SaaS
Introduction
Dan Reich is CEO and Co-Founder of Troops.ai which is software that makes sales a team sport by empowering people, automating workflows and supercharging sales performance.
In this episode we learn all hour the daily hustle that brought the first 10 customers through direct sales. How did this founder leverage good old fashioned hustle and networking to grow their business initially…
See how to get your 10 first customers…
Dan Rich: The goal of the website is really to act as a place of education, four a four most importantly, the problems and benefits and problem solutions and how Troops is uniquely suited to solve those problems and solutions. You’re going to be seeing us a whole lot more on our website, including more use cases around specific roles as we just talked about, sales uses Troops. There’s executive, as executives in an organization. As soon you’re going to see us talk more about how to talk to each one of those roles more specifically.
Pathmonk: Gotcha. There are already any types of metrics that you would really care about or that you would hold your marketing team accountable to in regards to the website?
Dan Rich: Yeah, we think about marketing metrics in a very similar way, I imagine to most other SaaS companies. We’re looking at your classic metrics like a web traffic and inbound traffic and then how that falls through the funnel into leads and qualified leads and demo signups and product signups and how that flows into paying customers as well. I suspect we look at metrics again in a very similar way to most SaaS companies.
Pathmonk: What role does the website conversion rate play? Is that something you closely track at the very moment?
Dan Rich: Yeah, I would say conversion rate and all of the funnel metrics increasingly will become more important and we’ll continue to work to refine them and look at each one of them and where drop-off occurs within the funnel, that’ll always be important. It’ll always be increasingly important as we grow and deal with larger datasets.
Pathmonk: How did you get in front of your first customers?
Dan Rich: Good old fashioned hustle and networking. This is the world I grew up when you grow up. Grew up in, as did my co-founders, just hustling and doing sales. Just a combination of cold outreach and networking and introductions. We were able to get in front of, quite a lot of folks very quickly. (…) I think one of the things maybe we would do differently is maybe pull forward sales and marketing earlier. The reason is if you think about what we’re doing and the problems we’re solving, the problems aren’t new. Every virtually every company on earth has issues with their CRM and data issues and usages issues and compliance and engagement issues. That is not a new problem. What is new is how we believe companies need to be solving them. We think the wrong answer is to buy another heavy, pointed solution that you need a log into. You have 50 different tabs in your web browser open. We think the right solution is to have that elegantly consolidate it into a beautiful medium. People are working and prefer to work as a human, and that just requires education and requires awareness. I think if were to do it again, maybe we’d get a fold dedicated sales and marketing functions forward earlier in the life cycle of our company (…)
