Brendan Short 🌊

Apollo.io

Product-led sales / auto-SDR function
Using Apollo, for Apollo (very meta, I know)

Product-led sales

The Signal (.club)

Separating the signal from the noise—a weekly newsletter on all things GTM tech

Writer

GTMfund

• Limited Partner alongside other great SaaS leaders in the GTMFund
• Message me if you're looking to raise money from GTM Leaders (they're all more legit than me)

Limited Partner (LP)

Groundswell

• Here is what we learned building Groundswell for 2.5 years: https://www.thesignal.club/p/what-we-learned-building-groundswell
• Started off building in "product-led sales" and then expanded to, what I call, "signal-based selling" (using gen ai to find signals and generate next-best actions)
• Raised $1.5M from Village Global, GTMFund, Henry Schuck, Lars Nilsson, Shaan Puri, and other founders and executives from the world's leading PLG companies including Slack, DocuSign, Rippling, Snowflake, TripActions, Workato, and others

Co-founder & CEO

Zoom Video Communications

• Consulted for Zoom starting in Dec 2019
• Joined full-time in 2020 as things got busy due to the pandemic (it was a wild time to be there)
• Led Operations and Enablement for the Global SDR Org (150-person team)

Operations & Enablement (Global SDR Team)

The Revenue Engine (Consultancy)

[Note: I'm not taking on clients, 100% focused on building Groundswell]

• While figuring out my next move, I took on some consulting and advising gigs to help B2B SaaS companies build scalable, predictable revenue engines
• I've been lucky to work with some incredible companies and people, including: TripActions, Zoom, Snapwire, WellHealth, LoanBase, Edvo, among others

Owner

OutboundWorks - ACQUIRED

• I joined OutboundWorks as VP Sales as part of their acquisition of my company, Hexa.ai
• We were building “Automated Sales Development”
• I led Sales Development, Sales, Marketing & Customer Success 
• The company was acquired in October 2019 (I decided to leave during this transition)

VP Sales

Hexa (acquired by OutboundWorks)

• SaaS Product to help automate XDR work
• Acquired the technology of Brisk.io and merged it with Proleads.io
• Class 17 of The Alchemist Accelerator (6 month program; #1 Enterprise B2B Accelerator in the World)
• Raised $800k in funding
• Acquired for 7-figures in Feb 2018, by OutboundWorks (backed by True Ventures)

Wiser Solutions, Inc.

• 1st full-time employee (started as SDR then AE then Manager)
• Was there from ~$15k MRR to $10M ARR 
• Personally closed $1M+ in first full year selling - online retailers, brands & manufacturers (mid-market and enterprise)
• Built and managed the Sales Team (SDRs, AEs, Sales Engineering, and Sales Ops)
• Wiser was acquired for 8-figures in September 2016

Head Of Sales

Avista Solutions, Inc. - now part of D+H

• Avista Solutions was acquired by D+H, for $40M (45 employees, in business for 4.5 years)
• In 2017, D+H was acquired by Vista Equity Partners, for $4.8 billion
• I left after Avista was acquired by D+H (cubicle life wasn’t for me)

Sales Development Representative

Playing long-term games w/ long-term people ✨ Building Groundswell

We help GTM Teams at PLG companies:
1. Identify which product signals matter the most 
2. Create Plays to run off the back of those signals
•••
Backed by Village Global, GTMFund, Henry Schuck, Lars Nilsson, Shaan Puri, and other founders and executives from the world's leading PLG companies including Slack, DocuSign, Rippling, Snowflake, TripActions, Workato, and others.

We re-acquired Sales Hacker last August, relaunched it as GTMnow, and have already driven 2x in revenue vs what we purchased it for.

After a few meaningful tweaks, subscriber and listener growth is strong and consistent.

Our podcasts are on fire (check out recent episodes with GTM legends - Katrina Wong,  Anthony Kennada, Bob Moore,  and Amanda (Elam) Cole. 

The newsletters have leveled up massively (don't take my word for it - it's getting reshared more than ever.)

Besides for sustaining itself as a profitable company, our media initiatives provide a ton of support for the fund. 

It allows us to drive community. We organize the dozen-plus dinners and events we do each year - plus the big GTMfund LP Retreat.

It also provides deal flow for the fund, candidates for our portfolio companies, and cash to allow us to invest in things that drive returns (like the hiring of our new VP of Talent, Leslie Schmidt). 

It's another way we're able to do more with less.

Major props to Sophie Buonassisi, our VP of Marketing. Not only has she done a fantastic job so far, but every 10x team member we bring on allows the rest of the team to remove parts of their focus from that area of the business, and refocus on other areas that support our investments and, ultimately, drive returns for our LPs.

So much more is in the works and yet to be announced. Stay tuned!

Brendan Short

There are a lot of stacks and starter kit posts going around, so thought I’d share what are hard requirements for founders of early-stage technical companies. There are many other tools, but you should not be starting without these. 

These all allow you to be data driven and focused. Once these are set up, you can review daily/weekly on how to refine your product experience, your target audience/icp, messaging, and/or GTM motion. Previously, this used to cost companies a lot of money and require experts to run each one. Now your founding team can do a lot of the work at a fraction of the cost. 

Consider this the “Rippling stack” for early-stage GTM: 

PostHog - Free to start vs. legacy tools; cost $10k minimum to start 
If you have anyone using your product (self-serve or otherwise) and are not watching sessions on how people use your product, you are doing yourself an incredible disservice. If you have no one using your product, well, the only thing you should be doing is having conversations with your ideal *user* profile. Then, make sure you use posthog once people start logging into your product :) 

Koala - Free to start vs. legacy tools; cost $10k+, $60k+ for quality
Know the companies landing on your website 
-“But I don’t know WHO the person is!” Sure, but I think a signal of someone landing on your website of your K8s product from your target prospect probably isn’t someone in customer success. Use the data as signal on where to start. Then be amazed at how much the product does as people start using your products :) 

Clay - Free to start vs. (good) legacy tools; cost $24k+
- Not sure who that gmail user is? Use Clay. Not sure how to find more companies that fit your ICP with specific requirements? Use Clay. Want to do personalized outbound at scale? Use Clay. Etc, etc. 

Apollo.io - Free to start vs. legacy tools; cost $2k/seat/yr.
- Everyone talks about ICP but no one wants to build the lists for it! Do it easily in here, track the data and success of your cold outbound and see in one report the titles, industries, company sizes, and other datapoints to know who your emails are resonating with most. 

Fathom - AI Meeting Assistant - Free to start vs. legacy tools; cost $15k+ 
It’s 2024. Record your calls. 

Assembly.marketing - early access, but will be a winner :) 
You should be posting and testing your messaging. Refine it every week and learn how your audience engages with your content. Messaging IS strategy!! (assembly.marketing)

Once set up, have a weekly GTM session reviewing this with your founding team on what you’re learning and how to better iterate each week. These tools allow you to be data driven and develop GTM skills week in and week out. 

The world of GTM is changing, fast. And, I am trying to keep up by adopting the new best practices, leveraging the new tools (namely, automation and ai), and sharing what I’m learning along the way.

One of the arrows in the new GTM quiver is “signal-based selling.” So, I wanted to share how to automate signal-based selling and share 3 specific examples of basic plays you can set up today.

I published my full thoughts today: https://lnkd.in/gVp74USV

Here's the TLDR:

1. Signal Based Market (SBM)

We are at an inflection point.

We used to live in a market that was starved for data and information.

Now, we live in a market that is flooded with data and information.

There is too much data for a human to parse through manually. But, if you can separate the signal from the noise at scale, you’ll be in the 1% of gtm teams.

Your SBM is the segment of your market that is most likely to take a sales meeting with you, today.

2. Types of “signals”

→ Company vs. Person-level signals

You can look for signals at the company level and/or at the person level.
(See blog post for specific examples)

→ Data Sources

Your goal is to identify signal within the noise across all of your internal gtm systems and external data sources.

• 1st Party (website, product usage, CRM, marketing automation, etc)
• 3rd Party (LinkedIn, B2B databases, 10-Ks, intent tools, review sites, etc)

→ How to find signals relevant to your business

There is no one-size-fits-all approach. In fact, from what I’ve seen, the best signals for any one particular business are usually not relevant for another business.

I would recommend you “do things that don’t scale”…then scale them (with ai and automation).

Run lots of experiments and iterate based on the results. Have holdout groups. And ensure there is statistical significance. 

3. Setting up (automated) signal-based selling plays

Start with your goal.

What part of the customer journey are you trying to improve?

You can build signal-based selling plays for any part of the customer journey (see blog post for image).

4. Three signal-based selling plays you can run today

1/ Website visitors play
2/ Product-led sales (PQLs) play
3/ Closed-lost deal play

(See blog post for images on how these plays work)

We use Apollo.io to automate Plays (it's truly magic). If you want to try these plays for yourself, it's completely free to get started. Give it a spin and ping me with any feedback. Sign-up link in the comments.

5. Closing thoughts

In a signal-based selling world where many activities become automated, I think that we’ll see a few interesting changes: 

- RevOps will become a more strategic role across all departments 
- A new role will pop up at the intersection of RevOps, SDR, and Growth
- The role of the SDR will dramatically evolve (but not go away) 
- Buyers will continue to have optionality in how they buy 
- GenAI/automation will become table stakes in every GTM org

What signal-based selling plays are working for you?

It seems like a lot of founders are stuck trying to figure out a new ICP, more precise messaging, or an innovative sales play to re-ignite growth.

The timeless wisdom of "talk to customers" is solid and data can be helpful, but it's often faster and more effective to just listen to some calls.

In ~3 hours this afternoon you can listen to 15 thirty-minute sales calls in Gong or Grain. Listen at 2x or 2.5x speed and skip demos.  I guarantee the time won't be wasted.

Some questions to think about:

- How are your most successful reps positioning the product (look for moments that have the prospect nodding in agreement)?  Is this positioning above the fold on your website? Should it be?

- Any surprising trends in why these prospects are engaging with your team in the first place?  Competitive dynamics and market trends have been rapidly changing; your context from 6-12 months ago may be out-of-date.

- Is your sales team really digging to understand the "why" behind the prospect's tactical need?

- Does your team end each qualified call with a compelling reason for the prospect to jump onto the next call? 

Even at the founder sales stage, you'll be surprised at what you pick up reviewing your own calls, without the pressure of winning over a prospect.

And finally, don't forget that sales is a stressful performance art.  Shoot your sellers a compliment when you unearth a great clip. They'll really appreciate it!

The call recording/coaching vendors are adding AI summaries to scale this type of call review activity, but I've only found those useful for identifying calls to listen to.  Anybody have a more efficient or defined process for pulling insights from sales calls?  

Choosing a venture capital firm? 
It's not just about the money. 

The top reasons anyone picks a VC firm are value add, relationship with the partner, firm's prestige, and valuation. 

But when you dig deeper, the number one factor is value add. 

Why? 

Because funding is a commodity.

If you've built something great, you'll be able to raise your next round. 

But the value add? 

That's where the magic happens.

Our portfolio companies tell us that the most valuable add-on we provide, even beyond customer introductions, is help with hiring. 

And it's not just about introductions to candidates.

It's about helping them understand how to interview, how to build a candidate list, how to create a hiring plan, and how to stay ahead of that plan. 

One of the biggest mistakes a company can make is not understanding the layering of their hiring plan. 

And hiring is just one of many value adds.  

Figure out what you need the most help with and then find the firm that's right for that function.

Six GTM strategies to hit $250M ARR 👀

Not every GTM play you try will move the needle on growth.

But what's more important is to treat strategies as an experiment: test what works, double down on that motion, and then run it consistently.

In Kyle Poyar's latest deep-dive, he interviewed ActiveCampaign's Sr. Growth Manager, Casey Hill, on how the company tests and reviews different marketing strategies.

Here’s the list of plays ActiveCampaign ran and the grades they got.
1. Run LinkedIn ads (B)
2. Customer stories and co-promotion (B)
3. Content personalized for specific verticals (B+)
4. On-demand (in-person) workshops (B+)
5. Influencer campaigns (C)
6. Optimizing email flows for activation (A)

A key element in Casey's process is to have very specific KPIs that dictate success – not just for each individual strategy, but collectively.

"How did we pace toward pipeline creation overall, and how did each play contribute to our goal." 

---
In the latest SaaS Weekly roundup, we featured Kyle's interview with ActiveCampaign, and more SaaS reads.

Here's a preview 👇.

1️⃣ GTM strategies to reach $250M ARR at ActiveCampaign
 - by Kyle Poyar

2️⃣ The zero-click email strategy that gets us 40%+ open rates
 - by Amanda Natividad at SparkToro

3️⃣ How to automate signal-based selling
 - by Brendan Short at The Signal

4️⃣ Pivoting to a billion-dollar idea: Lessons from Clipboard Health founder Wei D.
 - by Greg Kumparak at Y Combinator

PLUS, featured "SaaSy Social" posts by:
• Ray Rike
• Kate Syuma

---

Read the full issue below (linked in the comments) 👇

#saas #newsletter

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