The Scale Up Show

Ryan talks about "The Big Three" sales strategies that enabled a company with only four sales representatives to achieve a staggering $30 million in revenue in just six years, without the aid of marketing!

Apply for a Revenue Growth Consulting Session With Ryan Staley- https://www.scalerevenue.io/4-schedule-page1611678914248

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• There is a lot more in terms of details when it comes to successfully closing an enterprise sale. However, the core foundations of sales remain the same.
• The 5x5x5 methodology involves looking at the deals you pushed over the line that brought in the biggest revenue, the deals you were able to close in the shortest amount of time, and also the deals in which you suffered the biggest losses.
• Big decisions in small or big companies are based on results, certainty of outcome, time and work.
• There are three core sales operating systems that every company needs in order to see exponential growth:
  • 1 - The Whale Scale - customer deal value
  • 2 - Expansion Scale - customer lifetime value
  • 3 - Referral Scale - leveraging the foundations of Whale Scale and Expansion - harvest new customer acquisitions from both.

BEST MOMENTS

'I'm going to share some secret sauce today'

'Founders are a combination of a mythical creature, a rock star and a superhero'

'This allows you to scale up fast!'

'How do we continue to acquire customers, while also escalating the deal size'

VALUABLE RESOURCES

The Scale Up Show - https://omny.fm/shows/the-scale-up-show

ABOUT THE SHOW

How do you grow like a VC backed company without taking on investors? Do you want to create a lifestyle business, a performance business or an empire?  How do you scale to an exit without losing your freedom?

Join the host Ryan Staley every Monday and Wednesday for conversations with the brightest and best Founders, CEO’s and Entrepreneurs to crack the code on repeatable revenue growth, leadership, lifestyle freedom and mindset.

This show has featured Startup and Billion Dollar Founders, Best Selling Authors, and the World’s Top Sales and Marketing Experts like Terry Jones (Founder of Travelocity and Chairman of Kayak),  Andrew Gazdecki (Founder of Microacquire), Harpaul Sambhi (Founder of Magical with a previous exit to Linkedin) and many more

This is where Scaling and Sales are made simple in 25 minutes or less.

ABOUT THE HOST

Ryan is a Founder, Podcast Host, Speaker, Loving Father, Husband and Dog Dad. He is a 18x award winner and grew a business unit from 0-$30M in Annual Recurring Revenue while he adding $30M in capital revenue in less than 6 years.  He did this all with only 4 sales people and without demand generation. 

Whether you are a new Founder,  VP or CEO who is already generating  6, 7 or even multiple 8 figures annually, you are going to gain knowledge about sales you didn’t know existed.

CONTACT METHOD

Ryan Staley - https://ryanstaley.io/podcast/

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-staley/

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/ryanstaleysales

Saas, Saas growth, Scale, Business Growth, B2b Saas, Saas Sales, Enterprise Saas, Business growth strategy, founder, ceo: https://www.whalesellingsystem.com/closingsecrets

Grab your Free Copy of “The 4 Biggest Mistakes That Stop Companies From 10X’ing Their Revenue” at https://www.scalerevenue.io/10x

Sean Cahill started his career in sales, so it’s only natural that he absolutely hated marketing. To Sean, marketing was the group that gave them garbage leads that they couldn’t sell.

Eventually, he landed a job at Cisco that caused him to fall in love with marketing. From that experience, he developed a thirst for working with startups, where he started working in funnel generation for startups. This led to him starting his own company and developing a pipeline for startups and working to get them into a Series B.

Today, Sean works at Unify Marketing as the National Practice Leader for Marketing. He still loves working with startups!

To grow pipeline, Sean stays focused on these 3 main areas:

1. People
2. Processes
3. Technology

Sean realized early on in his startup phase that one of the biggest issues in the startup world is that when startups get a Series A , and they develop an MVP to take to market, and then they focus on the Series B.

Typically, it takes the startup getting $1M in MRR in order to get a Series B, and founders realize the only way they can close that many sales and generate that much revenue, they have to get more leads.

So they work to buy more leads, which then throws off their close rates and then they try to shorten their sales cycles and every time they try to pull another level to make up the slack, it just completely puts the entire process in chaos.

Startups don’t need more leads. 

They need better leads.

They need the leads that are the most likely to close within 30 days.

They need the leads that are going to generate the highest ACV.

So how can a startup go about getting all of these ideal leads for the goals they need to accomplish?

This is what Sean would call the Perfect Customer Profile.

To begin developing this, you could:

1. Go into your CRM and identify everyone that has bought from you.
2. Begin to identify commonalities among those buyers.
3. Take those commonalities and set it against your entire database and start tracking who else has those commonalities.
4. Begin to understand what features you can identify in prospects that could be able to trigger a sale.
5. Then focus all of your sales efforts on that data set that is most likely to become a buyer.

This whole process is called building a Propensity Model.

The whole idea is that instead of focusing on more leads, you are only focusing on the better leads, so narrow your database down to 1000 of your best leads.

Sean suggests targeting these better leads on a smaller level. These leads do not get the spray and pray marketing that gets blasted to the rest of the world.

Nurturing these leads comes in many forms, but Sean has had the most success with the following methods:

1. Email
2. Phone Calls
3. Social Media
4. Video from a tool like Video Card
5. Send a specific and targeted physical gift

If whoever you want to target could have a $30K ACV, then it’s ok to spend $1K targeting them.

Using this method, Sean was able to get MRR from $10K to $30K and increased close rates to 50%.

Because everyone is inundated with more touch points and communications points than ever, the people who end up closing business are the people who end up being creative and thinking further outside the box.

The best part about this whole concept of Propensity Modeling and then following up with your 1000 best leads can be set up with automation using tools like Salesforce and integrated tools.

Being able to do this in a very personalized way at scale is the magic that can truly change your trajectory.

When it’s all said and done, you’ve basically automated your entire SDR process, and then you’d have your ADR or BDR just sort of co-pilot the lead through the entire process.

When you follow this process, your conversion rates will go through the roof because you are targeting better, you are following up in a more effective way, which means you will close more sales!

The biggest mistakes that companies make when trying to go from Series A, to Series B, to Series C are:

1. Not properly defining product market fit
2. Not having someone be your Chief Devil’s Advocate to tell the Founder when they are wrong.
3. Thinking your total addressable market is everybody.
4. Not giving your product the Mom Test.
5. Investing too much in top of funnel.
6. Not moving enough people from top of funnel to end of funnel.
7. Not focusing on having a high conversion rate.
8. Not having the right leadership at the beginning. Just because someone is good at sales doesn’t mean they should be your Chief Revenue Officer.

On the marketing side of things, some of the biggest mistakes made are:

1. Not adopting industry best practices.
2. SaaS companies still selling perpetual licenses.
3. Not moving towards modern marketing.
4. Change happens slowly inside the Fortune 1000.

Connect with Sean on LinkedIn

Need help scaling your revenue? Apply to work with Ryan here.

Saas, Saas growth, Scale, Business Growth, B2b Saas, Saas Sales, Enterprise Saas, Business growth strategy, founder, ceo: https://www.whalesellingsystem.com/closingsecrets

Grab your Free Copy of “The 4 Biggest Mistakes That Stop Companies From 10X’ing Their Revenue” at https://www.scalerevenue.io/10x

I recently took part in a Million Dollar Mastermind. Today I will break down some of the things I learned there that can be applied to your business right away. 

There was a wide range of people involved in the Mastermind, and it focused mainly on entrepreneurs. Most of the people were earning well over $1,000,000 a year and crushing it!

I will break down three takeaways that you can apply right now to grow and scale your business:

#1: Boring beats beautiful

Someone who works between 20 and 25 hours a week and earns between 7 and 8 figures a year said the following:

• Do not let your creativity get in the way of your profitability.
• Stop getting bored and start getting paid.

His primary mechanism for growth was to do the same event once a month for this entire year and continuously convert and refine it. Using that method allowed him to crush the numbers! 

#2: Consistency creates a crowd

Another person runs a multiple 7-figure options business. He was on Impact Theory, one of the world's top podcasts, and has more than 700,000 followers. 

This is what he did to build up such a massive audience:

• He spent 2 hours every day on Facebook, in groups, or forums, answering questions based on his subject matter which was about money.
• He showed up to do a Facebook Live every day at the open or close of the market.

His consistency created a crowd.

#3: Disconnect from dreams

Whether you are a consultant, a SaaS founder, or a revenue leader, you need to create opportunities to disconnect your revenue generation from your time. Doing that has to do with product creation and product fulfillment.

Even though the results might not be 100%, here are some key areas in which you could do something at a massive scale and make a huge amount of money while serving your audience at the highest level:

• Create digital products for your product creation by doing one-to-many solutions for people instead of one-on-one.
• You can do that by creating a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution.
• On top of that, you could also implement a subscription or a membership model and build a team.

Links and resources:

Apply here for a Revenue Growth Consulting Session with me, Ryan Staley.

Saas, Saas growth, Scale, Business Growth, B2b Saas, Saas Sales, Enterprise Saas, Business growth strategy, founder, ceo: https://www.whalesellingsystem.com/closingsecrets

Grab your Free Copy of “The 4 Biggest Mistakes That Stop Companies From 10X’ing Their Revenue” at https://www.scalerevenue.io/10x

September was an intense month, with lots of travel that was mostly work related. I had a unique opportunity to make some presentations with Pavilion, which is a community of primarily C-Level executives.

I was able to present on Enterprise Sales Go-To-Market Strategies and Enterprise Sales Operations. I was able to do this live in 2 different sessions and had hundreds of my ideal clients listening live and on the replays.

It was an amazing experience and I came away with 3 big takeaways that I wanted to share with you today.

I’ve had over 40 people reach out for help with their businesses and wanting to work with me or give me positive feedback about my presentations.

#1 - I used a storytelling framework that I stole from Russell Brunson from Clickfunnels. It works like crazy!

The Storytelling Framework is:

1. Story
2. Strategy
3. Tactics
4. Case Study or Examples of the Outcome

In the past, I have focused heavily on the strategies that I was talking about, but after sitting through enough boring corporate presentations, I decided to do something completely different for this one.

For Story, I did the following:

1. Used pop culture references for feeling
2. Used principles - momentum, inertia, math, quantum leap and show them in a new way.
3. Used war stories - tangible examples where I walked through what I went through when I was in the trenches helping other people with sales.

For Strategy, I systematically explained what’s involved, both conceptually and philosophically.

For Tactics, I give them step by step guides or exercises leading them through your method.

For Case Studies, I give them examples of the results my method provided.

#2 - Engagement and energy - ask for feedback and get audience involvement. Use sarcasm or analogies or whatever feels comfortable to you. You have to have energy and speed as you go through your presentation because you don’t want to bore your audience to death.

#3 - Time - allow enough time to cover the following:

• Outcome - the audience needs to have
• Outline - your framework with sub-bullet points
• Context - play off of the current environment

Apply here for a Revenue Growth Consulting Session with me, Ryan Staley.

Saas, Saas growth, Scale, Business Growth, B2b Saas, Saas Sales, Enterprise Saas, Business growth strategy, founder, ceo: https://www.whalesellingsystem.com/closingsecrets

Grab your Free Copy of “The 4 Biggest Mistakes That Stop Companies From 10X’ing Their Revenue” at https://www.scalerevenue.io/10x

Covering a very wide market can be an exasperating experience! After solving thousands of pains for all kinds of companies in every different market, Aaron Krall finally got fed up and decided to niche down. So he started a group called SaaS Growth Hacks five or six years ago, and it now has 27,000 members. 

Aaron Krall is the former Brand Manager at L’Oréal and the former VP of Marketing at Lead Generation Specialists. He also founded a SaaS growth accelerator to help companies with their SaaS growth, and he developed a new SaaS software.

When Aaron started SaaS Growth Hacks, he did not know much about SaaS. He did not have a SaaS product either. He simply emailed SaaS founders and asked them to share any problems that they were having. 

When he first started contacting SaaS founders, he felt out of his league and inadequate. Over the past five years, Aaron has spoken to at least 1,000 SaaS companies and worked with hundreds of them. So now he feels that he has a pretty good grip on the market. 

Aaron looked at all the data he collected over the last five years. He came up with the top 20 percent of everything that can be done with a SaaS company to make the most impact and get massive growth quickly. 

When Aaron finds SaaS companies he can help, he implements that 20 percent to give those companies a guaranteed revenue increase.  

The companies Aaron can help the most usually meet three criteria:

1. They are the best-kept secret in their market.
2. They are succeeding despite themselves.
3. They have excellent use cases, customer stories, or customer loyalty.

When companies meet those criteria, the founders usually:

1. Do not yet have a product-market fit. So they do not know who they can serve the most.
2. Tend to undervalue their service and do not realize how valuable it is to their customers.
3. They do not leverage partnerships.

Identify your current customers who have paid you the most money and have been around the longest. Talk to them and find out what pain you could be solving for them. (Go to Aaron’s Facebook page and ask him to send you the interview questions he uses. He will be happy to share them with you!)

Aaron asks his customers what the highest amount would be that they would be willing to pay for his SaaS product. 

Aaron prefers to work with those clients who have partners out there who would love to work with them and are willing to increase their price and increase the perceived value of their product.

Generally, most SaaS companies are undercharging because creative people tend to undervalue what they create.

Aaron does not usually recommend raising your price for current customers.

If you can solve something no one else is solving, you will automatically have a mini-monopoly.

It is easier to find customers when you know who you’re going after.

An equation I used to grow from zero to $30,000,000 in ARR in less than six years:

• Have the big promise for a big outcome at the top
• Add the certainty of the solution you are offering
• Add how fast you can deliver the result and how little hassle will be incorporated in that result

Ideally, you want to 10x the outcome of the solution you are providing.

Partnerships can be broken down into three categories:

1. Channel partners: Those are people who have built an audience similar to yours, who will promote you to their audience.
2. Content partners: Find all the articles, listicles, and blogs that talk about the top 10 products in the market in the same category as yours, and try to get your product into those.
3. Deep integration partners: Integrate your product with someone else’s product in some way.

As a founder, ask yourself what real estate is unused currently in your market that you could leverage while also benefiting someone else.

You can find a lot of unused real estate in expired trials. 

If you have a retargeting list, that is real estate that you could rent to another company.

You can also create partnerships by sharing Facebook audiences with other people on Facebook.

Look at where your traffic spends its time and be aware of what they are looking at. Those are called traffic streams, and within them are transaction points. Come up with creative ways to get integrated into those traffic streams and transaction points.

You can also get to know who your target audience is and do some outreach towards them.

SaaS companies should not do free trials anymore because SaaS products are no longer something new or different. So instead of focusing on the offer of getting a free trial, focus on getting the outcome for free. 

Links and resources:

Apply here for a Revenue Growth Consulting Session with me, Ryan Staley.

Aaron Krall’s website  

Aaron Krall on LinkedIn

Aaron’s Facebook page

Books mentioned:

Play Bigger by Dave Peterson, Al Ramadan, Christopher Lochhead, and Kevin Maney

$100M Offers: How to Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid by Alex Hormozi

Saas, Saas growth, Scale, Business Growth, B2b Saas, Saas Sales, Enterprise Saas, Business growth strategy, founder, ceo: https://www.whalesellingsystem.com/closingsecrets

Grab your Free Copy of “The 4 Biggest Mistakes That Stop Companies From 10X’ing Their Revenue” at https://www.scalerevenue.io/10x

Could you imagine doing motion capture work for Mortal Kombat? Even though Pek Pongpaet, the founder of Impekable Solutions, was lucky enough to do that, he still dreamed of becoming an entrepreneur. Since then, he started his company and bootstrapped it to become a 7-figure business. Impekable Solutions is now 10 years old and has been selected as an Inc. 5000 company 3 times in a row!

Pekstarted his career in tech as an engineer and then became a self-taught designer.  

Although Pek had many ideas for projects back when he was still an engineer and designer, he could not execute any of them because they were never good business models. 

Pek has closed over $17,000,000 in business throughout his career.

Impekable Solutions typically serves the enterprise with their software development and software design PPC. They have done work for some of the biggest companies in the world, like Apple, Google, and Adobe.

It was a gradual process for Pek to work his way up to the point of working with some of the world’s biggest companies. 

He started by making himself available for product design work. He worked very long hours. Then he hired an intern designer to help him, and his freelance business became a tiny agency. He finished his first year with two full-time designers.

The demand kept on growing, so Pek hired two more people, and the business grew organically. 

They got their first big break with a large brand from working with a startup that was later acquired by LegalZoom.

Pek was trusted in Chicago. He was known to be a good designer, so Groupon, a Chicago company, hired him to do some work. 

Motorola, also a Chicago company, was another one of their early big brand clients.

After working for big brands like LegalZoom, Groupon, and Motorola, Pekgot known for his good work. That helped him step up the ladder and get more work from big companies in the Bay Area.

If you are a founder and you are not yet out of the woods, step on the gas when you reach a point where you can breathe a bit. Remember that it is a marathon, not a sprint, so you need to pace yourself. 

A CEO’s time is valuable for doing long-term strategic work. So pause, and become aware of making the best use of your time. When you have resources, make sure that you don’t go back to doing things you no longer need to do. 

Pek only knows how to sell to people who know and trust him. His technique for getting a big company like Apple was to get an introduction from someone he knew.

Pek became very good at design and communications technology, so they eventually became partners with companies like Twilio and Adobe. Nike was using Twilio, and they were having a problem and needed some help. So Twilio introduced Nike to Pek and explained why they trusted him.

When you know something deeply, and you are trusted by a big brand and they recommend you, that will get you through the door. 

Pek has real-life ninja skills, so he used to teach those skills to some club bouncers. When it comes to business, his ninja skill is relationships. Everything he has achieved is a result of relationships. That extends to his employees as well as clients.

Some tactics for building lasting relationships:

• Keep in touch with people without having any expectations.
• If someone you know changes jobs and starts working for a company you would like to work for, that will be a good time to check in with them. You can send them a personal note to congratulate them and ask if you can catch up with them once they have their bearings.

Links and resources:

Apply here for a Revenue Growth Consulting Session with me, Ryan Staley.

Pek’s podcast: Founders

Pek on LinkedIn

Books mentioned:

The Third Door by Alex Banayan

Leading With Emotional Courage by Peter Bregman

Founders At Work by Jessica Livingston

The E-Myth Book by Michael E Gerber

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

You2 by Price Pritchett

The Quantum Leap Strategy by Price Pritchett

Good to Great by Jim Collins

Saas, Saas growth, Scale, Business Growth, B2b Saas, Saas Sales, Enterprise Saas, Business growth strategy, founder, ceo: https://www.whalesellingsystem.com/closingsecrets

Grab your Free Copy of “The 4 Biggest Mistakes That Stop Companies From 10X’ing Their Revenue” at https://www.scalerevenue.io/10x

Today, I will be sharing three very cool nuggets that I learned from some of the world’s top entrepreneurs! 

In this episode, I will discuss three highly valuable takeaways from an event I recently attended. I will go over excuses, zero to $150,000,000 in revenue, and the number 1 reason why businesses fail. 

Excuses

Anthony Trucks is a former NFL player who speaks and does personal development. He once fell asleep at school and overheard someone using the same excuse he had often used for himself- that he did badly at school because he was adopted and had a rough upbringing.

Rather than allowing that incident to shape him negatively, he used it as an opportunity.

Anthony Trucks had a dream to make the NFL. He realized that if your identity doesn’t match your dream, it will not take place. 

I have heard the same concept from at least 4 different people I truly respect. The concept I want to share is: . Be, do, have

Many people want it to be: Have, do, be. (They want to have the six-pack before they start eating healthily, and then they will be happy.)

You first have to become the person who does the right things every day to create what you desire. 

When you are a founder, a revenue leader, or a sales exec, excuses can come up very easily because you are trying to do many hard things. 

Zero to 150,000,000 in revenue

Kaelin Poulin, also known as Ladyboss, grew from zero to 150,000,000 bootstrapped and without investors. 

She started with information products. Those she was serving wanted coaching, so she started doing coaching as well. Then, her people wanted to do a live event, so she did that too. On top of everything else, her people wanted products, so she added products, and from there, she also added specific types of products. 

That five-step iteration got her from zero to $150,000,000, using her super-simple three-step framework:

1. Listen
2. Ask
3. Execute

She used one of the simplest and easiest ways to scale revenue the fastest- she kept on selling more to her existing clients. 

She managed to do what she did because she focused on doing only one thing at a time.

The number 1 reason why businesses fail

Some stats on businesses failure:

• 50% of businesses fail in year 1.
• 80% of businesses fail in the first 5 years.
• 96% of businesses fail after 10 years.
• Less than 5% of businesses make $1,000,000 in revenue per year.
• Less than 0,5% of businesses make more than $5,000,000 in revenue per year.
• 0,00006% of businesses get to $10,000,000 per year.

Those stats all come down to 80% psychology and 20% strategy. 

One of the biggest mistakes business owners make is to start with a strategy.

Here is a 3-step framework for success:

1. Focus on the state you are in. (Do what you can to be full of energy.)
2. Focus on your story. (Become aware of your self-talk.)
3. Work on a strategy.

If you implement these strategies, you will notice a big difference! 

Resources:

Need help scaling your revenue, Ryan can help. Apply to work with him here.

Saas, Saas growth, Scale, Business Growth, B2b Saas, Saas Sales, Enterprise Saas, Business growth strategy, founder, ceo: https://www.whalesellingsystem.com/closingsecrets

Grab your Free Copy of “The 4 Biggest Mistakes That Stop Companies From 10X’ing Their Revenue” at https://www.scalerevenue.io/10x

Did you know that the presentation is the most undervalued asset of the enterprise world? James Ontra, the CEO and Co-founder of Shufflrr, certainly does! That is why he is changing the way the enterprise world thinks about presentations. He helped create a technology that is saving hundreds of Fortune level companies millions of dollars by adding clout to their Powerpoint slides and turning them into valuable business assets.

James was doing CD ROM technologies (slide libraries with video) in the 1990s. Then the web boomed, and he became the CEO of a funded company that did high-end presentations. The company did not make it because the internet was not ready for the work they were doing.

James and his sister then founded a consultancy and did high-end presentations for many large organizations. That process taught them how to organize slides, use them effectively, and make up a slide library.

They took those principles and built them into Shufflrr, which is all about presentation management. 

Presentation management is having an organized and structured library, from which anyone can take and reuse content at any time. 

Emotional storytelling is a key element of an effective presentation. Structured emotional storytelling allows the presentation to follow the conversation rather than the presentation forcing the conversation.

Good advertising is based on ratings, which are all about data. That can be dull. Storytelling, however, can change that dynamic because once you have been emotionally convinced about the importance of something, you will take all the logical data and use it to reinforce your belief. 

Presentation management will help you increase your business intelligence.

All Shufflrr’s presentation management data comes out through API and can be shared across certain platforms to create new efficiencies within global organizations. 

Shufflrr is a communication strategy for better efficiency.

For about 10 years, Time Warner used a process to chart the various ratings for their shows across 94 different markets. Eight months after implementing Shufflrr’s system, they regained their business intelligence and realized that the real value came from the emotional sale and not the data. They became far more efficient as a result.

How to tell your prospects an emotional story:

1. Collect the best slides from the best presentations ever done by your organization.
2. Weed through those to find the very best slides.
3. Bring those slides together and make them available to everyone out in the field.
4. Manage all the content regularly, as a published library.

The marketing department should be responsible for creating a library of quality content and slides for the salespeople.

Financial data should get updated quarterly. 

James’s travel clients in various locations prefer to update their data following their peak seasons. 

People who sell the best emotionally do 2 things:

1. They use an impactful image or video to make an emotional point at the beginning of the presentation. (That creates a connection that can later be backed up with other data.)
2. Then they create a flow, using a story to form the presentation and a different slide for each scene. Each scene should have a specific goal, and each consecutive slide should represent the goal of that scene and take you through an emotional process just like a movie would.

The slides should represent the facts and allow the audience to calculate the value equation for themselves. 

Links and resources:

Shufflrr website

Need help scaling your revenue? Apply to work with Ryan at https://scalerevenue.io/apply

Saas, Saas growth, Scale, Business Growth, B2b Saas, Saas Sales, Enterprise Saas, Business growth strategy, founder, ceo: https://www.whalesellingsystem.com/closingsecrets

Grab your Free Copy of “The 4 Biggest Mistakes That Stop Companies From 10X’ing Their Revenue” at https://www.scalerevenue.io/10x

I have a huge passion for founders that bootstrap their companies. That’s how I plan on funding my company - by bootstrapping! I’ve worked with companies who took on funding and it always destroyed the culture of the company.

A couple of observations about recent startup trends:

• All the money is going to obvious start ups.
• There are 10x more SaaS startups than there were just a year ago.

Investors are going for startups with:

• $10M ARR
• Growing at a rate of 100% - customer expansion
• 110% net revenue retention (NRR)

To figure out NRR:

Customer expansion/Customer retention  = NRR

Rand Fishkin - Founder of Moz - took on funding and he eventually wrote a book about the process, called Lost and Founder. When he was asked if he would do it all over again, he said that he would not take the money.

Rand’s is a cautionary tale of what happens once you accept funding.

Data indicates that early stage funding is decreasing rapidly - seed funding, angel funding - have decreased from 10.6% to 4.9%.

Series A funding has decreased from 36.5% to 26%.

Late stage funding increased from 52% to 69%.

All of the money that previously went to early stage funding is now getting pushed up market to later stage startups.

The amount of monthly new business applications nationwide is also decreasing. They went from an average of 500K/month in 2020 to 300K/month in 2021.

Getting funding can take up to 18 months. If you think about it, you can do so much for your business in 18 months if your focus isn’t on getting funding.

The way investors are holding out for more late stage funding, it really shows they are cherry picking winners with their funding criteria. And if you could meet their criteria, you could probably grow your company without taking on funding, and have a much better experience as a founder and be able to preserve the culture of your company.

Need help scaling your revenue? Apply to work with Ryan at scalerevenue.io/apply.

Saas, Saas growth, Scale, Business Growth, B2b Saas, Saas Sales, Enterprise Saas, Business growth strategy, founder, ceo: https://www.whalesellingsystem.com/closingsecrets