Best Of Sales Skills Podcast

"Why I moved my AEs to SDRs". How Lusha tripled their ARR in just 12 months: Assa Elder

November 23, 2021 Mark McInnes/Assa Elder Season 2 Episode 68
Best Of Sales Skills Podcast
"Why I moved my AEs to SDRs". How Lusha tripled their ARR in just 12 months: Assa Elder
Show Notes Transcript

What would you do if your sales director said we are moving most of our Account Execs into SDR roles?
It’s a good question.
In today's episode, we will find out what happens if you do.
 
ASSA ELDAR is the Head of Sales at Lusha and I'm delighted to have him as a guest.
Since our original recording of this episode, Lusha announced an additional $205Mill raise which gave them a market cap of $1.5Bill

I love it when you get someone who is prepared to take a few risks and it pays off, they make great stories, I love it even more… when it's a business I know and have genuine respect for.

If you work in business development you know of Lusha, you’ve even or have tried Lusha. It's one of those staple SaaS products that SDRs, BDMs and anyone doing outbound need in their tool kit.
 
In today's episode, we get a sneak peek behind the curtain to look into what their Product Lead Growth Strategy was, how it needed to change and the risks they took to get the business eventually firing on all cylinders.

Assa Elder
https://www.linkedin.com/in/assa-eldar/

Lusha
https://www.lusha.com/

Mark McInnes
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-mcinnes/

Mark’s Gumroad Portal
www.markmc.gumroad.com

Mark’s VIP Mailer
www.markmc.co/salesmail 

Catch all versions of me here.

https://linktr.ee/markmcinnes
LinkedIn profile
VIP sales mailer
Tactical Pipeline Growth
BOSS Podcast
1 on 1 Consulting

Mark McInnes:

What would you do if your sales director said we're moving most of our account execs into SDR roles? It's a good question. Well, on today's episode, we'll find out what happens when you do that. You know, I love it. When you get someone who's prepared to take a few risks and those risks pay off, they make for really great stories. And I love it even more when it's a business I know and have genuine respect for. Most likely if you're in business development, you know, Lucia, or maybe you've even tried Lusher. It's one of those staples SAS products that STRs BDMs and anyone doing outbound need as part of their, their quitter. In today's episode, we get a sneak peek behind the curtain to look into what their product led growth strategy was, how it changed and the risks they took to get the business firing on all cylinders. I Assa Elder is the head of sales at Lusha and I'm delighted to have him on as a guest, since we recorded this episode, Lucia has since announced a$205 million raise, which will give them a market cap of 1.5 billion. That's billion with a B. I know you're going to love this episode, buckle up and have a listen. Assa. Welcome to the BOSS podcast. Thank you for coming on the show.

Assa Elder:

Thanks for having me.

Mark McInnes:

Yeah, absolutely. My pleasure. So look, I'm really looking forward to our discussion today because there's some really interesting things happening in your business, but even your business itself is super interesting. So Lucia, you know, my guess is a lot of people on this podcast would know Lucia. They would probably have used it a little bit. Maybe they use it a lot. Lucia has been a great product. It's something that I've used over the last few years. I've used it on and off. I think it's a, it's a great product and it really does. They're very distinct hall in the market. So, you know, on that front, I'm really excited to be talking to you because I think it's great to have somebody from an organization, like that on a product that I, that I support and have them for many years. So thanks for coming on. And also for you as an individual, you're obviously a very talented sales manager and a very talented sales leader because some of the things that you've taken the business through. But 12, 18 months would normally be very difficult. A lot of salespeople sales managers would, could almost be career ending, you know, but here you are kicking goals and pushing ahead. So, Mike, thank you for taking the time. I'm really grateful.

Assa Elder:

Thank you very much. So yes, as you mentioned, I took some risks in the last, year, by changing the self-esteem completely from what we used to do, to what we're doing today. I got lucky because, I have a great CEO who actually supported that change. Not everybody would do. And we'll, I think we'll talk about it in a minute. I'll say a little bit about myself. So I've been in Lucia for the past three years and currently I'm I'm head of sales here at Lucia managing a team of twenty-five twenty-five people as the arginase. And before that, I was actually in the outbound business. I was head of VDR in a few companies. And I used Lucia in two different companies before I used, before I moved to the sharding, even though it was in Israeli company, just across the street of the companies to work in. And I think that Lucia really helped my process and helped me reach my targets and other companies and as a BDR. So when I came here, I was really excited to. To actually be a part of this, this company. And I started as a head of BDR here, and I knew that I'm going to get it. That's what I, that's what I did at the beginning, used my own product. You have to bring more business. And then I, I moved into sales. I did some enterprise sales and something again. And I realize it doesn't work. After four months of being head of enterprise sales at Lucia, I came to the CEO and I said, this doesn't work. What we do right now, is not going to take us to the next level. It's not going to bring us the business. We want to bring a solution in order to be successful. And we certainly together, by the way, our, my sales guy is. He helped me a lot. And he's one of the best people I know, to build it. And we can talk about that as well, but measuring everything about how to optimize your sales funnel. And I think that's a little bit about me and, short here at Lucia.

Mark McInnes:

Okay. So. Just, just in case we've got people on the podcast who don't know what litter is, give us the, you know, your side of this, a 32nd, 62nd spiel about what literal reason why people should kick it out.

Assa Elder:

So Alicia is a B2B contact information database, right? The end of the day, we have phone numbers and emails and a few more data points, a lot more data points on people around the world. If you are actually in the album business, and you want your company to start processing. And find the right people. You need to contact them and start cold calling cold emails, et cetera. Lucia is the tool for you. We, sit on LinkedIn and everybody, you look at a contact in LinkedIn, which I will provide a useful information on that contact. And we also just came out with a prospecting tool. So within our platform, you can actually slice and dice the data. So let's say you want a VP sells in a email. From computer for software space, we can provide that and you can download that, push it straight to you at Salesforce. And the goal is to be super targeted. We are very good with direct dials and that's our bread and butter. And everybody that moves to Lucia from other companies, it's mainly for the directors, you know, post Corona, nobody, no other people at the office. And there's not really a headquarters numbers. Anyone, nobody, you don't have extension one, two, three, or you call the secretary. Hi, may I speak to mark please? Oh, yes, please hold. It doesn't happen. Everybody has direct dials these days. And Lucia was the first one who start collecting those. And now we are the leader in that, and that helps us a lot in our business.

Mark McInnes:

Yeah. A hundred percent. I can, I can, validate that from a sales training perspective, some of the teams that I'm training we've had other products, I won't mention what they are, but, you know, when we've looked at the data, at least, you know, the names, we'd done, didn't have the direct oils. And when we started to dig deeper, a lot of those lists were pretty old pretty quickly. And because. You know, some of these list generation companies focus so heavily on USA and UK, because that's where everyone is right down here in Australia. We've only got 20, 25 million people, but the lists don't work because you can use Lucia. It does work so. Yeah, look, I can absolutely, support what you said there, it's a, it's a, it's a great product and a lot of my clients are using it. So again, I'm very pleased to have a representative of Alicia on, thank you. All right. So, so Lucia has grown through this thing called product led growth, right? So let's, let's start there and I think that'll make sense to. To dig a little bit deeper into how you've been successful as a sales leader with some of the buttons that you've pressed or the leavers that you pulled out of that. So just explain for the layman, for the average person, what does product leg grow like? What's a product lead. Organize it. Tell us about that. How does that work? How do you go to market? Give us a background there.

Assa Elder:

Great. So Liz Lucia is a product led company. It means a PLG means that the KPI of marketing is to bring. And not leads. Meaning the VP marketing will never give me leads. I will never get direct leads from marketing. Their KPI is to bring users, the other companies like that, like slack, for example, like monday.com like zoom.us, right? That you start using the product for free. You can download it and start using it immediately. Very simple, very user-friendly. And once you use the product. And you use it for free. You can use it for months. If you want for free, then you get hooked and then you start paying for it. You can pay, you can start paying self service, right. And, buy for yourself with the website, or if you want a big deal and big themes and more abilities and more features you go to the enterprise. So that's pretty much. The important thing to know is that we get a lot of users, hundreds of tens of thousands of users every month coming in and download the Lucia plugin. And now we need to do something with them. So some of them are actually raised their hands. I can get it Cummins as an inbound lead. Hi, I want to talk to somebody. Those people usually have a lot of intent because they already used the product product. So when you come to them and you say, hi, I saw that you, you want to say demo? Yes. Have you used the product? Oh yeah. I've been using it for a long time. I don't know of a company that doesn't have at least one or two users of Lucia for free you'd name, a company we have. The tricky part is actually to what to do with all these free users, the come from a good company, right? Let's say company about 500 feet. In good region, if you want to work with like UK and we only have for users there, it's not, we used to start our outreach to those companies in order to, get them on board. A lot of these companies are, using Lucia is a premium account or professional account. That's exactly, exactly what it means to have a product led growth environment. You have companies like Google or Amazon that has a hundred or 200 paid accounts. It Lucia, are we working with. Not necessarily we working with Amazon, not necessarily, but we have a lot of accounts, a lot of pain accounts that, are using us. Now, the goal is to come and have one umbrella account for those accounts. And that's the goal of the sales team in the, as part as well as inbound and our inbound machine, we have a lot of inbound leads. They come and they have tons of intent and we build the process for it. And we. Most of our sales from that. And that's great. The end of the day we have users, we have a lot of users. We want to do something with them. We want to try to convert them. And that's what the LG is all about. A lot of people coming into the product and you started to start selling them.

Mark McInnes:

Okay. So from the strategic selling point of view, do you target the company or the people like, so do you see, let's just use Google as an example, right? Cause everyone knows Google, but like if you say four people sign up from Google. Tonight or today, do you go, oh, someone should ring the people at Google or are you going through your CRM and going, who's a business that we want to work with. Let's put Google in. How many people have we got using Google? Oh, we've got four people here. Let's reach out to them. Like which one is it reactive or are you hunting or farming? Do you know what I mean?

Assa Elder:

Yes. So I think the, the two answers to this question, two parts of that answer. One is yes, we are hunting, right? Somebody that downloads. We try to call them and say, Hey, you done Lucia, use five credits. Why, what value did it give you? I see that let's not take Google. Let's take other companies, a thousand people company. I see the other people in your company are using Lucia. Why use it? How did you hear about us? Why, why are you using Lucia? That's one thing we do, but we talked to those people, but they're not the decision makers. The people who use our product or is. So we talked to them, we bribe them, give them some free credit. And in exchange we asked for the right. But I personally stopped to all we prospect. We used Lucia right on a database and we prospect the right person in the right team. And we say, Hey, by the way, you know that, John, Johnny and Georgia using Lucia. Did you know that let's get everybody on board, we start a free trial process and see if we can give you value. So it's a bottom up approach, very much a bottom up approach. Because we, I call it, the lollipop method we give a lot of lollipops to a lot of is they are. So at the end of the day, we'll come to the manager and say, look, three or four of your guys have lollipops. Five of them. Don't just give lollipops.

Mark McInnes:

Yep. So, look, I, I really love that. I think that's fantastic. And the access to the decision make, it must be much easier once you've spoken to two or three of those people that are using the product, right? You product users, right?

Assa Elder:

And we show them value. Once you show them value, they will come to the manager and say, Hey, this gives you run because give me value. I want this tool not expensive.

Mark McInnes:

So just from a tactical point of view, Get the users to introduce you or do you go, do you get the information and going cold to the, to the decision maker?

Assa Elder:

So, first thing I do is try to convince them my email, right? I'll give you 50 credits. I sent him an email. I'll give you 50 credits. They can use Lucia. Give me the name of a decision-maker or give me an intro. He doesn't do that. We can call them. And we can be prepared if the beauty depends on the BDR. If the PDR is. Then he will say, Hey mark. I know he busted. Shawn, is Shawn, do you have his number? I'm going to call him, just tell him good things about Lucia or, oh, ask for.

Mark McInnes:

Yep. Well that was 50 credits. It'd be pretty powerful. I think that'd be, that's a great idea. Yeah. So if anyone's used Lucy you'll know those credits, you know, they. Particularly when you're prospecting and you're looking for a couple of names inside one organization, you go, I'll just socially surround my prospect. Oh wow. There's four credits gone. Damn. So I can just see very

Assa Elder:

intuitive to,

Mark McInnes:

yeah, it would, they would be. That's very, very good bribery. Perfect. So I think that would work a lot. That's fantastic. So, okay, so now we need to understand, so basically. You know, it's, it's, we're going to try and get as many users as we can into an organization. Then leverage those users to get into the decision maker. There's less opportunity for you to have to PR or requirement for you to have to prove the fit because 20%, 30%, half, whatever of the SDRs or whatever already using the portal. And hopefully they're pretty happy with it. So the boss then goes, is this stuff any good? Yeah. We love it. We

Assa Elder:

used exactly what happened. Yeah. It's Lucia. The proof is in the pudding data is the best in the world. I'm turned it. I work in a company before Russia. It has a BDR. I build the all BDR structure there and I used all the competitors and I stopped using them to use Lucia BDRs on LinkedIn. That's the brilliant, that's what they do. All day, you want them to be on LinkedIn, liking posts, looking for people prospecting on sales navigator. When they look at people, they already, they, the Alicia comes in, give the information it's super targeted. And the end of the day, I don't teach people. I don't teach my BDRs how to pass gatekeepers because there are no gatekeepers anymore. You get the direct numbers and then you get them. You teach them how to show value in 15 seconds, cold calling.

Mark McInnes:

Perfect. Okay. So, we now understand how you go to market, so that's fantastic. Very clever. But you've recently in the last 12 months or so, had to make some significant changes to the way that you've structured the sales price or the S the way that you've gone to market. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that? Because I think it's really interesting.

Assa Elder:

Yes. So thank you very much. I think that what we did in Lucia before worked for a young company, And I'll explain briefly what we did. We had a lot of leads coming in, right? A lot of people there's a lot of movements. We talk about PLG environment. We got a lot of users, users ask questions and we had about nine or 10 salespeople. And they all sold a lot, a lot of small because of the high volume of small deals. Right? So we had sales people that sold $50 deals a month. We had the guy that sold. In one month 40 deals, 40 deals, each deal. It was a hundred dollars, $4,000 MRR or monthly recurring revenue. And that's, that's what he did. And when I started working with the enterprise team, I tried to do bigger deals. And every time I hit a wall because we didn't have the structure to sell big deals. Another thing that we did was. We used Intercom is a Chet, tool and most of our sales were in Intercon checked. Somebody will tell you type hi. I want to know how much it cost to buy five users. Oh five, it's $5 per user. Five times 25 times five is 25. I'll give you 20% discount. 20. Can I say the purchasing? Yes. Everything by checks. I didn't show value. We didn't show anything to the client. We assume that they know. We kind of help the self-service run. And once I started working on big companies, I realized that that's just impossible. So I came to the CEO, we broke our head together and we thought about what to do. And, I came from a company that was a good school for me. Worth mentioning it's a car, it's an Israeli company, probably the best sales schools in. In the world and you can see there, you can really learn, processes and structure there. And I didn't invent anything. I really took the structure that I knew from other companies and I built it in Lucia. So we had the inbound is the R's that receive a lot, a lot, a lot of noise, a lot of inbound leads and start screening renewals. How do we screen that in criteria? We're going to talk about in a second, where the account executive, the children. That has upon contract discovery, a short presentation, next steps, rent free trials. Talk about pricing, but I think that the most, and that's the structure, right then the structure is very, very important. The most important thing was guidelines. And the process, one of the things we did is we started doing minimum deal size a year ago. It was $3,000 minutes deals a minimum. Okay right now with 7,000 in one year, we doubled our minimum bills size because it works. It sells person cost money. And as the art cost money, if a sales person, we start selling $50 deals, you don't need them suspending. You don't have to pay them so much. So the minimum deal size was$3,000 and we only sold yearly subscription, not monthly. This is the first to change we did. And. The results came after two, three weeks and they were great. We, at that time, we close about two 50 a month in ARR in the recurring revenue. Every month we put in about $250,000 and, and that was good, but a lot of it, most of it was monthly and churned after a few months, right. Once you start moving people.

Mark McInnes:

Yeah, so you're not growing. So you're just replacing the people coming in the bucket, nailed the bucket, and you're just putting more people in that hurts. Yeah. That's hard.

Assa Elder:

Once we start moving to yearly, we reduce the churn dramatically and we realize we start measuring everything because I measure my whole funnel all the time. I measure everything and it took about two weeks. The weeks of change after the. It was August 1st, 20, 20, 28. Was it very stressful? And we didn't sell anything for the first two weeks and we didn't know what to do. What happened because a salesperson in Lucia used to sell 40 sales a month every day at the sales, all of a sudden they didn't sell anything for two weeks. We got really stressed out, but after two weeks we started, the sales came in and all of a sudden $3,000, $4,000 is $10,000. What's that $20,000 deals very minimum. So it pushed everything up. And we did close the first month, 200, 200,000, which is 50 lists, but all in York and the next month where we doubled it, I had to do a lot of changes, that weren't easy for everybody. A lot of people for, account executives that used to call account executives. They Lucia that's their sales people. They used to be salespeople for Lucia. For old Lucia. I call it used to sell by. A lot of deals, 50 deals, 40 deals a month. So you can say that it in itself, but the, but the quality is we're more of a BDR like then sells. They weren't ready. So I actually had to move people from account executive to, as they are that wasn't an easy transition I had to head on. I have a lot of. Tough conversations. But I think most of them understood and some of them are doing a E and renewals. Now they got advanced really quickly for them. Listen, there's a new process. You never heard of it. You never learned it. So beer is BR learn it for a few months in advance. And that was exactly what happened. The good ones moved to become account executives or, accountant.

Mark McInnes:

So I really like this because I think it's a challenge. And a lot of sales people have is, is they often try to sell the cheapest product or whatever the, you know, we want to try and help our clients. So we think, okay, there's a $50 offer. You know, let's start with that. And what you're doing is, is you've taken all that away and now you've got a $7,000 offer is your bottom offer. Now it's still a good product. It's still, you know, how many licenses does that get, you know,

Assa Elder:

It's six licenses.

Mark McInnes:

Okay. So, so that's great stuff. So, you know, you get six people, with all you got all the data for, for 12 months. So the bell user sign. Right. But the, but the, the dollar value. So the value for the, for the businesses are the same, but they are. The value for you guys is higher. So it must've been hard for the salespeople to get their heads around that challenge of going from selling, you know, 50, $60 a month to us, $7,000 a year and a bit, you had some really interesting conversations with salespeople as they are trying to get over their limiting belief about, you know, that, that, that jump. Have you got anything?

Assa Elder:

Yeah, it wasn't easy. They didn't believe it. They said, listen, Lucia is a monthly subscription. It's a small, it's only a plugin. There's not a lot. It's data trying to explain to them that it's a lot more. If I'm as a head of video. It has a VDI can reach my targets. We'd Lucia. Then the car, if a company can reach their monthly or quarterly targets because of Lucia, because at the end of the day, prospecting and outbound, it's a numbers game. You call 50 people. 10 will answer if you use Lucia, right? Cause you have direct dials five. We'll say not right now. I will say no completely. Maybe two, we'll say three. We'll say no right now. And then two, we'll say. If you put enough people in your father, we're going to, you're going to close sale. That's we all know that. And if you show that value to customers, they, it's not only data. It's not only a phone number. You can get some interesting information about the person. You can send them, you can put them in straight into cadence. You shorten the prospect in time. You, the process is much smoother and faster. You can give a lot of value to the company that right now is doing something manual copying pasting, or get calling people that their numbers are incorrect. It's very fresh, important. They are to call. And the number is incorrect. If the number is correct, it's a lot of value. You just need to show it. So I had a lot of conversations, mainly with SDRs. Explain to them at the beginning, we did the simplest thing in the world bank. I want budget authority. Need and timeline, that's it. That's all. I need the simplest thing today. We are a little bit more sophisticated. We actually do proper discovery, but at the beginning of the beginning, all I needed is a minimum deal size. And that's it. If that works the account executive, you showed them, or you quantify pain. I started working with them a little bit more about how to sell, how to deliver value, and not just give price. Because that will probably never work. And it worked for the small deals, but if you want to reach a hundred thousand$200,000 deals, do you need to actually meet people in person or by, by zoom?

Mark McInnes:

Yep. So let me just make sure that we, I understand that because I think this is a good point. What you're saying is what if people ask for a price without going through any kind of discovery, those deals very rarely go into. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Correct. So that doesn't matter whether it's sales training, I get it all the time on LinkedIn. Hey mark. How much for, you know, if I answer this, I'm never going to hear from them again. All right. Because

Assa Elder:

there's no, because they have all the information. Once you get the price, they have everything they need to know. I usually, I start telling you the ours, would you buy, would you like to buy a car from me plus a hundred thousand dollars and they tell me I don't have a hundred thousand dollars to buy a car. So what if they fly. Yeah. What if the car can take you to the morning, will you go and find a hundred thousand dollars to buy my car to say yes. Okay. So let me tell you what I do for what I did for the companies. What value I can. And then we can decide if you have the budget or not. We can decide if you want, if, if I, if you want to buy my product or not, that's the first, let me show you something.

Mark McInnes:

Yeah. So w what did you do any kind of exercises to help the team get over there? They're limiting belief about pricing, because I would think that, you know, if you're selling something on Monday for $50, and then on Friday, it's $7,000 and I'm selling it, that that must be hard, you know? So how did they help the team?

Assa Elder:

So the first thing I told them is never show the pricing page ever. Like we sent the, I divided and this is something my CEO was 100% on board and it was, he led this, this initiative where we have packages for self-service and we have a package for enterprise without the price. Most companies, they don't show the enterprise price. You need to talk to somebody that changed. I told them, forget about the pricing page. Forget the monthly subscription user costs, $1,200 a year. One user, you have a minimum deal size, start with that and see what happens. And you know what? I didn't go over the top. Our competitors have still more. We're still wide there in the middle. And that's another thing. I show them. I started going through them one by one, one competitor, a how much does it, how much do they cost the user? And this starts saying, oh, it's a hundred dollars a month, $200 a month. That's check. They cost $1,500 a year competitor to be, how much did they cost?$1,200 a year, considered a competitor to see how many they cost a thousand dollars. They will be cheaper than us. What's the difference? What do we do? Yeah, no number. No, no. And the, I started, I w I think one of the most important things is we started to take them out of Lucia and get her out to the world and see what's out there and stop being reactive. Wait for the chair to come in and sell $50 deals, be proactive and see what's out there. See where you are compared to in comparison to the company. And that's worked pretty well.

Mark McInnes:

Yeah. Fantastic. And so what have you learned, in relation to how difficult it is to sell a $7,000 minimum? As compared to a $50 deal. Okay.

Assa Elder:

It depends which space, right? A B to B and B to C a all the different, but in my space, I think that $50 deal is not really a sale. It's helped you help somebody who they already made. They're already made up their mind. They know what they want. They want one user for monthly basis. You don't try, you don't offer them anything. I don't want to think. I don't want to say take orders because you do some service, but it's basic like basic form of self $7,000. Them you already needed for a lot, by the way. No, $7,000 deal is less than this. My for a year. It really, it's not a lot for a company. Only $7,000. We bought a chili Piper here. We made a decision like this. It wasn't, it wasn't a big deal. When it's under 30, under 20 companies, big companies, they, they run fast, but they still need to show value, not to sell a $7,000 deal everything about 5,000. You need to show something to show value, to solve pain. Otherwise there's no excuse for it. And Lucia solves a lot of pain. I don't know, one company that reaches their targets and overachieved. And if you do achieve it, you can be up with the company and the boss and the board will raise your target. So you always need more. So you always need more data. You always need more meetings or we'll just go sales people. You know, you always need more cells, so there's always need, it's just going to find what the pain is, how much it cost to the client, how much it cost and compare between the two.

Mark McInnes:

Yeah. And, and my, my gut feeling is that selling a $50 deal. Or a $7,000 deal. A $7,000 deal might be four times as difficult and time consuming as a $50 deal. But it's worth a lot more like four, four fifties is 200, if two to four times as much work and you get a significantly better upswing. Right. And I, and I think this is a really good lesson for, for a lot of salespeople is we often focus on trying to sell the thing that's easiest to sell, you know, because we're trying to make it. Easy for us, but it's not, you know, sometimes we're not really thinking that through. And if we were to sell something that was second from the top or the top little product, whether that be your product, my services or something else, it's actually, it feels like it's more work, but it's actually less work. So, you know, I think so you must be doing, you must be doing a really good run right now. So you said you were doing 250 K IRR it monthly, monthly revenue. W I led to share what you're doing now, or I'm not

Assa Elder:

sure, but let's say that we it's six times the amount and more after nine months, how many

Mark McInnes:

trends? Simon amount of transactions, less, more,

Assa Elder:

less transactions. A lot less transactions. Okay. Less than half.

Mark McInnes:

So, less than half the transactions. Right? So that's less than half the. Well, Simon amount, headaches,

Assa Elder:

six time, more than 600 revenue. And again, this is from building a machine and measure and start measuring everything you have. We didn't have a process before each account executive or sales person, whatever you want to call them to be reactive on chat. Now we have a process. Each individual know what they're doing in the organization. There's the RS, the BDRs, the inbound, the down bunny. And we measure everything for them. We measure their average deal size, and we try to keep them up all the time. We measure the amount of discount they bring. How much discount do you give to clients? We use tools like gong, like Larry to get everything clear, like sales loss to do engagements. And we measure. In order to improve and we improve and we keep on improving. A lot of our deals is pure good process. If you do a good process and you will have a good process, you will optimize it because you do do it's repetitive. Sales is repetitive. It is what it is. That's how it is. Especially BDR. You call 50 people a day. You stay the same page to start the same way. It's not easy. But it's very rewarding if you're successful. And it's good because you, because it's repetitive, you can optimize. And become better.

Mark McInnes:

Wow. Okay. So let's just do a quick recap. So we've got product led growth. You know, let's getting lots of users on the platform then bouncing from those users up into decision makers to sell. That's called us enterprise deals in inverted commerce, as opposed to single users. And then, you know, the big takeaway for me is, is that you've focused on lifting the. Contract writer, minimum silo value to make it much easier for you to increase your total sales, but lower the amount of transactions that you do, which make, which is, you know, the key to sales, if we can see. So I think this is really good. So what I'd like everybody that's listening today to think of. You know, what, how can you do the same in your own business? Whether we are selling something that's a product led growth, or if you're selling some finance products or, you know, stop focusing on the easiest product to sell the lowest denominator, try and think about selling something a little bit higher up the up the value chain so that you can make less transactions, but make more money for both yourself and your organization. One of the good things you said there at the end asset of course, was, you know, measure everything. You're not liking going on your gut feeling is what got us into this gets us into trouble in that all the time. You know, because he got feeling, we'll tell you selling the cheap thing is the easiest thing, right? It's a major, everything. Figure out how much Tommy is spending on the phone. How many people you're reaching out to, what are your conversion rates? You know, how many phone calls you've got to make to have a conversation? How many conversations are you having to get a PR proposal? How many proposals are you putting out to get it? So on deal, you know? And then, and if the dollar value is low, then divide that across all of those activities to see what. Dollar for dollar, right. Is, you know, you'll be surprised you might be making, you know, telephone calls that a dollar, right. You don't want to be doing that. Believe me. So ask them before I let you off. And thank you for sharing. Is there, is there anything over and above that, that you'd like our listeners to take away from today?

Assa Elder:

Yes. I think that's the change that we did here in Lucia happened because I had support support of the CEO, COO, And it was risky, but if you come with a plan and you explain your plan well and show where you're going and where you want to go, it should work. Just, you need to be patient. It will make you focus on the right things on the good things you want to do in the business, but it might take time to start. And for me too, Luckily because Lucia is a high volume, low, low touch. Our average sales cycle right now is 25 days. It took her two to three weeks. And even if he took it, would've taken two months, I would stick by it because it looked correct. If it, if you have to acquire it, doesn't work, then maybe stop and look back and see what you do.

Mark McInnes:

If you didn't have, if you, if it didn't work after a quarter, maybe we wouldn't have been talking. So yeah,

Assa Elder:

probably.

Mark McInnes:

Yeah, exactly. So I bet the good on you for taking a risk, man. I think, you know, I think this is fantastic and that's why I wanted to share your story. If people are interested in learning more about yourself or indeed Lucia, you know, can they get in contact with you? How, what would you like to leave in, in relation to people getting in contact with you? I can

Assa Elder:

find my link. Is it B they can also email me my first name outside@lucia.com.

Mark McInnes:

Can I get easier than that? But thank you very much for coming on the boss podcast all the way from Israel much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks.