The Scale Up Show

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

When you become an entrepreneur, networking becomes extremely important. If you come from the corporate world like I did, the focus is always on revenue. Once you leave the corporate world, you have to focus on networking and it becomes much more important.

The premise of Larry’s book is based on the NCG Factor. 

What is The NCG Factor? A formula for building life changing relationships from college to retirement. When you think about your legacy, it’s important to understand what people are saying about you today, and not only focus on what happens after you are gone.

The difference in the smaller pipeline outperforming the bigger pipeline is relationships.

Larry interviewed people from all walks of life for his book. He examined both the inner circle and outer circle of the people he 

Inner circle - could be as small as 5 people who you rely on.

Outer circle - people you meet along the way 

Position yourself as an indispensable part of their network. When you become indispensable to others, they will open their whole world to you, not just the things that you do in your job.

How can I help you? - ask this question everyday and really mean it. Look for ways you can figure this out in relationships. Ask the question and follow through. Ask only after you learn about the person both personally and professionally.

The way you build relationships is the way that you can help yourself personally and professionally.

Putting others before yourself allows you to ask for favors when you need them.

“If you lead with yourself, you’re going to leave with yourself.” Lead with wanting to learn about the other person.

If you help people help you by identifying the people you want to connect with, then you will have better connections and build deeper relationships.

Larry’s advice for nurturing inner circle relationships at a high level:

• Assess who your coveted inner circle relationships are.
• Ask your inner circle who they can introduce you to.
• Build the relationships before you need them.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of working so hard to hit your goals, and never network outside of your company.

Top networking mistakes:

1. Not networking and building relationships
2. Leading a transactional life and not focusing on philanthropy or other aspects of leading a better life.

Connect with Larry: 

The NCG Factor

Find Larry on LinkedIn

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

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

Unicorns aren’t as rare as you might think, and I’m convinced that by hacking the success of unicorns, we can create more of them!

Today, I’m sharing 3 ways Invisible unicorn companies have bootstrapped their way to a $1B valuation. What is an invisible unicorn? A company with a $1 Billion valuation without taking outside funding.

There are 3 methods of becoming an invisible unicorn:

1. Presale
2. Partner Sale
3. Prototype Sale

Presale Example - Loot Crate - focused on efficiency over funding. On average it can take 18 months to get funding. That’s an 18 month sales cycle - an 18 month distraction! Instead, they focused on scaling the company organically. 

They had a landing page and sold all these crates with geeky pictures. They took the revenue from selling the crates to actually buy the products in the crates that they already sold.

Tough Mudder - they presold registrations to races and the CEO used a $7000 investment and turned it into a company with $100M in annual revenue, They used the preregistrations to races to fund the building of the obstacle course.

Partner Sale Example - Clickfunnels - they provide marketing software and grew to over $100M in revenue with no outside funding. They achieved $100M in revenue in 3 years. Russell Brunson leveraged JV partnerships and did webinars and gave the JV partner 50% of revenue sales.

Prototype Sale Example - Simplisafe - they are a hardware business, which is typically a revenue intensive model. While they were providing the security systems and putting them out there, he kept creating prototypes that he could create at scale.

If you need help scaling revenue for your company, I’d love to help you. Go to scalerevenue.io/apply to apply to work with me.

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’m sharing 3 important tactics in Palantir’s billion dollar sales playbook. Palantir is doing a few things differently than a lot of other SaaS companies. What they are doing right can be a lesson to companies from $1M to $1B, so I wanted to share them with you today.

3 Plays from the Playbook:

1. Be flexible with game changing deals - Palantir had initial margins of 18% and they now have 55%, which is in line with other SaaS companies. 
2. Get really good at selling big deals - They have 149 customers, but 66% of revenue comes from 20 customers. They do a billion dollars a year from 149 customers.
3. Systemize your second sales process - their average deal size grew 41% YOY. The average deal size from their top 20 customers grew 34% YOY. Across all segments their deal size grew by huge amounts YOY.

If you have a process built into your sales process to sell your existing customers more after they become your customers, your business can grow by leaps and bounds.

Case Study:

A company I was consulting for did not have a secondary sales process, but had great customer retention. We took one non-sales employee and spent 25% of their time focusing on serving customers at a higher level and systemizing the secondary sales process and in a month and a half the results paid for my 6 months of consulting fees. Just by focusing on the secondary sales process they made a huge improvement in their revenue numbers.

Remember - It’s 7-8 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to upsell existing customers.

If you need help scaling your revenue and want to see if I can help you, you are welcome to apply 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

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

Sometimes when you are going about the course of your daily life, you can run across situations that reveal amazing business lessons. That’s what happened to me last week when I was at the beach with my family on vacation. 

All of my family and extended family rented a big beach house in Florida and we spent a lot of time each morning at the beach.

One morning around 11am, I was sitting on the beach reading my book while the kids were playing on the beach and my parents were hanging out and enjoying the family.

I kept feeling like I was hearing a familiar tune playing off in the distance. Over the course of a few minutes, the music became louder and more familiar.

The next thing I knew, all 7 of the kids in our family came running up to all of the adults asking if they could get ice cream! 

Sure enough, a surfer looking dude came up the beach pulling a boat on 4 wheels and it had a gigantic cooler on the boat and it said “Gulfstream Ice Cream” since 1997.

It was 85 degrees and full sun and we had already been at the beach a couple of hours. We had planned on going to get the kids ice cream later that afternoon.

Suddenly, Grandpa (my Dad) looked at me and said, “What the heck, we’re on vacation!” Before we knew it, there were more than 20 people in line to get ice cream, and Grandpa bought a round for all the grandkids!

This leads me to the 3 important sales lessons that the top 1% of 1% practice - and that’s why this ice cream guy had been doing this since 1997!

1. Consolidation of customers - choosing a family beach with different generations ensures that there are plenty of people to buy ice cream for the kids. It also means that the average order size may be 8-10, not 1-2.
2. Cravings - be there at the exact right time customers are most likely to buy. We didn’t care that it was 11am and we hadn’t eaten lunch yet. We were hot and ice cream was the perfect remedy!
3. Capitalize on the circumstance - because there were no other vendors on the beach, he could charge 2-3x the price because he executed on #1 and #2.

If your sales organization needs help scaling revenue, you can apply to work with me 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

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

Do you know what it takes for a company to win? Today’s guest, Scott D. Clary, knows that companies win by having demand generation coupled with a strong and smart outbound playbook. Yet, most tend to focus on the outbound without getting the demand gen or the marketing piece.

Scott is a Career Sales and Marketing Executive who is rewriting the book on sales, marketing, and brands. He has worked with execs and entrepreneurs to 10x their business. He has sold and marketed to the most Fortune 500s and Fortune 1000s and featured in over 100 news sites. He speaks globally at industry conferences and has articles written in Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Hacker Noon, and The Startup. Currently, he is running a SAAS sales and marketing organization and is the host of the Success Story Podcast. 

Scott understands how to create huge amounts of content to turn any organization into a media company, how to build a community around the content put out by a person or a brand, and how to build the marketing engine of tomorrow. 

He is joining us today to share strategies for building the marketing engine of tomorrow and aligning that with a sales strategy. 

Scott started working for Bell Canada right after finishing high school, and he was making more money from sales than almost everyone else he knew! He enjoyed the money and was good at his job because he was always very technical, and selling came naturally. He worked for Bell for eight or nine years, always in sales and moving through larger markets after completing university. He made a lot of money and even made the President’s Club for a couple of years. After his tenure at Bell, he went into a smaller telco company where he later went into the first leadership role in his career and sold to large enterprise companies. That role involved complex implementations and longer sales cycles.

He left when the company was bought by private equity and went on to do his own thing to consult with other companies and teach them what he had learned in enterprise sales and sales leadership. He did not do well on his own, so he partnered with two people. They did fairly well, almost hitting $1,000,000 at the end of year 1. He had some great experiences and learned some great entrepreneurial lessons. They had set everything up to be project-based, so he did not enjoy the place he was in, and they soon closed that business up.

Scott went back to work at the company that eventually led him to where he is now. They had an exclusivity agreement, so they brought Scott on board to bring their software products for broadcast to market through a company called Grass Valley. 

After about a month-and-a-half, they were officially acquired. They have been growing aggressively for the past 2 years. 

Scott is now a Director at Grass Valley, where he is running most of the SaaS development, SaaS sales, and Saas marketing, as well as helping to modernize, revolutionize, and change the business. Scott describes what he does at Green Valley to be like leading an innovation unit within a much larger company. 

Grass Valley does about $600,000,000 in revenue per year.

Scott’s side-hustles are a podcast and writing a newsletter.

Any company needs to have sales and marketing alignment and congruence. Although that might seem obvious at a service level, if you take a deeper dive, you will realize how many companies have disjointed sales and marketing business units. 

A process for implementing a strategy and execution process for sales alignment:

Step 1: 

Find your first 50 customers. You then need to find a product-market fit and build out a customer profile or a buyer persona. After that, you need to give that to a marketer to develop demand against the customer profile or a buyer persona to start bringing in leads. 

Step 2:

A sales leader needs to build an outbound sequence that matches the ICP and BP that your marketing has bought into, and is marketing to. The outbound sales messaging must target the same ICP buyer persona. Solving the business pain points with which CMOs tend to struggle should drive the majority of your marketing collateral, which should be the content on your blogs and social media, and be covered in your webinars. 

The sales must use a personalized outbound, target the same profiles, and solve the same pain points as the marketing is advertising for. That will bring alignment.

Both the sales and marketing departments must be congruent and aligned with the personas to create the best possible customer experience. Having similar discussions in both business units will encourage CMOs to book a demo.

After getting the initial alignment, you must have your Marketing and Sales Executives constantly feeding information to each other to keep on updating that persona. There should also be scheduled one-on-ones between the VP of Marketing and the VP of Sales to discuss the lessons they have learned. That congruence needs to be maintained as the organization grows.

Scott feels that to be an effective marketer you have to take advantage of every single channel on which your company can show up. 

To do that, you need an effective, reliable, and educational content strategy that can answer any question your buyer may have. The easiest way to do that is to have a long-form, educational piece of content that you break up into blog posts, YouTube videos, or podcasts. Then, break it up even further into 2-4-minute pieces that go on Facebook and LinkedIn. Break that down even further into a 60-second piece that can go onto Twitter or TikTok, or a 30-second piece, that can go onto YouTube Shorts, LinkedIn Stories, or Snapchat Spotlights. 

To summarize:

• Show up all the time.
• Win the war of attention on social media.
• Find a content strategy that is replicable and scalable.

To repurpose a piece of content across the platforms:

• Figure out your target market.
• Get to know the questions that your target market has.
• Create a pillar piece of content and use it on a platform like a podcast to interview as many different experts as possible.
• Use questions that you know will drive traffic and that other COMs also want to know the answers to.

You can take it a step further by turning a video into a blog post by:

• Creating show notes for the podcast.
• You can write a blog post.
• You can use otter.ai to summarize your ideas before writing your blog post.

Title your blog post in line with the high-search volume queries that someone has to get Google to direct people to your article.

You can take the answers to your questions from the podcast to Quora to drive more traffic.

You can break down the podcast content into a 2-minute clip and optimize it for grabbing attention on social media. You can do the same thing, sub-60-seconds or sub-30-seconds, for Instagram Reels, TikTok, LinkedIn Stories, Snapchat Spotlight, or YouTube Shorts.

Remember that at least 90% of your content must be educational.

The best platform for creating revenue from Scott’s strategy for B2B is LinkedIn. For non-B2B, the only channel that Scott sees effectively flow into other social media channels is YouTube.

Links and resources:

Scott’s Website

On all social media: @ScottDClary

The Success Story Podcast

answerthepublic.com

Canva

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’ve been having a lot of conversations with tech founders and CEOs as I try to understand the VC world more.

In the beginning, most founders just want funding. That’s all they need.

The business news cycle would have you believe that virtually every company is a unicorn and gets massive amounts of funding.

However, I want to give you a case study of a $300M exit so that you can understand the mechanics behind the numbers.

The numbers behind this case study are very telling. 

Things you need to know as a Founder:

1. Only 3% of companies make it through to get another round of funding
2. VCs put in only about 10% of the investment up front
3. VCs get 15% interest in the entire investment YOY
4. VCs expect 3x,3x,2x,2x returns in each of the next 4 years
5. VCs walk away with almost 2000% ROI
6. Most founders get fired within 2 years of VC investment

If you are seeking VC funding for your startup, you should:

1. Do your research
2. Numbers don’t lie - understand what the expectations are
3. Know what you are getting into - the shelf life of a CEO is less than 3 yrs.

Need help scaling your company? I may be able to help you scale and you can apply to work with me 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

Would you like to know how to create a micro-community for your customers and learn to leverage community internally with everyone working for your organization?

The power and value of a community should never be underestimated! Building a community will allow you to gain more customers from referrals, provide more value and build long-lasting, impactful, and meaningful connections with people. 

Today’s guest is Galem Girmay, the Co-founder of RevGenius. Galem built, developed, and cultivated her community from zero to 5,000 in just 3 months! She is joining us today to talk about the value of community and explain how to create a community internally and externally. 

EPISODE NOTES

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

Building a community for potential customers within an organization will enhance the diversity of the people joining that community. 

You can look at building a community in two ways:

1. You can do it internally with the people with whom you work, to build a stronger culture within the organization.
2. You can do it externally by building strong relationships with your buyers, clients, or prospects.

It is powerful having a community of buyers and various personas all in one room because they learn from each other. They will gain from the value you provide them with, and they will look to you for guidance. 

Creating a community will allow you to help people create networks to build themselves up and become impactful leaders within their industry. You will also gain more customers from referrals and provide even more value.

A virtual community is a community that starts online. After creating either an online or an in-person community, you will need to think about switching and creating a program that will also work the other way.

Some things that will help you when you create a community:

• Build out content for your buyers.
• Build out case studies with those in your communities. (That will give you direct access to your buyers or clients.)
• Provide insights.

Creating a buyer community will allow you to give different types of input to a diverse pool of people from various backgrounds and industries with different strengths and skillsets. It will also give you a different perspective that could help expose any blind spots that you might not have even known existed.  

One benefit of having a strong virtual community is connecting with people all over the world and learning from them and their different cultural aspects.

Think about who your audience is and where to find them. Also, consider the different areas they are coming from. (Eg. enterprise, mid-market, or entrepreneurship.)

With all the changes that have been happening globally over the last six months, building a community is critical right now because it will help humanize the experiences that people have been having. 

Having an online community helps people think outside of the box to find new ways to connect and build meaningful long-term relationships. 

Building different programs for people, and providing them with value and additional resources, is a way to become a go-to thought leader and build long-term relationships in your community space.

Continuing education and exploration becomes a lot easier when you are part of a community.

When putting a large event together, you need to pre-plan and think about how you will support the people after the event. When creating a community, you need to get people into the community and also think about what you can do to hold people’s hands, keep them engaged, and convert them into a buyer, once they are in the community. You can continue to keep people engaged with conversations and content, and you can answer any questions people might have after a webinar in your community.

Galem’s suggestions for milestones when creating an online event:

• Find a platform like Slack to host the event.
• Invite all the speakers and create multiple channels within the platform for all the speakers.
• Get everyone who registers for the event to join a community so that they can get all the event resources and hopefully connect with you to have direct conversations and ask questions.
• Continue with your relationships going forward. That will be beneficial to everyone involved.
• Look at the entire online process from a holistic perspective, and humanize it wherever possible. Creating a micro-community is a great way to humanize the process.

To overcome your fears of starting a community:

1. Understand why you are doing it, who you are doing it for, and how to make it happen.
2. Think about the format (audio, video, or both) and how you want to present it.
3. Keep your thought processes aligned with where you want to go.
4. Think about how you can scale it in the future.

Galem’s community focuses on sales, marketing, revops, and leadership. When creating their podcast, they wanted to do things differently. They wanted people to engage and come back to their podcast regularly. So they decided to allow people to attend their recordings in person. They also wanted people to be able to jump in with their questions and get a response immediately, so Chalk.com allowed them to create a community room where people can listen and ask questions.

The biggest mistakes that people tend to make when building a community:

• Not fully understanding the mission and purpose behind the community.
• Not fully understanding what they want the outcome to be.
• Not having all their ducks in a row before launching and going live.

Links and resources:

Galem on LinkedIn and Twitter

The RevGenius website

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

Currently, I’m in 2 masterminds for my own business development.

One of the mentors has a lifestyle business and he works about 15 hours a week and makes about $3 million a year. The other has grown a performance based business to almost a billion dollar valuation.

I just came back from a mastermind event just on fire with ideas to try and implement big things to hit a crazy goal.

When I got everything mapped out, and I was all hyped up and my brain was just on fire with all these ideas.

Then I looked at my top 3 goals for the week and I realized I didn’t hit any of my goals this week. What the heck was I doing?

When we look at one common theme of successful entrepreneurs, one thing they all have in common is this...an ability to stay focused!

That’s it! It makes all the difference though. So, I found this focus exercise in Dan Henry’s Digital Millionaire Secrets book:

1. Write down the most important things - create a circle with all the things you are focused on, edge to edge as you go around the circle.
2. Then draw lines towards the center so your circle now looks like pizza wedges.
3. Now go and delete to complete - delete your focus areas down to 3 for right now. And you can’t go on to number 2 until you finish number 1. You always have to finish the next one before moving on to the next number.

I share a quote in this episode about what focus really is...it boils down to figuring out what to say no to!

I challenge you to do this focus exercise yourself!

Resources:

https://scalerevenue.io/apply - if you need help scaling revenue and implementing sales systems

https://Ryanstaley.io - if you want to connect to drop me a note

Follow me on LinkedIn

Digital Millionaire Secrets 

by Dan Henry

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