Collin Stewart

Next year, Lightspeed Commerce will exit its teenage years and turn 20. What does that maturity mean? For me, it’s all about shifting from simply a growth mindset to one of profitability. I sat down with Gus Papageorgiou, our Head of Investor Relations and host of the Inside Lightspeed podcast, to discuss this cultural shift, where we’re heading, and how my role as CEO will guide this moving forward. When Lightspeed first started, we were all about seizing opportunities — whether it was moving to the cloud early on, expanding into new markets, or launching payments. These bold moves have driven us to where we are today. Now, as we approach this new chapter, we're putting an emphasis on: - Doubling down on areas where we can truly excel and deliver the most value to our customers. - Making profitability our new North Star and ensuring that every move strengthens our foundation. - Staying true to our core mission: helping SMBs thrive. But now, we’re doing it with a sharper focus on long-term success. Had a great time reflecting on Lightspeed’s past, as well as discussing our vision for the future. Check out the full podcast here: https://lnkd.in/gF3vG-Qn

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Enterprise Salespeople - just a friendly push (from someone who isn't impacted by your results but wants you to kick ass) May & June - time to fine-tune  😎 If, on average, you have a 6 + month sales cycle - hopefully you rested up this long weekend.... It's GO time! Any Discovery Calls booked inside what's left of May & the month of June have a shot to close by Calendar Year End. Factor in some down time in July & August & December. This is when you want to: 🚀 review and own the heck out of next steps with ops inside your CRM 🚀work with marketing to provide timely and intelligent collateral for each stage gate of your ops 🚀ensure that decision makers are identified and introduced 🚀hammer away with your sales leader/founder the key accounts and get support 🚀build plans with your champions to get these deals to their natural close 🚀understand how market forces/head winds/corporate budgets etc might create a sense of urgency for prospects Good Luck & Go CRUSH Your Quotas - like only you can!!! AND make sure you have some personal activities for growth inside your daily calendar!!! That part is always non-negotiable!! If I can help - happy too! startupsalesgrowth.ca #sales #saas #saassales #founders #startups #startupsales #proptech #realestate #enterprisesales #ae #bdr #salesteams #salesculture #salesprocess #salescycle #salesstrategies #salestips #quotas #salesquotas #revenue #salesleadership #salespeople #worklifebalance #marketing #salesandmarketing #mentalhealth #salesprospecting #crm #nextsteps #coaching #b2b

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“Our AEs have a quota which is 5x their OTEs or 4x their total costs because everyone does it like that.” 🤔 🌟 When talking to other B2B SaaS founders or executives about their sales compensation, I often get an answer like the one above. While these rules of thumb have worked in the last years of horizontal SaaS, the new age of SaaS sales and vertical markets force us to have a more nuanced approach. Let’s work backwards: 🔍 As a SaaS business, I can look at my organization as the “growth engine” (how much € in ARR am I getting for €1 investment in GTM) and the “cash engine” (how much € in cash am I generating from €1 in ARR). The metric for the growth engine is “sales efficiency”, where e.g. a sales efficiency of 0.75 would indicate that I get €0.75 of ARR in the first year for every €1 in GTM expenses. 📊 Let’s break down the GTM costs into the following blocks: 1. AEs: On-target earnings (OTE) of quota-carrying Account Executives (AEs) plus the employer costs (i.e. 20% in Germany). 2. SDRs/RevOps: Other total salary costs of potential SDRs or Rev/SalesOps staff. 3. Sales Overhead: All other costs that are added to AEs, SDRs, and Ops costs, i.e., tooling, travel. 4. Marketing Costs: All costs of the marketing team. 📈 We can progressively get from the “AE costs” to the full “GTM costs” by looking at the following adders or multipliers: 1. AE to SDRs/RevOps: Companies usually spend around 80% for additional staff, supporting the AEs. (1.8x) 2. Sales Payroll to Sales Overhead: Overhead adders are usually around 40%. (1.4x) 3. Sales Costs to Marketing Costs: Varies based on the GTM motion. Often, we see marketing adding 60% of costs. (1.6x) ⚙️ So the ratio of Total GTM costs / AE costs can be written as: (AE to SDRs/RevOps) * (Sales Payroll to Sales Overhead) * (Sales Costs to Marketing Costs) In our example, we end up with: 1.8x * 1.4x * 1.6x = 4.032x Sales efficiency now is nothing else than: Quota Multiplier / GTM Costs Multiplier, so in our example 4 / 4.032 ~ 1.00 → If everyone hits quota, we could get to a sales efficiency of 1. ⚡At Luminovo, we are operating in a vertical market, where efficiency gains through more spend on SDRs and marketing are limited. So what do we do? • No SDRs, only RevOps: We believe in vertical markets, sellers need to demonstrate top knowledge from day 1. Instead of junior SDRs, our RevOps team is equipping sellers from the sidelines to run efficient full-cycle sales. Multiplier: 1.2x • Lean on overhead: We invest in travel and tooling, but try to keep most of the other things lean: 1.25x • ROI-driven in marketing: No spray-and-pray, but pointed marketing campaigns with a clear ROI: 1.4x This results in GTM costs / AE costs of 2.1x. So we could get away with setting seller quotas to 2.2x their costs and still achieve better results. ❓How are you calibrating your B2B SaaS GTM organization? #transformationtuesday #B2BSaaS #GTM #sales

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If you decide your sales team needs to help with renewals make sure they are incentivized correctly (I usually see a 70% new bookings goal and a 30% renewal / upsell goal). If you don't incentivize hunting, sales tend to farm too much and your growth will slow.

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It’s easy to get happy ears when evaluating an opportunity and accidentally fall trap to *confirmation bias* instead of actually evaluating it for its merit. Couple of examples as a sales leader: 1️⃣ Tons of PLG demand 🤩 This seems like the dream. Have a bunch of people that are interested and have tested your product in some form. Finding ways to upsell them or expand seems way easier than outbound selling. Sign me up ✅ But.. the questions to evaluate: - does the company have a clear ICP they are targeting? Do they have an understanding of who are the target users and the buyer here? (PLG businesses can be horizontal which means there is no single target persona and requires a cultural shift to drive sales growth) - how important is the sales led motion in the next 12 months? what type of resources are they willing to invest in this growth? what type of sacrifice would they be willing to make (like product roadmap, growth rate, margin, plg momentum) short term to get this right? 2️⃣ Great product / engg teams 🤩 As a sales leader, i want to represent the best product in market. This means working with the highest quality technical teams is a key to driving big $$s But… the questions to evaluate: - are they willing to optimize for product velocity at the cost of craft? (If that’s what the market demands) - do they respect the customers voice? how do they incorporate customer feedback into their product strategy? How important is the market reality (competitors, broader trends) when making roadmap decisions? - will they make exceptions to their POV to help expedite GTM? Spending time at a company is a big decision and it’s easy to get enamored by the superficial strengths alone... 🛑 Cool investors, inbound / PLG traction, amazing engg team are all great but ultimately it comes down to: 🔑 teams ability to respect your portion of the biz and 🔑 adapt to the needs to the market / customers It requires objective evaluation of their weaknesses and connecting that your individual skills and attributes ✅ #recruiting #hiring #cro #salesleadership #vpsales #execrecruiting

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Ever thought about gamifying your SaaS or B2C product? It’s time to think outside the box. Loads of companies are upping their game with reward programs that use point systems, but there's more to it than just racking up points. Take learning courses or lecture series, for example. You can get users hooked by letting them earn points for finishing units and visually tracking their progress. It’s a neat way to keep them engaged and motivated. And here’s a twist: instead of the usual discounts or freebies at the end, how about offering a certificate of completion? It’s something tangible they can add to their resumes or use as proof of continuing education. It’s a win-win – your users get a sense of achievement and something valuable for their professional growth.

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Discovery Process at Blueprint Tax: 1. Prospect reaches out, gets link to New Client Questionnaire via cognito forms. 2. Ten questions plus prompt to upload PY returns. Acknowledge minimum fees. 3. Once complete gets link to schedule discovery call via calendly. 4. Discovery call is 20-30 minutes 5. Proposal sent via Ignition. #smb #tax Sunset at Lake Michigan

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Wondering how to merge PLG and SLG for maximum impact? Japna Sethi talks about how they made this work at companies like Dropbox, Productboard, and Calendly. She calls it "defining the API" between the two growth motions so the right PLG leads get passed on to your sales team and shares the details on the approaches at the companies she has worked. For the full episode: https://lnkd.in/d-2ZAvir

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Don't be the same. Be quirky. You want to grow? You want revenue multiples? You want to be "enterprise?" There are over 17K+ B2B SaaS companies out there. You know how generic and same they all sound?? Take whatever you can latch onto about your company And give it a personality. Add  ↳A quirk - Puzzle  ↳Something humorous - Pumble  ↳A mascot - Rattle 🦖 Make sure it's in your Marketing. And then? The MAGIC SAUCE that so many companies neglect? ➡ Make sure it's in your Sales. Yup, so many Heads of Marketing make the branding awesome on their social channels and their website and their newsletter and their front-end prospect-facing stuff That they forget it has to carry through to ↳Sales Slide Decks ↳Sales One-Pagers ↳Sales Playbooks & plays ↳Sales email signatures ↳Sales vocabulary & company verbiage So take whatever you're doing out there And sprinkle it through internally And your prospect experience will align And create raving fans of your BRAND To help you grow towards multiples. #salesandmarketingalignment #branding #saas

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Here's a simple question that founders (and salespeople) should ask on every call: "Why'd you take this call?" There are four buckets that a buyer likely fits into: Bucket 1: Big Problem Buyer has a big problem and they think you may be able to help. Bucket 2: Heard Good Things Buyer heard about you from someone they trust and thought it was worth learning more. They likely don't know much about you or your product. Bucket 3: Doing a Favor Buyer wants to help you. They may or may not have a problem worth solving, but they represent your target persona and are open to having a conversation to help you. Bucket 4: Boredom Buyer has a ton of free time, likely junior level, and they fill it by taking sales calls to learn about new and cool things. By asking the simple question, you'll be able to uncover the "state of mind" of the buyer, which helps to inform how you spend your time with them. For bucket 1, get straight to the point. The buyer has a big problem, it's likely all that they can think about. Don't waste their time. For bucket 2, tell them what you're up to, since they likely don't know, and ask critical questions to determine if they have a problem and if it's worth solving now. You have the latitude to ask critical questions to uncover potential pain. For bucket 3, use this as an opportunity to learn about your persona in great detail. These learnings will help you get a better handle on your ideal customer profile, which will help inform your strategy. And, the buyer may surprise you and say they are interested, although this is not the norm. For bucket 4, these will crush you. You'll be excited that someone wants to spend time with you but will eventually learn that they aren't going to buy your product, they are just bored. Ask the buyer if they are progressing towards buying your product, and even if they say yes, remain skeptical. Always figure out why someone took your call and then tell them what bucket you think they are in -- they'll correct you if you're wrong.

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I am looking for VP of sales / CROs / RevOps/ or go-to-market professionals in general tired of having to buy dozens of tools and stringing them together to go-to-market. If that's you, I have a question for you: do you have a peer or colleague hungry and ready for a 10-year challenge to build a Rippling in the sales space? If yes, introduce me to that person because I am looking for a business co-founder. A lot of my friends are not passionate enough about the "GTM tools fragmentation problem" to go straight for it. Most of what I hear is: "Yes, we're planning be this huge sales platform, but we're starting with solving problem X and building product Y". I don't think this is aggressive enough. Do you imagine generating 1-10M ARR on a single product and one vertical and now all of a sudden you have to change your whole org and codebase to go multi-products? And you end up seeing results 1-2 years from now? Most companies end up focusing on one product and get sold. This is the reason why we have 30 tabs in our browser: companies start ambitious and end up acquired. And I have nothing against that. I think this is still the right play if you're optimizing for the likelihood of success. But you won't solve the "I have to connect dozens of GTM tools" problem. You'll just be one other tab in a VP of sales's browser. I think that in order to solve this problem you have to go straight for it. There is no shortcut. It's going to be brute force and if you need to dilute your equity to single digits, you have to be willing to do it. Because it's not about building a successful startup, it's about changing how we go to market and more broadly speaking, building a more cohesive future of work, where you don't need to run a 1-year data engineering project to unify all your data into one place (hello Salesforce Datacloud) just to hope unleashing AI into your customer stack. Most business processes involve a 360 view of your customer lifecycle. And AI is all about improving business processes. So how can you hope to unleash AI in your business if your business software is a fragmented stack of 30 different apps with different company incentives and pricing models? It's time for the great re-bundling.

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We are hiring at Exit Five. We just opened up this role today. We're looking for an Account Manager. $100k - $150k OTE. Equity. 401k. Flexible work hours and remote (US or Canada). We currently have a team of five and we're looking to bring on teammate number six ASAP. This role is a mix of sales and client success. The main goal here is to attract and retain sponsors. Companies that sell to B2B marketers. But it's not just about throwing up ads or finding sponsors for our newsletter. We are working with 25 brands and full content/media campaigns that include: co-creating content, writing reports, research, events (in-person and online), dinners, social media, newsletters, and podcast advertising. The job is to help creating relevant, valuable, and useful content that our audience of B2B marketers loves and will share, while driving business in a meaningful way for our sponsors. We have more inbound demand for sponsors than we can keep up with. The demand is there. But we want to level up our sponsorships all around, and after a year of doing this as a team, it's time to bring on a dedicated Account Manager to own this channel moving forward. You will work 1:1 with our partners to drive success. You’ll report to our COO Dan and work closely with me, Matt, Danielle, and Anna. You'll be involved in sales conversations, kickoffs, presentations, content briefs, campaign reviews, performance analysis, inventory management, planning, working daily with our sponsors over Slack, email, and Zoom – and most importantly – and you’ll be another valuable member of the broader Exit Five team and the amazing crew we’ve been working with over the last year. It's not just about selling. We have the demand. This role is not the right fit for someone who just wants to close deals and move on. This role *is* the right fit for someone who wants to get creative and work at the intersection of content and community while being the point person for our sponsors. Do you have sales/CS experience? Are you interested in B2B marketing? Do you want to join and early stage company and change the trajectory of your career? Come work with us at Exit Five. You can apply here (or comment for reach, that helps too) Thanks for all of the support for Exit Five. I'm excited to grow the team. https://lnkd.in/e3NJzCzn

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Why do SaaS salespeople often get paid more than the developers who actually build software? It seems simple, right? If a product doesn’t sell, there’s no growth.. But, on the flip side, if there’s no product or the product is terrible, how can there be any growth? The thing is, sales professionals have such a direct impact on their company's growth that they get rewarded really well for it. Especially in more complex sales cycles. Think of the top 5 highest-paid footballers: 1. Ronaldo 2. Neymar 3. Benzema 4. Messi 5. Mané What do they all have in common? They're all attackers, paid handsomely for their ability to score goals. Sure, no team would function without defenders, right? That’s true, but good luck finding a defender or goalkeeper in the top 10 highest-paid footballers. Are your dreams of becoming a pro-footballer fading? No worries, go for the next best thing: a SaaS sales career! Follow us on LinkedIn to stay updated on the latest hot roles in the market.

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Should you give too much info on your cold calls?🤔 As an SDR, your main goal of a cold call is to pique the prospect's interest and get them on a meeting. You need to share just enough information to spark curiosity or highlight a key benefit that might resonate with them to encourage them to learn more. Of course, first you need to: - gather information - qualify the prospect - overcome objections As soon as you get them hooked and sense the conversation is going in the right direction, go for it. Something like this: "Hey John, it seems like this might be worth exploring. If you'd like, we can set up some time next week so you can see how this works."

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Becoming a better SDR is a math problem. Low call to connect rate? Source better contact data and be intentional about the time zones you call. Low connect to meeting set? Make your intro more relevant to the persona’s challenges and ask better questions. Low show rate? Focus on uncovering real pain and shorten the # of days between the cold call and demo. Low sales acceptance rate? Look at your company’s SQL requirements to ensure you’re meeting the mark, and hold opportunity reviews with your AEs and manager. Your conversion rates are telling you something. Studying them and taking immediate action is one of the quickest ways to improve your game. What SDR metrics are your go-to? #sales #sdr

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Is product knowledge important for SDRs to have? Absolutely it is, but only if it isn’t used to feature dump. Instead, reverse engineer the outcomes delivered by the product into sales messaging. For the last few years, I’ve used this 4-step framework to help SDRs turn product knowledge into a tool for better conversations. 🔽 After showing each feature, as a group we: 1: Identify who it impacts and how 2: Quantify the cost of the problem it solves 3: Write a 1-2 sentence opener / value statement 4: Write 3 relevant discovery questions to uncover pain Revenue leaders: give it a try and let me know how it works. #sales #salesdevelopment #sdr

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GTM Tools I highly recommend to my friends and connections in any sales role looking to automate their sales process and generate precise leads that will then help you focus on the organic relationship part.🙂🙏🏼 (Tools are a mixed and recommend to do your own research to see if it’s best suited for you.) Clay Surfe lemlist OpenAI Smartlead ZoomInfo HeyReach HubSpot Zinnia Comment below any I might be missing 🔥

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Calling All SALES People – YOU HURT YOURSELF WHEN YOU DO THIS!! A huge piece of advice to all of you included in SALES process for your business including CEO’s, MD’S, SALES Directors, Client Directors, Head of Sales, EVP’s, VP’s, SVP’S…I think you get the drift. If your business is taking part in an official RFP process and the RFP states the lines of communication to be used (which it will) i.e. people you should contact (probably a #Procurement person or maybe a Stakeholder)…then abide by it! Now sometimes during the RFP process you may learn of other more senior people who may have an impact on the RFP outcome. This may be via demos or chemistry sessions, or your senior people already know and have a relationship with senior people in the business… BUT please, no matter how desperate or brilliant you think you are…. DO NOT CONTACT THOSE SENIOR PEOPLE DIRECTLY (unless requested to by the contact in the RFP!) It may in your mind seem like a smart thing to do, as you can influence the outcome and get advantage…and I get that is the SALES person in you, and you’ve seen it pay off sometimes… But here’s what actually happens: If the Procurement team are valued and are in charge of doing the official RFP - then take it as given!! All that will happen by your actions is that the senior person will reach out to the Procurement team and tell them…. and guess what that does to your proposal…? Don’t think for one second, your proposal goes to the top of the pile. IMHO, IT’S A HUGE BLACK MARK! What your actions have actually managed to achieve are: 1.     You will have annoyed the Procurement person managing the RFP 2.     You will have annoyed the CPO or Head of Procurement 3.     You will have annoyed the Senior stakeholder who is sponsoring the RFP 4.     You will probably annoy the Senior person you contacted… after all there’s a Procurement function to deal with this stuff! So, SALESPEOPLE…no matter the temptation, do yourself a favour and abide by the RFP rules of communication. You have been warned! _________________________ 😃 Hi I'm Steve Walton. I help companies to fully realize the value procurement brings in terms of cost savings, risk mitigation, supplier innovation and sustainability. DM me if you’re ready to move procurement beyond a tactical purchasing function, and need consultancy and training. 💸📉📊

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Want to know the most critical meeting in your customer journey? It's the kickoff call. So many SaaS founders underestimate the power of a strong kickoff call. It's not just another meeting - it's the foundation of your entire customer relationship. Get it wrong, and you're setting yourself up for churn before you even start. Nail it, and you'll unlock a flywheel of retention and referrals that can supercharge your growth. I've developed a 3-phase strategy that transforms kickoff calls from a potential liability into a powerful asset. Want the full playbook? I've broken it down step-by-step in my latest video, including the exact SOP we use at SaaS Academy. Check it out now ↓

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