Beyond Referrals: How to Start Growing on Purpose

In This Episode
For many growing businesses, referrals are the first growth engine. They are also a sign that customers trust the work. But referrals alone can be hard to predict, scale, or build a hiring plan around. In this episode of The Motii Playbook, Fred Schnell speaks with Marta El Bay, Head of Partnerships at Surfe, about what it takes to move from word-of-mouth growth to a more deliberate outbound motion. The conversation is practical, honest, and refreshingly grounded: before buying another tool or chasing another AI workflow, businesses need to understand who they serve, clean up the way their teams work, and build a simple system they can actually use.

What We Cover

• Why referrals are a strong signal of trust, but not a reliable growth plan on their own.
• When growing businesses usually realise word of mouth is no longer enough.
• Why outbound often feels uncomfortable, complicated, or too easy to postpone.
• How messy CRM data, unclear ownership, and poor team adoption can slow down even good tools.
• Why outbound starts with a clear ideal customer profile before it starts with software.
• How Surfe helps sales teams move from LinkedIn research into CRM follow-up with less manual admin.
• Why enrichment works differently when it aggregates multiple data sources instead of relying on one fixed database.
• The first useful steps a referral-led business can take before hiring salespeople or building complex automation.

Resources Mentioned

• Surfe
• Pipedrive
• HubSpot
• Salesforce
• Copper
• LinkedIn and Sales Navigator
• Clay, n8n and Make

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Modi acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia. We pay our respects to elders past and present and acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first peoples of this land. Welcome to the Modi Playbook. If you've ever felt like your systems are technically in place, but somehow still feel chaotic behind the scenes, you're in the right spot. This is where we share what we're seeing, what's working, what's not, and the lessons businesses learn the hard way. Think of it as practical strategy straight from the trenches. Let's dive in.

SPEAKER_02 0:37

Welcome to the Moti Playbook. One shift, one system, one measurable improvement. I'm Fred Schnell, managing director at Moti. Today's conversation is about something a lot of growing businesses will recognize. At some point, relying on word of mouth and referrals is simply not going to be enough to keep growing. You will need to be more deliberate about how you find and win new clients. And that's what today's conversation is going to be all about. I'm very much looking forward to this conversation actually, because Moti itself still has a bit to learn in that space as well. So I'm joined by Marta Lbay, head of partnerships at Surf. Marta, welcome. Now, for people hearing your name for the first time, do you mind just giving us a short introduction to yourself, what Surf does, and who it is built for?

SPEAKER_01 1:28

Yeah, of course. Nice to uh to speak with you again, Fred. We've been working together for now, I think, uh, more than a year. So yeah, happy to be in the podcast. We've been also partnering with Moti for quite some time now. But just in a nutshell, Surf was born as a LinkedIn Chrome extension, connecting LinkedIn with CRMs, so SpipeDrive, hotspot sales for Scoper. And then moved more broadly to the lead generation space. So allowing users to really build their outbound motion. So it's basically mainly for salespeople, salespeople and sales teams. And now we are also seeing quite a lot of marketing and RevOps uh teams that are also starting to use us for different use cases, which is quite interesting. And you mentioned it before, my role is a head of partnership. So my goal is really like to make referrals a predictable channel as well, which is also like quite linked to the topic for today.

SPEAKER_02 2:26

Very nice, very good. And so before we dive into surf itself, right? In your experience working with sales teams all over the world, really, on a on a daily basis, when does a business usually realize that you know the personal relationships and the referrals simply aren't going to be enough anymore?

SPEAKER_01 2:45

Referrals are great. So but like I just want to say, like, uh it's it's great to have a good referral system because it means that you're doing something right. If your customers are referring you to other potential customers, it means you're doing your job right. So that's great. The main issue with that is scalability. So it's really difficult to scale a referral system. It's really difficult also like to predict it. So if you own a business and and Fred, you know it better than me, like being a business owner. But if you need to plan your hiring, if you need to plan any funding, if you need to even just like doing the business plan for uh year by year, it can be really difficult if my channel is a referrals. Absolutely. So I think that's the really like the point where businesses start to think, okay, maybe we should really understand like uh how we are getting these referrals where we are strong and like really starting to also look for customers. Also, like, you know, there is uh of course, referrals can be uh there can be a lot of referrals, uh, there can be like a great channel, but then we also hit the point where yeah, it's just like uh you just need also like to go out there and go outside of your network and really bring new businesses in. So I think it's in this moment of growth that's this question really comes up of really how to build an outbound motion or even optimizing inbound, but just simply not relying on referrals anymore.

SPEAKER_02 4:07

Yeah. And so do you think that businesses sometimes almost kind of avoid this kind of outbound part of the business because you know, referrals can probably feel a lot safer and and a lot more comfortable.

SPEAKER_01 4:21

I think partially is also like that, and it also like goes back to resources. Like if you are like a small business and you get like some referrals, you know, it's great. You don't really have to think about outbound because then when you think about outbound, you need to think about a lot of other pieces. So it's quite a it's more of a complex puzzle. So it's not only about like getting a tool, it's also hiring a person. So first actually, it's hiring a person, but even before that is understanding who you're targeting, so who is your ideal customer profile? So there are a lot of pieces that then go with it. It's not just like hiring one sales rep, getting a tool, and just start reaching out to people. It's really like building a full strategy around that. So it really requires some commitment, dedication, and uh a sort of like a very scientific approach to sales.

SPEAKER_02 5:11

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I guess I mean the other thing is also outbound itself. Sometimes I feel like it gets a bit of a bad rep because you know, people, including me, immediately kind of associated with kind of that spammy or kind of the more aggressive sales tactics that a lot of the cold callers have out there, right?

SPEAKER_01 5:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:33

Now at Moti, we we primarily work with you know with growing small and medium-sized businesses and and we we implement sales tools, including Surf for clients on a regular basis. But when I look internally, right, honestly, like Moti is definitely not using Surf anywhere near as much as we we could probably use it, right? So I'm sure you're completely surprised by that. Uh, but no, seriously, is that something you see a lot?

SPEAKER_01 6:01

Oh yeah, I see I see this definitely a lot. I see this also with ourselves. So I think for quite some time we didn't have the best usage of our tool as well. Really, that's that's another story. But definitely I see this a lot with uh with uh customers, partners. Really funny. Also, like what that this is a case that we had recently. We have uh with quite a bit of customer that provides sales trainings, and in general, like online uh online trainings is really focused on enablement. And themselves internally, they had terrible, terrible like uh training of their own team. So they were basically not even like a they didn't even know that they had served some of them, some of them were using like a partial feature, some others were still using some spreadsheets, or like they were paying external tools. So it's it's one way to be uh let's say to sell a tool or like to sell some services, and then it's a different story to implement those for yourself. So I can say that we did this for uh also our customers. We helped them strategize their own sales process, optimize their usage of surf, and then as internally, we have had issues with our CRM. So we were mentioning like a CRM cleanup, helping migration, and then ourselves. We were really bad at that, and we struggled with it for uh I think at least two years.

SPEAKER_02 7:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:23

So yeah, I see this a lot.

SPEAKER_02 7:25

There you go. So let's dive into surf itself a little bit more, Marta. You mentioned you had your own struggles, right, with surf um or implementing surf in in-house and using it the proper way, and that you did not use it the right the right way. So can you talk us through in a bit more detail? So what was the gap and and what did you actually do to fix it?

SPEAKER_01 7:51

Sure. So I think the main problem was that every team was basically setting up processes in a different way. Um, and again, when we started, we were a team of 20 and we were mostly based in Paris. So it's not like you know, the story of like bigger companies with like thousands of people, different teams. So it was really like it still is, but it was back then even more a small business. So this can happen to uh any small business. And the some things that we did have first, like the SES team was on Pipe Drive, then the marketing team was on HubSpot. So already there there was a gap and said, okay, we have two CRMs. Why let's move all together? Uh in the end, like we decided to move to HubSpot because the marketing team has already built basically a lot of their strategy on top of HubSpot. And for us, we thought it was only about bringing in the pipeline, bringing in the data, and then sort of connect with both CRMs. So we didn't really think that the migration would be uh such an issue. And then we realized that the data was a mess because we had messy data on PipeDrive. We brought it to HubSpot. So of course it was the same, uh the same story all over again. The sales reps were absolutely confused by all the data that was in um HubSpot. So they started using their own spreadsheets. Then the marketing team, yeah, I think you maybe you heard this story like a lot, like adoption was really not on the table at the time. The marketing team had also like their own flows, so with SEO, venue marketing assets, ads, so everything was pushing leads to the CRM. And also the engineering team had developed something by which every time a user was creating a trial, we would have a contact saved in HubSpot. So now the problem was that all of these leads were coming with different details because the engineer, the way he developed the integration was okay, someone creates a trial in surf. A contact is created in HubSpot, but the name is the email. And then like the same person might come from the marketing team, but again, they had a different mapping. And then our sales team might add the same person on using surf. And you know, surf is like a tool. So like if you have a a mess in your CRM, it's not like a surf doesn't do like the magic, it needs to work like within a set a set tool stack. You need to have like processes. So you have like a full with a tool stays a full. So it's that's it's kind of it like so doesn't really solve the problem if everything else is like a mess. So this was our situation.

SPEAKER_02 10:31

And then it's it's an interesting point, right? Because it it's actually it's rarely kind of that the technology problem itself, right? It's it's mostly the the business knows the tools and and it's more it's it's the processes themselves that don't really work, right?

SPEAKER_01 10:49

Exactly. And it was just a matter of in the end communicating, so having a clear owner per team that would sit down and say, Okay, this is what I built, this is what I'm doing, these are the tools that I'm using. And we did this process because we realized that no one was using the CRM and we were really spending a lot of money on it. So it was really about uh sitting down and uh connecting like all of the teams and like really it was actually with with paper and pen trying to also like to just draw a simple flow, something that is where we could see as at least the gaps, possibilities, and then we started also to look at the tools that we were using. So we had bought a very expensive sequencing tool, and then we realized oh, that is actually the same in HubSpot, so why are we paying twice for the same thing? We also had another enrichment provider, despite us being an enrichment provider, which someone bought at some point, but it was also pushing data. So, like, I think like the first thing, like what I want to say by explaining this mess is that sometimes it's really like a lack of communication, a lack of thinking before doing. Because also like migration is not simple migration of data from one CRM to the other. You want to make sure that you're not bringing dragging the same problems because then it can affect the performance of other tools that you have on top. So surf is not a de-duplication tool, it's a lead generation tool, it's an accelerator of the strategy. But if you have a lot of duplication in your CRM, if you don't have a strategy behind, it's not going to, it's not going to help. So and for us, it was also then there was also like a problem of knowing who we are going after. We didn't have really a clear idea of our of our targets or of our ICP. So we were basically reaching out to everyone. But when you reach out to everyone, you don't speak with anyone at the end of the day. So you re it was already targeting our efforts, were really uh scattered across different platforms, across different geographies and industries. And then it was really like a a work that took two years, and we are still trying to refine it. Uh, but now we are in a better place than we were two years ago.

SPEAKER_02 12:53

Well, I think you know, you you bring up a good point. I mean, you you just mentioned, right, two years was the journey that it took you to kind of get to where you are today. And I think a lot of businesses know these tools are out there, and maybe they even have the tools, right? And and they they probably also know that they should be kind of doing and looking at more outbound and spending more time and effort into outbound, and still the the this just seems to be a hesitation or or a gap between being aware that it should actually happen and and building the process and the the structure and and habit internally to actually get it done, right? So, why do you think there is such a disconnect between knowing the importance of doing outbounds? Let's talk about outbound more generally, knowing that the tools like surf are available, and then actually going ahead and you know, and doing it.

SPEAKER_01 13:55

I think it's a matter of prioritization. So we know the tools exist, we know the like that uh looking for customers is important, but then a lot of businesses, I mean we have done this, I'm pretty sure that every every small business has done that in the like or is doing that right now, is prioritizing, for instance, like revenue and customers, like against improving their internal uh operations. Because think, okay, we do have we need clients, we need more revenue, we need more projects. And this, like it's of course it it's it makes sense because we need to build revenue, but then on the long term, it can actually make you lose uh money. So uh calculation that I always do like when I talk about every turn of investment with uh with partners or or their customers is so you have a sales rep, how much you're paying it. So that I'm taking if I'm taking the example like I was reading before, uh, I think in Australia, like at the hourly average is uh 43 between 43 and 46 dollars per hour, like in the in the cities for a sales rep. So I say, okay, if we're taking like your hourly rate for your sales sales rep, how many hours is it now spending on, for instance, like manually entering the data, like manually doing certain tasks. So we're like going back to the time and say, okay, if it's five five hours per week, okay, if I'm taking like a let's say like a $43 as an hourly rate per five, I have $215. So now it's been per week dollars that you spend on tasks that you're not optimizing. Now let's say that like if you're uh looking at this on a monthly base, you have $860 spending on manual work that is not generating any revenue, it's just admin tasks. Now, if you hire another person, so if you have like chooses reps because you're they're not productive, like they're not they're not optimizing their productivity, if you're looking at this, you're doubling the expense. So you're basically spending $1,720 for what?

SPEAKER_02 16:00

And so on and so on, right? Yeah, and so on.

SPEAKER_01 16:03

And then you keep hiring and you keep losing money. And then like you need to make more revenue on the side, but then it's always like running after money that you're losing behind as well.

SPEAKER_02 16:12

Yeah, I think and and that kind of goes back to a very important point that I always say is you know, technology should not be a cost or not be sh seen as a cost to the business. It should actually be seen as an investment into the business, right? So if you think about, okay, so how much time does a sales rep in in your example, right? How much does a sales rep actually spend in just research and entering data and updating data and everything else versus what the tool that costs you a few dollars a month, for example, can do to automate all of that? So you put these two things in into kind of you know a balance and you see, well, actually, that's money well spent. It's an investment into the business to optimize the business process. Now, exactly. You know, you mentioned that you know there's there's a lot involved in getting that outbound right. At the same time, do you do you think that businesses sometimes just overcomplicate outbound and just kind of put it into that uh it's too hard kind of basket?

SPEAKER_01 17:11

Yeah, I think the reason partially also like this like overcomplicating. I think that it's like, I mean, it it makes sense because right now we hear a lot of AI and uh all of these Rev-Ops engineers on LinkedIn sharing like these complex workflows on clay, uh NA10 or any like make, any automation tool. So like I I have to be honest, like when I look at all of this content and all of these hacks, it really seems complicated to me as well. So I don't understand that it's like demotivating because right now, like AI is the hype. So everything like needs or like we have the perception that everything needs to be done with AI, while sometimes just outbound like can start really simple. So like really just by knowing who like your services and who your product is serving. So not you're not speaking, like we're saying this before, like you're not speaking with uh everyone, with every potential company. So you might have, even if you take the referrals, like you might see some patterns. So I would always start from the referral. The first thing is okay, what what what are these referrals like? Like that they have small businesses, are they more in a certain industry? What do they have in common? So like starting from those referrals and those customers that you already close, you can like draft your ideal customer profile and say, okay, I see I have success with this group of companies. So I might then look for similar companies, and then you can also refer previous customers. So outbound can be as easy as that. So even like and right now, I'm not even mentioning any sequencing or any any cleaning tool, just simply drafting who you're talking to, and then you know you have already a starting point to know who to target after. So it can be as simple as that without Claude or any A tool. So just looking at what you have already. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:00

And I think you know, you you you brought up an interesting point because a lot of a lot of business owners or even head of sales or head of marketing, whoever you talk to, a lot of times when when you ask, so so who's your target audience? Who's your ideal client? Oh, we service everyone. And and I think you know, uh it's back to your point, right? Is kind of okay, so let's define who your who your target market really is, to then because that that that kind of just makes it a lot more easier, what kind of messaging you get across and everything else, right? So, Marta, let's let's make it a little bit more practical, right? So for a business that has mostly grown through referrals, word of mouth, and that has never really done any kind of structured outbound, what can surf change in the day-to-day prospecting process?

SPEAKER_01 19:52

Yeah, I would say so. Like there are like different levels also like on how to use like surf, like with different features, options. And uh what I I always bring like my my example also like on how I I ramped up with the tool. So I can give us like this, like the my sort of playbook, if we can call it in this way, so that like can be an inspiration for for uh some of the people listening to us.

SPEAKER_02 20:17

I'm sure there will be a lot of people interested in that.

SPEAKER_01 20:21

And uh yeah, definitely. So like I was mentioning before, so bring my example, like I'm I'm a partnership person, so I'm uh targeting mainly solution consulting companies that work with CRMs that we integrate with. So, of course, there's pipe drive, hubspot, etc. So what I started like as I started was just looking at like the pipe drive marketplace or the pipe drive announcements, and for instance, like the the pipe drive, the partner awards, like when they were posting on LinkedIn, and then just going there, like so. I was just on the simple LinkedIn, no sales navigator, nothing. I was just going into the company, checking if like myself like for Moti, like say, okay, is Moti interesting for me? Like, do we have a fit? I was looking at you guys on LinkedIn. I said, okay, I think there is a fit. So I was just using Surf to add Moti to my CRM. Then I was going into the people tab, and I wanted like normally I speak mainly with uh like owners, founders, directors. So I was using this like just on the on this search bar. I was just looking for okay with the managing director. And at the time it was Ben. So I said, okay, I will add Ben. So I just always like using Surf. So with one click, I could add him. And like what Surf does also, which is which is really, really helpful, is giving you the email and the mobile. So we do have an enrichment built in. So I could not only add the Ben's profile like directly from LinkedIn to my CRM without having to copy paste, because if not, it would have been a lot of time. But also like gives me the contact information. So then I know that I can reach out on LinkedIn, but I also have the other information if I want to give him a call, for instance, or sending an email. So this is like really what I was doing. So it was still like very manual, just looking at or looking at the marketplaces and see, okay, they have this new partner. So I will look on LinkedIn if it's a good fit as well, and then I will add them to my CRM. And already was very good to have like all of the contact information because I really like to do multi-channel. So you know, if you if I write a mess uh an email and you can easily ignore me, like in the in the noise of the email. But then if I also like uh reach out on LinkedIn, not always in the same message, of course, but really adapting my outreach to the channel, there is a higher chance that then I get a response. So this is what I was doing like at the start. And then when I started to have more partners, um, so I got you guys, you know, like other um type drive partners, for instance, okay, now I do have an idea of what works. So I saw that I was working very well with uh partners that had up to 50 employees, and I was doing not so well with partners that have bigger organizations. So okay, I will focus my energy directly on this segment, and I use surf like more of the we have this regeneration part, so which is more of a mass lead builder, um, very similar to a sales navigator, if you want to have a comparison. But I was just putting in uh as a look-alike filter, like Moti, uh Flowbird, and BLC, the partners that I signed. So, okay, these are like the partners. I want them to be like put as keywords, pipe drive, because I wanted to also develop the pipe drive ecosystem and said, okay, in the industry is going to be consulting and implementation because this is what you guys are doing. And then I was generating this list of look-alikes of your company, so other consulting agencies implementing CRMs, uh, mainly pipe drive. So, okay, there is there is a feed there. So I was basically just looking at the same people in uh in bulk, like managers, uh directors, etc., and then adding them in bulk to my uh to my CRM with all the information, of course, because also like we always run enrichment. And since I'm like I have to say, like uh I'm very bad at following up, what I did also like was using like some automations to make sure that I had tasks booked, like uh tasks um planned already every day. So I know like every time I was adding a contact, there was a set of tasks that was automatically created from for me. So I knew that I had to follow through.

SPEAKER_02 24:20

Perfect, very nice. Yeah, and uh I think you know you mentioned the the data enrichment, like phones and emails and whatnot. And what when I looked at Surf, the one thing that really stood out for me was and and was interesting was the fact that uh compared to our uh other sources in in the marketplace, you're not saying you're a database. You you just you describe yourselves as an aggregator pulling from multiple data sources. Can you can you explain a little bit more and in plain English, what what do you mean by that?

SPEAKER_01 24:50

Yeah, sure. So we know there are a lot of of tools in the space, like when we hear about like an enrichment, we hear, yeah, Zoom info. Like most of these tools, they are one database. So it's a fixed database. It can get upgraded or they can like update it uh once every one, two years or more, like depending on on their uh on their strategy. But normally it's one single database. So if you're using one of these tools, if the contact that you are reaching is not in those databases, well, it's just not going to work. So you're not going to find the contact information. This is something that we realized at Surf. So the very first idea of Surf was to build the database, and then we realized that it would take an incredible amount of time to just build like a real complex, complete, uh accurate database. But also we could never cover different geographies, different industries like fully, because every tool works very well in certain geographies, uh, but not so well in others. So we decided to abandon this project of like building a database or like just having it like in the back of our minds, but not really as a priority, and start aggregating different tools. So we know, like, for instance, there are there are tools that are very strong, and Casper is very strong in uh in France. So, okay, that's a tool that we can integrate. Okay. There is Prosper, really good in mobile phones in uh in Europe. Okay, this is like a tool that we take. So we just pick different tools, we benchmark them, see, okay, are they really good? Are they giving us like good results across different markets and industries? Yes, so like let's aggregate them. So we basically have now what we call the waterfall. So why basically basically when you enrich a contact, we just run through each tool to see if they have the right information and then we verify it. And we also showcase the data.

SPEAKER_02 26:45

You can actually see this when you when you're searching on on LinkedIn. You can see that all the databases that you're actually going through to find the data, right?

SPEAKER_01 26:53

Yeah, exactly. And we we keep changing them, like it depends it depends on their quality or their performance. So and we change also the order in the cascade, but yeah, the user doesn't really have to do anything. So they just look at the uh at the waterfall working, and then we take care of all the optimization and uh and really making sure the providers are always up to the quality that we see set for them.

SPEAKER_02 27:16

Gotcha. Now connecting the dots a little bit more with with Moti and for all the pipe drive and money users out there listening. How does Surf connect into my CRM? You mentioned that you know it's one click, and but how does it actually connect?

SPEAKER_01 27:34

So the connection, it's been because it's like I think it takes like 30 seconds to just download the Chrome extension and then connect your CRM and it's done. So it's really, really easy to connect. And the idea, like the best way to see like surf, but like also like the pipe drive, pipe drive is basically the receiver of all the data. So basically, when you are LinkedIn, yeah, you just click, you add contacts, and those contacts are saved in pipe drive. And as a setup, also like this is by funny, it's like very simple because you just need to do like just some mapping. Because there are some properties that we bring in from LinkedIn that you might want, that you might not want, like the past working experience, the languages, or uh we also do like a summary of the profile. By summary, you might want that data, and then you need to make sure that you have like the corresponding fields on PyDrive so you know that your information is falling like exactly where you're expecting it, uh especially if you're running some automations or anything on top of it. But the connection is really simple, and then like uh once you have it, it's really an intuitive tool in the sense that it's like quite simple to just like sync contacts. The enrichment normally starts, it's triggered automatically. So with one click, you get the contact in pipe drive with all the information without having to do much else. And then from LinkedIn, you can always add notes or plan tasks. So say I'm a big fan of tasks, so like when I'm prospecting on LinkedIn, then I always make sure to have a task planned for uh for with next steps, or like also adding some notes if I see anything interesting on the on the profile, and then everything is synced back to to pipe drive.

SPEAKER_02 29:08

Beautiful. I know, I know it's like it's it's really intuitive, it's super easy to use. Yeah. Now, if we just think about a business owner listening who kind of recognises, okay, this is this is a gap in in my kind of business, and he or she would would like to address this upfront. And maybe still feels a bit you know overwhelmed by it all, by the idea of of you know doing um some outbounds in in your view. What if what are the baby steps or what are the first kind of use what useful steps to take?

SPEAKER_01 29:40

Yeah, I would say like already I was mentioned before AI, don't don't even think about it. I don't think that AI is fundamental to get started. So already like take that away. Like don't first think about like your own business and what you have already done. And I always recommend having more of a scientific approach to sales or a scientific mindset to sales, which is also like quite quite uh quite hard for me. Like being Italian, we are very passionate and we are like, oh yeah, let's do this, but like you know, being very, very logical, very uh analytical about your business. And looking, I we were mentioning before, like, okay, who we have had successes with in the past. What is like the goal, but also like overall, like what is our business goal? So if your goal is growing internationally versus like growing more locally, then you have two different strategies. And it can still change because you might decide to focus locally at first and then to grow internationally, that's fine. But you need to understand like, okay, this is like my business overall, this is my business goal, where I want to go, and then really like break this down into small pieces. So, okay, who I want to talk to? Who can benefit from my services? Okay, what is the the time, like the total addressable marketing for this sector? So you can also like think about resources. If you have, if there are thousands of companies, you might need it down further down the line, you might need the hiring. So, like it imagine also like if you if you're selling then also like more complex products of services, you might need like different roles. So, but it's really like about like planning this and then like thinking about okay, if I have to hire uh my first sales rep or like other sales reps, what are the steps they need to take to make them successful? What I want them to do, who they should talk to. Because if they um for us, like it was it was a problem where like our sales reps were selling like one license deals, but we were not telling them what to sell.

SPEAKER_02 31:34

So, like it's like set them up for success, right?

SPEAKER_01 31:37

Yeah, yeah, exactly. We're not telling them like go after like bigger accounts, go after teams that have like multiple sales reps, because then you can sell like uh you can have like more substantial deals. We're not really training them, but also because we didn't know who we're targeting, we didn't know uh what our sweet spot was. So we hired sales reps before actually knowing how to make them successful. That's what's like it's really having this sort of like a scientific approach to sales and uh to build out bound without even thinking about tools at first, and tools come uh come later. It's more about the structure.

SPEAKER_02 32:12

Love it. Thank you, Marta. This brings us to kind of close to the end, and um well we we always finish every episode with with the same question to our guests. And if if a business owner or a sales leader is listening to this right now and is recognizing him or herself in this conversation, Marta, what is the one mindset shift you would like this person to take away from today's conversation?

SPEAKER_01 32:39

For me, like the big takeaway problem repeating myself, but it's really don't overcomplicate outbound. Don't overcomplicate sales, sales it's human. We have been doing this for uh centuries. I think probably sales it's still in our nature. It's actually like in our in that inner nature, don't overcomplicate it, just think about it in the baby steps, really think about your goals and like working towards them. So really start by working, not by running.

SPEAKER_02 33:10

Love it, love it. For me, I think winning work with with referrals and and word of mouth, I think it's a great sign that that someone's built a very good and and trusted business, right? And and so I also think that if you want to grow beyond that and and with more control, you will eventually need need to find a system and create a system that actively creates opportunities and not just you sitting there and waiting for leads to land in your lap.

SPEAKER_01 33:41

Yeah, and also more opportunities will bring more referrals as well.

SPEAKER_02 33:44

So like absolutely no one challenges. Couldn't agree more. Marta, look, thank you so much for joining us today. Um, really enjoyed our conversation. Now, for anyone listening, please head to moti.co slash playbook. You can learn everything about surf, how it can fit in your connected sales setup. And please don't hesitate to also reach out to the Moti team if you have any questions or if you would like to discuss what a good setup could look like for you. Now, thank you so much for listening and we'll see you in the next one. Thank you, Marta.

SPEAKER_00 34:19

Thank you, Fred. That's it for another episode of the Modi Playbook. One shift, one system, one measurable improvement. All information shared in this podcast is general in nature. For tailored advice specific to your business, visit Modi.co slash playbook and book a momentum call with our team. See you next time.