Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com. It is, of course, home of the ambitious upstart.
Let me explain what that means. I built Mixergy with the intention of having real entrepreneurs come on here to talk in-depth about how they built their businesses–and I mean really in-depth–so that an audience of entrepreneurs could learn from them, build their companies up and then come back and do interviews.
You can see the quality of the interviews not in me and what I say and what I tell you, but in the people who are in the audience and the people who come back here and talk about how they built their businesses. I think, to me, that is the most significant thing, much more than any other metric I could give you. It’s how many people come back and do interviews after having built a successful company.
And today I’ve got with me a guy who used to listen for years and I’m so proud to have him on here to talk about what he learned from Mixergy interviews and actually more than that how he built up his company. His name is Collin Stewart. He is the founder of Carb. Carb helps companies build their outbound sales teams.
This interview is sponsored by two great companies. The first is Acuity Scheduling. Later on I’ll tell you why if you want to schedule meetings with people and really get them on the phone, you need to check out Acuity Scheduling. And it’s sponsored by GoToWebinar and I’ll tell you later on why you need to use GoToWebinar if you’re doing webinars.
First, Collin, welcome.
Collin: Thank you.
Andrew: Hey, Collin, before we get into your story, there’s a reason why I was a few minutes late. I’m obsessed–here’s what happened. I’m about to do a live in-person interview in San Francisco and I said, “Before I get on stage with these people, I have to check them out.” So, I started doing research. Then I thought, “Research is not enough.”
I found this guy who commented on someone else’s blog. His name is Ryan Ballow. He commented on this company that I’m going to do an interview with. I looked up his phone number and I said, “You had a smart comment. You’re obviously in the industry. Can you tell me a little bit of what I need to understand about this company because otherwise I’m going to go in there like a puts. I want to go in there really strong and create a solid interview.” And he started telling me.
We spent like 20 minutes between text and phone. I finally just thanked him by text and he said something that made me realize that he knew me. I said, “Did you know me before the interview?” He said, “Yeah, I’ve been a long-time Mixergy fan and now I see how you do your interviews and what goes into it.”
Collin: Yeah.
Andrew: So, I thanked him and I’m looking forward to getting to know him better. That’s the kind of obsession I think is important if you’re going to do interviews. I see a lot of guys just have this list of questions that they ask over and over again with no follow up, with no depth, with no nothing because they don’t care about their audience. They just care about getting through the interview, having another thing on iTunes. I can’t get myself to do that.
Collin: I think that’s the one thing that stands out. You can sense, you can feel that genuine interest. I feel it now. When I was watching all your videos, from the early ones with you and the bookshelf in the background–
Andrew: Right.
Collin: To when you get the mic and that whole evolution. You can just tell you get a lot of joy and you actually care, which is rare.
Andrew: Thanks. Good point. I’ve always had like pretty weird mics until this mic and I never cared about it. I never had the best backdrop. I like the books a lot, but you can see here it’s not a beautiful background. I don’t care that much about it. I don’t care that much that this shirt is not the ideal shirt. I do really sweat the details. I appreciate you before we started spending time with both our producer and spending time with me. I’ve gotten to know you a little bit and I’m glad to see how far you’ve come.
The thing that I thought we’d start with before we even get into your business is your grandparents’ business. They were entrepreneurs and they owned a car dealership?
Collin: Yes.
Andrew: I’m so fascinated by car dealerships because it’s the ultimate sales experience.
Collin: Totally.
Andrew: Did you learn anything from knowing they had this car dealership?
Collin: I learned that my mom did not want me to sell cars.
Andrew: Why?
Collin: She had just lived it, watching her dad go through that. I can’t comment too much on that because I think he had sold the business by the time I was self-aware and knew what was going on. But he retired when I was just a kid and actually went into real estate as like a hobby and then won Real Estate Agent of the Year twice in North America.
Andrew: Was he the kind of guy who came across as a great salesman or would I not know it if I saw him?
Collin: It’s hard to say. He was friendly and I think similar to you, he always sort of put his customers first and had a genuine interest in finding him the right whatever it was. I think that’s one thing I sort of picked up from him was that genuine interest was probably the most important part, the sales methodology or the approaches. You earn a lot of graces if you actually genuinely care about the person.
Andrew: I find the same thing with interviews and conversations in general. I sometimes have to take a moment to think about, “What do I really care about with this person?” Or else this just feels awkward. Even Jason Fried, I’ve known him forever. I know he’s going to be great for getting traffic to Mixergy because people know Basecamp and they respect his ideas. But before I had him on, I just had to stop and say, “What am I personally excited to know from him?” Do you do that too as someone in the sales business?
Collin: Yeah. I love learning about–there are so many similarities. There are so many things that are different. One of the best pieces of my job–my background is in sales. Now I get to go into all these different companies selling all these different things. I get to learn about their products. I get to learn about what’s working for them, what’s not working for them. That’s super fascinating to me. Maybe there’s something wrong upstairs, but that’s what really–it’s like an equation. Trying to solve and figure it out is the fun part.
Andrew: There’s some comfort in that, otherwise human interactions seem so random until you try to figure it out and understand a little bit about what drives people. Before you started Carb, you started a company or a product called voltageCRM.
Collin: Yeah.
Andrew: Your eyes are closing. You’re wincing as I say that. Before we get into why that reaction, what led you to start voltageCRM?
Collin: I was basically in sales. I was the guy that you sort of brought in to help get your company from $0 to a couple million dollars and then build a team and then I’d move on. I think what really inspired me or sort of that inciting incident that gave me that deep, deep pain that made me silly enough to think, “I should build that.” I managed lead distribution for [inaudible 00:06:41] for North America. We had about 50 dealers.
Just seeing the pains of trying to move what should be just basic information in between companies and in between sales teams was a huge hassle. I sort of build a little bit manually. I was doing a lot of data entry and I managed to copy and paste some scripts together and automate my job from about eight hours a day to about 20 minutes a day. I got really good at solitaire. Then I almost got fired for playing solitaire.
Andrew: And there was no system? There was no easy CRM for adding stuff in? Couldn’t you just put it into an Excel spreadsheet, export it as CSV and import it into whatever you wanted?
Collin: For sure. This was like 12, 14 years ago. So Salesforce was just sort of becoming popular. We had an old IBM-based system. When you’re trying to do lead distribution with companies like that, basically when I came in, they were print–we had an online lead system. We’d run our searches.
We’d actually print the page in like four copies and then we’d put it into a big stack and then we’d fax it off to the different dealers and then we’d turn around and like manually type it into this Excel spreadsheet. I was like, “Why are we doing all this work?” I think I bought the back software on my own dime because I was like, “I’m not going to go through procurement for a $40 piece of software and I’m tired of walking from my computer to the fax machine. Call me lazy.”
Andrew: So, you just got software that allows your computer to fax for you and that’s what you started to use in place of it. I’m looking at I guess it’s your LinkedIn profile that we pulled this data from. It says that you started Voltage in 2012.
Collin: Yeah, about four years ago.
Andrew: By then, didn’t the software exist already, software that would scrape data, organize it properly.
Collin: I think that was sort of the piece 12-14 years ago, the piece that got me interested or excited about CRM. As Salesforce evolved, it was always a tool for managers to get their dashboards, to get the reports and the data they need. That’s super important data for everything from like hiring to pricing, anything that the management team needs to help the company scale.
But at the end of the day, it’s not a tool for the sales people to help them be better at their jobs. That was the frustrating piece for me having worked at a bunch of different companies. They wanted this data, but it was a battle between, “Hey, we need this data,” and, “As a sales person, I don’t want to put this in. I’d rather be closing. Isn’t my time better spent closing deals than typing into a spreadsheet or typing into a CRM system?”
Andrew: I see.
Collin: You can argue that you setup any of this in Salesforce. It absolutely was the case 12 years ago. I think that was just the frustrating piece for a salesperson. It was really challenging to actually get your job done. It was more of an admit workload.
Andrew: That’s part of Aaron Ross,’ the author “Predictable Revenue,” that’s part of his philosophy that sales people shouldn’t be doing this stuff. They should be spending time on higher value work. Did you read his book or know his work as you were getting started?
Collin: No, actually. I read his book very early into starting Voltage, fortunately. We were joking the other day. I bought it when he had some promotion on Amazon. I think I paid $1 for the eBook, for the Kindle version. He’s like, “It’s the best dollar you ever spent.” Absolutely. I didn’t know Aaron at all. I read the book. The whole book is about cold emailing. I thought, “It would be rude if I didn’t cold email this guy.” So, I shot him a quick question and he got back to me right away and I kept doing it as we were building voltage. When I’m stuck on something, I’d shoot him an email.
Andrew: What’s in it for him? I’ve heard a lot of people say, “I reached to someone I admired and they helped me out.” I’m wondering what’s in it for Aaron? Why would he want to help you and add to his email workload?
Collin: I think just people that love the solution, love what they do, love problems, challenges and love being helpful. I think that’s inherent in most people.
Andrew: Okay. So, why did you wince when I brought up the company? You came with a–let’s not say great yet–with a really good idea. You created the software. What made you wince about it?
Collin: I think that’s exactly what made me wince is that we had a ton of great ideas and maybe I didn’t watch enough of your videos. I should have spent some more time on the product development and customer development and understanding that. At the time, I watched a bunch of videos, but I was new to product management. I was new to engineering. I was learning to code, but not doing a phenomenal job with any of them. My background is in sales, so I was using that.
What made me wince was we had all these great, interesting ideas that people would say, “That sounds really smart. That sounds really cool.” At the end of the day, we spent 18 months on Voltage and we had one customer and we were making $20,000 a year, I think.
Andrew: I see.
Collin: That was Canadian too. That’s like $12 a year now.
Andrew: All right. So, what did you end up doing with the business?
Collin: We had read Aaron’s book. He helped us get good at it. We built a bit of a team and by team I mean intern. We had an intern. We had a bit of a team in India that we had sort of outsourced a few things too.
Andrew: This was all for one client?
Collin: We were doing it for ourselves as Voltage. When we sort of were realizing that, “Hey, maybe we’re not doing things right. I’m tired of working really, really hard and constantly running into a break wall.” Maybe we should bring our heads up and see if there’s maybe something we should be doing differently. We kind of took a step back and said maybe this isn’t like constant failure and we need to persist. This is actual market feedback that, “What you’re building isn’t valuable enough for me to pull out my credit card.”
Andrew: Let me see if I understand this. You had one customer paying you about $20,000 Canadian dollars, $12 US. That’s what you were hiring all these interns and people overseas for or were you also doing something else in addition for yourselves?
Collin: No. That was about it, actually.
Andrew: Just for that one customer and what did you do for that one customer?
Collin: We had built a CRM system and we were trying to iterate on different ideas, but we sort of ended up being their custom dev shop for CRM. They were really great about it. They were super helpful. We thought they were kind of our first customer and we thought, “We landed this one. The next five will be super easy.” The next five didn’t come. Actually, they came but they all had different requirements from the first one.
Andrew: I see. That is the problem with talking to customers and then building for one person, that it ended up being so perfect or so good for this one person, but not really relevant to the others. Okay.
You did tell our producer that one of the things that you did early on was you eventually sat down, watched Mixergy interviews on how to talk to customers, how to learn from them. How did that change–actually, before we see what you did different based on that, looking back on you talking to one customer and then trying to sell to others, what was the problem with it? How would you have done things differently?
Collin: I think a part was a little bit of inexperience, maybe some happy ears and rose colored glasses. At the end of the day, what worked for us the second time around when we did those interviews wasn’t just a pure, “Let’s ask some questions and discover the pain.” At the end of it was, “Give me some money.”
Andrew: Ah, I see. You started doing interviews. When you found a pain, you said, “We think this software could solve it because…” And if they said, “Yes, I’m excited,” you said, “Okay, it will cost you this much,” and only when they paid did you consider that valid feedback.
Collin: Yeah. After the whole voltage experience, my promise to our engineers was before you guys write another line of code that nobody’s going to use or pay for, I’ll have five paying customers.
Andrew: Interesting. How did you get people to talk to?
Collin: I think a lot of that was the local network. I was part of Launch Academy, which is like a coworking space up in Vancouver. I was doing cold outreach using predictable revenue. I was reaching out to people. I’ve been banned from almost all social media at least a couple of times. I reached out on LinkedIn. I reached out over Twitter. I reached out over Facebook. I’ve been banned from all of them multiple times for doing it wrong.
Andrew: For just going on Facebook and saying, “Hey, I’m starting this new company. Can I chat with you?”
Collin: Yeah. When you do that once or twice, it’s cool. When you do it like 200 times in a morning, they think you’re a bot and they block your account.
Andrew: And this is genuinely what you would do. It’s not at all an exaggeration to say that you emailed 100 to 200 times on Facebook?
Collin: Yeah. I think LinkedIn was the biggest one. I had my process wrong. I’d build a list of people on LinkedIn that felt like were smart people to reach out to that sort of fit my criteria. I’d open like a million tabs and then I’d go through that I’d have my template I’d wanted to send them. I’d hit the connect and in that little–this is back before LinkedIn changed things around, we used to get that little text you put in as a message. So, I’d paste in my message and customize it a bit. When they shut me down, I think I had sent like 1,100 of the course of maybe a week, maybe a couple of days. I can’t remember.
Andrew: You know, Collin, you’re just answering the question that I walked in here with which is I’m talking to some entrepreneurs who are going through this process, they can’t get enough people to talk to. Now my lesson, my take away from you is they’re not trying enough. They’re not trying to reach out to enough people. A dozen people is not enough, even a few dozen people is not enough. It’s hundreds that you reached out to.
Collin: Yeah.
Andrew: So, if you sent out 1,100, did you get one response, ten responses? What’s the hit rate on that?
Collin: I can’t remember the exact hit rate? I worked with a couple of local entrepreneurs recently. They’re getting anywhere from like 10% to 25% responses. They’re crafting them a little bit better than I was and they’re personalizing them. They add them first and then wait until they accept the connection. So, they’re spending a bit more time than I was.
Andrew: Okay.
Collin: I guess what I had to compare to was a phone book. I started at sales jobs but they’re like, “Here’s the book of businesses on your desk. Go. Start with A and call me when you get to Z.”
Andrew: Did you find one approach that worked better for getting people on the phone? I’m spending a lot of time on this for a simple reason. We talk in a broad sense about how before you build a new product, you should talk to potential customers. We understand why that works.
And then someone will go and start making those calls or start sending out those emails and get no responses. And this whole thing that’s so brilliant that happens after you get on a phone with someone just never gets started because you can’t get on the phone with someone. So, did you find anything that especially worked well for getting on a call?
Collin: You know what? It’s funny. There’s no magic bullet. I don’t think the one thing that worked or me was the social media. It was that I was at every sales event in Vancouver. We were based in Vancouver at the time. I was at every event in Vancouver. I was at every tech, every startup, every sales event.
I was reacting out to like VPs of sales, so, right in our target profile and asking them a question, trying to connect with them. My friends that were sales people, I was asking them for intros to their bosses. It wasn’t just one thing. I did everything. I spend my entire day annoying everybody in Vancouver that was in sales to just help me answer some questions.
Andrew: What are some of the questions that you asked?
Collin: At the time, I can’t remember exactly what it was. But we were trying to do some fancy stuff around forecasting. But the initial ask was, “Can I buy you a cup of coffee and ask you a few questions around sales and sales forecasting. I want to learn about your process and what’s painful?
Andrew: What did you learn from that?
Collin: We learned that I think what I learned as an entrepreneur is just because something is interesting and a great thought experiment doesn’t mean people are going to pay for it.
Andrew: Do you remember one thing that was interesting as a thought experiment but when it came to actually handing over the money, people balked?
Collin: Yeah. We were trying to do–do you know Infer, the company?
Andrew: Not well.
Collin: They do opportunity scoring. We were trying to do something similar with machine learning and basically looking at the patterns of activity in your CRM and using those to forecast your future revenue. I could tell half of everybody that’s listening now is just asleep. But for sales geeks, it was exciting and interesting and everybody that I talked to was like, “Man, that sounds so cool. You should definitely do that.”
And then at the end of the day–I was never asking, “How much is this worth to you? How much would you pay for this?” I wish I would have. A, it turned out to be a huge problem that we didn’t have a solid grasp on and B, everybody had that I was talking when I came back to that question, I was like, “Would you give me $100,000 a year?” It’s like, “No way.” It’s like, “Would you give me $50,000?” They’re like, “No.”
We’d get down to, “Would you give me $49 a month?” I can’t build a business on maybe $49 a month. The scope and scale of what we wanted to do, the numbers just didn’t make sense. The value wasn’t there for the target customers. Even though it was a really interesting idea, everybody loved talking about it, that was about it. That was about it.
Andrew: All right. I want to come back and ask what they were willing to pay money for, but quickly I have to tell everyone about my sponsor, which is Acuity Scheduling.
Here’s the deal. When you send out this number of emails, you can’t send out a specific time to talk to every one of these people. You can’t say, “All right. Email number one, are you free on Monday at 9:00? Email two–are you free Monday at 10:00?” It will just not work. It’s too confusing. The alternative of saying, “Hey, can I chat with you?” And then having them saying yes and then saying, “How about Monday at 9:00?” You’re busy. “How about Monday at 10:00?” You’re busy then. That doesn’t work either.
This is a common problem when people want to get their clients or potential clients on the phone. The solution is software called Acuity Scheduling. We use it here at Mixergy. I’ve had an account for years. The thing that Acuity does is it connects with your calendar and then it lets you mark off, “Here are the times I’m available.”
It gives you a simple URL that you can give to everyone you want to chat with that says, “I want to learn from you. I want to help you out,” whatever your offer is, “If you’re free, pick any time from my calendar and let’s talk. And they get to pick the time from your calendar on Acuity Scheduling based on their availability.
In addition to it, you get to ask them a few things that will help make the call easier, like, “What’s your phone number? What’s your Skype name?” You might want to even ask them a couple of things about their business if it’s helpful for you to know in preparation. How about your website or your LinkedIn profile. Whatever your questions are, you could add it in.
One of the beauties of this is that immediately after they create their event on your calendar, as soon as they pick their time, it goes on your calendar, but also it goes on your calendar, which means they’re not going to forget. Then their calendar starts bugging them and reminding them, “Here’s what you got to go.” And you can also tell Acuity, “Send this person an email about an hour before so we know that we’re both on the same page and are ready to roll.
It’s little features like that that make Acuity so good. Once you’re ready to go complicated, like maybe you have five sales people as you grow, the software will grow with you. It will allow you to combine all five people’s calendars in your calendar so your customer can say, “I want to talk to someone. I don’t care which one. I want to talk to someone at the company.” They can pick a time and whoever happens to have that availability, whichever sales person has that on their calendar, that person gets to have the call.
It’s beautiful. It works really well. I’ve tried lots of different software. There’s a reason why we’re shifting everything to Acuity. It’s because it not only has all these features, it makes it really for my team to adjust them and play with them and I don’t have to create a bunch of how to articles.
It just works and their tech support team is there when we have any questions. If you want to try this out, not just for talking to potential customers, maybe talking to every new customer. Maybe you welcome them and saying, “Thanks for buying. Here’s a link to my calendar. We should chat.” Whatever it is you want to do, if you want to talk to people. This is an easy way to schedule with them.
Here is an incredible offer from Acuity. It you go to AcuityScheduling.com/Mixergy, they’re going to give you 45 days–let me make sure that’s still up. AcuityScheduling.com–such a good deal that I can see they might take it away. Yeah, 45 days free. The reason its’ such a good deal is if you’re just experimenting, you could do your whole sales process or your whole customer development process within 45 days and cancel with Acuity and walk away a happy person. They give you that kind of trial period. It’s because they know that if you need them you’ll love them and you’ll want to sign up and stay with them.
Thank you Acuity Scheduling for sponsoring. Check out AcuityScheduling.com/Mixergy if you want to sign up.
So, Colin, you’re making all these phone calls to people and eventually people are saying yes to paying for something. What’s that something they started getting excited about?
Collin: Yeah. I think the piece that we started doing is we were talking about helping the customer development that we wanted to understand was our companies having a tough time implementing predictable revenue. That was sort of the question that really started the whole company.
Andrew: Meaning here’s this great book written by a guy who helped Salesforce grow, written specifically for the kinds of people who would be using a CRM or anything you’re thinking of building. What trouble are they having implementing this?
Collin: Yeah. Is it super easy? We struggled a bit and we were spending a good deal of our time on it and we had some help. We had the author of the book answer our emails, which is an advantage that not a lot of people had which was very helpful and I’m very thankful. The question as are other companies having these same struggles? I think the follow-on to that is, is there a product that doesn’t exist that should exist?
So, our sort of experiment with companies was do you guys need help with this? Are you currently doing it? Have you implemented it? We got a whole lot of, “Not really. We read the book but we haven’t gotten any results out of it.” So, that is where we sensed like, “Hey, there might be something here.”
But we definitely didn’t have any clarity on, “Here’s what we’re going to build.” It was just, “It sounds like there may be some pain. Let’s follow this down the rabbit hole and see where it leads us.” So, that first offer they said yes to was, “If I were to solve that pain for you and just do it all for you for $500, are you in?”
Andrew: What does it mean to do it all for them in relation to this book?
Collin: So, everything from building the initial list of email contacts to crafting the messaging, figuring out who we should be reaching out to, sending the emails, sending the follow-ups and booking the meetings for the company.
Andrew: I see, all that stuff the non-sales person should be doing to maximize the time and power of the sales person. I see. You were willing to take all of that on? Why not say, “What’s your hardest part finding leads and then I can build into the rest?”
Collin: We couldn’t get a clear answer and I really wanted to understand where’s the pain. So, figured what better way to understand where our customers are feeling pain than just do it myself. So, for a month working just crazy hours, I did everything manual. There was no magic.
Andrew: For five customers?
Collin: So, my goal was five. I talked to five companies. This is how much pain there was, at least at the time. Out of five customers, two of them, while we were in the meeting picked up the phone like, “Hang on a sec.” They called their buddy Jim and they’re like “Dude, I found this guy. He’s an idiot. He’s going to do this for $500. Are you in?” “Yeah, done.” So, out of five we got seven.
Andrew: Out of five you got seven meaning they referred you to–
Collin: Yeah.
Andrew: Really?
Collin: They called and closed like a friend of their customer’s. They recognized we weren’t trying to make money on the $500. I just wanted to see if somebody would give me $500 to do something. At that time, I was basically a full time SDR for seven companies for $500, which is just such a stupid deal. I wasn’t sleeping that much. I didn’t see anybody outside of my computer.
Andrew: Their pain was they had good sales people but they didn’t have the right people to talk to.
Collin: They didn’t have enough meetings.
Andrew: That’s the big pain. I understand that would be a pain for a lot of sales people. Okay. So, now you’ve taken on this big project. How do you implement this? How do you actually create this?
Collin: How did that month go?
Andrew: Yeah. How do you now start looking for so many leads? How do you start sending emails? How do you keep track of how many people are responding? This whole thing you described earlier–how do you do it?
Collin: It was all manual at the time. So, we had a script that ran out of Google Sheets. We built like a mini sort of–I wouldn’t call it a CRM, but like contact sort of database in a bunch of Google Sheets that were all… I’m making it sound a whole lot more fancy than it actually is. It was basically just a bunch of Google Sheets I was copying and pasting.
Andrew: Google spreadsheets–you wrote a script that would go online, get the data you needed and put it in a spreadsheet.
Collin: The sourcing contacts–we had a team in India and I was doing some manual contact sourcing for some of them.
Andrew: The team in India was Googling, finding a name, adding it to the spreadsheet?
Collin: Yeah, I basically taught them the process. It was like search for a company name, then CEO and then you’d find the guy’s name and then you’d put his name in quotes and then you’d search for first name-dot-last name @CompanyDomain.com. That had like a 27-step procedure on, “This is how you find an email address.” I taught them that and worked with them to nail that.
I had done that for Voltage when we were building the first company. So, fortunately they all knew how to do that. For me, the trick was not just finding the emails, but finding the right people to email. We didn’t realize it at the time, but it’s part of Aaron’s new book is nailing that niche.
You can send any 500 emails an email template. It doesn’t really matter the responses you get if you’re not emailing the right people in the first place. If we’re trying to sell CRM to farmers in Nebraska, you’re probably not going to get fantastic response rates. You’re probably not going to close any deals. But really helping those companies to understand where are we a need to have versus a nice to have.
Andrew: This is like where your clients are, the seven people, what are their need to haves? Got it.
Collin: Right. And then building that list of companies. I was doing that manually and then I’d send that list of companies off to our team in India in a Google spreadsheet. Actually, I think we were using Excel at that point. It was just a nightmare. I prefer not to talk about it. It’s sad.
Andrew: That is a nightmare. It’s the hard work that most people would never want to do because they would say, “Who am I, a sucker to do all this for free? Forget it.”
Collin: Not free but a phenomenal deal.
Andrew: Right. Essentially you’re losing money on this with this whole team in India, aren’t you?
Collin: Probably. I covered their costs. That was about it.
Andrew: It’s not a profitable thing, but you do learn. Before I move on to what you learned about this, I’m curious about how you kept track of the follow-ups. I guess you can use Google spreadsheets. If they respond, you have to go back to the Google spreadsheet, create a column where you’re keeping track of the responses and then put an x in that column. Is that it?
Collin: So, that was one. That’s what we started with. Then we got into the fancier stuff. I had a couple of scripts that would basically export–so, as soon as I sent an initial email, I had a label in there that would search for the email template and then apply a label that says, hey, they received the first email and the same with all the following emails.
So, when I was going, “Oh, I need to do my first follow ups.” I go into Gmail and I’d export the entire inbox and a script that would cut it down and just pull out the label I needed and then I’d throw those people into another Google sheet and then I had a mail merge script in Google Sheets that would run that and send out all those follow ups. So, it was a lot of cutting and pasting and running a script here and hoping it didn’t fail.
Andrew: Who wrote all these scripts?
Collin: The kind people at Stack Overflow. I copied and pasted most of them. There were a lot of people at the coworking space that helped me out. My cofounder, Preston, he helped me out a lot too. He’s like, “Why are you using that language?” I’m like, “I don’t know. I found it on Stack Overflow. It seems to work, but it’s doing this one thing wrong.” He’s just like shaking his head. I’m like, “If you want to code…” “No, no, no. This is what we agreed on.”
Andrew: Meaning we’re not coding anything.
Collin: We’re not coding anything until we have five paying customers.
Andrew: Got it. So, I have to just say that Stack Overflow is an incredible resource. I’ve never heard of anyone using it the way that you have. But it’s so good for saying, “I have this problem. How do I solve it?” and someone is going to basically solve it for you just to get points on Stack Overflow.
Collin: Yeah. Everything that we were trying to do had basically been solved in one way or the other. I think the unique thing that we brought was just a system that put them all together and aligned them to this process.
Andrew: Okay. So, now you’ve got these clients. You did it just so you can figure out what part of this process was really tough, what did you discover?
Collin: That it was really tough. Lots of companies had read the book and wanted to produce the results, but there was a bit of a gap, whether it was a skills gap, a knowledge gap, a trust gap or it was just time they didn’t have, there was a reason why they hadn’t done it right. There was a lot of pain there because a lot of companies, this could be a big lever for them. If you could help them build a channel–inbound is awesome.
We’re not very dogmatic about, “It’s inbound versus outbound,” or anything like that. It’s just another channel. It’s another tool in the toolkit to help you find new customers. It was a really helpful thing for companies that we could use to help them grow.
Andrew: Actually, I’m not following. I have to be honest. What is the toughest part? It seems like everything is the toughest part.
Collin: Yeah. I don’t think we nailed it down on one particular piece right away. We learned that was this huge gap between, “I’ve read the book and I have a team that’s up and running and actually producing consistent results.” There wasn’t one thing and still when we work with customers now, there isn’t that one thing, it’s a variety of things, from, “I’ve got a new team. I don’t know where to get the good data. All that sort of stuff.”
Andrew: Okay. So, you basically discovered it is this whole thing. This is a whole problem we are going to start fixing it. Okay. By the way, our connection is starting to fade–there it is. So, when you’re talking to all these customers, doing the work for them and realizing the problem is really massive, where do you even get started creating a solution?
Collin: Yeah. I think where we started was the biggest pain for me at the time, which was it’s an absolute nightmare to send all these emails. I was staying up until the wee hours of the morning and we were trying to run a complex process involving scripts and things when you’re not an engineer that’s used to doing that all time. Maybe engineers aren’t used to doing that all the time. To me it was something new. There was like human error that was coming in.
So, I was like, “Preston, I need help solving this problem.” It was like sending the initial emails and sending the follow-ups. It’ was the biggest backlog. It wasn’t a conscious decision of , “He, this could be a product.” It was if we want to continue this experiment without killing me, it’s kind of the people that we need to build first.
Andrew: Okay. So, there’s a cofounder now in the mix. I didn’t get to talk about how you found him. How did you end up with a cofounder?
Collin: So, I had one at first with Voltage, a great guy, we’re still buddies. But he just had made a decision that startup life wasn’t for him. He came to me one day and said, “I’m moving to Guatemala to open a yoga studio with my girlfriend.” I was like, “Cool.”
That was a shock at the time. It was really challenging to deal with, but he was awesome about it. It was what was in his heart, what he wanted to do. If I tried to keep him around, it wouldn’t have been the right decisions. So, he was great about the transition. He helped me sort of get everything taken care of and fix all the bugs and make sure the customer was okay.
After he left, I had a support network at the coworking space at Launch Academy, which was really helpful. I decided screw it, I’ll get back to Code Academy, I’ll learn to code again. Not that my team–if they see this, they’ll laugh–not that they’d ever let me have access to their code base or push anything.
But I did go back into learning Ruby. I was going to all the Ruby on Rails meetups around town with the idea that I’ve got to learn this so I may as well connect with people that can help. I wasn’t going there to meet people, but I had the idea in my head that I was going to keep my eyes open that if there was someone who fit the profile, I might have that conversation.
Andrew: Okay.
Collin: I went out to this meetup out in Abbotsford, which for me at that time, was an hour bus ride or sky train and bus to my parents’ house. I borrowed my dad’s car and then it was an hour drive out to the valley to get to this meetup. There were like six or seven people there. This guy who sat in front of me, we were talking and I’m like, “Oh yeah, this is happening. I’m getting this sort of failure.” He’s like, “Look for a file called this, a model that says this, you’re going to see something like that.”
I’m like, “Are you debugging my code without looking at my screen?” He didn’t even bring his computer. He’s like, “Yeah.” He knew it so well. So, at the end of the day, he had helped me a lot. [Inaudible 00:38:22] engineering and programming. He kind of figured out that I didn’t know shit. He said to me, “Tell me why you’re trying to learn to code.”
So, I told him about the company and Adam moving to Guatemala. We exchanged information and by the time I got home, there was email in my inbox. It was like the 34 reasons why I think we should work together and would make a good team.
Andrew: Wow. What do you think he saw in you? You obviously weren’t as god a coder as he was.
Collin: I wasn’t as good a coder as anybody. We had a customer, we had revenue. So, I wasn’t just talking about it. I had gone out and done it. Even though it was not the customer that was going to get us there, I think it might have been a signal that this guy is either lucky or a hustler or connected enough to find somebody to pay him some money.
Andrew: I see.
Collin: Which I think made it interesting.
Andrew: That is very compelling as a cofounder to go into a business where there’s some validation, some customer love. All right. So, he’s starting to code up the toughest part for you, which is sending out email. Do you continue to do the rest of the work yourself or you as a team continue to do it manually?
Collin: At that point [inaudible 00:39:40]. He had done a summer with us and then he went back to school.
Andrew: I’m sorry to interrupt. The connection is so bad right now that it’s really hard to get everything you’re saying. Do you happen to have anything in the background that might be downloading or uploading? I’ll tell you what–I really care so much about this idea. I don’t care about the design. I don’t care about anything else. I just care about what you’re saying.
So, let me do this. I’m going to do a quick message and if we can’t clear it up, I’ll do audio only and I’ll call your phone number and record that. I just have to understand how you did this because I love this process you went through.
While you’re doing that, I’ll tell people that my sponsor is a company called GoToWebinar. Sorry? Okay. My sponsor is a company called GoToWebinar. I forgot what I was going to say about GoToWebinar. I forgot what they asked me to say when they paid me to talk about GoToWebinar.
So, I just typed in GoToWebinar into my Gmail. I ended up with not dozens, but hundreds of emails that included the phrase GoToWebinar. The reason for that is so many different kinds of people use GoToWebinar. I saw people who were using GoToWebinar to create webinars that taught and then on the back end or at the end of the webinars, sold.
I saw people who were using GoToWebinar in my inbox as a way of talking to their customers. I bought something and they said, “Hey, we want to teach you how to use this thing. We have this weekly GoToWebinar. Here’s a link to go see it.” I saw people who just wanted to do short, small conversations and decided to use GoToWebinar as opposed to Skype and now you can say why.
So many good uses for GoToWebinar. The reason for it is that GoToWebinar is incredibly reliable. The quality is so good that you can see why businesses, tens of thousands of them, spend money on GoToWebinar. They want something that’s rock solid and just works.
It works mobiley too. So, if you have a GoToWebinar webinar and someone wants to join and they’re away from the office in a coffee shop. Maybe they’re driving. I don’t know that GoToWebinar would recommend it, but still, people want to listen in. They could with GoToWebinar.
It’s easy to use. And it’s easy to use. Even if they’re not computer savvy, they’re going to be able to join your webinar if you use GoToWebinar. So many people use them. It’s a really good way to welcome new customers and introduce them to your product and to go out there and find new customers by doing an educational webinar and having people also learn how they can buy from you.
If you haven’t get tried GoToWebinar, go–here it is–I was going to say go to GoToWebinar.com. But I should be clear and say visit the site is GoToWebinar.com. There is unfortunately no special code to tell them that you came from me, which is really sad for me because I’d love to have them as a lifelong sponsor, but I don’t know how they’re going to see that I’m actually delivering new customers to them. So, if there’s a place and you remember to, please say that you heard it on Mixergy.
But regardless of my credit, I know you’re going to love GoToWebinar. All I care about is that you try them and you’re happy with them. So, checkout GoToWebinar.com.
So, it looks like our connection is good. Before I took the sponsorship break, I asked you did you continue doing the rest of this manually after you guys coded up a solution for sending out email?
Collin: Yeah. That was sort of our approach was we’re going to feel all the pain of doing this from start to finish and see what hurts the most and building a product to solve our own pain and at the same time try to validate, “is this a pain unique to us, unique to prospecting or is this something shared by everybody?
Andrew: I see. So, your thinking is, “I want to do all the work involved in getting the potential customer to the sales person and I’m going to keep feeling the pain and automating what’s important and understanding what’s not important by checking in with other people.” How did you check in with other people to validate that the pain was just you and that it worked, an important piece of the puzzle?
Collin: Yeah. That’s something we’re still getting better at. But honestly it was sitting down with VPs of sales, sitting down with prospect teams, watching them actually prospect, sitting in their offices, talking to them about, “Hey, are you figuring out how the entire team was compensated? What’s the structure? What does that looks like? What are the pains there?” Diving deep into why is this really important for the business to solve.
Andrew: This is after you had customers, you’d still go into people’s offices and watch how they’d work?
Collin: Yeah, for sure. One of the funny things that we had a chance to do is on Aaron’s consulting side of things, I get to see into the inside of a bunch of different companies. We’ll actually sit down with a prospect and plug their laptop into a projector in front of the whole team and say, “Walk me through your process.”
One of the interesting things that we’ve seen is that everybody’s got a different process. Even though they have the sales playbook that says step one, step two, step three all the way through A to Z, everybody still–the implementation or the interpretation of that sales process is slightly different with every sales rep.
Andrew: This is Aaron, the author of “Predictable Revenue.” How is he getting people to plug their laptops into a projector and show their whole screen and show how they’re selling?
Collin: So, in that context, that would be like a consulting engagement where we’re helping them build the team and trying to understand what they were doing.
Andrew: I see. And if you’re going in to help them, you have to understand what they’re doing right now so that you can help them and in the process, you’re also informing, you’re also learning for yourselves how to improve the software itself.
Collin: Yeah. We were doing that before we were working with Aaron. We were sitting down just watching people do it to see is this something that they enjoy, is this something that’s easy for them or are they sitting there mashing the keyboard?
Andrew: Do you have one specific person in mind that you would walk into their office, sit down for a day and watch how they did their prospecting?
Collin: Like one person I did that for?
Andrew: Can you think of one specific person and walk me through how you found that person, whether it was awkward when you first walked into their office and started looking at their computer screen? What was the pretext for looking at their screens as they worked?
Collin: Sure. So, obviously I didn’t just walk into an office and sit down next to somebody. I emailed them first. I emailed their VP of sales and said, “We’re trying to understand–have you guys read Predictable Revenue? Have you implemented it?” sort of tried to qualify them ahead of time with like, “Where are you guys at with Predictable Revenue?”
When we found ones that had pain that say, “I’ve read it but I haven’t implemented it,” coming in and saying, “Hey, would you mind if we come in and ask a couple of questions, see how you guys work and as a thank you, maybe I can teach you something because I’m crazy and I’m doing it for seven companies right now. Maybe there’s something I can share that can have a little value.”
Andrew: I see. I kind of feel like if not for that last part that starts with, “As a way of saying thank you, I’ll teach you,” that you might come across as a weird who just wants to spy on people or waste their time and there’s nothing it for them, but by saying, “And by the way, I will also show you all this,” you’re giving them enough of an incentive to let you win and risk potentially having their secret information leaked.
Collin: Yeah. We weren’t recording anything. It was just kind of pen and paper. We wanted to come in and just really understand the pain.
Andrew: Okay.
Collin: I think what got us in the door wasn’t any magic template. It was the fact that there was so much pain with trying to implement predictable revenue that companies, there was this frustration between, “I’ve written the book. I hear company XYZ is doing this and they’re growing like crazy. Why can’t I do it?”
That’s really frustrating to people. That was sort of the spark that kept us going through everything, that there was this frustration. There was a group of potential customers for us that didn’t know how to implement it and they were frustrated. There was this big delta between their reality and their expectations.
Andrew: Why didn’t you and/or they say, “Maybe it’s just Aaron’s book. It’s not right for us at all.” What was it that kept you guys connected with this book?
Collin: I’ve seen it happen. In that first pilot, I think we got one of those guys into the doors in the front door at Walmart. We emailed their executive suite. Those guys were coming back. Square Enix, the guys that made the “Final Fantasy” series, their CEO had responded to one of our campaigns. Jimmy Wales from Wikimedia, he had responded.
These were in the early pilots. It’s the list of people that we never thought would respond to these emails. It was seeing the impact of helping a company make it happen. That sort of was the holy shit moment. You see a sales person smile and be like, “Really? I get to talk to them?
Andrew: You’re saying that when this works, it works so well that it’s worth putting in the effort to make sure the system works well. It’s worth putting in the effort to code this up your side. Is there one thing you learned when you walked into people’s offices after you had seven clients already, after you had already done the work yourself? At that point, was there one thing you learned by walking into their office that surprised you?
Collin: Yeah. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when this happened. It was the repeated exposure to customers and seeing the same sort of roles and the same people–sorry, the same roles at similar companies and they were all struggling with the same thing. That was sort of the aha moment.
Andrew: What were they all struggling with that they were so similar but still had in common this one issue?
Collin: I think the first piece was the data. I’m talking to VP of sales and he’s frustrated because he’s paying sales people like $60,000 a year to sit on LinkedIn and search for email addresses. He’s like, “That’s not a good use of their time.”
Andrew: I see and they’re all doing that.
Collin: Yeah. That was one of the first pieces. Everybody had a slightly different peace, but there were some common themes around. THE first was data and frustration around somebody making that much money shouldn’t be sitting around on LinkedIn. The next piece, and we struggled with this too, the sales reps weren’t following up on their follow ups.
They’d get an answer from a prospect saying, “Who’s the right person?” “Oh, I am.” “Great, would you like to have a call?” And if the prospect didn’t respond back, they wouldn’t follow up with them. And it’s like they’ve said I’m the right person. They said I’m interested. So, why haven’t you followed up until they told you to go away? “Oh, I didn’t want to bother them.”
So, it’s in the sales playbook. You know you should but there’s this like gut reaction around, “I don’t want to. Oh, and there’s something else to do.” So, you get this little ADD. So, I’m going to go over here and handle and inbound lead or I’m going to go back to LinkedIn and bilk some more emails. That’s easy. I don’t have to feel like I’m bothering somebody. There’s no dissonance there.
Andrew: I see. So, you’re doing the whole thing. You’re outsourcing it. At first I thought $500 sounds nuts. I’m looking at your pricing page right now. It’s $1,000 a month and you get 1,000 contacts, meaning I tell you who my prospect is, you get me 1,000 people like them. You get me 1,000 email addresses for each of them. You send out an email on behalf of my company. Is that right?
Collin: Yeah. Exactly. So, on the $1,000 a month, that’s where we’re helping. So, if you had Jeremy prospecting for you, you would plug in Jeremy@Mixergy.com.
Andrew: Jeremy meaning one of your people.
Collin: Sorry, meaning Jeremy the guy that interviewed me.
Andrew: I see. So, I’m going to play the role of one of your customers. You say, “Andrew, Jeremy happens to be your guy at Mixergy who’s going to be making these sales calls once we hook them up. I plug in Jeremy to what?”
Collin: So, we plug in his email account into Carb. The white glove between us is we’re helping who the right people to be reaching out to, what is that messaging? The system plugs into his email and manages the initial sending of all the emails and the follow ups, all that stuff that was really painful. The thing that we do a little bit different–
Andrew: And finding the emails?
Collin: Yeah. We have a bunch of different data partners that we work with now.
Andrew: So, you find the email addresses and the thing that’s cool is what?
Collin: The big piece we were sort of leading up to that we really learned was people weren’t great at following the process in that after somebody responds to an email, in my opinion that’s one of the most valuable conversations. And people were pretty bad at managing their conversations and being diligent about following up on those emails.
That was a common theme that we saw across customers, a common theme that as our team built–we eventually scaled this sort of outsourcing or this project. We had five or six people doing this all based in Vancouver. I had the same problems. I had to stand behind them with a hockey stick and be like, “Guys, it’s follow up time. Let’s do this.”
Andrew: When you follow up, do you also follow up with people who don’t respond to the original email?
Collin: Yeah.
Andrew: So, you send out 1,000 emails and then another thousand or some portion of it again if you don’t hear back from them.
Collin: Yeah. That’s sort of the automated part. We’ll send 1,000 emails and then the people that don’t respond back, we’ll continue to touch them with follow-up emails. Those are automated follow-ups that we pre-build ahead of time. And then once somebody responds to an email, now you’re sort of in this manual follow-up sort of workflow where we’re not automating the actual messages that go out. We’re automating the sales rep SDR. This is what you need to do next. This is the email you need to handle next.
Andrew: So, Jeremy in our theoretical example would be told, “Here’s the next person and here’s the next thing I want you to do with them.”
Collin: Exactly. Here’s all the context behind that conversation. And then here’s the tool that you need to use. It’s basically as easy as, “Would you like to follow up?” Customize the message a little bit and send. So, it’s like two clicks and a little bit of typing to follow best practices.
Andrew: Okay.
Collin: We noticed that as soon as our guys went into Gmail, even though we had the best system of organization, like a whole David Allen-inspired getting things done system, it was still prospecting ADD, something else interesting would come to the inbox that would distract them and they’d be off. You fall into that flow of prospecting and you’re changing context. It was really hard to sit down and be like, “I’m going to go through my follow-ups now. I’m going to go through these emails. I’m going to go through those emails. It was really hard to–
Andrew: How did you know that was a problem? I would imagine that once you got them a real prospect, that’s it. That’s when their commission brain would kick in and they’d get the job done.
Collin: Honestly, that’s what I thought too and then I realized I was bad at it as well.
Andrew: That you weren’t following up with people.
Collin: Yeah.
Andrew: Why not? Take me through your psychology.
Collin: Sorry. You broke up a little bit there.
Andrew: Can you take me through your psychology? What was it about you as a person or that situation that kept you from following up?
Collin: I don’t think it was anything about the psychology or I don’t know. I think the biggest piece there was you get busy. You get distracted. You don’t build it into a habit of going through–basically on the left side of your Gmail, we had these are the things you need to do. Similar to what people do in Salesforce, here’s a group of tasks that you need to do. You click here and then go through and like work through that list until they’re all done.
We had them setup as email filters. You click on this email filter. You go through. You send this template. You go through them all until you’re done. Then you go to the next one. Just being diligent about that, even though everything was like we had a process. We had the templates. We were using a bunch of different tools to send them. It was funny. People just weren’t doing them. As soon as they got busy, as soon as–it’s less cognitive load to make the decision to go and send emails to people that haven’t responded because I think the piece that the prospectors were thinking was “Oh, they didn’t respond back? That’s a no.” It’s not actually a no. It’s a not yet. It’s not a no until someone is like–
Andrew: You’re saying that once someone did respond, it was still hard and instead of following up with the person who’s a potential customer who’s saying, “I’m interested,” they’d go for something easier because it’s easier to get distracted by web and busy work than it is to confront a real customer who could potentially say no to you, who could potentially not want to even talk to you after they get to know you. That’s the issue. Did you find a way to solve that problem?
Collin: So, we had all these processes. This is the super-painful thing for us and for the customers. It took us a little bit longer than we’d like to admit to catch on that hey, this is the thing. We were struggling like, “Why can’t we get our people do this?” It was like, “Maybe we can build a little software to help that.” And honestly, it was our CTO’s idea. I can’t take any credit for anything good that’s actually happened. It’s been other people and I take credit for their ideas.
Andrew: So then what’s his solution?
Collin: He’s like, “Why don’t we don’t let them go into Gmail?” I was like, “How would that work?” “All the responses go into Carb. So, they have to come in and before they can answer their unread emails, they have to go through all those follow ups to get to the good stuff. That’s the pot of gold.” So, it’s pulling them through following best practices. They have to work through those in order to get to the responses that they’re dying for.
Andrew: I see. Actually, yeah, that’s brilliant. So, you were thinking, “I’m going to give them an easy solution, give them an interface they’re familiar with, which is Gmail instead of pushing a new piece of software.” What you discovered was in the end, a new piece of software is exactly what’s going to get them to actually take action. I see. What I’m a little blurry about is what’s the part they wanted to do that was like the goal at the end of the rainbow for them and what’s the hard work to get to that? What are those two different pieces?
Collin: So, the little pot of gold is the people saying, “Yeah, that sounds interesting. Hey, let’s book a meeting,” that positive response to an email. I was listening to Phil Fernandez talk about customers the other day. He called it like the cocaine of the new customer. That’s the addicting part.
Andrew: What’s the part that they didn’t want to go through that you had to put in their way so that work done?
Collin: All the people that hadn’t said yes yet and going through and following up again.
Andrew: They hadn’t said yes but they did talk?
Collin: Maybe they said yes like, “Let’s book a meeting?” But they hadn’t converted. So, they would say yes. You would say cool. How about Tuesday? Then it would go silent. They wouldn’t hear back.
Andrew: That’s when you need a person, not a machine to respond to them. Got it. That’s what they didn’t want to do. What they wanted was the sale, the win.
Collin: Yeah. Some people believe in automating those follow ups. I feel like if a human responds to you, you owe them a personalized response. Besides personalizing the response is going to convert better than some stock template anyway.
Andrew: Okay. And this is your CTO, Preston St. Pierre, he’s the guy who’s doing this thing.
Collin: Yeah.
Andrew: I’m curious about the calls. What happened on those initial calls that got you to start to understand what their problem was? Did you have a process for leading somebody through these calls? Did you have a set of questions you would go through? That’s really what turned everything around.
Collin: So, it was Cindy Alvarez’s interview on how to talk to customers. That was a huge one that really opened my eyes. I come from a sales background. So, I’m used to talking to customers. But it was always like, “What is your pain? What is your pain? What is your pain? Here I can solve it. Here I can solve it. Here I can solve it.” When you jump in with this, it’s like, “Oh, I can solve it.” There’s that tendency to jump in too early and it taints the whole conversation. It frames it differently than keeping it open ended and approaching it from that perspective.
Andrew: I see. Cindy Alvarez was so good. You know she’s actually at Microsoft doing this internally for them, helping them have a startup mentality, helping them how to talk to customers?
Collin: That’s awesome.
Andrew: She wrote a book on this too. I actually happened to have read the transcript of that conversation, the course recently. I remember saying to her something like, “When you’re talking to a customer, you say tell me about how you prospect?” She’d always say, “Go back a step. Don’t be that specific. Ask them something like can you tell me how you make your sales. Always give them much more latitude to tell you things you never would have expected.” So, it was her process that helped you understand what to say.
Collin: Yeah. We eventually got there. We did it so wrong so many times.
Andrew: What are some of the mistakes you made in conversation beyond saying, “Tell me your pain, tell me your pain,” which doesn’t work. And we’ve talked about why it doesn’t work in past courses and interviews on Mixergy.
Collin: We were so excited about what we were doing. We’d sit down and we’re like, “Hey, we’re going to do this.” And we’d just explode verbal diarrhea for like five minutes on all the cool things we thought we could do. And then it’s like a confirmation bias almost, that people are kind and they want to help and they’re not going to tell you something is a dumb idea straight to your face.
So, when you frame the context of, “I’ve already thought of this, here’s this idea.” They’re stuck sort of validating that idea, whereas if you use Cindy’s method properly, it’s way more open and you can ask questions to steer it but you’re not contaminating their, I guess, mental frame with all these different ideas of how you want to. My ideas weren’t as valuable as the customer’s pain and what they were actually struggling with.
Andrew: A lot of times when I talk to people who have done this process, they say that talking to four or five or six people, if they’re the right people, meaning in your target, then that’s enough. You don’t have to get thousands of people to know that you’re getting a statistically relevant collection of data. Is that what you found too?
Collin: Maybe if I had done it right from the beginning. I think we probably did 20 in the early days and that’s–my thoughts are something that sort of helped us is yes, it’s 20, but it’s 20 for that one specific buyer persona or it’s whatever number. I don’t think that’s important. It’s whatever you need to a minimum of one isn’t going to cut it, ten is probably a good number. We did 20 just because.
Andrew: 20 conversations.
Collin: 20 conversations with the same buyer persona in a similar role at a similar-sized company.
Andrew: I see. Do you remember the day when you hit the million-dollar run rate?
Collin: Yeah. That was really cool. On the same day, we had signed–basically bringing in Aaron Ross, the author of the book that we started this whole company based on as a cofounder in the company. We essentially became Predictable Revenue, whatever you want to call it. Preston, Aaron and I became partners.
Andrew: Okay. And because his run rate plus yours equaled a million, that’s when you guys hit a million in annual run rate? No? This was before, same day both things happened.
Collin: Same day both things happened. It was October 31st, 2014. Aaron had been sort of mentioning us. He mentioned us a couple times on newsletters, one blog posts, maybe on Mixergy. I think he had sort of namedropped that we were working together.
Andrew: I think so too because I was searching for him in my notes. Actually, I was searching for you in my notes and his notes came up.
Collin: Yeah, quite possibly. We had sort of tiptoed into it as we were trying to figure out, “Should we partner, how would we work together?” He had mentioned us a couple times just to see what would happen, see if we were real people that could talk to customers and close deals. When we started working together, I think between then I think it took about six months once we said, “This is what it should look like.”
It took six months to work out the details. By then, he had mentioned us a few times. Three months into it we were like, “Hey, let’s just act as if we’re partners anyway and get the ball rolling. Let’s not wait around.” By that time, he had referred us and we had built the business to $83,333 monthly recurring. So, that doesn’t include his because there’s consulting that he does and we keep that separate from the monthly recurring metrics that we focus on.
Andrew: And now you’ve got a company that does both, that does consulting that also does the software, that pieces it both together.
Collin: Yeah.
Andrew: What’s one thing that you did–I want to figure out how you went from seven customers to a $1 million run rate. But we don’t have enough time to cover all of it. Is there one period, one big milestone that is important to talk about that helped you grow to a $1 million run rate, one place where you discovered a lot of customers beyond Aaron?
Collin: Honestly I think a lot of it was goodwill of our existing customers. We found something that was really painful for them and we did an awesome job. They were our evangelists and advocates. It’s funny, for a company that specializes in outbound, we had a ton of inbound word of mouth referrals. I don’t think there’s anything bad about that.
At an early stage, we were hitting up our customers. If we were doing a good job, we were getting them to do case studies or give us quotes or seeing if they knew anybody. We were really hustling hard to do a phenomenal job. The most important piece was customer. We were bootstrapped.
So, if we want to continue to do this, we need to have happy customers that continue to pay their bills every month. I think it was just putting the customer first and then asking them for a favor. If you like this, do you know anybody else that’s having these same pains and challenges?
Andrew: And getting the referral actively.
Collin: Yeah. And the people that we had done the customer development interviews with before, there must have been 100 people that I talked to throughout that process of three months just sitting down with all these different people. So, keeping them up to date, I’m like, “Here’s what we’re trying. Are you guys interested? Do you want to check it out? Do you need help? Is there anything we can do to return the favor?”
I wish had the formula for magic beans for you, but honestly it was great from like slugging it out for 18 months with Voltage. That was like beating my head against the wall. When we switched to Carb, we were hitting on something that was so painful, the customers were coming to us. They’re like, “I heard you were doing this and you actually made it happen for this company. That’s amazing. Can you help us?”
Andrew: This meaning prospecting and getting their sales people on the phone with real customers. That’s the big pain?
Collin: Yeah.
Andrew: And once you get it, people are eager to give you money. They’re eager to sign up. You mentioned earlier that before you figured this out, it was really painful. Do you remember one especially painful moment?
Collin: This was with Voltage. We were basically chasing a deal, a customer saying, “Oh, that sounds really interesting. We’d buy it if it had these five features…” They had done this a couple times for us, “Do you think you can have it done for this? I want to show it off to my board.” It’s like, “Okay.” So, Preston and I would work the weekend–when I say Preston and I work on the weekend, he had to build all the stuff, so he was obviously working a lot harder than I was. I’m still there and trying to do everything I can. But this one customer, they had done it to us a couple of times.
I just remember poor Preston. We stayed up until like 2:00 in the morning because I had a Monday morning meeting with these guys. It was Sunday night, technically Monday morning, 3:00 a.m. Preston pushed the last change. I was doing all the testing and I was making sure things weren’t breaking.
We hung up the phone at 3:00. I was testing for another 15 minutes. Then I got the Ruby on–I think it was just the Rails, the little red square that says, “You broke something.” I remember having to call him back at like 4:00 and just being like, “I’m really sorry but…” And that’s all he got. He just hung up and I could see him back on making changes.
That was the sort of like, “There’s got to be a better way of doing this. We shouldn’t be saying up until 4:00 in the morning the night before a meeting coding features just so that we might win a deal.”
Andrew: Might win the deal. Yeah. And you found it. It’s not an easy process. Frankly, the fun process is, “I have this great idea. I should show it to someone first, but let me make sure that it’s right first.” And then you sit and you start to make it. Frankly, at that point it becomes an arts and crafts project. It’s kind of fun to figure out these new tools. It’s kind of fun to build. It’s kind of fun to make it look just right. It’s a little frustrating when you get it wrong, but you can solve it because it’s all within your control. It feels like the right move.
But in reality. It’s the weak move. It’s the one that keeps you separated from your customers. The hard move, the right move is the one you did. It’s so inspiring to hear you say not just, “I made these phone calls,” but, “Andrew, I sent out so many emails to people that I got kicked out of service. Andrew, I opened up all these different tabs and I sent them messages.”
It’s not easy. You didn’t just get to talk to a customer and immediately they said, “Here’s my pain. Here’s what I do. I think it’s inspiring to hear you say, “I didn’t know how to ask them. I didn’t know what to listen for. I didn’t know how to guide them. You figured it out and over time, you’ve got a process that got you here and it’s incredible to see how much you’ve built.
Collin: Thanks, man.
Andrew: Now, you are part of this bigger company. The company is called Predictable Revenue?
Collin: Yeah.
Andrew: Cool. I clicked on the team. You guys have a huge team. I thought it was just like five people, frankly because you guys are such big personalities.
Collin: Yeah, there are 26 of us now. We’re hiring a couple of engineers this month and a couple people on the sales team.
Andrew: Can you say what your revenues are right now?
Collin: I want to say probably around $130k monthly.
Andrew: Impressive. How long has it been since you launched Carb, not the previous CRM?
Collin: It’s hard to say when exactly we launched it because there’s a whole bunch of grey area in the middle where we were doing a bunch of stuff. It’s probably been a year and a half, two years.
Andrew: Okay. That’s impressive. It’s a lot of hard work, but it’s so impressive to see how far you’ve come. I’m so proud to hear this. Aaron’s got a new book. Actually, we’re recording about the time that he’s coming out with it. The reason I know he’s got a new book, by the way, I don’t know if it’s him or his publisher or someone, but they’re basically blanketing my elevator with ads. Every morning I come in, I’m so spaced out still from my run to work, I get into the elevator and I see “From Impossible to Inevitable” right there. That’s his new book.
Collin: We’re following you. It’s just your elevator, nobody else.
Andrew: Can you imagine if it’s retargeting in the elevator? That’s going to come at some point in the future, don’t you think?
Collin: I hope so.
Andrew: You click on someone’s website and they see that you haven’t bought, so they buy ads right now on Facebook to try to bring you back, imagine if it’s in the elevator and on the billboard and on the radio as you’re driving into work.
Collin: Yeah. That’s like the “Minority Report.” They’re following you around, scanning your eyes and being like, “Hey, Andrew Warner.”
Andrew: They may not be directly targeting me, but my building here is full of the kind of people who would be Aaron Ross fans. I’m an Aaron Ross fan, so they picked the right building for me. I’m glad to see how far you’ve come. I’m so freaking excited to have you be a part of Mixergy. I’m so excited I’m going to be late for my next meeting, but I didn’t care. I just had to get this whole story in there.
Collin: Thanks, man.
Andrew: Thank you for doing it. Thank you all for being a part of Mixergy. Look, remember what Collin said, that he liked Aaron’s ideas and he just shot him an email, if you got something of value out of this, my suggestion to you is that you shoot Collin an email and say, “Hey, Colin, thank you.” I always like to start with, “Thank you,” not, “Hey, Collin, thank you. Andrew says thank you, but here’s what I really need.” Just, “Thanks for doing it. I’m going to say it to you right now, Collin. Thank you so much for teaching here. I learned so much from you.
I want to thank also Acuity Scheduling. If you need a scheduling app, remember, go to AcuityScheduling.com/Mixergy, it will really help you. And if you want to experiment with webinars or you don’t like your current webinar software, just go check out GoToWebinar.com. You don’t have to tell them that I sent you. I don’t care if I get credit. I just want you to have good software in your life that will help you grow your business.
And of course, the site that we’ve all been talking about, you really should go check it out. What a great domain, so simple–Carb.io. That image of the mountain alone is worth going over to the site. What a beautiful site.
Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you all for being a part of Mixergy. I’m going to go. Bye, everyone.
