The document outlines strategies for building a $100 million business, emphasizing the importance of product-market fit and growth engines. It discusses various methods to acquire customers, such as paid, viral, and sticky growth strategies, while detailing metrics like customer acquisition cost (CAC) and lifetime value (LTV). It also provides insights into outbound sales strategies and the essential stages of lead generation, targeting, and conversion to drive business growth.

1. “How to build a $100m
business”
aka Build a Sales machine
1
www.slash.co
Prepared for B Work
Bali, 29 June 2021

2. Hi. I’m Andries De Vos,
CEO of www.slash.co
From Belgium
Currently:
co-founder
investor
15 ventures, 8 active
US$9M+ of seed
previously:
co-founder
raised US$45m
strategy consultant
NGO
In SG/Asia 12y
Now in Bali
… and more

4. Life is too short to build
something nobody wants.

5. You only have 2 jobs
Find a solution users want
Get many users

6. #2 WHAT DO YOU
HUNT?
3 Steps to grow a $100M BUSINESS
#1 YOUR PRODUCT
MARKET FIT?
#3 YOUR GROWTH
ENGINE?
Focus of this talk

7. 2 Key Assumptions
Value hypothesis
Tests whether a product or service really delivers value to
customers once they are using it.
Growth hypothesis
Tests how new customers will discover a product or service.
Focus of your
product market fit
Focus of
this talk

8. Let’s talk
about Growth

9. GROWTH IS WHAT YOU DO

10. MYTH: Product-driven businesses don’t need sales
Top 36 SaaS companies: for every $1 PRODUCT, $2 SALES & MARKETING
http://www.heavybit.com/library/video/benchmarks-for-xaas-businesses/

11. Are you in the product or in the
service business?
Service = sell time to solve a job
Product = sell a ‘thing’ that solves a job

12. 8 ways to build a
$100m business
Definition:
ARPA = Average Revenue per Account.
Average metric (ignores conversion rates, how active users are, churn rate etc)

13. Who are you hunting?
Flies?
Mice?
Rabbits?
Deers?
… or microbes ... or elephants?

14. To understand who you need to
hunt …
… you first need understand the
anatomy of Growth

15. PRODUCT + USERS
= GROWTH

16. 1
6

17. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
= cost measured over 12 months
KEY METRIC 1

18. Lifetime Value of Customer (LTV)
= revenue measured over X months
(usually 12 months)
KEY METRIC 2

19. LTV / CAC > = 3X
CAC Payback <= 12 months
with:
LTC = Lifetime Value of Customer (typically measured over 12 months)
CAC = Customer Acquisition Cost
GUIDELINES FOR SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS

20. Consider:
How to get your first 100
customers
through
Marketing and Sales

21. 1. PAID – Buy users for less money than they earn you
2. VIRAL – A user brings you more users
3. STICKY – users never leave
3 WAYS TO GROW COMPANY

22. Proven, but needs scale and lots of money
1. Sales people
2. Physical Stores
3. Search, advertisement (SEM, Google Ads etc)
4. Press (PR), content marketing, SEO
5. Etc
PAID GROWTH

23. This is a product strategy.
Slow. Potentially huge.
VIRAL GROWTH

24. VIRAL GROWTH

25. 1. You must have design and tech in founding team
2. Prioritize growth over everything (even revenue)
3. Virality must be core to your product
4. Metrics are KING
5. ‘Word of mouth’ is NOT a strategy (it’s a bonus)
VIRAL GROWTH

26. 2
6
STICKY GROWTH
“Once a customer shows up, they never leave”
STICKY GROWTH

27. Product and channel centric.
Focus on retaining existing customers.
Can be cheap and fast.
Right option for 90% of the companies?
STICKY GROWTH

28. 1. RETENTION is everything
2. Current customers are more important than new
ones.
3. Get traffic and subscribers.
4. Give free gifts and value. Over-deliver.
5. Convert subscribers to paying customers.
6. Retain, up-sell, get referrals
STICKY GROWTH

29. Early adopters / evangelists

30. Get your first 100 early adopters
Characteristics of early adopters
They have actively been looking for a way to implement a solution
They have put together a piecemeal solution
They have or can obtain a budget to spend on a solution
Identify channels
• How are they currently solving the problem?
• Are any of these behavior externally observable? List behaviors.
• Define the right channels to start
GET OUT OF THE BUILDING!

31. 3
1

33. HUNTING
MICROBES & FLIES
● Strategy:
○ Many active users to download +
subscribe to your app. SCALE!!
○ Strategy #1: viral / social product (e.g
Instagram, Snap, Telegram etc)
○ Strategy #2: lots of User-Generated
Content (UGC) > lots of SEO > virality
(e.g Yelp, Brainly)
● Monetization: advertisement, data
● Examples:
○ Whatsapp: ~$0.1 ARPA / year
Microbe
$1+ ARPA
Flies
$10+ ARPA

35. HUNTING
MICE & RABBITS
Mice
$100+ ARPA
Rabbits
$1000+ ARPA
● MICE:
○ 1M users who spend ~$100/year, sign up ~10-
20M users (depending on conversion)
○ Some VIRALITY (e.g social sharing, “powered by”)
○ Examples: EVERNOTE, MAILCHIMP
○ Maybe: e-commerce. But requires huge funding
to get 1M users.
● RABBITS:
○ Most SaaS ($50-100/month -> $1000/year). 100k
paying users -> 500k-2M free users or trial
signups.
○ Usually little virality
○ Growth? It is hard.
■ Inbound Marketing (content), or maybe paid
■ OEM (get product distributed by big partners)
■ Inside Sales (office-based) team

37. HUNTING
DEERS & ELEPHANTS
Deers
$10k+ ARPA
Elephants
$100k+ ARPA
● DEERS:
○ 10k customers @ 100k ARPA, with 100k business leads.
○ Similar to hunting rabbits. Add on top a good ‘inside sales’
force to support the growth!
○ Option to pay commission to channels.
○ The best deer hunters? Rabbit hunters who become Deer
hunters.
● ELEPHANTS:
○ Large enterprise clients (SalesForce, SuccessFactors etc)
○ You ‘only’ need 1000 customers with $100k spent.
○ Different approach than Rabbit or Deer hunting. Sales-
centric.
○ 2 steps:
■ Good solution for big problem experienced by many
enterprise clients. Need a LOT of money for Product-
Market fit
■ Build enterprise field sales team. Requires millions to
finance long sales cycle (3-18 months to close 1 deal).

39. HUNTING
BRONTOSAURUSES
& WHALES
Brontosauruses
$1M+ ARPA
Whales
$10M+ ARPA
● BRONTOSAURUS:
○ 100 customers of $1M ARPA
○ Sales strategy! Example: Veeva and Workday
○ Strong background: 20+ years of experience selling
enterprise software, domain expertise and an extremely
strong network in your target industry. Otherwise, start
with smaller animals.
● WHALES:
○ VERY large enterprise or government clients
○ You only need 10 clients ... Unique solution, sales,
reputation!
○ Example: PALANTIR

40. Most common hunting strategies for
first-time grassroot founders?
Flies & Mice for B2C?
Rabbits & Deers for B2B?
Elephants (and maybe later brontosaurus!)
for more enterprise-ready solutions

41. You only have 2 jobs
Find a solution users want
Get many users

42. PART 2 of talk:
Deep dive on outbound sales

43. Let’s breakdown 1 specific
ACQUISTION strategy
B2B outbound sales
It’s getting far too little attention and
new tech is changing the game J

44. Traditionally:

45. Outbound Sales
Performance Marketing
(Channel Partners)
Inbound Sales
Content
(Channel Partners)

46. Outbound Sales
Performance Marketing
(and Channel Partners)
Inbound Sales
Content
(and Channel Partners)
Bootstrap/hustle
Can it be done cheaply?
More mid- to long-term

47. New Lead Gen Tech &
Channels reduce cost and
increase ability to Target
Competition for good
content grows. Need to be
very differentiated and/or
high production cost

48. 3 simple, essential acquisition stages
in your funnel

49. 1
MQL Funnel
2
Nurture Funnel
3
Closing Funnel
MQL = marketing qualified lead
From Aware to Interested
Example KPIs:
# of sales appointments
# inquiries for product info
Nurture over period of time
From Interest to Desire in product
Example KPIs:
# demo requests
# inbound RFQs received
# new trial users acquired
Purchased product licenses,
signed contracts etc
Example KPIs:
# sale closed
# licensed sold
# new paid users

50. Deep dive into building an outbound sales playbook
1) on a relatively low budget
2) that allows you to qualify, target and convert prospects
at scale for your B2B or SaaS solution.

51. 1
MQL Funnel
Goal? Attract and convert stranger into a prospect who has indicated
interest in your product.
KPI? # of sales appointments, # inquiries for product info
Process?
1. Market research -> value proposition, scripts, product assets
2. Lead Research -> Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) with contacts
3. Outreach (e.g email, linkedin etc) -> achieve KPIs

52. 1
MQL Funnel
B2B Outbound Sales Tools?
1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator - for primary prospecting
2. Dux-Soup for LinkedIn - for LinkedIn automation
3. Pipedrive - as the main CRM (alternative HubSpot)
4. Hunter.io / Snovio / Apollo - for data enrichment
5. Unbounce / Neverbounce - for data validation
6. Dedupely - for CRM cleanup
7. Folderly - for email antispam
8. Zapier + custom scripts - for automation

53. Research: define buyer persona
For example:
Gender: male/female
Age: 30 - 50
Titles: CxO, Directors, VPs, Partners
Role: engineering, information technology
Industry: IT & services, retail, fintech, banking, financial
services, shipping & logistics, travel & tourism, automotive +
many more;
Geo: APAC
Pain: looking for reliable solution to achieve XYZ;

54. Lead Research: define buyer persona
Goal: targeted lead with accurate contacts
How?
• Contact mining
• email enrichment, verification, backup & reporting
• cleaning up the lists, filtering the cohorts
• writing the templates and more

55. Targeting
A lot of raw data for B2B lead research
comes from external sources, such as
LinkedIn.
Use the premium plan Sales
Navigator specifically designed to
conduct lead research across many
geographies.
Example screenshot:
On the left, sample targeting for GIS
executives based in Jakarta, Indonesia

56. Data Mining
Use a combination of tools and
methods in order to get the entire data
in your CRM to push it into the
outreach workflow.
E.g use native Pipedrive integration,
with Dux-Soup to get LinkedIn data in
CRM with:
● Name, Surname
● Job Title
● Company
● Summary
● Twitter handle
● + 30 more

57. Data Enrichment
Many tools available for data enrichment
and validation. Tools we love:
● Hunter.io
● Clearbit
● Apollo
● Snov.io
● Uplead
● Zoominfo
● + many others
Using a combination of these or similar
tools can give you around 80% of SQLs
for US$50-500/month.

58. But data is not coming in consistent,
clear way so use data cleanup and
validation tools and techniques:
● Neverbounce
● Zerobounce
● Unbounce
● Clearout
Without these tools it would be hard
to reach out to many qualified leads
(e.g for email campaign, emails
would bounce)
E.g: In the screenshot below, only
one email address is actually
deliverable (marked /w green).
Data Validation

59. Outreach Automation
with Four Waves
As a result of your research, you can
feed your SQLs (Sales Qualified
Leads) into your CRM automated
outbound workflow.
Consisting of the following basic steps:
1. Cleanup the list;
2. Adding prospect to LinkedIn
network;
3. Moving to Email Steps 1 - 4;
4. Moving to the next pre-sales
cycle;
5. Moving to Finished state

60. Smart Templates
For your outreach campaign, create
templates with different levels of
engagement and customization, such as:
● Marketing message
● Industry angle
● Geographic location
● Company sector
● + more
E.g At Slash we use tens of templates for
our manual engagement steps.
It looks like the screenshot below >

61. Drip Campaigns on
LinkedIn
You can also design drip
campaigns on LinkedIn.
The campaign on LinkedIn
typically consists of a connection
note + few follow-up messages.
Whenever the lead accepts the
invite BUT never replied anything
- they’re exited from the
automated workflow.
In the example on the left we use
3 follow-up messages.

62. Tips #1: CRM automation!!
Use a CRM to build an actionable
sales funnels and process
centralization including:
• automation
• various integrations
• no strict API limits
As soon as you spend 50% of 1 FTE
time on prospecting, a CRM can start
helping.

63. Tips #2: Good vs Bad Leads
Good Lead Bad Lead
Example:
● Executive in one of the relevant industries
● Has a relevant colleague to address to
● Company type fit
Example:
● Company too small
● Revenue less than defined sum*
● Frequent position changer
● No referral

64. KPIs we keep
an eye on
● # of unique prospects contacted via
channels
● conversion from outreach to first
appointment
● conversion from first appointment to
contract
● duration of sales cycle
● average size of first contract
● lifetime value of account from
outreach in 2021
We love to follow the data-driven
approach for the entire outreach
process, so we love to keep track on
few important metrics, such as:

65. Hyper-
automation
Tools for outbound sales or leadgen
automation are getting more powerful with
the day.
While human-control is still required
whenever human judgement is needed, a
new value proposition is tested on a
segment or persona , or leads reply, smart
automation in every step.

66. 2
Nurture Funnel
Goal? Keep your leads warm and engaged, build trust and convert
to deal after a nurture period of X time (days/weeks/months).
KPI? # of demo requests, inbound RFPs received, # trial users acquired
etc.
Process?
• (Re)target SQL with relevant content through drip campaign
• Specific process depends on product.

67. Est. Budget
• US$50-$500 for automation
systems
• US$1-2k total labor + management
• For an outreach funnel of 1-3k
SQLs/month
• Or US$0.8 - 2 / SQL
• Cost of sale US$50-4000/deal!
Wide range.
Realistic Outcomes
• Outreach to appointment: 1-5%
• Appointment to closed deal: 5-30%
• Expected range: 0.05% to 1.5%
The clearer your pitch and targeting, the
higher your conversion.

68. What do you
Hunt
Recap:
Your Growth
Engine
Outbound Sales
Playbook

69. 69
www.slash.co
you
Thank