0 to $30M ARR: GTM lessons from Levelset, a construction vertical SaaS
As CRO, Martin Roth scaled Levelset, a construction vertical SaaS startup from 0 to $30M in ARR until they got acquired by Procore, the largest construction software company for $500M.
Last week, I compiled all his essays in a Google Doc which turned out to be 206 pages long, and read them back to back. Here are my absolute favorite bits:
> Sell to your customers the way that they want to buy. Every customer in a given market has muscle memory with how they buy things. They have a preferred way to talk about pricing. They have a cadence for how often and on what terms they want to pay. Credit Card, Check, ACH, Net terms, etc. It’s important to understand how customers are already buying products in your space. When you are in the early stages of building a company, copy what’s already working.
> A 10% increase in any part of the funnel will result in a 10% increase in sales. But it takes significantly more effort to increase your BOFU conversion rate 10% than to increase your leads by 10%.
> Martin has an excellent template for a monthly sales dashboard especially for companies with an outbound sales motion. The key however, he says, is that the sales leader should MANUALLY INPUT THE NUMBERS every single month. When you manually input each number, and you have done this every month for 6+ months, you start to notice trends in the business. You spend more time thinking about each metric on the report, and thus thinking more about the business performance.
> On when to add more reps: You know that it’s time to add reps to the team when you have at least 50% of the team at 100% of quota, and 80% of the team at 80% of quota.
> The best way to build an inbound channel is to become a destination for your ICP. Build free courses, free tools, directories, libraries, resources, and templates that the ICP uses in their daily work. Surround your ICP with so much help that they see your brand as the most trusted resource in the industry. Do not outsource this. Own it. Curate it.
> When your new sales hire finally closes their first customer, make it a moment that they will remember.
> Any time 2 or more people come together to make a decision, it is a dysfunctional buying group. Why? Because humans are imperfect at sharing information with one other. It is the role of Sales to help the customer navigate the buying process.
> Don’t demo all the features of the product. Focus on a single feature that will make the biggest impact on the customer’s business, and showcase it right at the start. Make that feature the highlight of your presentation.