The Sales Process that Grew EchoSign to $100M in Revenues with Jason Lemkin (podcast)

This post originally appeared on Growth Everywhere, a marketing and business growth blog.

Hey everyone, today’s interview features EchoSign (now Adobe Sign) co-founder and CEO Jason Lemkin, who built EchoSign’s annual revenues to over $100 million and sold it to Adobe. He’s now a Managing Director at Storm Ventures, a top business contributor on Quora, and writes a wildly popular software-as-a-service blog, SaaStr, reaching 500,000 visitors every month.

Download podcast transcript [PDF] here: The Sales Process that Grew EchoSign to $100M in Revenues with Jason Lemkin TRANSCRIPT

Key Takeaways:

  • How going from $0 to $100 million in revenue takes trial, error and making mistakes along the way.
  • Launched EchoSign from TechCrunch in 2006 and grew his business through press and content marketing.
  • Jason made a lot of mistakes in the beginning including launching with the wrong messaging and market position.
  • Credits himself with doing one thing right – lavishing existing customers with incredible attention to keep the business growing into a success.
  • Reminds us to focus on what you’re good at and love to do. If you’re terrible at sales, but great at content marketing, build a brilliant online community to convert into paying customers.
  • Jason knew he was great at closing a huge deal with a company like Google, but couldn’t do 50 cold calls a day to small businesses. He hired people to do it for him and focused on his strengths instead.
  • Why Jason thinks getting to $10 million is the magic number in business building. Suddenly you can get a seat at any deal in town and business gets easier. You might not win every deal, but people know your mini-brand.
  • By nature, entrepreneurs tend to be impatient. But it takes about two years before you’ll see the benefits of investing in customer care and loyalty, and nearly three years to really see a quantitative impact. In year two, Jason discovered 80% of their growth came from existing customers through upsells and upgrades.
  • Why you shouldn’t hire a VP of Sales until you have at least two reps consistently hitting their quota.
  • How to use industry standards to set sales quotas and commissions and strategies to keeping customers and employees happy.

How To Grow Your B2B Revenue:

  • Pay lavish attention and care on current customers to foster repeat buyers and word-of-mouth marketing.
  • Start with what you know. Focus on growing your content marketing and online community if that’s where your strengths lie.
  • Find ways to scale your success techniques. Landing one great sale isn’t enough if you can’t do it more than once.
  • Develop your mini-brand until your true brand catches up. Your core, target audience will eventually find your mini-brand and help spread the word as they learn more about your company.

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