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.
Resources:
- In SaaS, As Long As You Are Growing 60% Or More — Your Competition Can’t Really Hurt You
- How To Know You’ve Hit First Traction In SaaS. The Moment When You’ve Got A Real Company
- How My VP, Sales Doubled Our Sales in 90 Days. And No, It Wasn’t Magic
- Predictable Revenue
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