????[Warmly Update #69] Sales projections, training & maxing out max

??Read on to learn: our actual sales numbers for Feb (largest growth month ever), why my focus has been turning to training, training, training, and our projection and plan to 3.5x this year w/o really changing headcount.

What do we do again? Warmly is an autonomous revenue orchestration platform that helps revenue teams find the best warm leads and automatically converts them while they’re still warm.

??Asks:

• > Subscribe to our new podcast, Revenue Rebels, to help us get it recognized! … bonus points for a review
• > RevOps Folks: I doing 1-1 interviews with revops leaders at Series B+ companies to build our warm signals strategy - please tag someone, I promise I’ll make the convo fun!

?? KPIs Last Month:

Total Warmly MRR → $127,648

• > Warmly MRR: $80,502 (M/M growth in Jan = +14.27%
• > Nametags by Warmly Sales-led MRR:? $45,730
• > Nametags by Warmly Freemium MRR: $1,416 (192 subscribers)?

Additional KPIs

• > Initial Demo Meetings Held Last Month: 104 (+5%)
• > Free Tier Sign Ups Last Month: 492 (-5%)

??Tweets & Posts: See my, Alan and Keegan’s LinkedIn profiles for:

> Our results from a freemium exploration in Q4

> Thoughts on Salesloft acquiring Drift

?? Accomplishments/Wins:?

• > New Channel: Launched AI Inbound Chat Workflows in Warmly you can now create simple or advanced workflows to direct your website traffic with intent & AI. We recommend hiding the chatbot for non-ICP website visitors, letting low-interest ICP website visitors come to you by clicking on the corner chatbot and then proactively using AI chat to engage the hottest leads directly while they’re browsing on your site
• > Data Improvement: We’ve improved our contact-level identification coverage by ~30% and now launched contact-level data in our free tier to give even more valuable data to our non-paying customers
• > First ever projections: now that we have a (hopefully) repeatable sales motion we can do our best to try to project our sales growth from where we are today to where we want to be. No guarantee we’ll hit but I want us to 3.5x this year and try to get beyond $3.5M ARR (will post more in depth shortly on this)
• > Named to Pavilion’s Top 50 CEOs to Watch: likely they mean to watch me because I am highly likely to commit saas crimes and must be monitored, but still cool? ˉ\_(ツ)_/ˉ?

?? Failures/Learnings:

• > Training, Training, Training: I’ve done 1,000 demos of Warmly. I can do it in my sleep (I do sometimes do it in my sleep). So it’s no surprise that our new AEs and CSMs will not on Day 1 be able to solve every problem like I can. We spent a lot of time this month thinking about scalable onboarding practices since we didn’t have up to date training guides since the product has changed SO much in the last year. We use Spekit for training which has been helpful. Shoutout to my CSMs who I required to do an all-day Sunday training with me since it was the only day I could carve out the whole day for them. We covered a ton!
• > Maxing out max: For almost 5 years I’ve read every slack message in every channel of our company and was always responsive day or night and all over answering everything. It helped me feel in control. But it wasn’t sustainable. Now, with almost 30 Warmsters, 8 different teams, and 100+ customer slack channels, I truly can’t keep up. Woah. I realized that in order to scale I have to let go, trust more, delegate more. So I messaged my leadership team and asked for their help in letting me declare Slack bankruptcy and trusting them to be the eyes and ears on the ground for all things Warmly and that I would interface with them directly. In this way I can spend my time on the biggest problems in the company rather than the minutiae of whether our podcast logo is good enough?
• > Rallying around goal setting: we set a goal to reach 1,000,000 auto-emails, auto-linkedin messages and auto-chats sent from our customers and it's been quite unifying to the team to be able to look at each project and ask “will this increase the amount of warm outbound sent? By how much?” …. I recently read the Walter Isaacson biography on Elon Musk and loved how he sets ambitious singular metrics for his company to rally around
• > CS <> Engineering process broken: we recently grew our customer base and CSMs by a bunch in a short period of time. We then uncovered a big problem: engineering and CS were not getting along when it came to resolving customer issues. Customer success, super busy and not highly technical, would pass along customer reported bugs without knowing how to really validate them. Engineering, super busy and needing detailed reports to solve issues, was understandably frustrated because they were spending extra time debugging things that weren’t really bugs or were considered priority urgent but really were not. We interviewed 6 startups a little ahead of us on how they solve this issue?

??Gratitudes:?

• > Thank you to the founders at Salesflow.io , OneSchema , Tourial , Pylon , Paragon and Fillout for helping us understand
• > Thank you to VioletX team for helping us transition to Vanta and set up our security program for success
• > Thank you to Saad Khan for helping us think about how to best improve Warmly
• > Thank you to Otto Hanson ???? at TermScout for a day-of customer reference for us!
• > Thank you to Rillet our new accounts receivable platform for helping us make sense of Stripe data and find all our monies. Great product!

?

Warmly,

Max