Collin Cadmus on this episode
Collin Cadmus is a revenue growth coach, creator, and podcaster with a career arc spanning from retail management through early-stage SaaS to established venture-backed companies. His experiences at Single Platform, Doctor.com, and Aircall have given him deep insight into how sales organizations scale and adapt to changing market dynamics. In this episode, Cadmus unpacks the evolution of modern outbound sales strategies and the critical lessons learned from each chapter of his career.
The core argument is straightforward: what worked in the past rarely works in the future, and successful revenue leaders must abandon assumptions about how sales should function and instead learn from their teams and data. Cadmus emphasizes that every company and market is different, and leaders who come in with rigid playbooks based on prior success often fail because they refuse to acknowledge that fundamentals have shifted. At Aircall, for example, his team wasn't cold calling despite selling a phone system. Rather than assume laziness, he dug into the real problem: product quality issues that made reps embarrassed to use the tool.
The reframe here is about the relationship between buyer behavior, technology, and go-to-market fit. Younger B2B buyers are locked into competitor contracts longer, technology makes certain outbound tactics less effective than they once were, and pricing and product complexity should dictate whether AEs make outbound calls or focus entirely on closing inbound. Cadmus walks through building outbound at Aircall with limited SDR leadership, creating peer-based coaching models, establishing clear rules of lead engagement between sales and marketing, and designing account-based marketing that went far beyond personalized emails. The conversation also touches on the tension between full-cycle AEs versus specialist AEs, the risk of losing talented AEs to burnout, and how to build career paths that keep people invested in SDR and outbound roles.
What we cover in this episode
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0:20
Career Journey: Retail to Revenue Cadmus recounts his path from retail management to startup sales, the pivot toward SaaS, and why selecting a high-growth startup matters for career acceleration.
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5:47
First VP Role Lessons at Doctor.com His first VP of sales role taught him that prior playbooks don't transfer; he had to unlearn assumptions and learn from top reps instead of rubber-stamping old strategies.
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9:00
Building Outbound at Aircall Facing an SDR team that refused to cold call due to product quality issues, Cadmus diagnosed root causes, bridged communication gaps, and rebuilt the outbound function with buddy systems and clear leadership.
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13:38
Long Sales Cycles and Locked-In Competitors Outbound prospects with VoIP systems are unhappy but contractually bound, creating pipeline that closes on their timeline, not the sales org's. Patience and persistence required.
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37:41
Full-Cycle AEs vs. Specialist Model At Aircall, high inbound demand and product complexity favored having AEs focus on closing demos rather than hunting. The rationale: product expertise and retention over territory coverage.
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43:35
Account-Based Marketing Strategy Jeff Rekers' phone booth campaign mapped target accounts and placed ads outside their office commute to build brand familiarity before outbound prospecting, a true ABM play.
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45:30
Sales and Marketing Alignment Rules of lead engagement define which accounts belong to marketing-sourced leads vs. outbound, preventing overlap and clarifying credit. Should be negotiated by the full team.
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56:02
Metrics and Cadence Management Early in his career, Cadmus hit 200 calls, 10 meetings, 5 demos, 1 deal per rep per week. Velocity varies by price point, product complexity, and AE specialization.
The lines worth sharing
You really shouldn't make any assumptions that anything will be the same. Assume everything will be different and go in with the mindset of: I know nothing.
Collin Cadmus · 9:45
The fruit of your loins come to fruition in the following year. Someone else gets the credit. They're just closing deals left and right. We were opening those opportunities two years ago.
Collin Cadmus · 19:30
If you don't start by my next new AEs are coming from the SDR team, we're pretty much going to make it more difficult to hire SDRs.
Collin Cadmus · 33:45
When people say ABM, they're usually full of crap. They're just personalizing their outreach. That's not account-based marketing. That's just outbound.
Collin Cadmus · 50:15
Common questions from this episode
How do you build an outbound sales team when SDRs refuse to cold call?
Diagnose the root cause first. At Aircall, reps wouldn't call because the product had quality issues. Once Cadmus uncovered this in one-on-ones and escalated to the CEO and CTO, engineering fixed the problems. Then implement cold-calling cadences with sales loft or similar tools, and establish a buddy system where AEs coach SDRs on product expertise until you can hire a dedicated SDR leader.
Should Account Executives make cold calls if they have full inbound schedules?
It depends on product complexity and retention. If you have strong inbound demand and AEs are booked on demos, forcing them to hunt risks losing talented people. However, Cadmus still gave AEs sales loft licenses to run light cadences eventually. In lower-price-point products with no marketing, AEs must hunt full-time. Case by case, not one-size-fits-all.
How do you align sales and marketing to avoid lead overlap?
Create a rules of lead engagement document with input from the full sales and marketing team, not just leadership. Define account size targets for outbound, clarify when a lead belongs to inbound vs. outbound, and establish which AE owns which account. Revisit monthly. Expect edge cases and one-off exceptions, but a clear framework prevents friction.
What is true account-based marketing, not just personalized outreach?
True ABM coordinates sales and marketing to build brand familiarity with target accounts before outbound contact. Cadmus's example: mapping target accounts' office locations, identifying their subway commute routes, and placing ads on phone booths near those stops. It's coordinated, multi-channel, and targeted to specific accounts—not spray-and-pray personalization.
How do you promote SDRs to AEs and keep the SDR team motivated?
Promote SDRs internally over hiring AEs from outside whenever possible. It signals a clear career path, reduces ramp time due to product knowledge, and motivates incoming SDRs. If you promote all your best SDRs at once, remaining AEs have to accept peer managers—which is uncomfortable but workable if you commit to developing everyone into managers over time.
Why is it risky to assume your past playbooks will work in a new role?
Every company has different market dynamics, buyer behavior, product complexity, and competitive landscape. Cadmus learned this at Doctor.com when he tried to apply Single Platform's model and failed. The key is to enter each role assuming nothing is the same, spend time learning from top performers and team members, and then selectively apply prior lessons to the new context.
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Collin Cadmus on evolving modern outbound sales: how to build SDR teams, align marketing, and adapt playbooks when buyer behavior and technology shift.
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Collin Cadmus
outbound sales strategies
SDR team building
account-based marketing ABM
sales and marketing alignment
VoIP phone system sales
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AE to SDR career path
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Read the full transcript · 82 KB · Collin Cadmus
SPEAKER_00Welcome to RevOps Corner, where we talk about how B2B SaaS companies scale through revenue operations by interviewing amazing guests and sharing what we see in the trenches every day here at Union Square Consulting.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAll right, welcome to RevOps Corner. Got another exciting episode today on the evolution of modern outbound with my special guest, Colin Cadmus of Colin Cadmus LLC. He is a revenue growth coach, creator, and podcaster. Colin, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to get into this. Today, we're going to dive into the evolution of modern outbound and talk about how buyers have evolved as younger generations make more B2B buying decisions and as the technology that enables and sometimes hinders outbound continues to evolve. I'd love to start with your background before I dive into my questions.
SPEAKER_05If you want to just share a little bit about what you've done in your career so far.
COLLIN CADMUSSure. So long story short, I started my career in retail management. I got a lot of good nuggets there, but it was not a place that I wanted to spend the rest of my career making, you know, 45 grand working 80 hours a week. So that eventually was just like, hey, I moved up, you know, three different positions here. And I'm looking at the guys ahead of me, the directors, the VPs, and I'm like, these guys don't seem very happy. They don't seem like they have very much money and they're working all the time. And that's really when I said, I got to do something new. What am I going to do? And I had no idea what a startup was at the time, but I had gone to work one day with my brother-in-law who was a, he was the director of sales for college humor. And I was like a kid in a candy shop. I see, you know, ping pong tables and liquor bottles on their desks and everyone's on the phone closing deals, making lots of money. And I'm like, this is what I want to do. And I'm like, give me a job. Right. And he's like, no, I didn't bring you here to give you a job. I came here to inspire you. So he goes, he says, go home and, you know, look for a startup job where you can basically start at the bottom, something entry level, even though it's four years into my career, four years out of college. So now I'm like, okay, I'm going to take a step back to take some steps forward. Long story short, ended up at a company called Single Platform. And this was a stroke of good luck and good timing because they had just been acquired for a hundred million dollars. And they were literally at the point of like, we're going to hire 10 to 20 salespeople every single month and just keep scaling this thing really massively right now. And so I took it very seriously, rose in the ranks, and luckily they needed someone to really own training and leadership because we were hiring 10 to 20 people a month. And all we had at the time was one VP of sales. From there, I hired 150 people over the course of nine months, which was absolutely insane. We went through sort of a bunch of different growing pains there. And I won't waste too much time on this backstory here, but when someone's picking a startup, you really want to look for that growth opportunity. Because if you end up going somewhere where sort of all those roles are filled, you just, if you're looking to grow into a leadership role, you're going to end up probably sitting, you know, around for a long time, waiting for that. Whereas if you want to move up fast, go somewhere, place that's hiring a lot, go someplace that's growing quickly. And maybe you can actually at least have those doors open for you. But we'll fast forward. They started to kind of dwindle their way out and the culture changed and the objectives changed. So I was like, okay, probably a good time for me to go. This is a good chance for me to try to look for another opportunity to actually be the VP
COLLIN CADMUSof sales, which is what I really wanted to do at that time.
COLLIN CADMUSSo I left there and started chatting it up with the founder of that company. And he was working for First Round Capital at the time as a VC. So he introduced me to a bunch of people, got me in touch with Dr.com. And the rest was history. I met those guys and they were selling a very similar product in the sense that they had this sort of network of publishing partners. And their whole product was getting online reviews for doctors posted into one place. And then they could push them out to sort of this whole network of, you know, sites that you would look for those reviews at. And Single Platform was very similar. I had sold into restaurants at Single Platform, but then we also had to figure out how to sell the product to all different verticals. But I was just thinking in my head, like, oh, I've done all of these other verticals. This is just one more, right? Like I can just go essentially take the same process, but it couldn't have been further from the truth. And the first six months of that job were really tough because I learned that the hard way. And I made the mistake of coming in there saying, hey, I've got all the, I've got all the answers. Like, here's what we're going to do. You know, typical first time VP of sales mistakes. And so it took me about six months to realize basically everything about this business is different. And I need to like really take a backseat here to our top reps and learn from them and then try to apply my expertise and rewrite the playbook, so to speak. And that's what we did. And it ended up being a tremendous success. We doubled revenue three years in a row. And then eventually they had an opportunity to acquire a company called Connect Healthcare, which sort of took us out of that SMB mid-market space and very much into selling to hospitals and health systems. And at that point, I couldn't see eye to eye really on the targets we were trying to achieve while transitioning all of our budget to enterprise. I have no regrets in walking away at that point in time because it only would have gotten probably really, really, really impossible to do what we were trying to do while having sort of all of the resources, you know, going in the direction of enterprise. And I think that that was the right move for the company, by the way. There was big opportunity there. So nonetheless, my ego got the best of me once again. And I thought to myself, you know, the last time I thought I could just come rubber stamp single platforms model to Dr.com. And at this point, I'm thinking, I should just start my own company. You know, I'm the one building all of the revenue. I'm growing the sales engine. You know, cocky me is just thinking like, this is going to be pretty easy. I've seen these founders do this stuff. I could do it, right? Again, couldn't have been further from the truth. The big hurdle there really turned out to be you need a technical co-founder. If you think that that's going to be just easy to find, you're wrong. It won't. And so I burnt about, I don't know, six months of time trying to pitch investors and potential co-founders. And so anyway, you know, I eventually realized that I don't really know what I'm doing as a founder and trying to go at this alone is a huge mistake. And I want to go back to doing what I am great at, which is leading sales. And that led me back to air call. And I tell those stories, it's a little boring and drawn out, but there's sort of two layers of getting significantly humbled there after each job that I left. And I think that that has given me a, it's given, it's allowed me to enter each role with a very different perspective, right? And I, and I think that that's important because if you're just jumping from one role to the next and not really having those moments of reflection, I think it can be hard to really make progress and it can be hard to really level up what you do. And so I credit a lot of that just to the luck of timing and circumstance and making some mistakes, but also just being able to look inward and recognize like what I'm doing here is not working, right?
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. No, I mean, let me highlight this for a second, because I think it's a really good point. We make this show for revenue leaders just as much as operations leaders. And the trap that revenue leaders so oftentimes fall into is thinking what worked in the past is what's going to work in the future. What worked in my past company will work in this company. What worked in the 2010s will work in the 2020s. And oftentimes that's just not the case. And I think that that's what I value so much about operations is trying to take a more objective
EDDIE REYNOLDSview and saying like, what are the metrics tell us? What are our customers telling us? What are we seeing working? What are we not seeing working? How do we modify our playbooks and our approaches to this new environment?
COLLIN CADMUSBingo. It's so true. And that's kind of what makes sales leadership really scary as well, right?
COLLIN CADMUSBecause you don't really know what you're getting into every time. You can have a really long drawn out interview process. You can meet everyone on the team. You can meet all the co-founders. You can become a user of the product. You can become friends with people who work there, but still like you really don't know what you're walking into. Every company is completely different. And yes, there will be things that are the same. There will be lessons that you can apply. But the big takeaway for me after just doing that a couple of times there is that you really shouldn't make any assumptions that anything will be the same. You're best off assuming that everything will be different and go in with the mindset of like, I know nothing. I need to learn from the people here. And then I need to decide over time how to take what I've learned before and apply it here. And that leads me into going to Aircall because that's exactly what I did there. So by the way, Aircall was a big step up for me. So I went from a single platform where I was started as an entry-level salesperson, grew into head of sales training. Then I went to be first-time VP sales at doctor.com, which was a bootstrap startup, right? So going to Aircall was very different because it had a lot of venture capital behind it. The company is based in Paris. They already had a very strong customer base in Paris. But in New York, it was a pretty small team. And that's really what I was hired to do was to bring the company to the North American market. Now, they already had it primed and ready to go. And this is why it was the perfect place for me to start. So in New York, they had, I don't know, let's say 20, maybe 30 people in the office in total. That's including some marketing, some CS, some sales, and a few engineers. So we had three AEs, and I forget exactly how many SDRs. It was less than 10. It was maybe like five or six SDRs. And they had just hired them. So they had- So just to clarify, three AEs, five, six SDRs, and maybe a couple people in marketing in New
EDDIE REYNOLDSYork, and then obviously resources back in Paris as well.
SPEAKER_08And then a big, big headquarters in Paris.
COLLIN CADMUSYeah, correct. So, and the head of marketing was based in New York for the whole company. They originally hired me to come in as the VP sales of North America with the intention of becoming the global VP of sales. Now, we pretty quickly within the first six months decided that makes no sense to do that. And it had nothing to do with skills or abilities. We're way too far apart. We're in different time zones. When you guys are working, we're sleeping. It's just really hard to coordinate. And so we did decide at a certain point that it makes sense to sort of regionalize the operations. By far, it allowed us to move much, much more quickly. So the challenges starting out there were really interesting. Because so we started out, like I said, we had three AEs. Two of them were basically the founding AEs. So Florence and Tommy, who I shout out all the time. These guys literally started, they started with like the title of business developer, right? Like they didn't even have that like official sales title. There was probably no quota, nothing real official. These were the guys who were going to just really figure out how to bring this product to market. And they did a great job doing it. But where they sort of were bumping their heads up against the wall was when they brought in these SDRs that were all reporting to the VP of marketing at this time, by the way. Because they had a VP of sales. It didn't work out. They got rid of him. And then the VP of marketing was just sort of interim managing sales. And, you know, his name's Jeff Reekers. Phenomenal VP of marketing. He's now the CEO of a company called Champion. You know, he'd be the first one to say like, I don't want to run sales. I shouldn't be running sales. Like, you know, bring someone in to take this off my plate. And so, but I say that because I got to come in where there were sort of things were already kind of going, right? Like you had some AEs closing deals. They just brought in this batch of SDRs. But they were trying to, they were really struggling to figure out how to make it work at that level of scale. How to really make the outbound engine work in some sense of a way that you could continue to grow it. And that's where I came in, right? That's where my skills and experience were really complimentary. But going back to what I said before is I came in very different. I didn't come in saying, here's all the things we're going to do. I came in and I spent the first month at least in one-on-ones with every single person,
COLLIN CADMUSmultiple times, over and over. And so that was a, go ahead.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI didn't mean to interrupt, but I want to put some context around this because I think this is great. So just to kind of recap, you've jumped ahead in answering my question. How did you build the outbound motion at Aircall? And you've got two or three AEs, you've got five or six SDRs. What was your average sales price to put this in context?
COLLIN CADMUSSo small. So we were selling deals that would be definitely less than $1,000 MRR on average.
SPEAKER_05Okay. Or less than 12,000 ARR. So pretty high velocity sales cycle, but $12,000 is still enough to justify having salespeople
EDDIE REYNOLDSinvolved. I think that there's a point where you get below that and you cannot afford to have salespeople involved in that cycle. But you're sort of just above that threshold. I would, I would think.
COLLIN CADMUSYeah. What made it unique too, is that it's a long sales cycle. So that was where it was sort of different from my previous roles where we were transactional, but we could close the deals pretty quick. Aircall, you could close a deal quick if it was inbound and they're like, Hey, we need a phone system. You know, it's, it's a, it's a voiceover IP phone system for those wondering. So if someone's in the market for what you're selling, you could close them very quickly. They'll sign up a free trial. They'll convert within a week. And that's great. And that was the bulk of our inbound leads were relatively small. They were usually startups just getting started and they would convert pretty quickly. But when you're doing outbound, that's where we were trying to go after existing companies, you know, that maybe we're using talk desk or they were using ring central. And even if they're not happy with what they're using and we pitch them aircall and they like it more, it doesn't mean that they can just rip out their phone system tomorrow and make that change. And so that was really from the outbound standpoint, that was what was always our struggle. Because the challenge was I could build all this pipeline. I can set all these demos. We can have these great meetings and qualify these opportunities. But these people literally just can't change their phone system overnight. Like they have to wait for their contract to be up or they have to, you know, get other people on board to even agree with it operationally. And, you know, there's just a lot of logistics that go into making those changes. And so that was tough for us because you're trying to prove the value of outbound really quickly. But sometimes you're just on a schedule of like, they're in a long-term contract with
COLLIN CADMUSring central and they want to make the switch and they just can't do it for six months. Right. I think that's a really common example.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI mean, my first B2B SaaS sales role was for a company that built a solution on top of Salesforce, basically Salesforce for private equity. And even if they were using some antiquated, like on-prem system they built in the 1980s,
EDDIE REYNOLDSyou still have to rip and replace that. That's not something that somebody answers a cold call and says, oh, like, this is great. I love this product. We'll put it in place tomorrow.
COLLIN CADMUSYeah. Yeah. You have to sell them off their initial service. And that was the easy part for us because if you've ever used a VoIP phone system, usually you're not happy with it, right? Because it can work for a hundred calls perfectly, but the one call it doesn't work for, that's what you remember. And, you know, that happens three times in a week and you're just like, oh, this thing's a complete piece of junk. The reality is a voice over IP phone system is like a hack, right? The phone wasn't designed to go over the internet. But if you want to have, you know, Cisco phones or Avaya phones wired into your office, be prepared to spend like tens and tens of thousands of dollars, you know, putting all that copper wiring in and, you know, all those systems and whatnot. So this is an affordable way to do it, but the quality really will never be as pristine as just a landline, right? And so that was a challenge for us, but it was also an opportunity for us because it meant if we just called on anyone who's using any of our customers, they probably were not super happy with what they were using. And so there was always an opportunity to create that, to open that door, have that conversation. But again, you know, when you start hiring a bunch of people, you really need to prove that these deals can close. And, you know, one of the problems in SaaS is, you know, I talk about it all the time on LinkedIn. It's just like, we don't often give enough time to these things. And, you know, what happens is, you know, I'll skip ahead and I can go back into the details of how we did some of this stuff. But, you know, I left Aircall after a year and seven months. COVID had a lot to do with that. But, you know, what ends up happening is you leave and there's all this tremendous pipeline and all these conversations that have been created over the last year and seven months that, you know, they're waiting for contracts to end and all this stuff. And so I've seen this happen with consulting clients. I've seen this happen with my friends. It's not just myself. It's like, oftentimes you end up leaving and then all the fruit of your loins come to fruition, like in the following year. And someone else, you know, gets the credit for that. They're like, we're just closing deals left and right. It's like, okay, well, we were opening those opportunities two years ago, right? We started those conversations.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI posted this on LinkedIn the other day. We closed a deal a couple of days ago. We launched this new customer. I use that in air quotes because they were a customer of ours two years ago. And this came by way of an introduction from somebody who was introduced to me by somebody else, by somebody else, by somebody else. And I can attract this all the way back to somebody that was a customer of mine at Salesforce 12 years ago. It happens all the time. Where does this start, right?
COLLIN CADMUSThat's why I constantly say, stop thinking that you need to hire your sales leaders based on the stage of the company. Like there's some truth to that, but I really strongly feel like the first VP sales who comes in, they end up getting topped by someone who has more experience at the next stage. But the person at the next stage comes in and has all the hard work that you did. Like they get to benefit from that. And it's just, it's a timing thing. Like if you're building pipeline, that's literally just the way that it works. If you're establishing a brand in a country for the first time, like the work you do in years one and two are literally going to pay off in years three and four. So this whole concept of like cycling in leaders every couple of years for me has always bothered me for that reason. Cause it's just illogical. And it ends up giving really the benefit to, to someone else. And oftentimes that person who comes in the second time, they often don't last a year themselves either. Cause eventually that truth shines to, to the surface, but I can give you a couple other. Oh, sorry. Go ahead.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThere. Yeah. There's just so much to building that foundation. And that's where I wanted to take this. I want to talk about how you built a foundation for outbound at air call. So with these two or three AEs and five to six SDRs, once you sort of got the lay of the land in place, how did you build out the actual process for a outbound? What was the step-by-step process that you built that either worked or didn't work in your first iteration at air call?
COLLIN CADMUSGot it. So from a process standpoint, it was very straightforward, right? It was your typical, like, we're going to cold call. We're going to email. We're going to use sales loft. It's your typical outbound routine. However, funny little part of the story is when I started there, I come in literally my first day of work and I'm, you know, in the mindset, I'm just, I'm here to observe. I'm not here to make any big rash changes. I'm sitting down at my desk, sort of getting set up on, you know, Slack and whatever. And it's just very quiet in the office. And I'm sort of looking at the clock, you know, it goes from eight o'clock to nine o'clock, nine to 10. I'm starting to think, when do they start cold calling? Now, I don't want to be the guy on his first day that's like, get on the phones. But I'm thinking to myself, like, it's almost lunchtime now. And I haven't really heard anyone making any calls. And so that's when I finally, you know, look over to someone next time, like, what's going on? Are you guys, uh, you can make calls today or you got a different schedule for that? How's that go? And they're like, oh no, we don't really cold call. We do everything through email. And I was just like, what? I'm like, we sell a phone system. Like, we're not using it. And it was very strange. And it took me about a week to get to the bottom of this, which it really shouldn't have. But I eventually realized why they were having product problems with our own product. They would cold call people. Now, this was in the early days of Aircall. They would cold call people and have literal, like, voice quality problems. And so they were all scared to tell me this because it's the type of feedback that probably they would get pushed back or sort of get brushed off before because they didn't really have a sales leader who knew how to go to bat for that stuff, right? Or maybe no one really asked the question before. But I finally got someone to, like, sort of open up to me in one of those private one-on-ones. They're like, no, man, listen, like, the product kind of doesn't work so great. And they're like, when you make a cold call and you're trying to tell someone that you're going to sell them a phone and your phone is having, like, it sounds like you're underwater. That's a hard sell. And now I'm thinking, like, oh, man, did I just walk into the worst job? Like, what's going to happen here? Is this going to be a nightmare? Long story short, I immediately had to sit down with our CEO and CTO. I said, I don't know if you guys are aware of this, but there's a general sentiment on the sales team that they won't even use our own product because the quality is embarrassing. And they didn't know. They were like, no one has told us that. And I'm like, okay, well, I guess I just, you know, added my first piece of value here bridging the communication gap because people were just scared to say that, which kind of makes sense. You just got hired as an SDR. You haven't really had a full robust sort of training and introduction because they're sort of figuring things out. You really want to go telling them the product's not working? Like, it's probably an uncomfortable thing for someone straight out of college to do. So anyway, we ended up solving those problems. The product, you know, they did a whole revamp of how it was built and the infrastructure and everything. And the quality went through the roof within, I don't know, maybe two to three months from there. And then we started cranking out cold calls and whatnot. But, you know, I did have them using the sales loft power dialer or phone dialer for a while because I wasn't going to let that be an excuse that held us back from making cold calls. And at first I thought it was an excuse, right? I'm like, do they just not want to make cold calls? They're blaming the product. And so I'm like, okay, I'll pay for the sales loft phone. Like in the meantime, you guys use that. Anyway, I'm getting way too into the weeds there, but I thought that that was, it was funny because it really tied into like, you know, solving problems, but also trying to change the culture of the sales team to being an outbound driven org. And so I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll finally answer your question. Now I keep adding in the details, but so how did we actually build the team? So we had the three AEs and I had no leadership. So it was just me. And then we had about these nine SDRs. And the plan was that we wanted to hire more. So I knew I wasn't going to be able to promote the AEs to be managers right away. Even though I saw manager, you know, abilities and chops in, in, in arguably all of them different to different degrees. But I actually, part of the reason I joined the company is the founding AEs. I knew I could make them into sales leaders. And so I sort of saw like how I'm going to build this team from a distance. Cause if we're going to grow as fast as we are, like, it's not going to be me doing it alone. You know, we're going to need a sales manager or two. We're going to need a director of sales development, that type of thing. So this is where like you, I think it was your post that I saw on LinkedIn the other day.
EDDIE REYNOLDSThat was talking about sort of like building this initial team of like rockstar AEs that this is like a scalable replicable model.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWe've got this thing working before we hire the next set of AEs, right?
COLLIN CADMUSBingo. So they had that in terms of the AEs, the SDR team was just basically brand new hired so that there weren't like having some sort of repeatable, you know, process or success yet, but we were able to fix that pretty quickly by getting them actually making cold calls, getting them following, you know, a traditional, you know, cadence or sequence. And, but also there was just a leadership problem on, on that team. They had put someone in charge of that team without getting into too much of someone's business, but they just weren't even coming from having been successful in the role themselves. And it was more just like, hmm, where can we put this person? Like we can have this person do some hiring and whatnot. But, you know, it was one of the things that like, when I sat down with all these reps, eventually getting them to open up about what's going on is they really just weren't aligning with the leader that was, that was there. And so I made the decision to, to remove that person. It was really the only person that we, that we let go in the early days, but it was extremely important because it was just the wrong position.
SPEAKER_05I've worked for people like that in the past where I'm in a very, very new role and I'm trying to learn how to navigate the waters.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd then I slowly realized that my sales manager doesn't actually know how to sell.
SPEAKER_32And I don't necessarily think that's the worst thing in the world, but I think what was worse
EDDIE REYNOLDSis that I think he pretended to know how to sell.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd so now he's sending me down the wrong path until I finally figure out, wow, I need to stop listening to my boss because he doesn't know what he's doing.
COLLIN CADMUSYeah. That was kind of the situation, right? Is, is they wanted to hire these people and they sort of just look to someone on the team. So they didn't have a recruiter or anything. And they're like, does someone want to sort of help us hire these people and bring them in? And then that sort of evolved into, do you want to help us train them and teach them this stuff? And it just really wasn't the right person. This person didn't have the actual experience. They were trying very hard. And, and, you know, like that's what makes those decisions really difficult. It's like, this isn't a bad person. This isn't a person who's, you know, nefariously doing the wrong things. This isn't a person who's even on a power trip. This is a person who's really trying to do something that they just don't have the experience to do. And so.
SPEAKER_02Well, and if I can take us down a path for a second, it's like, I was talking to Warren Zana of the CRO collective the other day asking like, well, Hey, like, what do you think about
EDDIE REYNOLDSpromoting like a marketing leader into a CRO? Like, do revenue leaders have to know how to sell?
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd he's like, absolutely not. I think that if you like, think I'm going to build a team and cultivate the right people, and we've got the resources that do know how to sell to help these people sell, that can be really great. So I'm not advocating that every revenue leader has to be the best salesperson on earth, but it is really interesting. If you're in a position where you're taking like very junior people that are still learning how to sell and you don't know how to sell yourself and they don't have a resource to learn how to sell. I think that's a recipe for disaster.
COLLIN CADMUSYeah, especially because we made the decision that, you know, we were going to start cold calling and making that a significant part of our process. And this person was teaching them a process that didn't involve cold calling because they had never really successfully cold called. So that was really like, okay, if we're going in this direction, which I knew we had to, there's no way we're going to sell a phone system and not use the phone system to call people, you know, granted that like literally cold calls are just a necessary evil, right? But so anyway, so we made that change, but what I had to do to sort of bridge the gap is I needed, I needed leadership now because I couldn't, I couldn't start recruiting and focusing my attention in different areas. If I was also being the day-to-day manager of nine SDRs, because that's a full-time job
SPEAKER_08because they're pretty much brand new on the job for the most part. Yeah.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI mean, these are people that are at a level in their career where they need help with a granular step-by-step process. Like, what do I say in this situation? Like, how do I open a call? How do I get them to like take the next meeting? That requires an immense amount of handholding.
COLLIN CADMUSYeah. And even just answering questions about the product, right? So let's say we got even to the point of, they knew how to make the cold calls, send the emails, do the research, all that stuff. They, if they get in touch with someone, they're going to be asked questions that they just don't have answers to yet. Cause the product was complicated. The integrations were complicated and these were all reps that were hired, you know, within the last few months. So what I did, which was very much an experiment, but I'm sharing it because it worked very well. It's not something I'd recommend doing long-term, but in this particular situation, it worked very well. What I decided to do was create like buddy systems. So instead of having managers for the SDRs, I said, we have three AEs. You guys are going to, you're going to be AEs. You're going to manage your own little pod of SDRs. In the meantime, this isn't a long-term thing, but you're the product expert. So every time that they need to know, you know, like, Hey, does our phone system do X, Y, and Z? Or, you know, does it have this routing capability or some super technical question? You know, we don't have sales engineers. We don't have anything. And our whole, mostly our whole engineering team is in Paris. So I can't even walk across, you know, the aisle to ask these questions. And so we set it up that way. And what it did was it really provided benefits in a few areas. Number one is it took the day-to-day management responsibilities, mostly off my plate for the SDRs. Number two is it allowed me to stress test my AEs to see who's a good leader and manager. Cause I'm thinking in my head, I know I'm going to have to promote them, but it's going to be one at a time. It's not going to be all of them at once. And when I met with these AEs, this was a big leadership challenge. I had to navigate there is they all wanted to be the first manager to get promoted. And they all had a very strong argument in case for why they should be. And so I had to navigate like, okay, I really would like to promote all three of you at some point. I could see you all being managers. We don't need three managers today, which means we're going to have to go through this transition where one of you goes from being peers to being the manager of this team, which means the other two of you are going to have to be managed by your peer. And in order to get to the point where we eventually have enough reps that you could become a manager that has to work. And that's a, that's a challenge, not only for me, but more so for them. And it's hard for the person that I chose to promote first, which I ended up doing it based on not only tenure, but it was also who I thought was most ready. I promoted this guy, Florence first, who was the first AE and he was so cut out, you know, for, for the role. And, you know, but the other two guys also wanted to be promoted to managers and they had been AEs for a while. Like they had really put in the work, but, you know, luckily they, they understood, you know, I was able to reason with them of like, obviously we can't promote three people at once. Like that literally just doesn't work, you know? And I sort of laid that challenge them. I said, like, I know it's probably uncomfortable to come in and like, let your peer be your boss. And I'm going to leave that to you guys to figure out how that dynamic's going to work. But if you can make it work, I'm committed to developing you into the next manager and the next manager and so forth. I'll be honest with you. I didn't think that it would work. I thought that like one of them would quit, at least that one of them would quit. And I did not want that to happen. And I did everything that I could to prevent it. And luckily it worked. They didn't quit. They stuck around. And some of them for way longer than they wanted to in that AE role, right? Because it really takes a lot of time to need another AE manager. Like you have to really grow that AE team. And we were very focused on growing the SDR team. So like, I really had to string them along for a little while. And I wasn't being dishonest about it, but it just was what it was. But one thing I'm curious about is were these AEs also making cold calls as they were coaching
EDDIE REYNOLDSthe SDRs on making cold calls?
COLLIN CADMUSNot anymore. No. And the reason for that was that they were at capacity with demos. We had a very significant amount of inbound demand. And so these AEs were on the phone most of the day running demos, which is the reason they hired SDRs, you know, before I got there because, you know, they wanted to be able to bring in more AEs, but they were also trying to bring up the average deal size and outbound was, was relatively on the smaller side. So they were thinking if we can supplement, you know, some, some outbound, you know, sort of larger leads, we can bring up that average deal size and get the LTV to CAC, you know, where it needs to be. But, but no, the AEs were not cold calling. They literally didn't have time.
COLLIN CADMUSSo out of curiosity, this strikes a really good point.
SPEAKER_49So out of curiosity, why not hire, you know, one, two, three more AEs and spread out those
EDDIE REYNOLDSdemos so that they have 20% of their time to make cold calls. Obviously you felt that wasn't the right thing for the company, but I'd be curious why.
COLLIN CADMUSSo it was what I did next, but I didn't hire them from outside. I wanted to take them from the SDR team. And the reason I wanted to do that was twofold. Number one, it's a lot of product training. And so to bring an AE in from outside would be slower to ramp them than to transition them from the SDR team. So that was sort of the short-term thinking there. But the long-term thinking was that if we really want to grow a successful outbound team, I need to show that there's a career path to them becoming AEs. I need to prove that that can really work. And so if I don't start by my next new AEs are coming from the SDR team, like we're pretty much, you know, going to make it more difficult to hire SDRs because they're going to come in and they're going to be like, well, why didn't you promote, you know, you just hired AEs from the outside, but you know, I'm coming here. I want to become an AE in a year or two. I don't see your current SDRs getting promoted. So like, you know, I wanted that engine to work the right way. And so that was, was my, my rationale there because we had some SDRs who, even though they were new, they were good, they were strong. And I don't necessarily mean they were strong at like knowing all of the tactical things. They were just really good hires. They had the raw chops and I knew I could get them there quickly. And so that's what, that's what, that's what we did.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI absolutely love that. So you've got this career path for your SDRs and to clarify what you're saying is you eventually got to a point where you're saying, I don't want my AEs fully booked on demos all day. I want them to have time to make cold calls themselves. No, no, no, no, not at all.
COLLIN CADMUSI want the AEs. I might, maybe I said that backwards. I want the AEs on demos all day long where they had a little bit of flexibility. I wanted them coaching and helping to develop the SDRs until I could find the right leader for the SDR team. That was something that, um, you know, I had to decide, do I want to bring someone from the outside in for that role? And I eventually decided that that was the right move only because we didn't really have like an outbound guru on the teams. We had air call gurus. We had sales gurus. We had AE gurus, but we didn't really have someone who was like an outbound wizard. And that's what, that's what we needed. And so, you know, the, the goal with the AEs was always to just have them running demos as much as possible again, because the inbound demand was so strong. And, you know, if you're working in a company where you're just, you're coming in every day to 20, 30 leads, you kind of just want your AEs going through those and just getting on
COLLIN CADMUSthose calls and trying to close them down as fast as possible. Well, this is something I always find fascinating and I want to break down is why is that?
EDDIE REYNOLDSI mean, just from a financial perspective, if you do the math and you look at AEs that are just spending all their day on inbound, or let's say twice as many AEs where they're spending half their day on inbound and half their day on outbound. How did you do that calculus to determine that it was better to just have less AEs with a full plate versus some AEs that had to hunt on their own?
COLLIN CADMUSI think there's a lot of reasons and then it might not be some sort of mathematical, you know, like here's the gotcha, like this is why it makes sense. A little bit of it might be sort of anecdotal, but you know, number one is I will keep going back to this point because it's true in, in most SaaS companies, there's a lot to learn about the product, the integrations. And so the less people you have on the sales team, the better that that can be because you just can, can have your better people running those calls. Whereas when you're sort of constantly adding AEs and you're trying to do this whole, like we're going to grow the headcount and they're going to be full cycle AEs, like that works for certain products. Don't get me wrong, but you know, selling air call, it was a very technical sale. You had to be able to answer a lot of really complex questions. And the product integrates into like hundreds of different tools. You also have to know the answers to all of those questions. And so the amount of effort that it would take to train an AE to get to that point of being really good at it. Once you have them there, why would you want them wasting their time cold prospecting? You know, I mean, you could, you could. I want to give you an answer to that because I really love this conversation.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSure. So for context, I've spent most of my time in B2B SaaS sales. I was in sales and finance as well, but in B2B SaaS sales, I spent most of my time as a full cycle AE, which also included existing customers. And most of that time on selling either for Salesforce or for a Salesforce partner or for my own company now. And that's always been a very complex product. However, the thing that I have found is, is that I always fear that when people are fed a hundred percent by inbound, that they lose power. Meaning that you're sitting in a sales cycle with a customer that is not willing to bring in the decision maker. They're not willing to like do the things that they need to do to make the right decision to follow the right process. And you're afraid to walk away because you don't have the ability to pick up the phone and replace that deal with another deal. You don't have sort of this balancing act of saying, do I want to spend my time chasing this deal that doesn't feel right? Or would I rather reallocate that time to doing outbound activity? And so, I don't know. I was always in a position where most of my pipeline came from some form of outbound. And therefore, I could look at a customer and say, or a prospect and say, I've tried my best here and I don't think it is worth pursuing this further. I'm going to walk away so that I have time to go build better pipeline.
SPEAKER_08So, that's not wrong. There's plenty of situations where I would agree with that. I think a lot of it is case by case.
COLLIN CADMUSA lot of it has to do with the product. Excuse me. A lot of it also has to do with how much is being spent on marketing and demand gen. You know, at Aircall, they're spending a significant amount of money on marketing. And it was very predictable because people were constantly running Google searches for better phone systems. Like I said, they're always unhappy with their phone system. And so, part of it, excuse me. Part of it was that we just, we wanted to have experts on those calls and we were actually able to keep them busy all the time. Now, that eventually did change and I'll give you the answer to that. The one other reason I would, I'll add in there that for me was the most important reason to decide to keep our AEs strictly just running demos was that I didn't want to lose them. And if, in every experience that I've had, and I know this is not the same everywhere and there's, you know, there's different scenarios for different companies, but every scenario that I've had where you're really constantly pressuring AEs to cold call and outbound, cold call and outbound, is they eventually just don't want that job anymore. And keep in mind what I just told you that I had three people who were already itching to become managers. And I want to keep them here because I want to make them managers, but I just can't do it yet today. So if I were to also say, I want you to start cold calling now, I would be pushing them out the door and it would have been the most irresponsible thing I could have done because they were tremendously talented.
SPEAKER_55So I don't think you're wrong at all, but I find this absolutely fascinating. And this is because I came from like banking and private equity where I worked with guys
EDDIE REYNOLDSthat were 60 years old, some of them making over a million dollars a year, and they're still just banging phone calls all day long, right? Now I'm not talking like boiler room, 300 calls a day. Like these are thoughtful calls, oftentimes to people that they know, but they are hustling. And I'm now 20 plus years into my career and I have time blocked today to do, I mean, it's not really cold calls. They're warmer, but I'm prospecting today. And I have realized over the course of the last 10 years or so, maybe more that B2B SaaS in particular has gotten into this culture of after your first year or two, you don't make cold calls. And I still have trouble wrapping my head around it.
COLLIN CADMUSYeah. I mean, I'm with you and it actually, it wasn't my, my preference as I entered air call. I would have been very much in the, in the school of thought, you know, of what you are and, and certain companies, I would still say the same thing. Like you've got to just keep pounding the phones. Air call had the luxury of having really strong inbound demand, which just, it just given that and the particular people that I had in particular roles, like at that time, it just, it would have been a waste of their time. Right. I will also say that like, you have a low price point and I think there's a correlation there.
EDDIE REYNOLDSRight. So when I'm thinking about like Joe and we were, and we were at capacity, right?
COLLIN CADMUSSo our AEs had full schedules and oftentimes like they had to kind of skip lunch or take a late lunch. Cause there were too many demos at this point in time. So like it would have just, it would have been going in the opposite direction, you know, to make them start cold calling at that point in time. Now that said, when we got bigger, we, we gave sales loft licenses to our AEs and, you know, we encouraged them to be running some cadences and doing some cold calling. So we did get to that point. It just was not like the, the priority coming in because what we needed were actually more AEs with more skillset. Cause we had, you know, all of these demos and whatnot coming in. So my objective was to take these three AEs or four AEs, actually we had four, cause there was one more that had sort of just gotten promoted. So my objective was to take them and pair them up with these SDRs and allow them to sort of like let their skillsets become contagious over the first couple months so that I can develop more. Yeah.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd one where, one place I wanted to go with this is to ask, do you think, I think a lot of people will say this, that as the price point is lower, it should be much more heavily reliant on inbound. And as the price point is higher and we get into enterprise sales, it's much more reliant on outbound to at least get that initial foot in the door.
COLLIN CADMUSIt wasn't the case for me at single platform. And I hesitate to give that answer just because it was a while ago, but we were selling a very low price point solution at single platform and we had no marketing. We had no SDRs. It was all 100% us pounding the phone all day. So every day we had to make 200 calls. We had to schedule 10 meetings. We had to hold five meetings and close one sale. So it was 210, five, one. Those were like our metrics that we had to hit for the whole funnel. And, you know, we generated all of our own leads and it was a low price point product. We were selling it to restaurants. So I think it's, it's very case by case, but I think you'll find interesting how this evolved as the team grew. Because that's where it starts to align a little bit more with sort of where you're, where your gut's taking you. And so I might be focusing a little too much on sort of what I had to do initially, but because my priority initially was not to lose good people. Right. I love this context.
SPEAKER_02It's like really, really helpful context. Right. And so if I'm understanding you, you had this strong inbound engine that made its way into
EDDIE REYNOLDSfilling AE schedules with demos, but then you had your SDRs making outbound calls, like cold outbound. I'm increasingly a fan of ABM or some kind of an account based approach for this reason.
SPEAKER_63And so what I'm wondering is, is if you've got all of these people that are exhibiting buying
EDDIE REYNOLDSintent via their engagement with marketing, and then separately a team to make outbound calls, did you guys have overlap? How did marketing and sales work together to penetrate different accounts or did it work
SPEAKER_46in a silo?
COLLIN CADMUSGood question. There were definitely phases of this evolution. Probably the first phase is that things were a bit messy, right? And there was some overlap and some confusion. Eventually, you know, I have a very specific document that I think needs to be in every sales playbook and it's called the rules of lead engagement. And this is a document that should be made, I think, with the team. This shouldn't be the VP in the sales ops creating it and then saying, here's the rules, follow them. You should sit in the room with the entire team and you should say, okay, here are the problems we're trying to solve. We want to make sure that we know when a lead should get credited to marketing or when it should get credited to outbound. We want to know when a lead is fair game or when it belongs to another AE. Like, here are the problems that we need to solve for. And then let's sort of discuss and debate and negotiate what those terms should be. And we'll set something today and we'll stick to it. And if we need to change it, we'll revisit at the end of the month, right? And so establishing that criteria is really the foundation for solving those problems. It's not going to be perfect. There's going to be areas where people still feel like it's unfair. And you can make sort of one-off exceptions and whatnot. But generally speaking, for outbound, we were trying to reach a certain size account. And so usually those were not the same leads that were coming inbound to us because we were going after accounts that, like I said, they probably already had a phone system in place. So it doesn't mean-
SPEAKER_02Larger accounts.
COLLIN CADMUSRight, right.
SPEAKER_02Got it. So then now, and the reason I ask this is because I have this hypothesis that every company should be doing this.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd then I question myself, does it make sense at a really low price point, at a very high volume, at a very high velocity? So then my next question is, why? Why would marketing focus on these smaller accounts? Presumably because it's profitable, because it's working. But what I'm wondering is, did you guys have discussions to say, okay, marketing is getting all of this attention from companies of this size. And we really want to get in front of companies that are larger, should we change the way that we market?
COLLIN CADMUSYeah. So I will give you an incredible example here, and I cannot take credit for this. The credit goes to Jeff Rekers, who was our VP of marketing, then CMO, who again is now CEO of a new product called Champion, which is really cool. People should check it out. But this was a great idea that he came up with. I wish I had a picture. I could probably send you one afterwards. But this was our best account-based sort of approach. And so he was walking to work one day, and we were in New York City, and he noticed there's all these old phone booths throughout the sidewalks, and they're abandoned. Most of them have the phones ripped out of them. Some of them have drug addicts sneaking their head in there, doing stuff they don't want people seeing. But they're just phone booths that sit there. But they have these advertisements on the side of them that you could still purchase through the city or through whatever company would handle that. And he thought to himself, wow, that could be interesting to advertise a modern phone system on old-school phone booths. That would be funny, right? And then he thought to himself, well, what would be even cooler is if we could actually create a list of specific target accounts that we are working on getting in touch with, and we could make sure to place these ads right outside of the subway stops that are next to their office. Wow. Yeah. That's cool. It was brilliant. And it really worked. Now, if you were just walking around New York City, were we all over the place to the point where, like, if you were just in New York, you're like, oh, I see air call everywhere?
SPEAKER_08No. Pretty sure.
SPEAKER_23I was going to say, I thought I saw you guys actually in the subway, but I can't remember.
SPEAKER_08We never did the subway. Unless they did it, it was very expensive, and that's why we didn't do it. But it also wasn't targeted, right?
COLLIN CADMUSSo if you do the subway, you're hitting everyone. So the subway was good for consumer products, like Casper Mattress, for example. They were in there forever because everyone needs a mattress, but not everyone needs a phone system. And so the subway ads were just too expensive for us. We wanted to do it because it was cool, and it was like an ego thing in New York to be plastered all over the subway. But it really would have been a waste of money because we would have been...
EDDIE REYNOLDSIt makes sense. I remember seeing a lot of ads for Monday.com, and I'm like, Monday, I think, sells to small businesses. Like, 99% of the people in this subway car are not decision makers in small businesses. Why? Why?
COLLIN CADMUSIt was probably a bit of an ego thing there, or it was spray and pray methodology. I mean, I'm not even going to an extreme here to compliment Jeff's marketing abilities. He's the best that I've ever worked with. He's an absolute genius. And his rationale behind this was so brilliant. And what he did is he created a map of New York, and we mapped out these customers that we wanted to target. We collaborated with sales and demand gen to create that list. And I don't even think he told us what his brilliant idea was until he really had it all, because I remember just being so blown away by it. So, you know, he put together this list and then he would figure out, like, where their offices are located, what subway stops they would be getting off of to commute to that office. And then he was able to negotiate deals to purchase the ad spots on those phone booths that were right outside of those subway stations. And so the rationale was, we want to build brand recognition before we reach out to these people, right? And so we want them to just sort of see these ads. They're probably not thinking anything of it. No one's going to see a phone booth ad and, like, go sign up for Aircall. But we want them to just see it every day when they're walking to work for about a month. And then we're going to try to reach out to them. And, you know, we're going to see if our brand recognition, you know, is, or the perceived, you know, brand recognition is improved. Because, again, we were bringing a company from France into the U.S., right? So people didn't know who we were. And we're cold calling these big accounts and whatnot. And no one really knew yet what Aircall was. We hadn't really, you know, gone to all the Saster events or really built up the brand yet. And so this was a great way to do that because it just put it in front of people's faces to the point that when you start calling them, they're not like, oh, yeah, I just saw you. Like, no, they don't give you that reaction. But there's a level of familiarity. And then they eventually connect the dots as we start talking. And so that campaign was incredible. I think I have pictures on my Instagram or something of us standing, you know, next to those phone booth ads. But it was really brilliant. And I would say that was hands down the best account-based marketing campaign that I've ever seen. Because I tend to think that when people say ABM or account-based marketing, that they're usually kind of full of crap. And really all they mean is they're just personalizing their outreach. And it's not really an account-based initiative. Like, they're probably just doing some research or maybe they're going to send something in the mail and hit them from this channel and that channel. And I kind of just think that's just outbound, right? That's just like what outbound should be. When you get account-based, like, you're putting a map up on the wall of how people are commuting to work. And you're finding the advertisements and the billboards that, you know, are in their area. Like, that's account-based marketing in my opinion. Yeah, I see a lot of people roll their eyes when you say ABM.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd I don't know why. Because most people are not doing that.
COLLIN CADMUSThey're just – what they're doing is they're creating personalization for their outreach, which is already what, like, is the status quo for outbound. Meaning there's no marketing involved.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIt's just personalized cold sales outreach.
COLLIN CADMUSMaybe they're collaborating with marketing to send them some spam emails. But what does that do? Come on. That doesn't really make it an ABM campaign. Now, maybe your marketing team is going to send, like, some physical gift in the mail to them or something. And that's going to tie into the email you send them. Like, okay, now you're getting closer to, like, a real ABM campaign.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah, I mean, when I think ABM at its core, what I think is is that sales and marketing are aligned in the sense that they say,
EDDIE REYNOLDSthese are the accounts that we want to go after. This is the sales activities that we need you to get in front of them. And this is the marketing content that they're going to want to see that's going to want to resonate with them. I mean, I'll give you an example. I remember when I was at Salesforce, I covered S&B, which is a funny term at Salesforce because, like, I signed a million-dollar contract. Like, some of these companies were, like, you know, pretty big by that point. But they're going into, like, the Salesforce world tour, and they're seeing this giant presentation on how Coca-Cola uses Salesforce. And they're like, we have 500 employees. Like, I could give a shit what Coca-Cola is doing with Salesforce. And my team, all the way up to, like, my executive, are saying we need more relevant marketing content for our audience that you're asking us to bring to these events, as an example. And obviously, Salesforce has, like, an army in marketing. And so they did have a lot of that content. And then we as AEs are thinking, how do we distribute that content? So when we take that back to a much smaller, earlier-stage business, all I think about ABM is, is sales and marketing aligned on the accounts we want to go after and the content they need to see in order to convert into, you know, interested customers? And then I think you have this extra step of, how do we distribute it? And for me, like, we think about targeted ads. You could talk about, like, phone booths. You could talk about literally the AEs or SDRs distributing it.
COLLIN CADMUSThey were targeting them with the paid ads online, as well as the phone booths. So that was that idea, was to hit them from those angles. You hit a great point, though, there. You know, Salesforce, you really needed segmented marketing, right? Because you're selling to such a wide variety. That was less necessary in the early days at Aircall. So we were kind of just selling to the same ICP across the board. But what you're describing, to me, really, it sounds like it's alignment with product marketing. And yes, the deeper or the further you scale, the more necessary that becomes. Because you can't just have, like, a one-size-fits-all marketing message, right, at that point. And so, yeah, you make a good point. In our own business, I mean, we do not have the budget to buy ads.
EDDIE REYNOLDSBut we are thinking, like, we get a lot of customers and a lot of inbound from companies that are at $1 to $10 million in revenue. And I think we play best with companies that are at $10 to $100 million in revenue. So it's gotten to the point where every single thing that we create in marketing is filtered through this lens of, would a CRO and a $50 million company care about this? Or are we solving some problem? Like, I try to really steer away from, here's how to build your first sales team. That's relevant at $1 million. It's not relevant at $50 million. So if we want to go after $50 million companies, we need to make sure that everything is aligned towards that. Even if we don't have the budget to buy ads, distribute it to them.
COLLIN CADMUSThat makes perfect sense. I completely agree with you there. And where we started to do quite a bit of that, actually, at Aircall, was when we really launched our integration marketplace. That's when we, and we actually had a director of demand gen, and we were really getting into, you know, the product marketing and whatnot. And so that's where we really did a lot of what you're describing, where we designed, or not designed, we would create targeted lists of, you know, potential customers who we knew were using HubSpot, for example. And we're going to do a targeted campaign to them about the Aircall HubSpot integration. Or then now we're going to do one to Zoho customers, to PipeDrive. And that really required that sort of ABM approach. And you wanted to, you know, tie that into what marketing was doing so that they were getting retargeted with relevant ads that sang that same tune, right, about that integration, so to speak. So, yes, we did do that. That was later on in our scale.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, and the core or the root of my question is basically, like, can you do ABM at a low price point? So for these companies that you wanted to outbound, what was your ASP?
EDDIE REYNOLDSAnd it sounds like you're saying that at that ASP, it worked.
COLLIN CADMUSIt was really hard to have an average sales. I mean, I shouldn't say it's hard to have an average because you can average anything out. But it was all over the map. And the reason for that was the product we were selling was not only based on the quantity of users that you have, but also the volume of minutes that they use on the phone. Because we have to pay Twilio and the phone carrier for that. And so you kind of have these two numbers that if you're just looking from the outside at a company, good luck predicting, like, what the value of that contract will actually be. And that was a huge part of our problem is we tried different ways of doing this. We said, okay, why don't we segment our, you know, our lists by how many employees they have. And then we're like, well, we're running into a bunch of companies, they have 500 employees, but they only have two people who use a phone, you know, so that didn't work. And then we're like, well, why don't we look at how big their sales team is? Like, okay, well, now we're running into some teams that their sales team is only using Zoom, but they have a support team that's using the phones. And like, so we had all of these different like challenges and trying to like actually understand the average size of the account. And you would also, until we eventually, this is something I pushed for endlessly, was that we need to just have like an unlimited price point where you can just make as many calls as you want. And the minutes are baked into the price because we had to discuss the value of the license and then your per minute price. It made the conversation quite complex, right? But it really was aligned with our cost structure. Eventually, we got to the point where we were big enough that we could say, let's just offer a per user price that includes unlimited minutes. And it means we're going to have a better margin on certain people in certain accounts than others. But really, all we need to care about is how it averages out for the company, right? And as long as we can average that out to a healthy, you know, you know, healthy ROI, then we could afford to just have this simple, like unlimited minutes, you know, pricing. The same way we went through that change with our cell phones, you know, over the years, you used to get a certain amount of minutes. And then eventually it was all, all, all unlimited.
SPEAKER_05I'm so old. I remember my first cell phone. I'd have roaming charges if I like just drove out of my town. Remember, call me, call me, call me back after seven.
COLLIN CADMUSIt's, it's free.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. It's crazy. Yeah. Kids these days don't know that. Is earlier, you said the ASP was a thousand dollars a month. And so I'm just curious, like at that price point or somewhere, or somewhere in that ballpark, did this ABM strategy make sense? Or was it like, no, like these customers are paying us like 10 grand a month. And that's why it makes sense for us to like, you know, focus our efforts in that way.
COLLIN CADMUSWe weren't really, I wouldn't say we were aligning with marketing per se on like going after necessarily small accounts.
SPEAKER_49Mapping all these offices out and everything like, no, that's a lot of effort.
COLLIN CADMUSWe were very specific with the types of companies that we did that for. These were all companies that like, they would have been one logos, like logos you'd want to put on your website. Like we're very strategic there. It doesn't mean all of them. Like, you know, if we were targeting a specific, you know, office that was, I don't know, on the corner of 18th street or something. Cause we really wanted their logo. Monday.com, by the way, it was one of them that we were trying to, to, to sign up. I believe that we eventually did, but, and this shirt I'm wearing is from a company called untuck it. And that was one of the target accounts too, that we wanted to get, uh, untuck it. And so we got them. So we would sometimes mix in some less priority accounts just because they were close by. And so we were already spending the money to try to get, you know, the Monday.com, you know, get their attention with those ads. And so since we're putting that phone booth ad there, let's now look at other companies that are in the area that maybe wouldn't have made the list. But since we're already there, let's see if it makes sense to, to put them in there. And so we would do that. But I think we did this sort of on two different, sort of two different scales of what you're talking about. One scale is where you're really collaborating with the marketing team in that way. And the smaller scale where we did it more commonly on outbound was really just the SDRs creating their own sort of targeted lists that were either for a specific integration or, you know, a specific use case or something like that, where they're like, okay, I'm sending out a campaign today. You know, that's going specifically to, um, retail clothing, you know, websites that have telephone support, right? Like, like untuck it, for example. And so they would craft their messaging, you know, in that way that it's, it's very specific to that type of a vertical. But yeah, we weren't always necessarily aligning with marketing on, on all of that stuff. It was a long winded answer. The short answer is, yeah, if the deal sizes are too small, it's probably not worth it. But that's the same thing for outbound in general, right? If the deal sizes are too small, outbound is almost not worth it. At least as a dedicated function, you can have full cycle.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI'm hearing that from a lot of people. And my personal experience has always been selling like reasonably high ticket items. You know, a lot of the deals I've done on the smaller size are like, you know, 20, 30, $40,000.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo I just don't have a lot of experience with something for like 500 bucks a month.
SPEAKER_05And it makes sense. I mean, I don't care. A lot of this was, a lot of it was land and expand too.
COLLIN CADMUSRight. So, so we, that was also what was challenging is like, okay, so let's try to sign up their sales team and get them using air call. But we know that they have a big customer success team. They have a big support team. And probably they have some phone needs just, you know, throughout the office for intercommunication. And so we would set sort of these roadmaps of how we were going to try to land and expand into those deals. So some of it wasn't even necessarily a part of the initial sale. And, but we knew, you know, you know, once we're six months into proving to them that our phone is better than what they're using, you know, we'll be able to get more users and whatnot. So there was that, you know, challenge as, as well, where it wasn't really just, it wasn't super predictable how big an account could actually become. But, you know, it's always for, for anyone who is wondering, I'll, I'll, I'll just write this down LTV over CAC, right? You want, you want about a three, three to one, right? This is like your, your objective bare minimum. So lifetime value over cost to acquire the customer, right? So if you're spending a dollar, you want to get $3 back. That's like the industry benchmark. That's how they're ultimately going to look on the financial reporting to see, does your outbound team even make sense? Does it make sense to have this? Do your, does your marketing spend make sense? Does it make sense to have this? Now we didn't have this for outbound. We were closer to like one-to-one when I started because we were hiring reps in New York. They were expensive and we were selling relatively small deal sizes. So a huge part of my job was how do I get this to three-to-one instead of one-to-one? Or how do I even get to just, how do I get to two-to-one, right? And so we, we definitely wasted some time probably overthinking this because we got too focused on the specific channels. And we started to lose sight of the fact that at the end of the day, what really matters is the company's overall LTV over CAC. And so we kind of had that epiphany at a certain point in time. And we said, well, wait a minute, what we're doing on the inbound model had like some months, it was like an 11 to one LTV over CAC. It was so profitable. That's why I say like we were so heavy on the inbound because it was just wildly profitable because there were so many people searching for what we're selling because it's a phone system.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSo that's so interesting because I would normally push back on this and I'm curious if there's something I'm missing here. What I'm hearing is you're saying, okay, we've got this really great LTV to CAC and to break that down for other people. Meaning that you are getting a lot of long-term value back for the amount of money you spend to acquire that customer via inbound.
SPEAKER_90Yeah. But on the outbound side, not at all.
EDDIE REYNOLDSNow, one thing I would be curious about is, is how are you defining LTV? Like we're talking about an early stage company. That's part of the problem.
SPEAKER_44It was too soon really to have accurate math. So you hit the nail on the head right there. Yeah.
EDDIE REYNOLDSYeah. So that's kind of what I was going with that. But I think where I struggle is I think like, oh, what do you pay in SDR these days? It's like all in. It's probably a hundred grand a year between salary and bonus. And then the 25% overhead you have to add on top of whatever you pay somebody. Yeah. Okay. So they make X amount of calls and let's say they book like 10 meetings a month, whatever. You can do the math based on your average price and figure out like what that first year revenue might be. And maybe you can estimate LTV. Okay. We can all do that math. And then that tends to lend itself to say, well, if I'm selling a product for 500 bucks a month, that math is not going to work out. And then the flip side of this is I spent one day, just one day in college selling like national geographic subscriptions or something like that on some like auto dialer. And I don't know anything about that business, but I bet it works. You know, you're selling like a magazine subscription for like five bucks a month or 10 bucks a month or whatever, but you're making 500 or a thousand calls a day. I have to imagine that model works, but I have less than one day of experience with it. So it's like, well, where does that, where does that take us? Right. I know you're not going to be hiring SDRs for five bucks an hour or whatever. I was getting paid that day in college, but is there a model where you do have the velocity to say, okay, well, these SDRs, they're not booking 10 meetings a month. They're booking a hundred meetings a month because of whatever, but I don't think I've ever seen it. I don't know if you have.
SPEAKER_08That's how it was at single platform, even though they, we weren't SDRs, we were full cycle
COLLIN CADMUSAEs, but we were literally calling any restaurant in the country and like telling them that our product can put their menu in Yelp, in Google, in TripAdvisor, in Foursquare. And this is back when, when you went to these websites to look at a restaurant menu, you may be like, there was like a PDF photograph of like their menu. There was no like digital nice menu. Now you go to Yelp or Google, there's like a view menu button that was single platform that created that. So like we were selling, you know, like ice to an Eskimo type of thing, right? Like you're, you're calling a restaurant and you're just saying like, Hey, wouldn't it be great if your menu was like on all of these top sites, the same way your competitor is? Yeah. Okay. 50 bucks a month. Like let's do it. And so in that type of an environment, for sure, you can have such high volume that, that it makes sense. And also keep in mind, we were calling restaurants, which means someone had to answer the phone. They can't ignore you, right? Cause you could be a customer calling every time. So when you're calling a storefront like that, you're going to get a good connect rate. You're also going to get hung up on a lot, but we were very slick with our, you know, our, our, our cold call intro, so to speak. But you know, with, with some of this other stuff, like at a certain point, it does make sense to look at each channel's LTV over CAC. You should definitely track it, but also to your earlier question of like, how do these things overlap, right? Well, they do, they do a lot, right? Because on one hand we can say, okay, our marketing team has like a 10 to one LTV over CAC or 11 to one. But like, how often is our marketing team utilizing our SDR resources? Well, every time they want to go to Saster, we're sending them there. Every time that they come back from some event with a list, like we're using our SDRs to call on them, you know, so it's like, how can you really just separate the two and say, well, one's way more efficient than the other when the marketing team is constantly really leaning on the SDR team to, to do a lot of what they're doing. And eventually, of course we, you know, originally when I first started, we had all of the inbound leads would go straight to those AEs. Eventually I didn't even want the AEs dealing with those calls because I literally just wanted them running demos because that's where they've served the most value. So then we would have inbound SDRs who would take those calls, you know, sort of pre-qualify them and get them on the schedules for those, for those AEs. And eventually I was going to add this in earlier because you, because you kind of asked, but it ties in here. Eventually we made a decision. We had AEs who were getting inbound leads and outbound leads because they're getting some leads from the marketing channel. They're getting some from the SDRs. And at a certain point we started to see that there was just a weird level of prioritization going on. And I think that's kind of what you were alluding to earlier, you know, in this, well, it was a slightly different question, but sort of that conflict of like, if I'm an AE and I have inbound and outbound leads, whether I'm generating them myself or someone else is almost irrelevant for the point I'm making. But what I noticed was a certain AEs were better at dealing with inbound leads and certain AEs were better at dealing with outbound leads and certain AEs would prioritize inbound leads more or certain AEs would prioritize outbound leads more. And so eventually decided, let's have two separate teams of AEs at this point. Let's take, you know, an elite group and sort of just have them deal with our outbound leads because they're bigger deal sizes anyway. And so we were kind of at that stage where it made sense like, okay, we could probably have like an AE role and a senior AE role. And the senior AE role is dealing more with like this mid-market sort of level, you know, deal size. But then we realized we're like, well, most of our mid-market is outbound. So maybe we just kind of have two separate pods of like inbound and outbound and there's SDRs and AEs on both. And that's eventually what we did. And it worked really well because it just was this constant, like, which thing do I prioritize more? Right? Like, I've got these- It's so interesting because it like, I think it completely contradicts the hypothesis that I
EDDIE REYNOLDSwas trying to ask about, but I don't know if that's a bad thing. Look, there's no one size fits all.
COLLIN CADMUSAircall was very unique. A lot of the things that you're saying make total sense to me. And I could see dozens of scenarios where like, that's just how it works. I'm just talking about, you know, one experience at Aircall. No, of course. But it's different everywhere.
EDDIE REYNOLDSI don't think it necessarily conflicts. And like, we're way over time. So I need to wrap this soon and be respectful of your time. But this is fun. Where I'm going with this is just that like, as a sales rep, forget A-E-S-D-R. I just want to talk to the best account. So how do we determine the best account? Now, I do think like separating mid-market from S&B makes a lot of sense. You might have like a completely different sales motion there. So that's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is, how can we measure different signals? People downloaded a white paper, attended a webinar. Maybe you have access to third-party intent. Maybe it's none of that. Maybe it's just the fact the company just raised funding and they're growing like a weed. Why did you want to talk to monday.com? Why did you want to talk to untuck it? How do you take all these different data signals and put them together into one single list and just say, let's have our sales reps call the best accounts. You know, maybe this account, like this lead doesn't have a high lead score, but there's five different people that are hitting our website right now. Maybe that makes it a more valuable account than this other person over here where you have a junior person that's not a decision maker that's just slamming your website and consuming all of your content. I don't know. This is a very complex thing. But if you could magically solve for this in every company, which I'm not saying you can, why would you not just want your sales reps calling the best accounts?
COLLIN CADMUSWell, you would, but ideally they're getting on the phone with the best accounts to run a demo rather than, you know, pounding the cold calls all day to maybe get one or two people a day to answer the phone. We just had such a high volume of demos there. It's probably relevant and important to point out that our sales process always included a free trial. And that's because you literally had to test the phone. You got to make sure it works. We need to know that your internet connection is strong enough. Like there's a million things that could make a phone system not work that are completely out of our control too. And so that was our sales motion was like, let's get you into a free trial. And either you landed on our website and you set up that free trial on your own, or we're walking you through a demo. And by the end of that demo, we're trying to convince you to try it.
SPEAKER_05See, I think that that's very different from the problem that I am trying to solve and thinking through this problem I'm trying to solve is other companies that have this like massive amount of like thousands of quote unquote leads.
EDDIE REYNOLDSSomeone downloaded a white paper and now you have your quote unquote inbound SDRs call them 10 or 15 times with 0.001% conversion. It's a very different scenario from what you're laying out.
COLLIN CADMUSYes. Yes. So I know I'm not answering your question directly because I actually don't have a magical answer to it. I don't think there is one. I just love like this debate, you know, or not debate, but just like, you know, whatever we call this.
SPEAKER_58There isn't one, but I can give you like what worked in that scenario and kind of what you can do.
COLLIN CADMUSAnd it's never perfect, but like, and this probably is somewhat obvious, I would think, but it's really about seeing what has been most successful and trying to replicate that. And so if you bring in a company like untuck it and they become super happy and they're like a really good customer and there's a lot of other businesses out there that are just like that e-commerce, you know, B2C. Like we're like, okay, those are good accounts. Our phone system works really well for them. They didn't have a bunch of like feature requests that our product couldn't do. We were able to do all of the routing and all of the different details that they particularly needed. So let's do a campaign and let's, you know, let's build a list of similar businesses and we're going to reach out using the success story of untuck it to try to get their attention or to see if they've had similar problems that untuck it had before, you know, we, we solve those problems for them. And so, you know, we would do that and it was, it was really just a lot of, at least for me in the early days was a lot of like understanding who our existing customers were and who, which ones were really happy, which ones were really successful. And then how do we try to like clone that right into a list of similar companies? But it certainly sounds way easier than it actually is in practice because.
EDDIE REYNOLDSIt always is. Yeah. For a million reasons.
EDDIE REYNOLDSWell, cool. Colin, I want to be respectful of your time and we're way over, but we're over because this was really fun. So, you know, thank you for joining me today. Likewise. Where can people, how can people find you?
SPEAKER_08LinkedIn. I'm writing posts every single day or colincadmus.com.
EDDIE REYNOLDSAwesome. Thank you so much for joining me today.
SPEAKER_08Thanks for having me.
