Xiao Hu’s Post

📅 May was another record month at Causal for New/Expansion MRR + NDR 🔥 Here's my best guess at what's working right now: 𝟏. 𝐆𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐡𝐨𝐧𝐞 Believe it or not, some people want to talk to a human before dropping $3-10k/year on a SaaS tool 🤯 We're happy to do 1–2 calls with users during their 2-week trial. These are more like consultation sessions than sales calls, answering specific questions + showing them that they'll be in good hands with our team. 25% of our new customers in May did a call with us during their trial, and the ACV for this segment was 55% higher than our pure self-serve customers ($4.2k vs $2.7k)! 𝟐. 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐝-𝐨𝐟-𝐦𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐡 1/3 of our signups come via word-of-mouth, but until this month, we had no idea about this 🙈 We always saw a lot of signups coming via "Direct" traffic in Google Analytics, but never quite knew what it meant. After lamenting about this to Dave Kellogg, he told me the solution: including an explicit "How did you hear about us?" question in the signup form. It turns out that even in 2024, this is still the gold standard for attributing leads. I wish we did it 2 years ago — thanks Dave! 𝟑. 𝐒𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 + 𝐜𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐢𝐧𝐬 Lukas Köbis and I have always struggled with this, but we're starting to get the hang of it 😄 There's an amazing energy on the Causal team right now, and it's a result of people seeing the fruits of their hard work and being connected to the outcomes that they're contributing to. Our customer feedback Slack channel is always popping with the latest that we're hearing from our customers on Zoom, Intercom, and Slack conversations, and the whole team gets a Slack notification when a new paid customer signs up (via Causal's Stripe integration). That's it for May, let's see if we can do it again in June! And shout-out to Hunter Hammonds for perhaps my favourite customer testimonial to date 👇

#MondayMomentum for April 17th - 21st. Evolution. My partner and mentor Mary K (MK) Marsden has led me to an actual Revenue Engine. My focus going forward from today is bringing my network over the next few months to Revscale™ | Sales & Marketing Automation to help you grow your business. Founder Unnat Bak has put a rocket ship on the launchpad with tremendous product velocity; I am excited to work with him on the team. More eager to strap your sales results to that rocket. My first outreach was to a small group of CEOs of small firms with limited Revenue Operations capacity. Typically just the one person. RevScale provides the content marketer, marketing automation, and Business Development Rep in a fully automated package. I will expand to #RevOps leaders and other more robust teams soon; stay tuned, Chad McCaffrey ;). Reach out to scott at getrevscale.com to get white glove access. Challenge us; this is #AI reality, not hype. I have been looking for this solution for 20 years. Every salesperson I have known and I have looked for hacks to get more outreach at a higher quality done. No one wants to personalize hundreds of emails, slide into DMs, and make cold calls all day; we have all just been in a race to find the 1% in the market right now for the solution you offer. RevScale automates and exponentially improves the quality of delivering prospects ready to buy to your desk to close. Just Close and let the Revscale™ | Sales & Marketing Automation Revenue Engine do the work up funnel work. #FridayFollowUp April 21st plan is to report we have closed subscriptions from cold start today to close by Friday.

We’re pulling back the curtain on five powerful revenue plays straight from the LeanData RevOps team playbook. In this playbook, you’ll learn a combination of inbound, outbound, revenue protection, and data management motions: #1 Repeat Customer Play #2 Win Back Play #3 Sales Process Plays #4 Renewal and Upsell Plays #5 Partner Play Check out the full playbook ➡ https://bit.ly/3TliHPA #leadrouting #datamanagement #revops

Most first-time founders don't realise how easy it is to get their SaaS product in front of customers, especially early on. Here's how I booked 200 calls to validate ideas and pre-revenue products: 1️⃣ Get Sales Navigator and create a list of 2nd degree connections who might pay for your product. 2️⃣ Automate 15 connection requests to this audience daily with Lemlist or Overloop. This equates to 400 people per month. 3️⃣ In the connect request message or after they accept it, let them know you're an early-stage founder and want their feedback on your product. 4️⃣ Ask for a 15-minute call and send them a Calendly to set up a meeting. You'll be shocked at how many people will give you 15 minutes to help out. #bootstrapping #saasgrowth #productmarketfit

🚀 What is the KPI of RevOps? I was asked this question yesterday during a great conversation with a colleague about RevOps. My answer was: It depends. The key performance indicators (KPIs) of RevOps can be measured in various ways. Many businesses want to grow their revenue and therefore one of the core KPIs of a successful RevOps strategy is the impact on revenue. To be clear, adopting a successful RevOps strategy does not skyrocket your revenue immediately. One of the best functions of RevOps is the optimization of processes and enablement of team members through a solid platform strategy (shoutout to HubSpot). This means that there is time given back to the team members in the business, such as sales reps, to spend more time selling and less time entering data, diagnosing, debugging, pulling data, etc. Reduction of monotony + Time back in the business = a KPI of RevOps. Follow for more 👉

POV: you’re a scaling company focused on growth. Maybe you’re a professional services company. Maybe you’re in SaaS. You’ve built the company to be a little over 100 employees. You’ve either recently received funding, or you’re undergoing evaluations for series A or B. If this describes you → what you need is visibility into your data. Visibility gives you options. Once you know the weaker points in your sales cycle (where are conversions stalling? Where are there leaks in the funnel?) you know what to solve for. Your next big rock is NOT additional marketing strategies. It’s NOT onboarding new fancy tech. Your focus should be on the data: creating visibility for better insights, more accurate reporting, and a more holistic view of performance across different aspects of the GTM strategy. In short: it’s nailing #RevOps to build a solid foundation for growth. ... ➡️ Still thinking back to Sid Kumar’s talk at Southbound on leveraging Revenue Architecture frameworks to drive cost-efficient growth. ➡️ Be on the lookout for all of our Southbound Sessions on the RevPartners website, coming soon! ➡️ And if you're looking to master efficiency, check out our QBR webinar tomorrow at 1pm est: https://lnkd.in/eDYy7MKy

Feeling Unseen in RevOps? Here's How to Shine Ever feel like your amazing RevOps work goes unnoticed? ❌ Not invited to meetings? ❌ Last to hear about things? ❌ Just given tasks without any say? Here's the thing: if people don't understand what you do, they can't see your value We RevOps folks are natural helpers. We love to see others succeed, and we might think our hard work will speak for itself. But sometimes, you gotta toot your own horn (a little) Here's the secret: Share your wins! Did you streamline a process? Did you improve data quality? Tell everyone how it's helping the business grow Connect the dots. Show how your work helps the sales team reach their goals. For example, if you made it easier to qualify leads, explain how that's putting more qualified deals in the pipeline. Here are some examples: 1) New campaign intake form: Reduced turnaround time by X% for marketing. 2) Revamped pipeline review: Increased conversion rates by Y%. 3) Data enrichment: Sales can reach more qualified leads, leading to a Z% boost in ICP penetration. Basically, share what you're doing and how it helps the team win No need to brag. Just keep it clear and focused on how your work makes a difference. Now everyone will see you as the RevOps Rockstar you are.

HubSpot's recent acquisition of Clearbit is a game-changer for data-driven marketing and sales! 💥🚀 With Clearbit's data enrichment and HubSpot's suite of tools, RevOps pros can supercharge their customer insights game and it will get easier to drive business growth. 📊📈 Exciting times ahead! Can't wait to see what insights and discussions emerge on LinkedIn and beyond. What are your thoughts on this acquisition? #PotterMemes #RevOpsMeme #RevFlix #Hubolution #datadriveninsights

Day 13/365 of Building SaaS: Validating Our Data Yesterday was a big day for us! We hit a major milestone by deploying our LLM model wrapped around an API. To celebrate, we reached out to some ex-colleagues and sales managers, sharing the results we generated using our API. Here’s what we did: 1. Fetched results from LinkedIn profiles using our API. 2. Created detailed PDFs with the data. 3. Shared these PDFs with 2-3 ideal target audiences. We spent hours crafting these PDFs and were eager to hear back. Unfortunately, we haven’t received any feedback yet, but we’re hopeful and determined to validate our data points. Knowing we’re on the right path is crucial. In the meantime, I’ve been trying to reach more people through Sales Navigator. However, it seems we might need to pivot to email marketing for faster validation. Sending bulk emails could be the key to getting quicker responses. So, that’s today’s update. Not the most thrilling part of the journey, but necessary groundwork before we dive into the exciting chaos ahead! Stay tuned for more updates! 🚀