Eddie Reynolds’ Post

When we announced we were shutting down Outbounder and launching an inbound-led outbound firm, the feedback was mixed. There were a lot of questions that I thought I’d answer 1-by-1: 1 - Is outbound really dead? No, outbound is alive and still performing. And while Outbounder was doing just fine, we wanted to pivot because we felt as though inbound-led outbound was the future of our space. If you want to continue hammering out your power dialer, do your thing. 2 - What is inbound-led outbound? Inbound-led outbound is a hybrid of organic marketing and sales development. It’s done by creating demand and capturing it through signals. It’s been around for a while but never had an official name. We put together a guide to explain how it works: https://lnkd.in/gPgaNbFC 3 - Why is it “better” than traditional outbound? When you create your own demand and find high-intent leads, your prospects will make faster decisions, close at a higher win %, and will ultimately generate bigger deals more frequently. 4 - Are SDRs safe? No. Not at all. Despite all the job postings, SDRs are in the worst place we’ve seen for years. At the end of the upcoming quarter, we’ll see more layoffs. The market is saturated and more competitive than ever. SDRs need to start stacking skills now. Otherwise, they will likely not make the cut.

Something that I couldn't get my head round in 2023 throughout the layoffs is RevOps being classed as a cost centre, but I'm seeing a mind shift in the right direction... European SaaS companies sometimes view RevOps as a cost centre, I'm sure this is due to a lack of understanding about its full potential and impact on revenue growth. However, RevOps is indeed a revenue enablement function that can significantly contribute to a company's success. Here are 4 (of many) reasons why I think every business should have a RevOps function: 1. Alignment of revenue-generating teams: RevOps aligns sales, marketing, and customer success teams, ensuring they work towards common goals. This alignment reduces friction between departments, improves communication, and creates a seamless customer journey, ultimately leading to increased revenue and customer satisfaction. 2. Data-driven decision making: RevOps centralises data from various sources and provides actionable insights. This enables leadership to make informed decisions about resource allocation, strategy adjustments, and growth opportunities, resulting in more effective revenue generation. 3. Improved operational efficiency: By streamlining processes, automating repetitive tasks, and optimising the tech stacks, RevOps increases operational efficiency across your revenue-generating teams. This allows sales, marketing, and customer success professionals to focus more on high-value activities that directly impact revenue. 4. Enhanced forecasting and pipeline management: RevOps provides a holistic view of the entire revenue cycle, enabling more accurate forecasting and better pipeline management. This leads to more predictable revenue streams, and the ability to identify and address potential issues before they impact the bottom line. This is why I believe RevOps should be viewed as a revenue enablement function rather than just a cost centre. By implementing a strong RevOps function, businesses can drive growth, improve efficiency, and maximise their revenue potential, no brainer!!

The most expensive mistake in SaaS is building a product that nobody really wants to pay for. The dev hours wasted. The top salespeople leaving. The lost deals. The market share lost to competitors building sellable products. The negative culture that ensues. People feeling deflated. The top performers quitting. You're left with those who just complain. The lasting impact this has on sales and product is massive. If you're a CEO, I'd ask your head of product and head of sales how they're agreeing on sellable features. How sales reps are forwarding usable feedback. How product teams are using this feedback for roadmap decisions. If you see sales consistently losing deals for similar product reasons, or your competitive win rate declining, it means there's a problem. The focus in recent years was on optimizing everything. In 2024, turn your attention to fixing this feedback and prioritization process. Focus on filling market voids with features people are willing to pay for. It will have much more impact on profitability than just cutting costs (software + layoffs).

In his thought-provoking blog post, Jason M. Lemkin from SaaStr writes about the prolonged 'downturn' in SaaS buying and its far-reaching implications, including slowed growth, tougher sales landscapes, heightened competition, and the normalization of layoffs, among other challenges. Navigating through such an environment has been an intense journey for us. Over the past six months, we've undergone significant adaptations, including - refining our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) to enhance fit 🎯 - implementing substantial pricing adjustments 💲 - grappling with outbound strategies 😬 - integrating more proactive prospecting and outreach into our Account Executives' daily routines 🏋♂️ and - closely monitoring metrics like LTV:CAC & ARR:CAC 🔍 We've also had to downsize our team and at times it has been painful. Despite these hurdles our marketing efforts have consistently boosted lead volumes, and our sales team has achieved two consecutive record-breaking months. While there are too many individuals to acknowledge individually, I'd like to give a special shoutout to Roope Rajala, Linda Pinnola and Niklas Sluijter and their respective teams for their impressive contributions.

Layoffs in Tech are slowing down But with the ZIRP mindset gone (thankfully, we can now get back to the basics of running sustainable businesses) as a CS leader we still need to be very focused on driving our companies forward. So, how can CS continue to add value? ✅ First, own your teams revenue targets. CSM’s should be owning their portfolio and the financials around their book of business. As a CS leader, you should be focused on driving these numbers. NRR, Expansions, Renewals are all a company-wide effort but the CS leader should be focused on driving the numbers ✅ Invest in your pipeline processes. A CS team should operate just like their sales counterparts. Having a weekly pipeline review meeting to cover renewals and expansions is critical. Have each CSM commit their deals and tighten up your process. Each deal should have concrete next steps and the right activity to keep it moving ✅ Focus on the cross-sell. For every account spend the time to map out the company and key stakeholders. Are there potential opportunities to have another division use your tool or another team? Dive into your accounts deeper to find cross-sell opportunities ✅ Do you have monthly accounts? Put together a program to convert them to yearly! Yearly customers have a 6.2x lifecycle vs monthly customers A majority of revenue in SaaS comes after the sale. We all know this and it’s still a big opportunity for many CS team to drive forward. What else can CS do to help drive the numbers? Let me know your thoughts 😃 

For the 3rd time in 3 weeks, I saw layoffs—3 different IT consulting firms. The last one happened Tuesday, right before I jumped on a call with an account manager to talk shop. Before the call, I reviewed their website to learn about their BizDev efforts. This is what I saw: 130 Employees 11 Sales representatives 4 Marketers 94 SEO Blogs 4 Unverified Testimonials 0 Case studies 0 Unique positioning statements This is a team throwing people at a problem. They probably started with 2 - 3 SDRs who went through the meat grinder, trying to generate new business, finding minimal success. Then, they probably added more and more bodies, thinking that volume would solve the problem. But those teams have no value to share. If they did, it would be on the website instead of SEO blogs and generic positioning like (literally) “We solve challenges and scale growth.” Those teams have to work harder to close deals. Pressure increases because of higher overhead. That leads to desperate tactics. Prospects see desperation and run, making it harder to close. Everyone loses. As a marketer at one of these firms, you gotta fight for your team: Clarify your positioning, narrow your ICP, review client data, build case studies, verify testimonials, create sales enablement, and thought leadership. All this empowers your sales team, driving success—and protecting everyone's job. If you don't, your team will end up on the chopping block. 

Pipeline = not getting fired It’s Q4 and if you don’t have enough deals to close in the next two months, the best way to avoid the ax is to drive high-quality pipeline for 2025. But you, like every seller in the field, face headwinds: “Our inbound leads have dried up” “My outbound sequences are getting me blocked” “I can’t engage decision-makers” The threat is real and growing. I did a graph of Q1 firing of SaaS sellers 2021 - 2024 mashing up data from Layoffs .fyi, Crunchbase and other sites tracking layoffs. Yes there is a ton of anxiety and selling scared out there, but let’s use the bad trend as a motivator. The good news is that there are sellers out there who are killing it. Even in this economic environment, there are plenty of sellers who are not only getting quality pipeline on the books, they are closing 6 and 7 figure deals. Tomorrow I am going to do a free session teaching the four frameworks that are working for these sellers - right now in the second half of 2024. They are: - Deep account research - How to build a strong Point of View - How to execute disruptive outbound - How to execute discovery like a corporate detective I’ll just say it: pinning your hopes on centrally generated outbound sequences to drive pipeline will continue to fail and is more likely than ever to get you fired. Let’s get you on a better trajectory before January hits. To join the session tomorrow comment ‘frameworks’ below and me or someone on my team will get you the registration details.

🤔 What do you think 2024 bring us in terms of new revenue growth for B2B? 2023 was...no bueno for many companies from a growth and revenue perspective. Selling is really, really challenging particularly for SaaS companies. GTM costs were out of line relative to growth. Layoffs occurred as all of us know, and hiring is super challenging. Today is March 1st - Spring is coming, there is reason for hope. I was born and grew up in the Northeast US and the Spring season represented weird weather days - 40 or more degree temperature swings in consecutive days, one day really warm, the next it could snow. Today's selling (and marketing environment) mirrors Spring. Some companies showing alot of growth potential (anything AI), some companies guiding growth expectations downward for the year (Salesforce, Snowflake). And then the IPO market is heating back up (Reddit). We'll be dissecting these Selling and GTM trends twice today - at 10aET and again at 11aET on LinkedIn Live (see comments). PS Bravado published a very optimistic hiring report for selling in 2024 - which is encouraging! (see comments and photo insert).