#SecretSauce: How RevGenius Grew 0 to 17K

Play Video about Jared Robin @RevGenius- #SecretSauce: How RevGenius Grew 0 to 17K Video Transcript: [Music] welcome to our founders friday webcast uh why founders because they're always thinking about driving revenue you were talking about it a minute ago and uh they're always thinking about how to make their business bigger uh so this is a tell all for people who love driving revenue that's what this this webcast all about and why fridays because it's the best way to start your Weekend my name is asim this is our plant called fred we've adopted him uh we invite experts responsible for driving revenue share their experiences to educate and entertain just one rule in mind keep it fun keep it exciting share your secret sauce so first we're going to learn about you uh jared i you're one of the most exciting founders i've met and i would love to learn more about who you are so Maybe we'll start with the easy part tell us about how you got to where you are your professional journey first yeah i always joke i'm not supposed to be in sas now i did it to save the space so i'm the son of two awesome parents uh my mom passed unfortunately a few years ago but she's still with me every day and and it's important for me to start like that yeah because i truly believe Um everything i've learned accomplished rough patches or whatever the secret sauce to being a founder i say is being level like you should be hungry and everything but being levels that like that secret sauce because you've all seen those crazy amazing people but they just burn out and the whole team leaves um and the start of that came with them right so uh I knew i wanted to be a founder since uh i was in high school but i was too scared after that uh common story i guess i i wrote my first business plan tjb auto detailing in in high school as a senior i went to college at penn state uh because i wanted a true experience i didn't want to go to babson because in my head babson was for entrepreneurs awesome school uh but there wasn't gonna be any fun there So like i so i have two themes through like getting to where i am one um live life and be a part of life and to uh you know follow where i want to go right so so babson would have just been one of them penn state was kind of both uh was in sales for seven years working for fedex a fortune 100 company ended up there in president's club number one out of 500 which is all great uh but you know you know the irony is i worked for a Company called seamless web before for three months now at seamless.com it's had two acquisitions i left after three months because i hated cold calling the the irony right um but but i realized like my ambition wasn't being satisfied but i also still had this fear so uh how can i satisfy my ambition and keep my fear at bay and that was going into the startup world working for A company that already had funding so sales for the last seven years um working for others and then finally covid uh kicked my tail out of work and um i had no choice but to satisfy my ambition so i just said you know what there is no way out and i honestly felt that it was it was harder than ever to get an interview it was impossible a year ago for a sales rep like come on dime a Dozen at the time yeah so launch rev genius based on um the empathy i had for the sales profession like being tossed around like having those feelings like of being the top rep but wanting more um and then having the feelings in the software as a service or technology world of not having that security of the fortune 100 like that empathy over you and just being Like rough and tumble along the way um and and i'm here like i i truthfully keeping it fun i wanted to do this in a creative space you brought up something really interesting a minute ago when you talked about trying to balance your ambition with your fear and at some point obviously you jumped right into it and you've launched red genius but before we talk about dev Genius tell me a little bit more about what you do as a founder to stay centered so having a support system is is my answer meditation ditch the booze and have a support system very cool very cool okay um all right now let's turn to rev genius so you started rev genius last year at the start of a pandemic tell us the origin story uh The origin story i i decided to do more than i've ever done to try to get it to work that meant let's be active on linkedin right that meant video message hiring managers that meant let's network with as many people and show up to as many places as possible and what i realized was one they were marginally helping me get to my goal and two there was so much Effing fragmentation and then i'm like wait is there a space like where these people could live like they're talking linkedin was breaking on everybody's phone every day and we looked around there was like four main communities there was none that that really felt like what we had like an empathetic open um accessible no or low cost all these that and so we created it in the rest is History awesome awesome so so born out of a pandemic and looking for work and something that's open empathetic and met a need that wasn't being met by existing communities that's you know that's the formula for how rg got started uh i'm gonna start referring rev genius to rg if that's okay with you for the rest of this uh i'm cool with that So so um one of the challenges that we see we've talked to a lot of folks who run communities and we are part of several communities is that initial cold start right i mean you start with a handful of people but then kind of stalls and you have to and you guys are on this amazing trajectory right now you know last i talked to you were out adding a thousand people a month and That was this past summer so tell a little tell us a little bit more about how that inflection occurred how did you take it through that inflection what what are some of the key learnings now looking back that other community leaders can can learn from and how to drive through that inflection point so you need to really understand the space with community building like real like there was what we had so we went really Hard in the beginning and i i hit as many as 3 000 people a month but what others were realizing was there was a low barrier to entry to starting a slack group yeah so it's not zero-sum from a community standpoint but let's be real it's zero-sum with the time we have in the day yeah that's just a that's just an objective fact right like yeah you're like competing For attention yeah and um so you might have people in multiple groups but then the attention dwindled you know potentially and and we were doing better than maybe all and the most active but like you know now you're competing so our focus was just like top line like drive drive drive members and then we we transitioned to like okay let's uh Let's drive engagement let's drive engagement let's and and we had engagement just because people wanted to be there we got lucky what we've had to learn of late is how really to dive in but to get there's so many inflection points man like you have the inflection point of getting to growth and then something else drops out and then you have another inflection point of trying to get To certain uh other goals i i think you have to set a north star metric and and hold true to it and and it seems as fun as it is for revenue or like gross numbers to be that and and investors love seeing that and and we still want to go that like it has to be something that that the people that you're serving value right and and then when you drive that Then everything that's the leading indicator and then everything follows right instead of going for these vanity metrics yeah so so that's awesome i and i love the term vanity metrics because i see that a lot in social media in particular you know people people uh stress over their followers and this and that but um so tell us more about this north star Metric aside from revenue and aside from growth which obviously are important but what is the north star metric that rev genius is centered around to engage the community and drive them forward yeah so i i always think of it as like um like a car dashboard right your gas tank is your revenue you always need to have an eye on there it's got to be full enough right like you can't lose sight Of that um but what's going to get you there whether it's uh the speedometer or whatever uh being the main thing is weekly active humans just getting people um giving them understanding what people need and being truly empathetic and building around that for them and then before doing that baselining you know what that means And figuring out how to get there that that that's been everything so the metric we picked weekly versus daily you know we're we're more of a social network at scale then we'll probably even admit because yeah you kind of have to be um but but we also realize that people don't have to show up in a community every day um so why force them to like oh you know why forces to do something that's not natural Um yeah so weekly seemed about right and and we followed cues from some of the bigger uh social networks to get there got it so jared for folks who are not familiar enough yet with revgenius can you share some of the growth metrics uh you may be the top Three or four metrics that will give them a sense for how you're scaling and what the what the business looks like today yeah so um 17 000 plus members uh roughly a thousand members a month roughly um [Music] revenues past goal we'll get where we're Approaching a million dollars in revenues projected for this year which is which is great and um in in the metric now as i'm as i'm we're we're niching down now yeah we're niching down and we're creating more specific buy raw programs because you know you heard me talk about engagement and and it's fine like hey what do you need i need more founders fridays okay great Um i need this i need that we want to create different programs for each role so founders might need this but doing founders fridays that's only 10 of your community what's the other 90 well let's just create different things for each one at a time and not try to do too much yeah i've learned everything anything oh man you want to do it all and then There's a 100 chance of failing so right now uh the metrics are we've launched rev league uh we we we have dozens not hundreds of people that signed up for that this is the new thing and but what's cool is i could tell you we we tested this program for the last year or so we have we have probably 50 to 100 reps super Active and the number one person is about 70 meetings a month so so now notice how the metrics out of my mouth are literally their metrics for their job i'm aligning and i think this is the takeaway i'm aligning with them like i want all of these people hitting their go and i want the next thing so i said weekly active humans Am i am i backtracking uh and pardon me for unpacking this a bit on here but like i i just want to say like no because that that's a general metric right but then like you get more specific i want my like if you're if you're a founder and you're trying to raise a million dollars and you're paying somebody like they should be aligned to help you raise a percentage if not all of that otherwise why are you paying them right Ideally perfect world not many companies do that type of granularity because it doesn't scale but we have an awesome point right now where we can as we figure it out yeah and uh as a member of red genius i've experienced the beauty of being matched to other members of rev genius for conversations through your latest uh offering uh you know meet drivegenius.com and um i was just commenting to somebody here at work that uh it's great that you Know every thursday i get a message and i'm i've got four more meetings set up and i really didn't have to lift a finger uh and it's it's amazing uh you know it's a wonderful service that uh that helps the community so uh you mentioned roles uh and and sort of starting to think about it in terms of different roles what is the demographic of this community what does it look like so the community looks like everybody um 50 let's say are individual contributors you know the people working day-to-day selling marketing etc the other 50 some level of management from first level management to top to founders that might be founding selling to founders that are bigger right so so that's everything sales marketing rev ups uh and customer success sales is the lion's share sales is 50 to 60 percent Marketing in rev-ops is probably a clean 20ish percent each with like a sliver for customer success as as as we grow that and um yeah that's that's what the community looks like today got it and and uh you know you mentioned of course you know founders very focused on driving revenue sales very focused on driving revenue marketing very focused on enabling revenue Revops is a relatively new uh new phenomenon particularly with b2b sas companies and historically you know we had sales ops marketing ops kind of different ops functions and it sort of evolved into revenue operations what do you see the role of revenue operations in driving revenue what what does that look like to you yeah i'll tell you with our organization rev-ops Organizes everything yeah rip-ops holds me honest um so i think rev-ops has always been around just not with the right responsibilities like maybe that's your sales force admin that just got a little more responsibility is that leveled up etc um there's always been somebody to take i'm sorry perfect organization there's always been somebody to take the heat Off sales and not make you have to do anything make you just show up to work log in and just do what you need to do and all of a sudden there's leads and all of a sudden um you get an inbound email when somebody signs up and you you just as a sales person you never think about who does that you just know that you don't right right so so so that's ops right and and then why rev ups for sales marketing Because at the end of the day everything is driving towards the same revenue goal and people were seeing or companies were seeing a lot more fragmentation uh people operating in silos like why is marketing ops just with marketing and talking to themselves in sales ops here having a rev-ops function where sales marketing ops everything enablement tools is all-in-one Enables a more seamless organization right because you have marketing ops without oversight um they have 20 tools you have sales off so that oversight they have 30 tools yeah um and you know what let's see some of the tools they both could use yeah and sometimes they don't even know like like we're talking like marketing automation platform and sales engagement platform They're not that different and like et cetera et cetera so the role of revops has increased uh 2x over like the last 12 to 16 or 18 months on linkedin from a titles perspective and it's for good reason rev opps higher was our third higher gotcha interesting very interesting and uh and so i mean you sit in a very unique place uh Jared where uh obviously you run a business and you have rev ups as a third hire on your team but you're also looking across a lot of uh rev ops uh folks that are part of your community and having a conversation about what's important and interesting in this in this role what and you brought up this very interesting Point about you know how every sales rep or marketing person or ops person has these 20 or 30 different tools that they have to go into to get access to all the information that they need and you know kind of i see devops as as uh the glue that kind of holds it all together so what role do you see data play in in the in driving uh sales right i mean and and how does sort of revlops bring the right information the right intelligence the right insight to uh to a sales team Oh my gosh so so data's everything literally everything um you could have two sales reps right that are just as good next to each other two marketing people that are just as good and if you don't have a clearly defined icp for one and you have the clearest to find for the other you give them the same tools we're just talking data icp Teamed with the right data to get to them are you kidding me like like one person is just spraying and praying and very inefficient with their time yeah that's that's the word inefficient and because inefficient ineffective and the other person you know is is like an assassin right like like i know companies that do between five and 10 million in the usa that have salesforce And marketo in their tech stack because there is this unique gap in between connecting the two i don't even know what it is for companies that also um have an acv of this or this and what what i'm saying here is it's not just like a high level icp if you could get down to knowing this like that that are on that some for some reason are still using zapier to connect it right me as Workato oh my god this amazing opportunity why are you using zaps do you know 20 of them are breaking and the data is not transferring and your market key doesn't get that i don't even sell this product right but like i think i just made a sale right like that's crazy first thing you have somebody else that's like that doesn't have that data and and they're Let's say they have a top 100 list right they don't know 25 percent of them are on hubspot because that's that's roughly maybe what it is so they're following up and doing all this not knowing that they're wasting their time yeah and now their messaging is a little off and and this person realizes that hubspot actually works too in these Three use cases because they have the data for it yeah night and day same rep this person crushes goal this company scales to the top this person um takes a lot longer to get there a lot and hopefully they have the runway to get there yeah i love the way you broke it up and the analogy that you kind of brought up here of uh two different sales reps and you know One enabled through data and having clarity on their icp the other sort of feeling their way through the problem and uh and you're right it takes a lot of support and information and connectivity and data to get the sales machine going and so so i love that now i'm gonna you know i'm gonna switch gears back a little bit about rev genius i wanna understand uh as you Think ahead what is the vision for red genius what does that look like to you aside from sort of you know obviously you're gonna scale obviously you're gonna drive growth you're already doing that but just for the community what's your vision so at a high level our mission i'll start with our mission and then we'll go to the vision our mission in the beginning and still is today and I i can see it evolving a little is to educate empower and inspire all revenue professionals so to give everybody a space to learn to level up and all of that now over the last year we had some learnings like fragmentation tons of noise right like and even more so i said is so now it's evolving to um having like an unbiased space in the Sense that no matter what network you're going to to try to learn whether that's a social media platform linkedin or otherwise whether that's google you're the bottom of that funnel any content that they put out is to get you to buy to watch to listen to get your eyeballs either buy right now or buy tomorrow that seems a little off right like Anything you google if i google data am i gonna if i googled how to podcast am i honestly gonna find that very fast no you're not and then team that with the community world you have um in part in the tangent you have you have linkedin you have private community slack discord whatever and neither of them like if you want to learn you can learn here better than Here linkedin you can't uh here you can but you have to ask questions it's hard to search and find so how how can how could we create a new category in between that helps people truly honestly learn gives everybody access to that learning wow um and does some key things better better better networking you see us trying to Test better networking linkedin doesn't do that slack doesn't do that right um better discovery not algorithm driven so to speak what does this look like uh well we're going to be launching a new category community learning platform and then perhaps perhaps even integrating right like and we've spoke about this into your already tool stack so how can we do some key things that these people Need to know better so the vision is create a space everyone could go to okay i love it i'll always have a free thing and and yeah help them learn yeah i i think uh you know to hear you speak about the missions but with such clarity uh it's great uh to to hear that and and the the category creation that you're focused on uh from a community standpoint i think community learning platform is indeed pretty unique as a story and as a Category and i think if you simply ask the question that you know all of us spend time on social networks a variety of different social networks how much of that time is actually spent learning something new versus you know time that is that that is not recoverable in in any positive way think about that and if you can switch that ratio that's you know that's a great way to Uh to to create a category and to to engage a community okay uh we're gonna shift gears a little bit now so we're gonna get to the fun section um so one of the you know one of the i follow uh several folks on your team online and one of your team members recently uh had rg tattooed on uh on his finger yeah so that was day one by the way day one day One the day he joined you amazing so and you've been with this business for over a year and a half so the question everybody's asking is when are you getting rg tattooed on on you and what's going to get you there it either has to be soon or never because i i've got i've got an offer from chili piper to uh up to 500 bucks to do it so there's no cost for me to do it i have no tattoos i have no tattoos So um i'm of the jewish faith my mom always said i can't be buried in jewish cemetery and that just kind of sticks with me uh that's uh um hmm even phil knight has nike on the bottom of his shoe if we become as big as nike when we do i'll consider on the bottom of my foot Okay got it i'm rooting for it uh jared it's been awesome talking to you and reconnecting with you thank you for your time thank you for sharing your insights and your journey i'm pretty sure you've inspired more than a few people uh i love the way that you're building a community it's been incredibly beneficial to us as immersa in our early days as we're working our way through how do we take our story to market and Get some feedback uh from the community and it's been wonderful so i'm going to encourage everybody to check out to check out brevgenius both on slack and on your website and sign up to this amazing community if you're not already a part of it you're focused on community we're focused on data and bringing data intelligence to everyone you can find us at immersa.co and drop us a quick note if you'd like to talk About how we can help to drive data intelligence into your crm and revenue organization and address some of the challenges and drive growth for your business thank you again for your time thank you i'm grateful [Music] you

“Our mission is to educate, inspire all revenue professionals…so to give everybody a space to learn to level up.”

Jared Robin

About The Guest

Jared is the Co-Founder of RevGenius [+link out], a community of revenue generating sales and marketing professionals brought together to learn, share, support and grow with each other. Prior to founding RevGenius, Jared spent 7 years running sales.

From a sales professional who hated cold calling to creating the fastest growing community of revenue professionals. How did Jared do it? You would not want to miss this founder’s secret sauce to growth.

What We Cover

In this session of Founder’s Friday, we go behind the scenes to uncover Jared’s personal journey that led to the founding of RevGenius (RG) in the midst of a global pandemic.

From zero to 17k revenue professionals in just 18 months, RevGenius is seeing amazing membership growth. Here, Jared takes us on a virtual journey that began with a LinkedIn group[link out to LI], moved on to Slack [link out to site], to the creation of a new category of Community Learning Platforms with RevGenius.

How does data drive growth? What is the future of RevOps? How does RevGenius evolve from here? Jared addresses every sales, service and revenue professionals top questions as he paints the vision for the future of RevGenius.