Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: You're listening to b two B revenue acceleration, a podcast dedicated to helping software executives stay on the cutting edge of sales and marketing in their industry. Let's get into the show.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Hi, welcome to b two B revenue acceleration. My name is Auranjamutier, and I'm here today with Mike Malloy, founder and CEO at Malloy Industries. How are you doing today, Mike?
[00:00:22] Speaker C: I'm doing great, Ray. Thanks for having me on the podcast.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: It's a pleasure, man. That's a pleasure. So today we'll be speaking about strategies to scale SaaS companies. But before we get started, would you mind just giving our audience a little bit of background as to who you are, Mike, and also what your company does?
[00:00:40] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. Hi, I'm Mike. I have previous experience as a Deloitte consultant, a traveling sunglasses salesman, and international beach ultimate Frisbee player. I was a startup CEO, incubator, program director and adjunct professor at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. And I'm passionate about being a relentlessly generous and enthusiastically good and fun force for good in the world, helping entrepreneurs buy back their freedom and time to focus on what matters most to them, both professionally and personally, and to be a little vulnerable for you. I started this company about three years ago, and at the time we were coming out of COVID and started malay industries, this kind of the Mike Malloy show. And after about three months, my mom passed away in the fall of 2021. And the same week we found out my wife was pregnant with our first son. And so I took some time off. And as I got back to work, I realized I wanted to grow and scale this company and found myself at the forefront of the future of work because I'm all in that fractional is the future of work. And we'll talk a lot today about fractional sales executives and other fractional executives because as the CEO at Malay Industries, we create more time and freedom for other CEO's by helping them take off those undesirable hats, typically sales and other functions as well, and confidently delegate to trustworthy, vetted fractional executives, primarily helping B two B SaaS companies scale from one or 2 million up to ten to 20 million in annual revenue.
[00:02:15] Speaker B: Wow. Okay, Mike. Well, time and freedom, two currencies that I wish I had more. It's so difficult to find them in freedom when you're running at 200 miles an hour. So, yeah, let's dive straight in. One of the most common use cases that I think I've seen in term of complexity for startups at scaling at least, is going into new territories. So a UK company going all across Europe, a us company coming into Europe, people from APAC coming here, whatever it may be, going into a new territory, getting the culture, hiring rights in this territory. So I'd like to start there and ask you a simple question, which are basically, what are some of the most effective methods for penetrating new market and reaching new eye in those markets?
[00:03:04] Speaker C: Yeah, great question. I think one of the most effective strategies is to partner and work with somebody who is already in that market and has been living there and working for decades, has relationships with potential buyers, and also fully understands the culture. You know, we specialize in North America, primarily the US and Canada, in helping companies expand, you know, and acquire new customers. And we match them with fractional sales executives who've been selling in North America to us based companies for decades, and their B two B complex sales where they know how to navigate, you know, the different job titles and hierarchy and some bureaucracy and, you know, how do you get the internal champion? What are the things you need to equip them with? A lot of buyers today are digital first and they're going to do a lot of research online. It's not like, hey, you're going to fly in and knock on their door and have a four hour meeting with them. It's often emails. They're looking at stuff that you sent over. You maybe get 30 minutes with a couple of the stakeholders. I think to get into new markets, having people who know how to confidently lead those meetings and create momentum and velocity through the sales funnel is key. I think one of the number one metrics is the velocity through the sales funnel from first contact with a company to how many days or months does it take for them to pay you for the first time? I'm sure you would agree that time kills all deals.
[00:04:23] Speaker B: Yeah. When you mentioned partners, would you be looking at actual companies that you could partner with, like a partner ecosystem? The question I'm being asked is a chicken or the egg? Should I start with man on the ground, fractional or full time, or like a consultancy outfit that can help me because they've developed some of my, some people in my space, or should I just hire a bunch of partners that can go and sell my product and bundle it with what they've got existing?
[00:04:52] Speaker C: Great question. And I'm going to start by saying you have to be hopeful that you can land and expand in the new market. And hope requires three ingredients. Belief that a better future is possible, multiple pathways. And I'm gonna talk about the pathways to get there. And then agency to actually influence what you're doing on those pathways. And I think there are a few different paths that you can take as you're entering that new market. And one of those paths is to potentially hire some sdrs, work with a firm like yours to identify the ideal client profiles, to schedule the meetings, qualify them, and then, hey, let's have our existing sales team in another market or another country take those sales meetings. So that's one path. I think another path is to work with a consultancy or somebody that says, hey, we're going to do everything from a to z.
You just give it to us. Don't worry about it. We're going to take 25% or some large margin, perhaps as a result of covering it. But they often can't do everything from a to z and don't successfully go from top of funnel to middle of funnel, to bottom of funnel, to closing to, you know, what's the onboarding kickoff process and figure out where does the baton get handed? I think is very important.
And then the other option, one that I'm biased towards, is working with fractional sales executives who will come in usually moving deals from the top to the bottom of the funnel. They're not necessarily going to do the paperwork and do the onboarding and kickoff with a new client. At some point, somebody from the home office, a CEO or somebody may hop on a virtual meeting to show that they care, answer a few questions, help close the deal.
But the fractional executive is able to do the majority of the legwork. Once they get the lead list, it's not always a cost effective strategy for them to have to go hunt and do everything else.
But if you can give them qualified leads, get them meetings, have them work both as an individual contributor as well as a leader, coach manager for the existing sales team. That has been tremendously successful for us and for the clients that we work with, especially helping entrepreneurs that are not trained salespeople. Or maybe they're good at sales, but they're not good at being a sales manager, which is a different skillset than closing deals and holding people accountable and coaching and encouraging them, because, hey, man, you got to go for the no. There's a lot of rejection in this game that we're playing here and being able to create a culture of positivity and growth. And it's not win or lose, it's win or learn to. If you're in a sales situation, doesn't quite work out, hey, what do we learn from it? What can we do differently? How can we better prepare for the next opportunity.
[00:07:31] Speaker B: Yeah. So I mentioned the challenge of scaling into new territories for the sales businesses.
What are the other common challenges that you see?
What are the other issues that you see people facing over the course of their growth?
[00:07:46] Speaker C: Yeah, great question. And I think for scaling into new territories as well. It doesn't have to be a whole new country. It could be a new state or a new tangential industry. Maybe you're selling to fintech companies that have some financial services play and you want to start selling to ed tech companies, but the product still solves the problem. But there are nuances in that case. There's some changes in maybe the language of what they refer to, the vernacular, if you will, for that industry, that's one challenge is speaking the language of the future customers. And if that language changes based on geography, based on industry, making sure that you guys are thoughtful in understanding how they talk about things in their company, with their customers, because ultimately you want to be providing value and like, what is the benefit that they're going to get by working with your product or service? You know, they care about hanging the painting on the wall. They don't care that you're a hammer and you're going to put a nail in there and hang it up. But like, how beautiful is the room going to look with the painting on the wall?
[00:08:51] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And in terms of the other changes, so we talk about international, but is there anything else that you see in terms of raising money or. Oh, yeah, some people say that you are zero to 5 million ar type of guy. I'm more like a five to 15. I'm a 15 to 100. So what are the other challenges that you see? Just b two B SaaS company facing when they scale up?
[00:09:15] Speaker C: Absolutely. So the first challenge is, hey, let's get to two commas. Getting to 1 million in revenue is something to be celebrated. It does take a lot of blood, sweat and tears, as I'm sure you know. And during that first phase of kind of the startup phase, if you will, they have to figure out their product. They have to find product market fit, they have to get people to pay for it. They're like testing pricing strategies, but they're usually not the most efficient ones, capturing the most margin. But they're just happy to kind of have clients. They want to maintain retention.
We tend to help folks after they get into the two comma club. They've got a couple million in revenue, they have product market fit, and they're often getting ready for their series A or even their series B, and they need to have that up into the right revenue graph. And part of that graph also requires that they have a scalable sales system and processes. And we can talk a little bit about the different systems and processes that go in there that are necessary to convince investors that, hey, if you give me a few million dollars, I know where I can put fuel on the fire. Increase our sales and marketing. We have a playbook, we have metrics about the conversion rates throughout the Funnel that we can communicate confidently and know that it's not all relying on the founder and their charisma to sell the product, because that doesn't scale to 10 million to 50 million in revenue.
We have a company we're working with right now. In four years, they got to 4 million in revenue, which is awesome. They're doing great. They have no sales team. He's just the CEO. And he's got a smart tech team around him who's built out the software. They have some customer success folks, but he wants to go raise his series a by the end of the year and realize, hey, I can't keep doing all of the sales, partially because it's not going to get us to 20 million, and partially because it's like a full time job to fundraise. I got to go out and do the investor dog and pony show and build those relationships. While I'm doing that, the revenue still has to go up into the right. And so bringing in one of our fractional sales executives has helped both to take their sales playbook and be able to test it in reality. Like, what is it like when not the founder is selling? Because there are nuances in the language, how you communicate it, getting confidence in overcoming objections or concerns, slowing down for yellow lights to make sure that the people factual sales executive and ideally, our relationships usually grow where you might bring on a second fractional sales executive, or you might hire some sdrs or account executives underneath of the fractional sales executive. They can manage the existing team in order to scale sales and really let the CEO step back and be able to focus on what's important to them, whether that's fundraising or product, or who knows, maybe they have a wife or a husband and kids that they would like to spend more time as well. One other piece just on the fundraising side as well, because I think that's an important thing that we've seen in the market, is that most entrepreneurs need help with fundraising. And in a former life, I ran an incubator program, housing incubator in DC for five years, a lot of my job was connecting our founders with investors industries. We send out Malloy's monthly deal flow, which is an email newsletter. Goes out to about 550 investors and super connectors sharing five pitch decks a month. And it's our way of trying to help the entrepreneurs get access to the investors, the capital that they need. I can't promise someone's going to write you a six, seven figure check, but we'll get you one to five first meetings with new investors. And from there they kind of go through the courting process and doing it for about a year and a half now. Featured over 100 companies and more than 20% of them have raised capital, millions of dollars from our network and we just charge a few hundred bucks to feature them. Basically pays for putting together the newsletter with the hope that we want you to help get access to the capital. We also want you to know us like us and trust us. MLA industries. So then if you have a few million dollars and you need help, maybe you need a fractional sales executive, something else that we can offer.
[00:12:56] Speaker B: And I want to speak about cash flow as well, because this is another one that probably become a little bit more apparent. Last year when the market had a little bit of a slowdown, everybody was speaking about CAC.
You would have Sarah BC company that may be looking at an APO, but they had to be cash flow positive. Everybody wants to do more with their own money and not burn cash. How do you balance that challenge of growing with kind of now being more careful about burning cash?
[00:13:28] Speaker C: Cash is king, then sales is queen. And I think putting some of that cash into your sales engine to then five x or ten x might take a little while, depending on how long the sales cycle is. But ideally, you can identify ways to invest resources in things that are going to make you a lot more money. And I always recommend having at least three, if not six months of cash in the bank to have a little bit of a safety. When you get below that three months of payroll and everything, like, dude, the worry, the stresses, the middle of the night wake ups, that is real. You are not going to be able to focus.
Actually, I've been reading a book recently by Dale Carnegie called how to stop worrying and start living.
And I'm gonna drop a nugget here that I learned from this book. When you're worrying, identify what is the worst possible thing that could happen to you, to your business. Maybe you lose a client, maybe what's the worst possible thing? Okay, step two is to radically accept it. That that is your new reality, that the worst thing has just happened, and you realize I'm not dead. Hopefully my spouse didn't divorce me. And then step three is to calmly think about what actions can you take to improve from that worst case scenario that you've already mentally accepted. And by doing that, you don't get stuck in this worry, anxious cycle. And, like, I'm not doing anything. I'm just stressed and a little frenetic to, like, okay, like, yeah, that would suck if we lost this, you know, $100,000 account. Well, what else can we do? Well, we got some, you know, accounts paying us 20k. Maybe we get them up to 30k. We got some leads in the pipeline. Maybe we spend some more time focusing on them, helping again to overcome that. And this ties back to cash, because if you don't have the money in the bank, it's a super stressful place. Whereas if you have 612, 18 months of Runway. Yeah, you don't want to light it on fire.
And some of it, I would say, goes into marketing. And I'd also say that there's no such thing as a great marketer. There's just great testers. Marketers are testers. They are testing. They're making little bets. And let's say you're doing paid ads and you spend $50 on ten different ads. You spend $500.09 of the ads produce no leads. Nothing happens at whatever. But one of them brings in, let's say, $250. So you spend 50, you got 250, but overall you spent 500 and you got 250. So you might think, oh, pay that didn't work like this was a failure. No, no, no. You found the one ad that's going to get you a five x return. So now take ten grand and put it on that one, and you're going to get 50 grandd. And so it's a matter of thinking about, like, how can you make small bets? And when you see what works, ten x 50 x 100 x the investment there until you start to see there's a law of diminishing returns at some point.
But that's a great way to be smart with your money and not necessarily pay an agency tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars to do fancy marketing.
Ray, have you ever read the book traction? We talked about, like, the 19 bulls. It's a great book, and I will. I'll share for the show notes, too. I have like, a Google spreadsheet. It's called the bullseye framework. It's from this book traction. And there are basically 19 different channels that you can find new business from. So traditional business development, hand to hand sales, like offline events, speaking engagements, hint, this is a podcast. This is one of my 19 channels and one that I'm experimenting and doing bets with this year to see, you know, how, how industries get in front of new customers. There's also affiliate programs, search engine optimization, content marketing, email marketing, trade shows. The list goes on. And so a lot of companies have grown and done really well with like one or two channels bringing in the majority of their leads. Like two weeks ago, I went on a sales trip. I live at the beach in Delaware, here in the US. I went to DC on Wednesday, philly all day Thursday, back to DC for an event on Friday. And we now have like over 20 leads in our sales pipeline from that three day trip. Going to events, seeing some old friends, making some new friends, getting referrals from friends I saw there. And like, it's clear offline events work. Like, let's get Mike in person. I can't just live at the beach and hang out with my wife and two year old all day. You know, I gotta, gotta show a little bit of FaceTime. But like, that three day sales trip is giving us a good amount of work going into the end of May now, like going into June and July, I feel very confident, probably going to make at least six figures from that trip. And so that helps us know, hey, this is something we want to invest in more. And when you're thinking about your cash, you can't just have one or two channels. I recommend having five. And like, you've got the top two or three that really work. And then let's pick another two or three to do some experiments with. We've done a little bit of experiments with SEO. We have one client who found us on Google by googling fractional sales executives and they heard of the phrase fractional sales executive by being on a competitor's website, googled it, found us, and then ended up hiring us because we were a better option, which is pretty cool. So you want to try different things to see how you can attract and nurture your ideal client profiles.
[00:18:26] Speaker B: Yeah. And then, you know, as coming back to the international stuff, you know, you've also picked into the local markets, creating landing page, landing page in the specific region. Adapting your content is important to the region using the right logos. You know, if you go, if you go and you are a us company and you want to speak to a uk business or a german business or a french business, and you're going to speak all about your huge american logo. They probably look at it and say, well, maybe we are too small for them. So you always have to think about those things, which I think you mentioned when you spoke about the subtleties of each market and getting someone that can adapt the tone. I think for me, it's culture. There is a culture in every single market. There is a way that is slightly different to the business. Everybody loves to think that it's impossible to sell in the market. I was with a french guy on a call two days ago. He was telling me, it's too difficult to sell in France. It's the most difficult market in the world. I was with a german guy last week saying the same stuff in Germany is the most difficult. We've got it bad.
You go around, everybody think that territory is very specific and very difficult. Having done it a little bit everywhere, I think, yes, there is some slight difference of process, and people want different type of information. Then you've got people who are taking risks versus people who don't take risk. Countries where decisions are made as part of a consensus. So in France, Germany, people stay in their role for 15 years. Right? Why stay?
[00:19:55] Speaker C: Wrong.
[00:19:55] Speaker B: Because they don't take risk.
They always make decision with five other people. They protect their ass. Right? So if you want to close a deal with that sort of company, you won't do two or three meetings like you would do in a similar organization of similar size in the UK or in the US. You probably would have to have seven people that you've got connection with in the accounts. Okay. And find some other sponsors. And it's. It's very interesting the way it grows. But I just want to come back on that because do you have any strategies to share with us in terms of building and managing sales team across different regions? Because there's difficulties. There is the culture. There is a time zone. There is. Albert, you don't understand my market, so they can feed you some b's about what's going on the ground. And technically, you know, you will not know better if not expand. So, effective strategies. Do you have any effective strategies or effective framework that you've seen in play to manage those multicultural sales teams?
[00:20:47] Speaker C: First, you talk about the fact that, like, people in France say, oh, France is the hardest market to sell in Germany. Oh, it's the hardest market here. Quick little parable. You know, there's two travelers, and they show up to this new town, and the first traveler talks to a guy at the gate, he goes, well, what is it like in this town? And the guy at the gate says, well, what's it like where you come from? And he goes, oh, it's terrible. Everybody's hard to sell to. They have all these objections. Nobody wants what it is that we're selling. And the guy at the gate goes, oh, it's the same in here. You're not going to have any luck. Sorry. Second traveler comes up, maybe they're a traveling salesman. And he says, hey, what's it like in this town? The guy at the gate goes, well, what's it like where you come from? He goes, oh, it's wonderful. Everybody is kind and thoughtful. They're transparent. They collaborate and find solutions. They're creative in how to help one another, and it's just a real joy working with them. The guy that gate goes, great. So is everybody in here. And so it really is a matter of that lens and how you perceive people, regardless of what country or town you're in. The second thing that you mentioned I want to hit on was that people want to protect their own behind, and I want to encourage people that are selling to realize you don't have to have the best in the world solution to their problem. You have to have, not a terrible one. And you have to do everything you can to protect the downside risk, to have a risk reversal, a guarantee, you know, something like, we do fractional executive matchmaking. And I tell people like, well, hey, we'll interview you. We'll do an assessment. We'll understand what your needs are. I'm going to pick the three best to match you with you, then interview them. If you interview them, and for any reason, you decide, hey, you don't work with anybody, I'll buy you dinner. You're not paying any cash up front. We charge a matchmaking success fee if you ultimately hire somebody. And, you know, typical headhunters for a full time role are charging, like, 33% of the first year salary. We charge 25% of the first month, which is usually five, eight, or ten k a month, depending on if they want kind of 2033 or 40% of somebody's time. So that fee is much lower. And if you don't work with, I want to buy you dinner, I want to respect your time. I value you that you've invested and you've explored this, and that's just one example of a guarantee. You can give the 30 day money back guarantee, or I've seen some people even do the 105% refund if you don't like it, which is like, we believe in it so much we'll give you a little bit on top. And as you're going through the sales process, people are ultimately going to have objections. And it's very effective, I'm sure, you know, to have social proof and testimonials. It's even more effective if the testimonials begin by having your happy customer talk about why they almost didn't hire you. What was the biggest objection in their mind? Because when somebody is reading or watching or listening to that testimonial, they have an objection in their mind. They have some reason that they may not buy. That's why they're still looking. Testimonials they haven't hit, you know, buy now. And so having a third party, non biased person be like, hey, I almost didn't work with Malloy Industries because I thought it would be too expensive. I was worried about the investment. We were on a budget.
And what I found was that it was actually well worth the investment. We got seven x return on that investment over three months of the initial project. We're continuing to work with them. They were able to increase our velocity, all these great things, but they started with the price, because someone's concerned about the price. They started with, I almost didn't hire a fractional executive because I didn't understand how someone could be productive one or two days a week when, like, I have people I pay for five days a week and they don't get anything done, you know, and then understand, like. But what I realized was, you know, Mark came in and he had 30 years of experience, and he could get stuff done in an hour that would take other people two weeks, because he just knew how to do it. He had the frameworks, the playbooks, the templates, the scripts, and was also able to change the culture of our sales team and ties into that question, how do you manage that diverse sales team across different markets and cultures? And I think part of it is having a growth mindset and encouraging people to admit their failures and depending on what country they're in. Not everybody grew up in a place where failure was cool. My mom made sure I had straight a's my whole life. I got a b plus on my high school report card, two class. I had parent teacher conferences with those two teachers. Like, why wasn't I doing perfect? By college and into entrepreneurship, I learned, hey, failure is great. It's part of the game. You gotta learn from it. It's not win or lose. It's win or learn. And so on. The sales team, in your weekly pipeline meetings, have each rep, go around the horn and share something they learned in the past week about how they can improve their sales. Either the pitch, the questions they're asking, a better way to overcome an objection, a new resource or marketing collateral, something that the team made. Hey, start using this. I sent it over beforehand and they watched the 1 minute video and it made it a much smoother call.
And in those pipeline meetings as well, you want to hold each other accountable. There has to be a public scorecard. Human beings naturally want to compete. They want to be the best. And if they don't, you probably don't want them on your sales team. Just spoiler alert. And so understanding, what are the expectations in terms of qualified leads, of meetings booked, of first meetings? Hey, do we establish a business case with them and schedule the next meeting? I love tracking the number of bam fams. Ray, do you know what Bamfam stands for?
[00:26:03] Speaker B: Absolutely not. Now I was thinking about it might.
[00:26:05] Speaker C: Be a us thing. It's book a meeting from a meeting.
[00:26:11] Speaker B: So you get your next meeting from the previous meeting.
[00:26:14] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, I had a meeting last night. I host an entrepreneur roundtable every Wednesday at four east coast. I had three entrepreneurs there. We talked through a lot of things to help them and give them advice. It's free every week. One of them was like, hey, I actually need a fractional sales executive. So the last two minutes of the meeting I was like, hey, let's look at our counter. How does Friday at eleven look so that we can have a one on one for 30 minutes? Understand, kind of the sales scalability assessment, what do you need? Help. And it doesn't have seven emails back and forth. The other thing that is really effective in getting that second meeting is asking who else is involved in the decision making process and when can I meet with them.
You can't just rely on this first champion. And even if they love it, they only have so much social political capital within their organization.
Unless they're the CEO, maybe they have a little bit more. But if you're talking to somebody else besides the CEO, you can't rely on them to close the sale without you. You have to get in front of people and like maybe they can pull up their outlook calendars or their Google calendars and like see when that person's available, even if it's two and a half weeks out. Hey, let's get it on the books. Because those emails, especially like annoying, hard scheduling emails with somebody just trying to sell me something that's not going to bubble up on the thing. I'm going to do in my five minutes between other things I got to do today?
[00:27:30] Speaker B: No, I'm with you. And I've also got a question about, it's probably less salesy, but more like risk and compliance, because that's the other thing. You've got GDPR, you've got all those things, you've got employment law. Do you have any framework or specific way to go about mitigating risk?
When you work with your clients in.
[00:27:50] Speaker C: Terms of mitigating their risk, I think it's helpful on the front end, like before an engagement even starts to understand what they perceive as the biggest risks, like what are they worried about? And I will often frame it as a positive person, say, hey, what's your dream outcome if we're sitting down six to twelve months from now? This engagement has been a massive success. What does that look like to you? What a success? What are we hoping to achieve? And then on the flip side, if it's been a massive failure, what do you think might be the reasons for that? Are there any specific risks you're aware of? Have you worked with other firms in the past or other software in the past trying to solve this problem? And why didn't those work out? And that helps to know upfront, what are some of the yellow or red flags? Maybe they're yellow flags now, but could turn to a red flag because, hey, we didn't spend the time to be thoughtful about how we wanted to overcome that collaboratively together. You know, it's not necessarily just on one side of the fence. The risk, if you can kind of meet in the middle and say, hey, what can I do to help decrease the downside risk and increase the likelihood of positive outcomes, you can't guarantee everything's going to be amazing and you're going to make a ton of money. But if you at least break even, like, if somebody works with us for three months, they spend thirty k and they make $30,000. I mean, that's for my standards, is terrible. By their standards, it's at least, okay, we're hoping to get them a five to ten x return. And so whether that is 150k or 300k, depending on sales cycles and when it comes in, that's what we're looking to do. But if we promise, like, hey, you're at least going to break even.
And if it doesn't work out, you will have learned a bunch about what to not do the next time and we'll be transparent in what our learnings were. And hey, we tried this cold outreach campaign we sent 10,000 emails, a bunch of folks in Zoom info. We got zero meetings.
And so, like, maybe it was, I'm going to hypothesize that the channel was not the right channel for whatever it is you saw. And so let's look at the other 18 traction channels. The other risk as well that can come up for folks is like, well, somebody brought up a risk recently of like, hey, if I have a fractional sales executive, what if their other client wants to hire them full time? And then I can't work with them anymore and I've trained and onboard them. I was quick to say, hey, that's never happened in three years. And the folks that we work with are, they're at a stage in their career where they don't want to go full time and you're not going to lose them. What we do instead is when we help you grow so much that you have enough cash that the bank is looking good, you want to invest and you want to hire full time, we'll actually help you interview, vet, train and onboard the full time replacement and hand the baton to them in a way that sets the entire organization up for success. Not a, oh, your answerment full time, hey, we're out here, like, no, not at all. Like, we are. We're partners. We want to help you be successful. I encourage everybody listening to view your customers and your future customers as partners, that you guys are playing a collaborative infinite game. You know, it's an infinite game. It's not a finite, like, hey, I got to get my quota, you know, by the end of the quarter, it's like, no, we're going to be doing business for the next 50 to 100 years. I'm 37. I'm trying to make it to 115, so I make it to the year 2100. I got a lot of business ahead of me and I could care less about the short term. Hey, did we make a quick buck and care so much more about the long term relationships over the next several decades?
What can we do together in the current seats that we're sitting at Ray and we're across from the pond on this podcast right now? I always like to imagine in business there's all these tables around the circle. And at different times in our careers, we sit in all the different seats. You know, sometimes we're the founder, you know, in earlier stage in my life, I was a traveling sunglasses salesman. I was a founder CEO, and then I went bankrupt. Like, I did not have a profitable business. I had to move back to my parents basement at 30 and catch my breath. And I got a job as a program coordinator. I went from CEO to program coordinator and was super grateful to be there because I got a paycheck and I got health insurance, and I started rebuilding my life, you know, seven years ago. And so from there, I was a manager to a director to, you know, there's the investor hat, there's the people on the board hat, there's the operations, finance, marketing, sales, like all these different seats at the table. The more you can empathize with people in those seats and understand what matters to them, you know, what's important now for those roles, you can position whatever it is that you're working on as a solution, as something that can help solve their problems.
It's important to remember, though, that nobody wants to solve a problem that they're not problem aware. Like, if they don't know they have a problem, nobody cares. You can't try to sell somebody sunglasses on a rainy day. Nobody. And I dealt firsthand with that.
That is not something people care about. And there's five stages of the modern customer journey. There's problem unaware and then problem aware, and then solution aware and then product aware, where they're aware of your product as a potential solution. And then they become most aware where, like, hey, they're ready to buy. You just got to make them a good offer.
But, like, 70% of your future customers are in those top two problem unaware and problem aware. They don't even know that a solution exists. And so, so much marketing and kind of top of the funnel content needs to be focused on shining a spotlight on that problem. And I'll give you a quick example, Ray. What time is it that you are?
[00:33:07] Speaker B: 445.
[00:33:08] Speaker C: All right, so I asked a question that directed your attention where I wanted it to go. Looking at the clock in the corner of your laptop, what are questions listener that you can ask your future customers to make them aware of the problem. They have things that can remind them that they're dealing with it, that it's hard, that it is really annoying. Is there a follow up question that you can accentuate the problem and twist the knife a little bit so they're like, it is really annoying.
I have no idea how to solve it. And then, oh, my God, what a great time to share a case study or a story, because humans love stories about somebody just like them who was able to solve that problem and go through this transformation. You know, what is, what does it look like after the hero's journey? Dip. And they're on the way back up and understanding that your company, your product or service, you're the guide.
Our fractional executive are the guide. Our other fractional executives in HR and operations and marketing, they're the guides to help the company be transformed, to help your customers be transformed. And once they know a solution exists, then they start looking for, hey, what products could do it. And you want to make sure that they know what your products are. We have another company we're working with. They've been selling one product in financial services for almost 20 years. And they only targeted the top 50 banks in the US, and they own that market. They're now launching new products that are appropriate for those banks, but also the next 250 regional banks. And that market has no idea they exist. Even though they've been a leader in the industry and they've done this one thing really, really well, suddenly you're going to do these other things for a new target market. And part of the beginning of this conversation was, hey, how do you go to a new market? It starts with creating awareness. You need awareness, interest, desire. So they take action, schedule a call, want to learn more. But if they're not aware, then the rest of your efforts are kind of wasted.
[00:34:59] Speaker B: Sure. Well, thanks for your insight, Mike. If anyone wants to connect with you to carry on the conversation, speak about fractional leadership, scaling up SaaS companies, what's the best way to get all of you?
[00:35:11] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. Would love to connect on LinkedIn. My email is mikelloyindustries.com, malloyindustries.com and we've got a page on our website, maloyindustries.com pod that will put some of the resources we talked about here and, you know, other things that any listeners want to learn more about how we can help. Would love to connect there. And yeah, thanks again, Ray, for having me on the show. I think this was really great and hopefully was able to share some wisdom with your audience and help them scale their sales.
[00:35:46] Speaker B: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Mike. It was a pleasure to have you on the show.
[00:35:50] Speaker A: You've been listening to b two b revenue acceleration. To ensure that you never miss an episode, subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast player. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time.
