Matt Best: Thank you for joining us on the Growth Workshop Podcast for part two of our discussion with Alex Olley.

We talked ahead of the recording of this podcast about you attribute some of your success in the US to your own methodology when it comes to kind of selling.

Talk to us a little bit about that.

Alex Olley: Yeah, I was exposed to sort of the world of Account Based Marketing before, and I feel like, as it were, that we don't really use as much anymore.

It used to be 2021, it was a buzzword.

ABM, say, There's everything...

Jonny Adams: What is Account Based Marketing?

Before we jump in, you're gonna share that in a moment.

We can just for the listeners...

Alex Olley: Account Based Marketing is essentially this flip funnel approach, rather than sort of an inbound method.

You're you're selecting your accounts, your it's essentially good B to B, selecting your accounts.

You're orchestrating campaigns around those in a really narrow fashion, rather than trying to boil the ocean.

It's kind of just flipping the inbound model and turning on its head.

It just doesn't fit in loads of organizations.

If you're running a model within an org where you're trying to generate qualified leads, ABM is always in conflict, and so it just, it's kind of tried to eke its way in, and it gets forced out really quickly.

My method is sort of like clean slate, right, start from scratch, and it was born out of my frustration of how I saw things.

I saw that MQL conflict with ABM, but it was basically I used to hate the fact that our marketing team would celebrate that there would be 150% target, and sales were at 50% so one team's going, we're doing really, really well here, and the others going, we just tanked like that.

That was one of the worst courses.

And you I think that's just really bad for an organization to be in that position.

Jonny Adams: Can I clarify what you're talking about?

Because they've hit target?

Are you saying that there were separate metrics for the two different departments?

Metrics to the market?

Because we buzz about marketing sales alignment.

One of our core propositions is aligning marketing and sales functions for the greater good.

Sounds like they were misaligned.

Possibly they're really misaligned.

And just for the listeners, the what I'm hearing is the misalignment was the fact that the KPIs in the marketing team were what MQL and the sales team was, entertainment, revenue, interesting.

So that sort of the proxy is misaligned on KPIs.

Alex Olley: Exactly.

What I do, everyone is focused on the same goal, which is revenue marketing as well.

So that's the starting point in this all bound method.

It's not inbound, it's not outbound, it's not ABM, it's that everyone in my go to market team is focused on us hitting the revenue goal from the graphic designer in the marketing team to the demand gen, to the BDR to the AU, we all care about by hitting our number in this quarter.

Guess who celebrated with me?

Marketing celebrating, BDR, celebrating.

It's not sales.

Just going, Oh, we're awesome.

Everyone's going, we all did this together, and they all believe it.

And so you start by saying your target as a team is this number, and if we don't get there, we have failed, right?

So that's the starting point there.

We don't talk about MQL, so we don't talk about leads or database volume or anything like that.

We do have to look at like pipeline pacing and back that into the revenue number, but ultimately, we don't really care if we if now everyone's really happy, right?

What I then did is I thought to really stay true to that everyone therefore has to have a comp plan.

They're all gonna have skin in the game.

So recently hired a demand gen manager.

I said, right, by the way, this is your salary, and you can earn this much on top if we if we hit our sales number, and if you go above that, it's uncapped.

And he kind of looked at me and say, this isn't a joke.

Is this a joke?

It's not a joke, because I need you to buy into this, because I think that if you do, if you don't, and I said, hit these mqr numbers, he'd probably go and hit them, whereas now he's thinking, these are all the things I can do to help sales hit their number.

And those are the conversations I see.

I see marketing team, or go into the office marketing sitting with sales, and they ask that question, what can we do to help you close more deals?

Right?

Obvious answer, yes.

Get from sellers, I want, I want more meetings, right?

But we don't really have this conversation.

It's like, well, actually, we've got this massive account, and we need your help to accelerate them doing these things.

So you get really creative with it.

So everyone has a comp plan, and I'm not trying to pay them less than their market value.

I'm trying to pay them way above.

And you see very different behaviors from doing that, and because when you've done that, you've got everyone on aligned to revenue.

Everyone is incentivized to do it, so they've got skin in the games.

They're always trying to beat the number.

You can then start to do the things that remove the friction for the buyer.

You can start ungating all your content, because you're not trying to capture a lead.

For the sake of saying, I generated a lead, you're saying, well actually, I mean, I don't know about you guys, but I can't remember last time I entered my email or phone number into a form, I don't think people want that anymore.

And the more we do that, the more we frustrate our buyers.

And so by having this, this, this, this mindset towards revenue and not having to gamify the system, you free up your team to do the things that your buyers actually want in 2025 right?

Which is removing the friction, which is not just, you know, once the meetings happen, see you later, that's it.

We've thrown it over to you.

It's integrated campaigns, where people are working together on like, Is this really the right ICP marketing is going up.

We've looked.

All the close one deals.

And actually we think we should be targeting these guys instead.

They could have said we could generate loads of leads, but actually they're saying, no, we want to target these guys in a really precise fashion, because we know the win rates, sales, cycle lengths and ACVs are optimum there.

So we're going to really focus on here.

We're going to cut out a lot of this.

This is marketing saying this, by the way, right?

And therefore we're going to be running these campaigns because sales, we want to help you win more, and that and that is that is a world that I think most people want to live in.

It's just really hard to get to you, because the way that organizations are built, yeah, get in the way.

Matt Best: It's fascinating.

And I think that clients, I love the bit around actually, we end up doing what the client wants, rather than just being laser focused.

There is a reality though, Alex, I guess.

And some people listening to this might be going, Yeah, but we do need to have certain amounts of control over what people are doing, and there's this balance of, you know, autonomy and agility within the team to be able to make those decisions.

Do you find, have you seen through this approach, any issue with any sort of too far on the right or the left side of the kind of the road that we're going down, that means we're sort of in the verge that's a terrible analogy, but hopefully it makes sense in terms of, how do we keep everybody how do we keep everybody focused and not getting distracted?

Clearly, they're focused on that end goal, but they still have to go on a journey to get there.

Alex Olley: Yeah, honestly, no.

Like I can do.

First foremost, there's never been an argument in my business where we're going that was a sales lead or that was a marketing lead, right?

Just, just think about how big of a problem that is, just how wasteful that conversation is.

So because you eliminate things, I think you spend your time doing the things that matter.

But you know, a lot of this ultimately, is down to planning.

Now I still do look at sales velocity by channel, which I think is the most important metric.

And you can I do look at Pipeline created by channel, but ultimately as because it's about revenue.

I look at the sources.

I still look at inbound, I look at events, I look at outbound, AES generating their own pipeline.

I do still look at the are we creating enough opportunities?

What's the win rate, the ACV and the sales cycle length, you know, the standard sales velocity calculation.

I break it down as one and then by channel, and I do look at the which ones are generating the most revenue right now, if you've got a problem and it's down, first conversation is, well, can we fix it?

Now?

I do see a lot of excuses out there saying that outbound is dead and doesn't work anymore.

I think it's just because it's really hard and it doesn't get the attention it deserves.

We had an outbound problem in outbound problem a year ago, and I've spotted it because we're generating, not necessarily fewer opportunities.

They're just not closing at high enough rate.

We're not generating enough revenue off the back of it.

Let's inspect that now.

Let's double down, and this way you start digging.

I have this concept of snorkeling like snorkeling is just like going on the surface and you start diving down and going right.

What is the actual problem?

Is it because we're targeting the wrong accounts?

Is it because we don't get enough volume?

But ultimately, I try and link it back to revenue, and so I look how many opportunities we're creating from that outbound source.

What is the win rate?

The ACV is actually okay.

We're not closing enough of them.

Sales cycle length is really long.

All right.

Now let's try and find the ones that actually do fit where we want to go, and let's reverse engineer those.

Okay, back to your question.

That's when the planning comes in.

And I'm relentless on focus on a small number of things, rather than letting things just go off the rails into the verge as you say, yeah, you then just got to have, like, really systematic ways of making sure that these initiatives are being managed properly.

That's where leaders come in.

That's their job, right?

They've got to be able to, just like, put the guardrails up and get this is what we're doing.

Yeah, fine.

We're gonna do some experiments on one side, but this is what we need to fix.

This is what's gonna be optimum result for the business in terms of revenue.

Now, let's agree these are the three things we're gonna do.

Let's get them done.

And we're just really regimental with our approach to how we get stuff done.

Where it goes wrong is when you go, we've got this idea.

And it was like, whose job is that?

Is that mine?

Like, should I be doing it?

Where is it being tracked?

Like, what do we need to do?

It doesn't get written down anywhere.

There's no like, weekly thing.

And the way I've kept it in check, I suppose, is we have my favorite meeting of the week, which is the go to market ops meeting, right?

And in that meeting you have customer success, account management, rev ops, sales and marketing, everyone that touches the customer right, they're all there.

And we're all talking about the same thing.

How can we improve retention?

How can improve net retention?

How can we improve pipeline, pacing, sales?

And we're all working together.

And that's where the initiatives, literally, there's a thing.

It's like top initiatives.

And we go, let's go through these.

How are we doing on these?

For example, we're talking them.

We're not talking about them as a sales team or marketing team customer success, that everyone has a voice there, and that's that.

That's the, I think, the perfect state when you're getting the feedback from the voice of the customer, as well as what you want to achieve going forward, from like a, what you would perhaps describe as a go to market standpoint, bring all that together and manage it properly.

You're operating in a different world.

Jonny Adams: It's really interesting what you're sharing, because we are so aligned in the way that you are delivering in your business.

But we do it as a day to day job to educate the world on.

That alignment of those customer facing teams, and what do you think inhibits businesses?

Because you said something about the way the business is structured, but I'd like to unpack that.

What is it that inhibits them to do that marketing, sales alignment, motion internally.

Alex Olley: Yeah, look, if you're a massive company, it's really hard.

This is like, I think the first, the first reaction, if someone who was in a billion dollar company were listening to this, like, there's so much legacy there, this is going to take years to to change something, there's that sort of lack of desire.

Perhaps, I think it's about incentives.

Like, my favorite, one of my favorite sayings is, show me the incentive.

I'll show you the outcome.

If you put people in a position where they are personally incentivized and collectively as a team, change will happen.

And comp plan I've spent, I think I've spent a third of my time thinking about compensation.

I never used to do that, but I think compensation drives the right behaviors.

And I have to admit to you as well, I think I, over the years, I had to, I had to remove people that didn't buy into that, people that were too used to that.

You need people that buy into that vision and that way of thinking.

Because if you put something that's incentivizing someone that doesn't feel good and they don't feel great about it, they're going to be doing stuff behind closed doors that essentially the antithesis of what you want.

So you've got to have the right people on board that buy into it.

You have to incentivize them.

I think that's the number one thing that gets in the way, is that comp plans and compensation incentives are built in a way that can be gamified.

I use that word intentionally, by the way, I'm still shocked by how many companies one don't incentivize people.

I talked to you about incentivizing marketing.

I think everyone should do that, by the way.

So either they don't incentivize them, and when they do, it's based on vanity metrics that can be gamified a lot of the time.

Other than sales, sales is pretty easy, but I just, I think, I'm not sure where, where this stems from, but I think people just need to think about that a bit more.

Jonny Adams: Yeah, it's really helpful to get your your point of view, because that's the day to day.

We work with organizations that, you know, half a million, a billion, possibly, and we're trying to bang that drum.

But you know, if you're a C suite individual that's been working there for 15 years, in a in a financial service organization, Jonny, I get what you're talking about, but just not interested in that alignment at the moment.

But the value that you can get out of aligning those functions is it's incredible, right?

Alex Olley: It's huge, yeah, and again, big lesson for me.

It's one of those Fergus conversations where I remember saying, like, I think we're gonna be doing this.

And I remember saying to me, like, What'd your customers think?

Oh, it's a good question.

I felt really stupid.

All of a sudden, there's all, how often do you have the voice of the customer essentially informing what you, what you what you're going to do as a as a company, but it's really important as a go to market unit, and that those are the moment, the moments where things did change like they changed massively, because essentially, we're all here and building businesses for the benefit the customer, and without that voice in the room,

Matt Best: And we so often get into that with our with our what's the point?

clients, right?

Jonny, and we're thinking about created various different processes, customer journeys, all of that kind of good stuff, but it's still looking at it from the internal lens and never validating that with the client.

But has anyone tested this?

Like, how do we know that that's the truth?

Yeah.

How are we checking that that's still working?

How do we know that's still the same, like you talk just even earlier, just around the way things have changed in terms of the number of people who are just going to pick up a cold call that's in a relatively short amount of time.

So it's always changing.

So sort of cut.

Yeah, we did customer journey mapping 20 years ago.

This is why our sales process looks like this.

Well, maybe you should have a look again.

Alex Olley: Yeah, exactly.

And actually, I think we digress, because your original question was that, how did that methodology help us in the US?

Right?

I've tried going into, I think, I think every business I've been part of, we've either tried to go into the US or another major territory.

And that's that sort of way of thinking.

That methodology, just like it did, break down barriers, it did mean that we could easily translate things, and it helped us speed up big time, because we weren't trying to put barriers in our own ways, let alone the customer.

But that's one of the hardest things we had to do, was get into the US, because I failed so many times.

When you go into new territories, the territory plan and ownership is like the number one thing that gets in people's ways.

Like you've got an AE in London who's been working snowflake in the US, and next you know, you've got an AE in the US and says, Well, snowflake.

And we're like, Well, hang on a second.

We actually don't have territory maps.

We have dynamic ways of pumping enough opportunities and signals to reps so that they can then work them.

Because I believe that we shouldn't wait for a company to be ready to buy.

We should be getting there beforehand.

Like, it's usually a month or two beforehand, right?

And so we don't have this sort of territory static map that we use anymore.

And again, because as a team, we're trying to get to the revenue number it was, I didn't really matter so much anymore.

We kind of just, like, removed the conversation quite quickly.

It helped us big time with how we think about, like.

Outbound as a motion previously, I'd have conversations with finance in previous businesses saying, Well, this STI isn't hitting their number.

They're just not hitting their number.

We need to put them on performance plan.

I was like, this str is actually creating a ton of revenue because their win rate is 35% and even though they've only hit 50% of their ops number, they're 120% to revenue pacing, and that's what I care about.

And about.

And it's those things that I think are dangerous, that we often lose sight of what's actually contributing to revenue, because we're looking at these metrics that actually perhaps are leading indicators more than like, the final metrics that really matter for individuals.

And instead, it translates into this guy now feels really good because he's making an impact to the team, and he's incentivized to do that too.

Jonny Adams: I've been to a number of conferences just on this, you know, making it into the US, and our organization, parent company, is in the US.

We're one of 20 organizations that amongst that, that business concept.

We're one of the only ones outside of the US.

So we know the US market really well.

We've got a really strong alumni within our business, individuals that have spun out of our parent company to work in the likes of Tableau and other organizations in the marketplace.

But people do say, Well, how do I make it into the US?

Like you've talked about your framework, but what's that sort of thing that you you know, other than the methodology that you got?

But what was that one thing that you think needed to get into the US?

Alex Olley: I think that for us, there are actually two things.

The number one thing about going to any new territory is going all in.

I see too many companies that just dip their toe and go, I think we're going to try and go into the US often they wait too long.

They wait till they've raised more money.

But even when they do, they don't want to make sacrifices.

And we made every sacrifice.

I'm not gonna say I sacrificed myself, but I went there.

I'd actually only been to San Francisco for like, a weekend conference before basically, essentially deciding, I'm going to take this to the US.

As I said before, the reason why we went to the US is because the market was massive.

That's the number one reason why everyone wants but the market readiness was, was, was the leading indicator.

We knew that we'd have fewer headwinds selling this in the US.

And so why?

Like, this is 2019, so just before COVID, but you needed boots on the ground.

You needed face to face interaction.

And because people were using gifting and direct mail in their outbound their sales process, customer success, it was just way easier.

So I was like, that's just an easier opportunity.

Now we launched in the US six months after launching the business, right?

So a London startup, four blokes, we're gonna go to the US.

And everyone laughed at me.

They're like, you will fail.

It's gonna go horribly wrong.

You don't know what you're doing.

You should wait five years try and get it to like, 15, 20 million error raise a big round and then go into the US.

And I just ignored everything.

I was like, we're gonna go all in.

We hired a US CEO.

We thought that was really, really important, partly for fundraising, but also we needed someone over there who's going to be, like, a big culture driver.

We brought people with us.

I've always said, if you're going to do something important, you've got to sacrifice your best people.

And sometimes that's like, that doesn't make any sense, but it's one of my biggest learnings, if you're gonna do something really important, put your best people there.

And so I take certain people along with me, and they would actually show people how to sell.

Like, go back to focus, talking about a lot.

I remember him saying to me, your number one job right now is to teach people how to sell, reach desk.

That's it.

I was like, that's such good advice.

I was like, Well, I've got AES.

You can sell it way better than me.

So let's get them to do part of the teaching too.

So you bring your best people, you go all in.

We put almost all of our budget in terms of marketing and everything into the US.

We didn't leave much behind for for the the EMEA market.

And I think going into these new territories, I've done it with other companies and into other regions, when I think done well, you go all in, but you cannot dip your toe the moment you do, you may as well pull out.

And if you're not ready to do that, don't bother in the first place.

Yeah, that was the lesson.

Now it's not all gravy.

I mean, we were very lucky in that the first customer we signed when we landed in the US was zoom info.

Now that's pretty handy for two reasons.

One, it's like we can use that as a reference.

Everyone we are selling to B to B, sales and marketing people.

They all know that logo.

But also what they were doing is, because they're using digital gifting in their process, they're sending that before every discovery call.

They're sending like a, I think it was a $7 Starbucks that's all like, look forwards being soon.

Here's Starbucks and us, and it was a powered by reach desk at the bottom.

Now think about how big that company is, and how many of those are being sent out.

A lot, hundreds of that.

Hundreds of 1000s.

So we'd get loads of companies saying, I've been gifted by zoom info, and they tell me that it's you or I saw it was you guys.

What's all this about?

So it just that was jammy.

So look, we got lucky in some ways, but we did go all in where it really changed.

Was one of the best executed things I think I've ever seen in my life.

And I don't know if you're familiar with Vern harness, scaling up methodology, and it's essentially like a company wide cohesive strategy that allows you to get everyone on literally one page.

And it starts with your values, your purpose, your mission, your vision, your vision.

There was this moment where it was, I think we spent two hours every.

Day for two months working on this, me and my founders, yeah, and the purpose, mission, vision, values.

That was, I think we kind of defined that quite quickly.

But there's these parts where you check, it's like a checklist you have to complete.

And so you talk a lot about, what are your differentiating activities?

And there's a really good question you can ask yourself, is, what are we prepared to be bad at?

That's a really powerful question to ask, because when you're thinking about differentiation, you can't be great at everything, and I think that's where a lot of companies fail.

A lot of teams fail.

So we were asking ourselves a quote, like, we're prepared to be bad at this, this and this, but we are.

We're willing to be great at being the international player that takes personalization seriously, and you can measure ROI, those are our three things, and everything is about those three things, and what that does is that folds into what you call your brand promises.

These are promises you're going to make to a customer.

I'll give an example.

Our promise to all of our customers was that you will be able to measure the impact of direct amount of gifting.

That's quite a new concept for most people, particularly me.

That was the world I was.

I couldn't measure it, so I wanted that to be part of our promise.

Now every company makes promises to customers, right?

And it's created a lot of skepticism.

So what you do is, then you back those up with guarantees.

So we said you'll be able to measure the impact of direct money gifting on your pipeline creation and essentially closing more deals.

We then spent about a year building one specific product to allow to do that, because we're like, that's one of our three things we're going to lean into that we could build all these other things.

These other things, these cool things that our competitors doing.

Let's make it this one thing, right?

Let's make ourselves really good at that, that has that attribution in it.

So you can weight your attribution model within our platform, so that when you send a gift, and it creates a meeting to say that's attributes back to gifting.

Great.

That's really hard to do, by the way, because it's an offline channel.

And here was the powerful piece.

We then said, for every dollar you spend, you'll get at least $5 back.

So that's the guarantee.

So people are like, Oh, it's kind of a no brainer.

I was like, here's how we really make it a no brainer.

If we don't, we'll refund you the difference, and bam, with this London company that no one really knew to going all in on the US with this, like, really focused strategy and these really clear value proposition that made it a bit of a no brainer.

And, you know, we talk about, are you a nice to have, or you must have?

I'm in the camp where I like it to be, am I a no brainer?

And that's the position where, when I say that to people like, Oh, brilliant, because we're not, we're not a must have.

So it kind of frees you up a little bit.

But it's funny, I met the CEO of our biggest competitor about a year and a half after do that.

I think we launched it in q1 2022, I think we needed 200% of our number.

We didn't think it would be executed this well, because every pitch we were going in, they were like, what's the difference between you and your competition?

Well, it's these three things, and we know you care about these three things.

And here's the promise and here's the guarantee on each of them.

And people are right, and then they go to the competition saying, reach us is guaranteeing this ROI and what are you guys doing?

So our win rate against our bit all of our competition was about 90% we'd win almost every single deal.

And inevitably, what you expect to happen is that they're gonna start copying that what we do on 5x ROI guarantee as well.

Great, but they haven't built a product that actually allows you to measure it right?

And so our win rate went up a little bit more because it's like we've actually we're the only guys that can do this, and we lent into our strengths and what we wanted to be about as a business.

And I think if you're going to go into somewhere like the US, don't just go all in, go in with, like, a really focused, differentiated strategy that sets you wells apart and makes you a no brainer.

I think that's where you win.

Jonny Adams: It's a conundrum that you hear a lot in marketplace, and you know that that lure of the US, but you've just answered the question, but then just 10x that, with that, without response.

And I can personally just say thank you so much, Alex for that, for that little snippet, because that is gold

Matt Best: Yeah, the going all in is a is a brave thing to do, isn't it?

Like you've got to you went and spoke to a bunch of businesses about that, they'd be like, oh, yeah, but what's the risk?

Like, what's the risk of that?

I'm not suggesting you didn't consider the risk.

I'm sure you did.

And you also would have considered, like, What the what your expected ROI is.

So you make sure that that sort of 5x number isn't, isn't seeing you writing checks and credits back to clients all the time.

But it's a really brave thing to do, but also recognizing that you can't just do part of it.

I mean, I've spent, I spent a number of years in SaaS startups, scale ups where you're sort of like, you know, to your point, you're like, Oh, we just give that a try.

And then we go, we do not even half a job.

We do a sort of Third, we do it, you know, third at best, probably less than 25% of a good job.

And then we go, kind go, Oh, that was rubbish.

Yeah, wow.

Can we do expect?

What's going to happen if you don't go, if you're not really backing yourself and kind of going all in, then, yeah, how are you going to get the outcome that you want?

And I think it's that I don't know if you'd use the word bravery.

Do you see it as a bravery thing?

It feels it certainly, hearing that story.

It's a bit like, you know, going back in time to, Can't you think of the Romans?

You think of the Vikings.

They didn't just send, like, two of their mediocre blokes on a ship and expect to conquer another country, did they?

They lifted the whole that, you know, their winning team, their best of the best, and they left the rest at home with the hope that they come.

That, but they knew that they wouldn't succeed unless they put it all in this.

They put it all in.

Alex Olley: Yeah, we had this thing called the big, hairy, audacious goal, the bee hang and we all that was actually the starting point was that, where do we actually want to get to?

Because if you're not clear on that, and you're not aligned on that, then trust me, you're never gonna because one of you is just gonna get I can't do it.

And like one of my I suppose strengths and weaknesses at the same time is that I'm just relentless.

I won't I will not give up until we've achieved what we've set out to do.

And I expect everyone else around that.

But when you give people clarity around this is where we're going, people want purpose.

They want to be on the journey.

They need to be clear on where you're going.

And when you get everyone on the same page about that, the bravery kind of doesn't become a thing anymore, because it's just like, this is where we're going, and here's everything that cascades underneath that.

These are all things we're going to do.

Yes, it's going to change, but substantially this is what we're doing.

It just helps everyone.

Helped our product team, helped sales, marketing, our messaging.

I don't remember a time where people like, what are we doing?

Like, I've been part of four startups before this, and how was that?

Was 80% of time it's like, what we doing?

Why are we doing it?

And that slows you down when you when you've worked on something that hard for so long, that is so wildly differentiated, and you put so much effort into it, you don't really see the change.

I remember bringing it to like, my team, and they were like, Whoa.

Are we doing this?

I can't believe we get to do this.

When you see that reaction, you just think, I can run through walls and like, if you get it right.

When you see that reaction, it just energizes you to go, oh, wow, we actually are going to do this together.

Matt Best: Yeah, that's a fantastic place for us to end today's conversation.

To everyone listening, join us for part three as we continue this conversation.