We’ve been working through the growing pains of reaching that 50+ employee mark. With more people means there are more processes, more meetings, more management, more project management software, more, more, more… with more, it seems less is getting done and if anything, more balls are getting dropped.
An event from my personal life this past week helped provide some perspective for me on the issue. While visiting family our 1 year old son was doing what 1 year olds do best, crawl around like a mad man. Four of us were hanging out, each taking turns keeping an eye on Finn. Kind of a round robin, hot potato type of situation. One task, four capable adults, sounds simple enough.
After not long the shared system of responsibility broke down and the inevitable question of “where’s Finn?” erupted the house into chaos. The kid moved fast, made it to the top of the stair case where he sat teetering on the edge of disaster. Once the momentary scare had subsided and the blame game ended, the question that was in my mind was how did four grown adults totally fail at one simple task.
This is no different than what happens in the work place. Whether it’s business or personal, unless one person is accountable then there is going to be a higher probability of failure. And, if that failure does happen it’s human. All we can do is hopefully learn from the mistakes, improve upon the system and continue to grow.
I’ve started this post with items that we are actively initiating from SaaStr Scale on Thursday August 29th. Excuse typos as working to get this live (Currently in Boston for Hubspot Inbound – Join us for happy hour Thurs).
Adrian Hunter (Justuno VP Sales) and myself.
Examples of SaaStr inspired items: * Justuno is hiring in our rapidly growing Austin office (recently ranked top 10 Austin company environment) – View roles.
* Upcoming Phoenix Launch – Customer Advocacy – Join fellow digital marketers & eCommence merchants as we build the greatest visitor conversion platform (program in the works).
*Shopify Special: Contact our Shopify or Shopify Plus team who can help engineer a special conversion strategy like we have for thousands of other Shopify merchants (in the works).
*Launch and Upgrade with ease. Your time is valuable and we’ve modeled both pricing plans and on boarding support to offer the most frictionless experience. Start collecting emails and increasing sales by the end of today (Including in our sales language).
*Special shout out to all of our retailers. Retail is tough, there are a million moving parts and all eating away at your margin. As former retailers and current business owners ourselves, we understand how easy one can overlook key aspects of your business. Converting just one more customer into a sale that otherwise would have abandoned a cart, this is valuable. Or that visitor who clicked your new facebook ad. Did you capture an email address from that visitor? Our pro services team is your outsources Conversion Rate Optimization experts that if you soy “GO” today, we will be converting more visitors for into both money and email addresses that you can now target for free.
Ok, so what did I learn and either put in motion, launch or highlight in my business.
Always be recruiting. 20% of leadership time should be spend on either interviewing or building up relationships for future hires. You also want to interview a min. of 30 candidates which can be done over time not just when in need. The reminder that continuing to nurture your current professional network as the timing might not be right today, everyones plans change over time. It kinda goes along with the predictable revenue model as well. Constantly be crafting and working on your recruiting plan. Doing a bulk interview of candidates (similar to sending bulk emails) doesn’t lead to the best use of time, resources and results. If you are always recruiting, interview over time, the conversations and relationships are stronger. When your company is ready to hire, the positions will be filled a much higher rate and quality candidates.
Customer advisory board is invaluable for closing current deals and driving in high quality leads (word of mouth). As a company we have to get back to focusing on a customer driven product. With our upcoming platform update (Phoenix), I’m working to make sure we work with our customers to provide feedback along the way. This makes not just a better product, but generates invaluable word of mouth marketing.
Generalized sales person not best route, Ok to have reps specialize. We’ve been experimenting with round robin and this discussion was helpful. I’m very glad that I invited our own VP of Sales Adrian with me and we spent a good amount of time working brainstorming ideas we’ve been having. With the growth of Shopify, it wold make sense that we have a 100% focused Shopify SDR and AE that specialize in talking the Shopify language. Another validating conversation regarding scaling our sales team was with SalesSource CEO Lars Nilsson. While at Cloudera, Lars shifted his sales team from San Francisco to Austin just as Adrian has done with Justuno. When asked for further tips, Lars #1 advice in Austin was to set up shop downtown to attract the best talent.
We as a company need to review with the sales team wheat are the “friction” points during their sales process. What is slowing them down from closing deals. “What is slowing you down or causing you to lose deals? Is there anything you suggest we do to make it easier for you to close deals?”. What’s also interesting about our business is we have some deals we call “The Machine” where customers will sign up and pay the same day without our team talking with anyone. “Marketing, tell me everything about these “Machine Upgrades” and go find me more of this ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). < Literally slack messages that will be going out Tuesday. Today is Labor Day. I am not working.
NPS: Net Promoter score. We’ve heard it many times. Don’t be afraid of the number you see. Many if not most of startups have low scores initially. Jason mentioned that many companies he’s seen become very successful had low NPS scores. NPS can bring the company together on a metric that every department can be a part of in their own individual way.
Other Key Areas: VP level roles: Hire any great VP. There was discussions on which specific role at which time, however if great talent and experience express interest in you and your idea, it’s a good idea to bring them on earlier than planned.
Marketing: Marketing is everything. Without leads your business is nothing. It has alway surprised me how larger organizations invariable seem to have the Sales and Marketing teams at each others throats. When we hired our Marketing and Sales department heads, I made it very clear early on that this was a symbiotic relationship that requires constant interaction. As a self funded company we can’t afford to point the finger when problems arise, we have a culture of working together and it was very validating to hear this similar emphasis from various speakers.
New areas we can improve:
Recruitment: 20% of time should be focused on recruiting
Outbound is still a good investment. Outbound is tough and when you’ve grown up being a 100% inbound generated sales business, it’s very easy to shy back focus to the easy street. We’ve been making huge investments into our outbound in 2019 and hearing from Aaron Ross and Jason Lemke that it does in fact work when the right recipe is in place. Gave both Adrian and I the extra pep talk to keep charging on.
Ok to continue to invest and test multiple marketing channels. All marketing works, just need to know where to focus for your business. This was an interesting one. I’ve been researching a lot around the concept of “Focusing on your Pillars” which has been very helpful in our business (why I started to blog again, my prior days). Testing multiple channels constantly contradicts the invest into the channels that works. We are experimenting with paid which is a new channel for us (as a self funded company we are always seeking the highest ROI channels for inbound). While we won’t lose focus on what works, we are actively testing new paid channels and very interested to see if we can squeeze just enough MRR out of the channel to stomach the low ROI.
Empathy for the plight of your customer. Need to truly understand this. Need more research in this area for marketing.
In Summary: All in all the event was very much worth our time. I also appreciated the rate, it made it a no brainer for me to go. For SaaStr, you should know that several things worked.
I received your email on Sunday (I think), read the email on my phone, saw Aaron was going to be talking PR and thought at very least would inspire me to make a few sales. Give the rate and the chance to further push PR onto my team, I sent my VP of sales a text on a Sunday (note, I do my best to not contact my team on weekend), tens minutes later Adrian simply replies with “Boom”. So, keep the $199 rate and you will get an AOV of $489 out me every time. thought about it, checked schedules with family and logged onto my computer to get the ticket.
Also, imagine if you had run a personalized onsite display ad when any of your paid channel leads has clicked a paid ad or marketing email? Here’s Adrians email Adrian@justuno.com who’s team will help you launch your campaign today. Yes today. No PILOT needed, we have your team converting in an hour.
Where do we look for inspiration? A few companies have recently come across my radar that have helped to inspire me. Shopify Plus, Taxjar and Hotjar which are founder led SaaS companies that have achieved $10M ARR and share eclectic cultures similar to Justuno.
What’s to learn.
Shopify Plus: In 2018 we found a common thread amongst our top tier customers in which they each had their own custom needs which we were accommodating. How were we accommodating? Robbie Hammett who was leading our Customer Success department at the time had been trained since day 1 back in 2012 to do whatever was needed to make the customer happy. This translated six years later to simply put Justuno getting taking advantage of. We were bending over backwards, providing the most incredible customer service but not charging enough for the service. We were giving it away. We stepped back and asked ourselves how do we make this work for both parties… We looked towards the industry and recognized that this was the solution that Shopify had rolled out with their own Shopify Plus. Shopify had finally found a way to allow a shared code base to be customizable and provide flexible solutions, we shared similarities with our platform and recognized value in highly customizable solutions. Part of our DNA has been to say yes to customers as Travis built our platform to allow for outside customization (part of our DNA is to count on others to help provide resources). So, should we stop giving away our customer service and generate a new plan? We wanted to validate our decision and sure enough we found Taxjar who just by chance had just announced a monster $60M raise.
Taxjar:
Validating Plus with Taxjar
We were on the right track? Well, Taxjar had just shifted their entire model around going upstream and selling a “Plus” version of their platform and successfuly closed a $60M PE raise. So, we felt we were onto something.
Co-Founder Ryan Thompson was kind enough to share his further insights and while this was still a new direction for themselves, it was clear this was the call. So, we diverted major resources and in a rapid 3 month period we did what we always do… we doubled down and launched Justuno Plus.
Hotjar:
I had the pleasure of briefly meeting David Darmanin of Hotjar while on visit to San Francisco from his island nation of Malta. Yes, Malta (For those like many not familiar, let me save you from Googling). David helped remind me to get back to the basics of our business which is the pillars of success. You can learn more in his podcast here, but essentially it really gave me a kick in the ass to realign the focus within Justuno.
What happened with Justuno? With new department heads in place, new hires happening weekly, my own selfish lack of focus enjoying my first born son and needing a breather we simply lost focus on our own pillars of success. This only became glarlingly apparent for me personally after hearing David speak on his podcast interview. We had lost focus and was now time for me to do the part that is expected.
Today: Three Pillars have allowed us to continue to grow; our Product, our Customer Service . and the fact that we are Self Funded. Each of these require their own blog post. But what I realized after a deep introspective is that a lot of my own time and department head time was being spent else where. As a company unless we are delivering on our core principles of success we are failing. After a deep dive, we were failing miserably in many areas. I was embarrassed, this was my own fault as a leader and must be fixed. In order to hit $10M ARR, as a company we have to work harder than ever and I’m committed to sharing our adventure. Enjoy.
$10M SaaS ARR with Justuno 