, Dante Lex
— The 2 reasons that informed their pivot
— Why early validation isn’t nearly enough
— The Default Alive goal
— Why founders should be wiser about adopting free tools
— How all roles at Onboardbase begin with mastering security
— Selling to a most discerning persona: engineering leaders
AMAs (upcoming!) — I’m A Smart Bear (Jason Cohen), founder of 2 unicorns, both bootstrapped & funded; bought, sold, and invested in startups. AMA!
#1: Board members as BDRs
(From: Roam’s Howard Lerman) (Source: SaaStr)
I think the whole BDR model is kind of flipped in companies.
Yext had a lot of BDRs. And we’ve raised a lot of salespeople over the years. Probably over our 15-year career, probably 3-4000 people came through our sales system.
One thing I’ve learned particularly in enterprise is that the best BDRs are the most senior people. Because they’re a phone call away. Can easily meet people.
I really think founders ought to think about how to construct their board and the advisors in a way that they can just make them the BDRs, to get going, and to get those high-level contacts.
Because the fact of the matter is a BDR is going to have a really tough time unless they’re super clever [with outreach].
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An advisor channel is the best way to get leads. Because you could find someone amazing and a lot of people are willing to be advisors for stock options in the company.
We worked advisors really hard. We had a board that was able to make high level introductions to executives in various places…A super high-end introduction service.
That’s the first channel that I personally would go after.
In fact, when I started Yext, the very first thing I did…We were selling to gyms and I called the founder and president of IHRSA, which is the trade organization for gyms, which was in 2006 and he sent me a fax back and said, ‘I’m in.’
He’s now 78/80 but I made him an advisor to Yext and he helped us sign up every gym because he was just a phone call away from everybody.
So, go for targeted advisors particularly in certain verticals. It really works well. You want to get into healthcare. Get a healthcare advisor….
Finding these hard-won founder takes valuable? Consider forwarding this edition to an ever-curious teammate or a much-cherished SaaS friend? :)) New readers can sign up here.
#2: The 4 stages of data maturity
(From: ScreenCloud’s David Hart) (Source: Medium)
I recently spoke to a founder about how to approach his company’s data strategy…
My conversation came about because the founder wanted to know what my experience of evolving a company towards a more data-driven mindset consisted of.
Changing the extent of data available to a company is hard, but changing behavior towards using data as a non-negotiable pre-requisite to any decision-making is harder still.
But at least recognising the stages of data maturity is a good start.
Stage 1 — Gut Feel
When you first get started, you don’t really have much in the way of data. And so part of the founder’s magic sauce is their ability to check in with their gut and see what it is telling them.
“Will my customers prefer this feature or that feature? Let me just check what my gut-feeling is on this for an answer”.
Because gut feeling is based on all of your experience to date, it’s not totally crazy to consider it in the absence of data.
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The obvious problem with it is that just because you think something, or even the people you generally hang out with think something, that doesn’t necessarily translate to anything statistically valid.
As they say, ‘the plural of anecdote is not data.’
Stage 2 — Data, data everywhere, but not a drop to drink
To (mis)quote from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, at the second stage of maturity you have a load of data, but the ability to do anything with it is limited. Why? Because it is generally a very manual process to get at it and it’s siloed.
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Possibly you can look at some of this data by customer type (for example size of account, size of business, location etc), but it takes time to go and get the data and manipulate it yourself in a spreadsheet.
This is actually not a terrible thing because as a founder you will get a really good feel for your business’ key metrics, but it won’t be easy to do it at any scale. It will be time consuming and very probably a lot of it will reside in your head, however diligent you think you are at sharing.
Even though creating reports is time consuming and manual, at least you are now able to make data driven decisions. Validating your ideas using data is infinitely better than leaving it to gastrointestinal superstition.
Stage 3 — Central Data Platform
As you grow, you’ll find more people in the company desperate to get hold of data to measure what they are doing.
Each department’s ability to extract and manipulate the data may vary and may just come down to the skills and willingness of particular team-mates to roll their sleeves up and get stuck in. This is where having a central data platform starts to become important.
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Inevitably, to do this you have to pay for your BI tool in the first place: tools like Tableau, Microsoft Power BI and Looker. These aren’t cheap. On top of that, unless you have those skills in-house, you’re likely going to need to find a Data Engineer to get things set up.
As a result, Stage 3 isn’t normally reached until you get to a point where you have enough data and enough different people screaming for answers to data questions, and you can afford the investment in both the software and the expertise to make the data actually work reliably.
Stage 4 — Data as Insight
Once the data is all firing and seems to be accurate, the final stage is when you move to having a Data Analyst on your team whose job it is, firstly to create and manage the various reporting that the business needs.
Ideally this is more about creating reports that can be interrogated by individuals, rather than being on the receiving end of a load of report requests that they have to fulfil.
But secondly, and perhaps this is Data Nirvana, actually use their skills to be able to spot insights in the data.
Along with an agreed set of reports that can be interrogated by anyone in the company, what you really want to end up with is someone who says something like, ‘I’ve been looking at this set of customers and I noticed that if they do x in the first few days after trial, they are ten times more likely to convert.’
Identifying trends like this can give the product marketing team a better sense of what behavior to encourage new trialists towards for success. But it can also inspire the product team to reimagine some of their onboarding.
Related Relay read: David’s AMA with notes on the agency-product transition (and commitment), SaaS metrics that matter, 16 years of co-founding lessons, and more.
#3: Pitching Latin America’s SaaS promise
(From: Runa’s Courtney McColgan) (Source: Latitud)
Particularly in the world of B2B software, Salesforce now is a 20+ year old company. They were one of the first people who were doing marches about how the cloud is coming and that we all need to move to the cloud…
Now, 20 years later, everyone knows what B2B software is and how it works. I think, for me, I have to roll back the clock for them and explain to them what it’s like to be an SMB in Latin America.
…Gusto is a great example because they’re a sister-version of Runa in the states. When you look at stats today, you see that an SMB of 30-40 people uses 100 different softwares day-to-day across all of their different orgs and areas.
When we install a bread-and-butter SMB in Mexico, they use like 2 maybe 3 softwares. And those are Gmail and Microsoft Office. Then maybe running up against a CRM or an accounting software.
We’re not in the levels of 100 softwares.
So I sort of have to bring them back to a time where B2B software was new and what that looks like. But also growing at a much more ridiculously fast rate and one that will supersede what’s happened in the valley.
When we talk about payroll, we maybe one of the early installs for people, as B2B software has like a 20% penetration in Latin America today…but how people use software will be different than the states.
This concept, for example, of embedded payroll where you’re going to be using payroll where it makes sense for you and not on the Runa website. Maybe you’d be using Runa’s software engine inside Mercado Libre….
That’s something that Gusto hasn’t really done yet. Because it sort of is happening now vs when they originally built their software. It’s hard to turn that on tomorrow.
Explaining to them the ecosystem you’re operating in but also the ability to do so much more in that ecosystem than the same company could do in the states.
This is much more exciting opportunity… Because 1) I have little to no competition and 2) there’s a whole another ecosystem here where you can be much more than a Gusto for Latin America; we’ll be bigger than Gusto.
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There’s a great example of Mercado Libre and eBay. Mercado Libre is much bigger than eBay, but I’m sure when they started they were like, ‘we’re building eBay for Latin America.’
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It’s just huge markets. For Runa to be Gusto we need 2.5% of Mexico. Just Mexico. If I want to be an ADP, which is an $80 billion company then we’re talking about, ‘okay, 5% of Latin America.’ Still. That’s nothing.
Most people who’re innovating in their country don’t have the privilege to say there’s a big market out there. That’s one of the beauties here where there’s a uniting language that’s Spanish, that does connect all these different geographies.
Yes, there are differences and I’m the first one to say I can talk all about those. The differences between Peru and Chile and Mexico. There are a lot of similarities too.
But if you create a great model (i.e. Mercado Libre) that works and you become a trusted technology provider, they’ll invest in you, and you can grow.
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Until next time,
Team Relay (Chargebee for Startups)