so I set out to read every sales book out there this year and it's becoming a daunting task because there's like one that comes out every month or every other month and and and and the the majority of them have the title like they the Fillin the blank sales right yes and you can have you know challeng whatever and whatever and whatevers so um some powering through it I'm not I haven't given up yet but um it's it's really fun to actually draw a a line between the old school sales books like the S Ziggler the the the Brian Tracy uh of the world uh and compare that to like the new schools that is a lot more new ones and there's a lot more steps and there is a lot more you know ways to challenge the customer you don't you know it's kind of like the difference between Glen Gary gling Ross and where we are right now you're not always closing you know I mean but if you're not always closing you know you're also not closing so there is this like passive aggressive tone to the new burrito books that are coming out where like oh you stay away from the closing you don't ask about the order the customer has to like volunteer the order I'm like that has never ever happened to me and all every single one of the over 200 million AR that we have generated not once have somebody come and told me you know take my money and shut up so um it's it's it's just really interesting the the pendulum swing that it sort of like it Maps a little bit of the societal mood of like where we come from of like you know you sit down with somebody and you use one of the 10 closes right you use the tie down cloth the wraparound clothes or whatever clothes and now they tell you that if your clothes has a name don't use it I'm like yeah that's not completely true you should be using some closes techniques because they help to actually you know part customers with their cash help it's helpful so if you haven't guessed yet who that is then that's your own fault so this is many Dina here with us today um obviously uh CEO co-founder of Outreach which we're like super happy to to have you an interview today um and you mentioned already there so you know I can ledge on to this number you guys are well beyond uh 200 million in a I think we have something like uh a thousand people working in the organization something like 6,000 customers and obviously you have uh close a bunch of funding and you know unicorn and multiple unicorn States and all of that stuff right so super impressive and thanks a bunch for spending a little bit of time with us here today Manny I appreciate you having me this is fun and I can just say with that intro I also I felt my own excuses for not reading books collapsed pretty hard in my brain for a second there because I know that I have a lot on in my life but then when you talk with a CEO of a company of that scale who commits to reading that amount of books is yeah I need to go and reassess uh my my priorities around reading why don't you okay ml this year why don't you try and read every single marketing book out there you know every sing Single children's book yeah it's all AI books by now anyway it's all AI books but so what we really wanted to go through today is it's obviously super impressive what you and the team have accomplished over the last couple of years um and we really want to peel the onion on that story hopefully to find some both some challenges along the way and some solutions to really help the listeners across the different stages of growth that they might be at right so super thankful that you want to share some of that viice advice today um one of the things we kind of assumed and I guess you shouldn't do that in in a podcast when interviewing someone but given the field you and we assumed outbound was kind of a motion that you probably bet on very early and so what we wanted to dive into is like what was the first motion I'm assuming outbound here but what was the first motion and how did it start for you to really start selling Outreach yeah so we um we I don't know if you know this but aage is a pivot MH so we started as a separate company that was in the recruiting space and you know we were running out of cash so we build this engine to be able to to outbound to to um corporate recruiters to try to match him with with employees with potential with potential talents and we built this engine that that um did this the personalized and followed up a scale it was only an email and it was it was in essence a workflow meaning we decided that the way to get meetings is to create one deeply personalized message and follow up like four four to seven times depending on the person and that worked marvelously that that took reply rates from you know 0. 24% to four to 6% which is incredible yes um as we were generating this business volume um uh we were trying to sell you know we couldn't close fast enough to Keep Us Alive so we tried to sell an appointment service to agency recruiters and the agency recruiters were like you know how you're generating this volume and we talked about the engine that we built and they were like stop I want to buy the engine I don't want to buy your service so we had to Pivot the entire company to become a SAS company for for appointment setting uh and then we realized one day after selling all the licenses that could to an to a recruiting team that the sales team was Far larger like 10x larger than the recruiting team so I remember this one recruiter that held my hand he he was at app Dynamics and walked me over to the sales floor cuz I was trying to do an walked me into a cell sore and he said Pitch to them not to us out of people so but they have all these people I walked out of there with 50 licenses and and the rest is history that's how we that's how we grew Outreach now when you have a product that that's something that has never been done before you are creating a new category and when you're creating a new category there is no latting demand for you you see I mean there's no like I can go and tap into like the the search stream for whatever because that doesn't exist exist so you have no choice but to educate the market outbound and there is you know sure you can write SEO all day long but that takes a long time and we're again we're still running out of cash you see I mean we're still running into the same problem and we need you know money to survive so the easiest way to generate It Is by calling somebody and selling something and it does two things one it that that it sort of it adds to the product Market fit equation right for every sale that you make and every customer that you retain you know that you're getting better to at Proto Market fit that you were before and the second piece is that by by doing you know I think you you call it in your podcast this founder Le sales um you're able to hone in the pitch in such a way that you can actually scale it you know because there's two parts that are difficult right one is how do you get the door open how do you get somebody interested a on a on on something that they not exist before to solve a pain that you didn't know you have so you have to create that wedge and get really good at that because then you have to bottle that up and give that to a bunch of sdrs and A's and the second thing is that how you navigate a close to organization that did not buy software so when we started selling Outreach cro and BP sales did not have a budget so they have to go and borrow from marketing and borrow from head count and borrow from Ops and borrow from X to actually buy Outreach now is less of a thing but back when we started it they didn't have a budget so we have to a generate the need and B generate the budget so it's like you know new and new and new all all along so like if I didn't blaz that path you know I wouldn't be able to scale and bring in sales people Al to actually do it and that's that's how how out bounding for us that's what out bounding for us means so we were born from C outbound we we never knew inbound until we were I don't know 100 million or so like it's it's kind of like I don't know if you remember that fighting scene between the Bane and Batman and they're fighting in the dark and the Batman can't see Bane and Bane is just like kicking his ass and and and Bane makes fun of bman like I was born in the dark and now this is how we are we were born called outbound like we never knew you know soft inbound lobs and whatever like that's you that's for other companies not for us born in the dark outbound that's what I heard I love that absolutely so I mean so again right I was kind of saying this before we hit record so we had in the company actually the two of us were working kind of uh a bit ago we had kind of the same thing it was bit more of an established Market but very well dominated by extremely strong competitors and we then just started going outbound like crazy you know worked out uh and and we so I I still remember our CEO calling it um you know we are it's kind of an aged statement now that I'm thinking about but we're carpet bombing the market basically right it's kind of it's you know it's maybe we cut this out later but basically kind of using that in order to kind of very go precise out there instead of having the ads run and all of this other stuff and need to wait and wait and wait and nothing happens right so I really I really love I really love that story obviously but I think it's it's also like you see with plg companies today so everyone's like oo look at slack no Salesforce and then you fast forward the clock a couple of years is like oh yeah they have a big sales force what was it air table not abandoning plg but also going sales so you know even with with the new motion that's that's the thing even atan that famously had no sales people of course they have salese you know what is it what is the hottest brand right now open AI what do they have they have salese absolutely they have a ton ofes but they don't have a ton of Enterprise contracts yes and that's that's useful what do you so I mean we were joking also before for the show that you listen to our episode outbound as Dad which is great that you listen to that specific one Manny but um what's your what's your message to people that you know I on LinkedIn is like you know bashing outbound and saying hey you know this is this is such a '90s tactic this doesn't work anymore what's your what's your what's your message to those folks look we we we are all trusted advisers at some point so like if you if you have a big voice on LinkedIn you should take on the responsibility of knowing that your advice is being heard and sometimes acted on and I think that creates a a higher onus of of of of um of um of of work in that you you should make statements that help an audience as opposed to statements that gave you clicks um especially in LinkedIn um and and and for some and for some Industries Al alound may not be you know a strong Channel I I I I accept that but just calling things dead it's it's a little it's it's it's a little misleading yes and it doesn't help neither the company that is trying to grow revenue or the customer Journey that you're trying to empower so you know in in your episode about um this outbound said you were talking about how it's annoying in outbound and like Yeah The Great majority of outbound is Annoying It's a exraction and it's low value but that doesn't make the medium bad you see if somebody calls you with something like if somebody hits me with something that is top of mind for me right now I will pay attention to it but that's hard it's really hard for for you to figure out what's stop on mind for somebody else so the best way to do outbound thing is to is to figure out what are the you know you you you you establish two or three hypotheses or what may be top of mind for the person you're reaching out to you then elaborate on that hypothesis by bringing some amount of value go do some research you know build that two three points of some things that you think are going to hit the mark and then experiment MH it's the same way that if you're trying to make a friend or find a date at the bar like you look at the person and you you're trying to figure out what is your opening line that is going to get you the next 30 minutes of conversation and you may fail and it may be annoying and that person may kick you out but it it's not like you're not going to try you know what I mean otherwise you stay single for the rest of your life so there is you know you you got to be able to go out there and and have a message that resonates with somebody you know the other thing it does is that it allows you to really build your marketing muscle CU When the markeet you know you were mentioning like oh the marketers look at the brand and if it's not on brand off off it goes nobody cares about your brand they care about their problem so out bounding forces you to establish to to create your point of view from the point of view of of the of your customer back and then you have to reflect that back so to to me it's it's it's it's it's misleading and it's unhelpful because you know gets people swinging from left to right and and and it's not really what we're here to do we're all here to to grow Revenue help other organizations to grow Revenue so it it it creates this lost of of advisor ship for all of us who are on lint train trying to to help out how do you think with AI and I'm sure you have had this question now probably 20,000 times but how do you think AI is going to change this outbound game I think it's going to make it way sharper you know AI is a is a prompting game so you have to prompt the AI to extract the hitting knowledge in this llm that you know that depends on how you approach the question you may get a different answer so I think it's going to make you more efficient at coming up with great hypothesis that may resonate with your um with your recipient but at the end of the day it's all about getting in your recipient head and trying to figure out what is important to them and then serving that you know go find industry articles that benefit them go find this nugget that benefits them go find like become an expert matter expert subject matter on the thing that is woring them and only then you should have permission to outbound all the rest of stuff is noise so I think this is um probably at least from my perspective the wrer way of how AI uh will probably have an impact on this because the the uh alternative route that many people are um I'm not saying scared of but but saying hey this will destroy the whole thing is instead of making the individual Outreach more valuable which is your point basically generating more volume with is kind of value um and then kind of you know making this a an even more spammy um approach than it might have been previously right and I think this is um and I totally agree with you I think the the game is going to be much more around enabling that SDR enabling that rep that's outreaching um by you know doing that in a much better way than trying to get rid of the SDR um and trying to do all of that automatically right kind of I think this is uh totally agree with kind of your approach there I think I I think that we need we need to separate the the the job description from the from the activity and from the result that you're looking for um you're your your the the you know the mission here is to generate qualified pipeline meaning to re to to get somebody to to give you permission to engage to exchange you know valuable information for 15 30 minutes of your time to see if we have a zone that we can work together that that could be done by anybody now it turns out that AES that happen to have more experience are better at doing that than SDR that happen to have less experience and that shows up in the conversion numbers but that doesn't mean that an SDR couldn't get great you know and gain that experience by doing research in the industry and become just as good as better as any other AE the at the end of the day it's the activity and the result of that activity that matters so the um you know we went through this period right now and I'm sure you heard of like oh we're going to get rid of SCS you know and we're going to you know we're going to let AI do the whole thing and and you know the the job of pipeline generation doesn't go away it's like saying I'm going to get rid of pipeline generation it's GNA sit here and wait for orders to come in good luck so somebody has to the pipel has to be generated by somebody if it's not as year sure then it's marketing and then there the AES but if you get rid of your SS and you don't have a strong pipeline generation culture in your AES you're just going to miss your number and that's the part that this advice starts getting a little tricky right because that's the kind of stuff that I'm seeing spew it out on the interwebs and it's not helpful yeah and also when you think about it right the I'm not sure I think they have 15ish th000 SAS companies and then there all kinds of other companies obviously out there um really you know the ones they're cutting through an inbound marketing kind of perspective you can probably you know count them in two hands or something like this everyone else is either dying or using outbound to kind of keep growing or get to the next Milestone and get to the luxurious position order to then have a marketing engine you know know the right things to say run ads and build that piece on the side and I just want to kind of take this one step back here because we have like one or two things we also wanted to get kind of your your input on so we we were kind of trying to break this down in like a 0 to 10 or 1 to 10 and 10 to 100 million journey um yeah was there that difference for you or was it was it all just hey the first thing was 20 reps and then it was 100 reps kind of was it different between uh 1 to 10 or 10 to 100 um yeah it was significant differen and in that you especially for us uh because what we were selling did not exist so if you if you peel back at Outreach the entirety of Outreach is a is a workflow for sales MH meaning there's a workflow that you follow to generate pipeline so you you you you find out you know you you pick your accounts you find the right people in the account and for each person in the account you have a number of steps that the medium may change the communication may change but you have to follow the workflow and once you get that person engaged you have another workl for for sort of like finding the zone of Engagement finding if there's collaboration opportunities you know it used to be co- qualifying I think that's that's misnomer right now because like nobody likes to be qualified I think that you need to figure out like where there's a problem you need to solve yeah then and then you use that to then you know you know find the buying group and then engaging them forward that's another workflow in which you have to figure out who to buying group and then you how you stitch them together so the um to answer your question we because our category didn't exist we had to S and we have to generate Revenue right away we were selling to whoever wanted to buy you know all the way to 10 million and that could be anybody that could be a sales organization that could be a a a fundraising for a political campaign that could be a repo shop in Hawaii that could be anybody that needed to do some kind of out bounding um then we realize that that having such a broad diverse customer base was actually unhelpful because we couldn't success them a scale because each of their workflows look very dissimilar so I couldn't get leverage of you know selling to the same type of workflow and then just teach everybody the same workflow in the best practice because if I have people doing all sorts of things then I can't get the learnings fast enough to scale that was problem number one so we have to then reduced our our ICP our ideal customer profile to only the people that that we need knew that we can success and that the success was scalable meaning that the success that we drove with one client was very similar to the next yeah the next thing was that um our short our Cycles were very short and we were happy with getting 10 to $50,000 deals on the regular at High Velocity the problem with that is that when you your high velocity deal landed at a very um you at a very low level so you get you know back in you know before 2022 anybody any 20 some year old could write a $200,000 check yep and so they will buy one of each right so Landing those deals are very very easy and then when when we got to 100 million or even no when we got to 50 million that's when I realized that this will we will not be able to scale this and retain our customers at a higher rate and given the success that we they they need if we don't if we don't start selling significantly larger ticket items with much more involvement in the success of the client and with a lot more Professional Services involved and sort of like change management involved you know we're going to be in this threadmill of getting in this short contracts that you know the moment that person gets fired that you know we're were churned and it not scale the organization and then the next layer from 100 to 200 and Beyond is that now we have multiproducts and when you have multiproducts then you have to figure out you know what is the right approach to the customer so that you can fit the right sort of product solution and then sell the remaining other products and and it became an expansion game rather a new logo game so there's all these faces that we have to navigate from being a transactional sale to a bigger sale to a platform sale each of them look vastly different than the last I think the really cool the narrowing in the ICP I think that that's that's pretty cool actually and then doing the high velocity stuff many of us would be happy with that by the way right kind of this is a very successful business to get to like I don't know 25 million with that stuff um did you then bolt on the Enterprise pieces or did you evolve the whole goto Market to then focus on the Enterprise stuff you know uh that's a that's an amazing question because we were told by advisers investors and and so on to just bolt on the Enterprise just bring a great Enterprise leader and will'll sort you out and if you're not it's one of those things that is a is a it's a self- referential problem if you're not already Enterprise it's really hard to attract all the Enterprise leaders because your Sal cycle is completely different your produ road map looks completely different M so now you have to the you don't you don't scale your sales to Enterprise you almost turn the entire company into an Enterprise you know machine right your product is oriented towards an Enterprise need your goto Market is oriented towards an Enterprise need so uh the first time we did it we tried to just bring in Enterprise Sellers and leaders to go after that market um then we realized it was really hard we had a few people that were super successful and you know the remaining were not and then you start wondering is that a product Market fit issue like what was it and it turns out that there was just a a kind of like the iceberg there is a a ton of Enterprise requirements that you have to have to be able to even play in that in that in that space so you have to so we we we we change the uh the entire organization to be more consultative because even in the lower Mark even in the lower segments in the smaller segments um an Enterprise approach is helpful it it helps you land bigger so if you bring an Enterprise approach to say an S&B or commercial segment but what happen is instead of Landing a $20,000 deal you land a $100,000 deal that is more W to wall now the Sal cycle will be longer so you have to be careful for that but but it will be a stickier land it will be a more strategic land the conversation that you have will be more about change management in future and getting you into a road with me as opposed to just buy this tool and be done with it so I I think that it for us it was helpful to bring this entire Enterprise motion uh across the organization so one thing I also want to double back to here is specifically on the um the ICP kind of the okay we need to focus in on this this slice of the market was there just a cold hard decision to then say well we're just not going to prioritize anything for anybody you know of our existing customers that falls outside of that category how did you navigate that part because I can also imagine it's being difficult when you look at the Mr you have on the books right well that's what uh that's a beauty of outbound is you get to pick you get to choose where are you going to point your people to and when you decide I'm not going to sell to this segment I'm going to sell to this segment all you have to do is change the phone numbers and the profiles and boom you are in the right you're heading in the right direction and so it it it had a it had the problem it became at scale that you wanted to use evidence to show to a bigger customer that you know their space and that you can success their space if you're too broad it's really hard to get evidence so you have to be able to focus so that your marketing can focus so your product marketing can focus so that your sales can focus um so you just stop selling stop coal outbound to the areas that you don't want to Coal outbound that's why I love it like it's that is way harder to do when you build an edifice of inbound leads that are all crap you see what I mean switching off of that is really hard so I love that um couple of questions in my mind I'm just trying to kind of got organized I think the uh we've been talking a little bit about marketing here and there um and uh and how it's sometimes helpful not helpful um I think you mentioned uh you only lay it in marketing around 100 million or something like like that I'm not sure if kind of where no we had marketing before but what I'm saying is the the inbound engine didn't kick in until around 50 yeah and then it became a a meaningful driver of of growth you know or like closer to 100 but we we we had a you know we brought in a marketer immediately helped us um establish the category create our brand awareness around who we were the word engagement or sales engagement did not exist until we had this marketer come in and sort of help us you know narrow that and like what is that we are and then defining what engagement is and defining like what is our our Persona in the market what's our brand and so if our brand became um this engagement workflows our brand became uh our conference called on leash that became really quickly a very popular conference um and that allowed us to then you know help us with a calling card right so when you say hi I'm many from Outreach the response is what the hell is outre but the response is like I heard of you tell me more you see what I mean like so it creates it it gets a little bit more more of air cover to your cold outbound it still doesn't get the you know the the floods open of of inbound but at least it gets it gets uh it gets our sellers to have an easier conversation in less of like who the hell are you and why are you calling me and the way you kind of saw that you know help out besides of the inbound pieces just like you mentioned right that there's a bit more recognition especially in the first touch or the second touch or something like this would you would you say you've seen similar effects on I don't know conversion rate sales Cycles a couple of other things really what I'm fishing for is this and I by the way I hate the term all bound I don't think it's helpful I don't know how kind of you see this thing but there is certainly a CO mingling of those two motions that that does happen successfully and especially when you have such a pure outbound motion and then so let no don't want to say late in the game but so late in kind of in terms of AR kind of really adding this I was wondering if you kind of could clearly see a shift you know stable conversion rates more marketing suddenly conversion rates go up did you see something like that data we we did see an increase of um we did see an increase in in conversion rates and conversion rates defined as an opportunity open and uh and then close one versus divided by everything else um you know once marketing started kicking in um but it makes me wonder whether was marketing kicking in and or the fact that the category became yeah and I don't know which I can't give you causal reasoning to one or the other it did get easier it's a short of it um over time um I'm sure that some of it was our marketing but I'm sure some of it was our competitor marketing some of it was the fact that the entire I remember this was one piece from lenkin that talk about the sales stack and that got all of a sudden the entire at least the B2B Tech Market talking about what's your stack so you stop being just you know you bought you know Zoom INF for and Salesforce it became like oh you have to buy this a stack of things to get your your your sales engine going um and the moment that became popular then then people started talking about their stock and we were part of the stack meaning not only we but like sales engagement was part of the stack and and and the stock continued to grow up to to the point where it is today and you mentioned a couple of times kind of this category being established you guys figuring out hey it's sales engagement um a couple of others jumping on that bandwagon as well I'm not sure you know what order can you talk a little bit about the competitive situation starting out and later on when it kind of developed and matured a little bit more um and did it you know was it helpful or was it not helpful right because so many people are scared and worried about competition but then there's so much evidence also that it's a good thing so we would love to have your perspective on that yeah I think at the very beginning competition was very helpful um because it helped us establish the the the market so when we when we showed up to the market we were actually scared of going into such a busy Market which is technology and we were pretty sure that somebody has solved the problem that we're looking at which is how do you create a workflow for sales as opposed to point Solutions so so there was a point solution for calling there was a point solutions for emailing there was a point solution for slides sharing there's a point solution for uh booking appointments there is a point solution for everything and what we realized is that for the you know at least for the pipeline generation part of the job the job was interl meaning like there wasn't just calling or emailing or linking or texting it was the whole of it and then you have to figure out like what works when right because some of the activities are are useful at the beginning and some of the activities are creepy at the beginning right so if you you know if you LinkedIn somebody uh to make a connection or even before then like if you like somebody's comment or you comment or you or you engage with them on on socials on some sort and then you use that to to drive a conversation and then you and then and then as the the the the trust grows your relationship becomes more intimate now you're texting that's one path but if you use the same medium and you start texting right at the very beginning and try to sell something that's just creepy so the the understanding of what mode of communication and what kind of language needs to happen where in the in the in the in the pipeline generation cycle was super important and nobody was attacking it like nobody was creating workflows and testing and becoming intelligent around it so we saw this opportunity um and and build a product around it but again it was really hard for us to just lift the whole Market by ourselves so as others joined in the in The Fray and and and sort of became this you know ballooning of other applications that sort of like look like Outreach and some of them are still around right like you know a polo was born back then it it died for a minute because it had a you know hacking issues but you know it was now it's born again um you know there was there was other competitors that came into the fry um that you know booed the market created so like this this this awareness that we need it that everybody needs something right and and the the job for us is to position ourselves as the leader in that category so that if you are buying number two and number three you know it's a trade-off you know I mean like that you you decided to like go with number two for whatever reason um but as long as you're the leader you get the full the full awareness now It's tricky because the market is is just tough the market is tough for everybody like it's not just stuff for us it's stuff for everybody and now the you know because we're sort of like it's still selling a lot into Tech you know the competition is just creating a lot of traits and that is just stalling everybody so there's there is a point in which you know we going to either the market has to you know go back and grow again or we're going to have to figure out how to consolidate it but at at the right time it's helpful at the wrong time is UNH helpful so let's talk about um internationalization a little bit or going global rather so I mean you guys obviously started in the US US is a big enough market to grow to you know large numbers right um when did you make the move to go beyond the US um and I'm sure you did it with outbounds I'm not going to ask about that but when you know when was that decision made to jump over and what was the thinking around it yeah our move to um our first International Market was of course emia and the our our our decision to to put people on the ground was due to the fact that we already had customers there and we were paying people in the US to do you know odd shifts to be able to serve that that customer base yeah the first thing we did is we moved support and success and that was our start of the internalization because it was all about supporting the customers that we had abroad um or the customers that were not in the US rather um and then once we do that then we can scope the size of the market and put put sales behind it the problem with that approach is that you lock yourself into the customer base that you have not in the customer base you want to haveh you see what I mean yeah and of course you know when we did that our customer base was a small transactional in buying single Point Solutions as opposed to bigger more strategic and we are you know part of the sales transformation conversation and you know if if I were to do it again I would I would have a a a definitive strategy as to what am I trying to do in in a Market expansion move you know what are the things that look like the us and what are the things that don't look like the US so my current hypothesis is that it's best to pick markets but it's best to pick markets and industries in that market and then go after that you see what I mean because that you have momentum from other industries that kind of look the same and then you can get the leverage of the industry where you're already sold and looks very much similar into the other country um the case studies the sales motions Etc you can even teach something to that same market player in that industry that that they may not know as opposed to go g geographically geographically doesn't you know will will you end up always with an easy path with they fill you the tank with a bunch of S&B companies that turn over the moment the market gets off so that's that's that's my learning and I think that makes sense like we had um Aron Mani from playo on the show obviously a different company because they do fintech so there's a lot of requirements locally in the markets but his point was when you enter a new market you almost also need to reestablish some level of product Market fit so so I think that resonates a lot um one of the things I I kind of was wondering about because you talked about Market expansion and another way to kind of expand your growth is something you mentioned earlier which is going multiproduct right having having different offer in how did you go about you know so when did you do that and how did you go about that decision because there's so many ways you can go you can go for another department another ICP so I'm curious how you know why you made that decision to go multiproduct and what that look like for you yeah I I think it's um I forget exactly where it flips but if you look at the majority of AD scale B2B SAS companies uh in at scale I'm I'm speaking you know over let's go call it half a billion um you may argue it's a billion but let's call it half a billion when you're at that size over 60 to 70% of your sales are expansion sales are upses cross sales um and and you know getting that growth rate on the back of new logos is just too expensive so when you when you when you do the math and you and you have to content with the fact that the great majority of your sales are going to come from expansions then you have to figure out whether it's going to be seed expansion as going to be use case expansion meaning the same seat by using the same product in a different way or it's going to be you know division expansion like find other divisions within the company where it's going to be product expansion and uh you know you just work back the conversion rates and everything else and you realize that if you don't have an approach to all meaning if you don't have one of each you're going to miss you're not going to get the the full the the full juice out of the expansion squeeze if you would uh if you don't have multi multiple products now the the decision that you need to make is what kind of product do you build right you know do you build a marketing product do you build an Ops product do you build so the easiest thing to do is to expand into the same into the same buyer so if you can sell to the same buyer a different product that's far easier that finding a net new buyer uh in the same organization and even then it's hard right because usually when you expand into multiple product there's already a product incumbent in the new product that you're building that you have to dis place so the question is how do you do it with a platform sale and how do you shift the market from bestto to platform which in sales hasn't happened yet but it's in the middle of happening um so the the and and the last thing is that you you just look at the market like you look at public markets and you'll bring it back to to to where we are and you can see that there's no public company that's can have multiple products so you have to have multiple products because that belt and suspenders your your AR on the back of that question um and I'm not not quite sure I'm you know sometimes not good at you know asking the right questions here in the in the the right way but so you you look at those uh you look at this cluster around sales engagement um those four companies basically right um there's un sales Loft that had a similar origin then you have gong that has a different origin and then you have clar that has a different region right but ultimately all of those four if I'm not forgetting anyone uh have basically kind of build a similar Suite now um what is in my head all the time when I hear gong and I know for a fact that they have all of those different tools gong is for me still a you know demo recording tool clar for me is still forecasting tool I'm sorry they can they can buy as many other stuff as they want it's forecasting tool um and and and you and sales soft um probably in my head at least for a while it's going to remain kind of a hey this is an Outreach you know sales engagement tool right how do you how do you navigate that right because this is so complex and you know trying to get into the the buyer's mind that you know now it's all encompassing it's kind of this line extension problem almost right kind of how how are you how are you navigating this by winning I mean it's it's just that like it's a it's a it's a game of of of of it begins as a game of corner so when I started Outreach I was living in San Francisco selling door to door to all the startups in SoHo and in the Soho area yeah and word gets out that there's this new thing on the Block that looks like X you should take a look at it and as momentum builds you sort of grow with it and and I think we're all sort of heading in that direction and that we're trying to use parlay our strength in where we are to capture the the additional pieces of what you need to grow and and and here is where points of view become important MH because uh you're saying that I have it too is not gonna convince somebody to switch because what what's happening right now is we all came to the market had and heavy we evangelized a point of view that's talked about a stack and best of breed and we told everybody that you should buy Best of breed fast forward to today we're going back to the market and saying forget the best of breed buy everything from me yes right so um that's hard it's going to be hard to to shift that market so our point of view is that is that instead of selling the platform what we're approaching the market with is that let's let's figure out what are your the the workflows of your sales organization so how do you want your sales organization to perform and then where is it performing right now what are the gaps that you see in performance and then we can attach solutions to each of those pieces so our platform doesn't doesn't um doesn't Force us to say hey you should buy the whole thing from Outreach but we can say look the the the Technical Solutions that you need for your workflow gaps can be supplanted by Outreach but can also be supplanted by anybody else and this is the beauty of sales right that you know the the way that you approach a customer needs to be from their point of view and their problems and then you can attach your solution to that if if you did a good job in the sales cycle but if you added value in the sales cycle itself you should the customer should leave that conversation smarter and that's why we come into the point the to to to the market by saying it's all about creating the workfl and how do you get tighter alignment to your to your dream state from where you are right now you know it's really interesting that back in the day and you probably heard about this there was this whole movement around Six Sigma that there were processes that you took from A to B especially manufacturing right so G evangelized ETA and what it and Six Sigma told you that you you wanted to bring the the tolerance of the errors down to a Six Sigma event which is you know out out out out on the far tals if you look at sales sales is not even like half a sigma you sales is is very you know depending on the person depending on the training depending on a faster number of things and having a this disperate you know stack is actually compounding the problem so you know one of the ways that you choose ICP or who you going to be your great customer profile for you is somebody who believes in this thesis that your sales needs to be a system that is repeatable where everybody can win right as opposed to say I'm just going to hire great reps and you know let them let them do their thing like you have to have a point of view on what great looks like and what is a system creation that you're going to build and then deliver that and that's our point of view you know the rest of the compet have their own point of view on where they come from based on their marketing on their tagines Etc but ours if you create one that is out there and differentiated and from and helpful to the customer that's going to help us get into the into the full category so I mean it's been quite insightful so far just to hear hear this journey also if you've you know if you listen to other episodes there's a lot of stuff on so we had Dave boy on the show and we talked about when is it time to develop you know a new motion and he said well if you have a motion and you can go to 100 million why not just focus on that and it kind of sounds like you've been you've been following that uh you know maybe not his advice but been following that approach and I'm really curious because a bunch of our listeners they're going to probably sit at 10 20 30 million they're going to look at that 100 million number that every SAS company is initially at least uh gunning for once they're past 10 with all the things you've learned maybe this is a good kind of note for you to take us home on what are some of the things you would pass on to the listeners to the revenue leaders out there listening to the show um that would be helpful in the journey towards 100 you know the the the the the time to worry about things and is when everything is working because right after that is when you know it hits a fan so for us we had a number of breakage points at 10 at 25 at 50 and then at 100 where we I'm like what's going on like things were growing but not in the way that you anticipated and you knew that there was a problem in the system right and that forced us to go from your selling feature and capabilities to selling the solution to selling the the the value of the solution not just the solution but the value the solution is going to create selling the pl from each of those were distinct motions and if you didn't take the whole organization through that distinct motion you're going to hit a wall the the problem of getting to 100 is that the the moment you get to 100 you wake up and you have to do it again doing it again it's G to be a tough goal [Music] this must be like how professional athletes feel like after they won the gold medals like yes it's like next year we need to do it again guys Brian said you rest at the end not in the middle you see what I mean so like thinking of a h 100 as a destination is resting in the middle you rest when you want to rest but 100 is not a destination it's a milestone to wherever you want to go this is or this was many Medina for everyone uh absolutely pleasur to have you here just kind of a quick wrap up obviously very much outbound Focus was actually a pivot coming out of something completely different like hey you know this is working why don't we build some software around that uh building up sales engagement as a category going going going and then you know maybe this is really the inspirational message for everyone here is like well you know get to 100 and then realize you just need to do it again yeah it's like no no problem um Manny thank you so much for being here spending some time and um yeah have a great rest of the day thank you it was fun thank you byebye