S2E10 – How to build and grow a B2B SaaS Sales team? With James Ski

To build and grow a high-performing B2B SaaS sales team, it’s essential to follow a strategic approach. Start by defining your ideal customer profile and understanding their pain points thoroughly. Then, hire sales professionals with a deep understanding of your industry and product. Provide comprehensive training and ongoing coaching to ensure they are well-equipped to communicate the unique value proposition of your SaaS solution. Implement robust CRM and sales enablement tools to streamline processes and track performance metrics. Foster a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement within your team, encouraging knowledge sharing and experimentation with various sales strategies. Additionally, invest in content marketing, thought leadership and social selling to generate leads and establish credibility in your industry. Regularly analyze data and adjust your strategies based on performance, ensuring a scalable and sustainable growth trajectory for your B2B SaaS sales team.

In this episode of the “Grow Your B2B SaaS” podcast, host Joran welcomes James Ski, founder and CEO of Sales Confidence, SaaS Growth Event founder, public speaker, and author. The discussion centers on the evolving landscape of sales strategies and the crucial role of building a sales team in today’s SaaS environment.

Why you should listen to James Ski

• James Ski’s extensive background as a high-performing salesperson and sales leader in early-stage SaaS startups and at LinkedIn.
• The inception of Sales Confidence, the largest events and membership platform for sales professionals in the UK and Europe.
• The annual SAS Growth conference aimed at supporting founders and sales leaders in understanding effective go-to-market strategies.

Understanding Sales Roles

• An overview of typical sales roles, including meeting bookers, closers, account managers, sales management, sales leadership, sales operations, and sales enablement.

When to Hire the First Salesperson

• The critical decision of when to hire the first salesperson for early-stage SaaS companies.
• James emphasizes that founders should be capable of running the entire sales process themselves before hiring.
• The importance of having 10-20 customers, testimonials, case studies, and proof points to instill confidence in the first sales hire.

Common Mistakes in First Sales Hires

• The common mistake of hiring someone from an established company with a playbook for a startup with no established processes.
• The need for the first sales hire to be resourceful, motivated, and able to ask for business effectively.

Growing the Sales Team

• The mistake of hiring only one salesperson, reducing the probability of success.
• Overhiring by one or two individuals to increase the chances of finding successful salespeople.
• The importance of creating a feedback loop, utilizing call intelligence platforms for analysis, and conducting role play and coaching sessions.
• The value of A/B testing in presentations, email campaigns, and pitches to continuously improve the sales process.

Product Demonstrations in Sales

• The common mistake of showcasing all product features in the first call.
• The need for a thorough discovery call to understand prospects‘ challenges, objectives, and stakeholders.
• Gradually introducing key product features that address the prospect’s major problems.
• Involving multiple stakeholders in the sales process to showcase the technology effectively.

Keeping the Sales Team Motivated

• Motivating a sales team is crucial, as they need to consistently perform and meet sales targets.
• James emphasizes the importance of aligning the sales team with the long-term vision and purpose of the company.
• Setting milestones, targets, and reward structures, along with financial incentives, is essential.
• The standard practice of a 50% base salary and 50% commission (OTE) in SaaS sales.

Hiring Salespeople and Commission

• When to hire a salesperson: James suggests considering hiring a salesperson once your product reaches a $5,000 annual contract value.
• The importance of hiring eager, motivated individuals, even if they have less experience, for early-stage SaaS companies.
• Balancing commission and salary to motivate and compensate salespeople effectively.

Product-Led Growth vs. Sales

• Discussing the trend of product-led growth and James’ perspective on its limitations.
• James acknowledges the efficiency of product-led growth but highlights that sales professionals are still necessary for scaling.
• The role of sales in navigating businesses, educating users, involving stakeholders, and building business cases.
• The importance of product adoption metrics and expansion opportunities in determining when to involve sales.

Mental Well-being in Sales

• James emphasizes the significance of mental well-being for salespeople.
• Strategies for maintaining mental well-being include providing perspective, setting realistic expectations, offering downtime, and reducing negative stress.
• The importance of fostering a positive company culture.

Benefits of Sales Communities for Founders

• Sales Confidence offers a community where founders can connect with sales professionals and access training, mentoring, coaching, and networking opportunities.
• The value of enabling sales teams to upskill and develop, especially in early-stage companies.

Scaling Sales Teams

• James provides practical advice for SaaS founders at different stages:
  • Up to $10K MRR: Founders should initially handle sales themselves, gradually hire support for lead generation (e.g., virtual assistants, junior SDRs), and only consider closers after reaching this milestone.
  • Scaling to $1M ARR: By this stage, a company should have a proven sales process, independent closers, and a predictable pipeline.

Parting Thoughts

• James encourages founders to have confidence in their ability to sell their product and recommends investing in sales training and coaching.
• The importance of patience in business and understanding that everything often takes longer than expected.

Key Timestamps

• (0:28) Show and guest intro
• (1:30) Why you should listen to James Sky
• (2:34) The different roles within sales
• (3:30) When to hire a salesperson
• (5:12) What needs to be in place before hiring a salesperson?
• (6:02) Common mistakes companies make when hiring a salesperson
• (7:06) Common mistakes companies make while growing a team
• (8:16) The effective strategies and processes implemented to make your sales team successful
• (9:06) How to do an effective product pitch to your prospects
• (11:51) How to keep your sales team motivated
• (13:53) When does a salesperson come into play?
• (14:42) James’ thoughts on product-led growth strategy
• (16:00) How to qualify leads in the sales process
• ( 16:42) The importance of the mental well-being of a sales team
• (18:31) How Sales team members can take rests and time off without worrying about their next paycheck
• (19:43) How founders can benefit from James’ Sales team network
• (21:25) SaaS building growth advice (growing to 10K MRR & 1M ARR)
• (24:54) What James wishes he had known 10 years ago

Transcription

[00:00:00.170] – Intro

Welcome to growing a B. Two B. SaaS? On this show, you’ll get actionable and usable advice. You’ll hear about all aspects of growing a business to a business software company, customer success, sales funding, bootstrapping, exits, scaling, everything you need to know about growing a startup. And you’ll get it from someone who’s going through the same journey. Now you’re your host, Joran Hoffman.

[00:00:28.170] – Joran

Welcome back to another episode on the Grow Your BDB SaaS podcast, where we discuss all topics on how to grow your BDB SaaS. No matter in which stage you’re in, based on the previous episodes, we know that you often go for one growth motion. The best is to combine two or more. And according to the latest pedal study, product Led growth becomes bigger and bigger. But they also noted that tracking PQAs and PQLS will result in a much faster growth where you are going to need salespeople. It basically means is the hybrid approach of sales and Product Led is becoming more and more important. Hence, we’re going to talk today about how to build a sales team. My guest is James Ski. Today. He’s the founder and CEO of Sales Confidence, the founder of SaaS Growth Event. Focus on SaaS Growth. And he’s also a public speaker and I think he’s currently writing a book. So I have no idea where he finds the time, but I’m more than happy to have him on the show. So, without further ado, welcome, James.

[00:01:24.670] – James

Thanks for having me, Joran. I’m excited to have this conversation today.

[00:01:28.350] – Joran

Likewise, likewise. I always ask this very Dutch blunt question if people are not convinced after this introduction, why should they listen to you today?

[00:01:36.910] – James

Sure. So I guess my background has been as a high performing salesperson and sales leader where I was involved in early stage SaaS startups in the UK, companies like Huddle, Ametria and Apogo. And then I spent over four years at LinkedIn building and developing teams, as well as selling to executives at FTSE 100 companies. Over the last five years, I’ve built Sales Confidence, which is the largest events and membership business for salespeople and sales leaders in the UK and Europe. And we also have an annual conference called SAS Growth where we basically support founders, sales leaders, revenue leaders with understanding what the best go to market strategies are in the UK and Europe.

[00:02:23.430] – Joran

You’re definitely embedded in the sales region here. You can hear that. I’m going to start with some real basic questions because most of them are majority of our listeners are early stage SaaS companies. If you just go over the different roles within sales, what are they and what are the differences?

[00:02:40.370] – James

Yeah, so typically you have a typical split is meeting bookers, closers and account managers. A meeting booker would be known as someone that generates leads outbound lead generation prospecting, making cold calls, sending emails, sending LinkedIn messages. They’re typically known as a sales development rep or a business development rep, then you’ve got an account executive. They are typically the ones that are closing the deals that are passed from the SDR or the BDR and then once they are in the closed one and they are a customer, you will have an account manager that nurtures those relationships and builds and upsells. Of course on top of that you have sales management, you have sales leadership and also sales operations that support that and maybe sales enablement that supports with training and development.

[00:03:29.390] – Joran

Nice. And I think a lot of SaaS companies struggle with when do I need to hire my first salesperson? And I guess then the question is also going to be what does the first salesperson actually needs to do? So what kind of roles would fit the first sales hire?

[00:03:44.160] – James

Great question and it’s a process that I’ve been through in my own business. I think ultimately you as the founder need to be able to run a full sales process yourself. You need to be able to generate and create leads via inbound or outbound. You need to be able to demo your solution, manage a process and then close a deal. And you’ve got to find a repeatable pattern that you can then pass on to someone else. Now that first sales hire, you’re not going to be able to afford to compete in terms of salary and commission package with other established scale ups. So they need to be someone that is super hungry, super motivated and entrepreneurial in nature without being an entrepreneur that’s going to go and do it themselves. Meaning that they need to be able to be very resourceful. At the end of day, you don’t have a perfect playbook at the early stages. So this is not something that you can rinse and repeat. You’re continuously seeking feedback from the market, you’re learning about how to manage the process, you’re taking feedback and you’re improving it. And so you need someone that’s curious, hyper motivated and also fantastic at asking for the business, actually closing the deals.

[00:04:55.810] – James

If someone’s not asking for the business, you’re not going to grow your revenue and you’re not going to be able to scale. So that would be some of the characteristics I think you need to look for.

[00:05:04.370] – Joran

Yeah, and you mentioned it right at the beginning, you need a repeatable process but you’re not going to have a lot of resources available for your first hire. What do you think though? Has to be minimum in place before you really hire that salesperson. Yeah.

[00:05:20.780] – James

So you need to at least got it’s hard to put an exact number on it, but you need kind of 1020 customers that you have shown that you’ve managed a sales cycle and closed business and you’ve got testimonials, you’ve got case studies, you’ve got proof points that a salesperson can believe and have some optimism. They’ve got to come on the journey with you and your vision, but they need some proof if you’ve got nothing, you’ve got no customers and you’re going to hire a salesperson. That’s almost impossible for a salesperson to get behind because they need to see some proof points for them to have confidence to go through and follow and be motivated to win and close more business.

[00:06:02.420] – Joran

When you look at hiring your first salesperson, I think you can make a lot of mistakes. What are the most common mistake companies make while hiring their first salesperson?

[00:06:11.660] – James

Getting someone from an established company is often the mistake. So having someone that’s come from a place where they’ve had the playbook, there’s already tens of millions of that software that’s been solved and then they try and bring them to an early stage business where there is no playbook, there’s no resources, there’s no training, there’s no onboarding. You have to figure everything out yourself. There’s often this idea that going to get a big name from someone is okay, but it doesn’t work that way and it’s very unlikely to be successful. You’re most likely to get someone with a lot less experience but a lot more fitting in terms of their character and motivation and their tributes.

[00:06:51.270] – Joran

Yeah. And that comes down to what you said before. They really have to be hungry where often I guess when they’re already in a big established company, they’re more treated with tools, automations, they don’t have to work as hard as really going back in the trenches and working for a startup. Yeah, nice. When we take it one step further so that’s the first sales hire does. It also often comes back to when growing the team. What are the most common mistakes companies making while actually growing the sales team out?

[00:07:18.170] – James

So I think one thing people do is they hire one individual so they only hire one SDR or they only hire one closer and that just reduces the probability that you’re going to have success. Ultimately you should try and kind of overhire by one or even two individuals because only one or two people are going to be successful. That’s just the nature of sales and figuring out a new business and a sales process. The other thing is having a repeatable feedback loop. So companies should be using call intelligence platforms like Gong or Jiminy to be able to analyze the conversations that are taking place so that you can feed back to the salesperson and the leadership and the product team to be able to then go and reiterate your pitch, your demonstrations, and really nail how you’re managing that full sales process.

[00:08:09.310] – Joran

Yeah, and I think that’s already like one thing you can really do on the process side, as in making sure you keep giving feedback. Indeed. Are there any other strategies or processes you would always recommend doing to make a sales team successful? Yeah.

[00:08:24.450] – James

So a continuous feedback role play, coaching individuals so without a live prospect, running through a presentation with each other and providing live feedback without a live real person prospect. So real time coaching is really important. Also a B, testing, running presentations with one type of demo versus another type of demo, having one version of a presentation deck versus another presentation deck, using one version of an email versus another. A B testing and getting those feedback would be another area that I would say that you’d want to focus on.

[00:09:02.300] – Joran

Yeah, and I think that’s a common thing you always have to do, I think within sales, or at least for SaaS companies, they always say don’t show your product in the first call, don’t show the actual product. What are your opinions on that too?

[00:09:15.440] – James

Yeah, I think as a product founder, when you’ve loved your product, you’ve coded it, you’ve built it, you’re very motivated to put it in people’s faces and show it off. And often the mistake, this is the number one mistake I see product led founders make is let’s say they’ve got ten widgets or ten features. They want to come and show up and throw up and show all of those ten features. Ultimately, while your product can solve lots of problems for that initial hook and that prospect’s interest, you only need to solve one problem. So that’s why it’s important that you have a full discovery call where you understand the business challenges, understand the personal challenges of the individual, understand the stakeholders that are going to be involved, understand the objectives of the business, really understand exactly why they would be a good prospect for your software. Once you’ve had that successful discovery call, then you can move into a demonstration and then you just want to highlight with that product the key areas that they mentioned previously that you can solve. Don’t overdo it, get them hooked that at least two or three of your features can solve their major problems.

[00:10:26.630] – James

And then as you go on a journey with them in the sales process, that will evolve and you will be able to build on that and they will see the full solution nearing the end of the process. But take your time and stage it is really important as part of the sales process. And also be aware that you need to bring in multiple stakeholders in a business. So you need to show off your technology to multiple stakeholders.

[00:10:49.640] – Joran

Makes a lot of sense. Like, we made this mistake ourselves as well, where we just dived into the product almost, I think, five minutes into the call in the first call, and we’re now chasing that where we’re really doing a good discovery, so we know if they’re going to be a good fit for us and vice versa, basically. And then from there, indeed, getting their pain out there.

[00:11:10.630] – Commercial Break

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[00:11:51.430] – Joran

when we talk about the sales team. So let’s say you establish a sales team and correct me if I’m wrong, but one of the biggest and hardest things to do is to keep your sales team motivated because they always have to keep performing, right? Like either every month, every quarter, again when the sales targets reset. How do you keep your sales team motivated?

[00:12:10.000] – James

Yeah, sure. Really? They need to have commitment to a vision. They need to buy into the vision of your business and the purpose that you are in existence for. So there has to be in their minds that this company is going places. So that long term vision is absolutely critical and you need to be reminding them of that vision and the progress that you’re making. You also then need milestones and targets that are shared amongst the team so that you have stretch goals, you have your realistic progress goals and then you have minimum expectation. And so setting minimum expectations guidelines, drilling into those daily, weekly habits and then rewarding with small wins, encouragement, recognition, reminders in the wider business that people have done well, that goes a long way. On top of that, salespeople are naturally money made to money motivated. We did a survey recently at Sales Confidence with over 1000 salespeople and 80% said money was the main reason they were in sales. Which is fairly obvious. Right, but you do have to have a very clear and transparent incentive scheme. You shouldn’t be holding back commission, you should be rewarding people in the right way, at the right stage.

[00:13:26.010] – Joran

Yeah, and I think that was one question I wanted to ask, as you mentioned, indeed rewarding and giving them recognition. But in the end, I do think indeed most salespeople do it for the money. How would you make that split between commission versus salary?

[00:13:38.800] – James

Yeah, typically in SaaS it’s a 50% base and a 50% what we call opportunity to earn OTE that makes up 100% of your package and that is fairly standard and is industry wide accepted.

[00:13:52.710] – Joran

Yeah. And when does a salesperson really come into play? Because if you can earn 50% commission, you probably want to earn 50% commission of high ticket deals. Like when should you recommend? Is there a certain price of your product when you should really think, okay, this is the moment where we really start hiring sales. Yeah.

[00:14:10.690] – James

I would say five K annual contract value. You can start to have a model whereby it makes sense to bring a kind of high ticket closer or a salesperson that’s got a target that you can afford to reward them, give them a percentage of the closed revenue. That’s generally the market that I would aim for.

[00:14:29.340] – Joran

Yeah, makes sense. And we briefly discussed it before we started recording. Like a lot of companies now go towards product led growth and have full focus on it. I know you have a bit of a different opinion on it. Yeah, I guess maybe my question here is what do you think of the road a lot of companies are taking while they’re trying to go like full product Led growth?

[00:14:47.510] – James

Look, ultimately it’s fantastically efficient and if you’ve got the right user experience and the UI, you can onboard and automate that experience. Your product immediately adds value to an individual user, can be expanded to a group of users effectively. It’s magic and it’s one of the most kind of magical go to market strategies that the kind of SaaS world has adopted. I would say though, you have to be realistic that for scaling from one to kind of 10 million arr, you will need sales professionals to manage a process. Even if people have adopted your solution, you need to then navigate that business, educate more users, bring in more business stakeholders, create business cases, persuade, negotiate, and build a plan. All of this is required to maximize the investment a company is going to have in your product. So by all means, it’s a fantastic strategy. It works when it’s right and you’ve got that product market fit, but it’s not going to remove the need for salespeople.

[00:15:50.840] – Joran

Yeah, and that’s exactly what the study of Petal said as well, where you have like, product qualified leads. So you are able, of course, with all the data you have as a product led growth company to qualify certain leads when they’re actually ready for a salesperson to reach out. How do you decide who to follow up on when somebody joins in a product Led growth motion? Like, what kind of data points would you look at to determine it’s valuable for a salesperson to start reaching out or not?

[00:16:16.490] – James

Yeah, look, that’s each to their own. I don’t have a particular ultimately you need to see a level of adoption versus those that are not adopting highly. So I imagine it would be some kind of metrics around adoption and usage and then also expansion opportunity. So have additional users been brought into whatever that product solution is? Would be a good leading indicator if it’s worth exploring that from a sales conversation perspective.

[00:16:41.400] – Joran

Yeah, makes sense. And I think one other big topic which is within sales is mental well being. I know you spoke about it on some other podcasts before as well. How do you make sure you keep your salespeople with a good mental well being?

[00:16:56.000] – James

Yeah, that’s a really important point. I’m glad you bring up. My business is called Sales Confidence and our kind of three pillars of focus are helping salespeople and sales leaders and founders with their mindset being in performance it’s no good having a high performing individual or business if you don’t have a good mindset and you feel well in yourself. And being is important. And also you need to be sustainable. Obviously in early stage startups and scale ups, there’s huge amounts of pressure even if you’re bootstrapped or funded, there’s so much chaotic change, pressure, stress that’s happening all the time. And ultimately what you need to be able to do is give people perspective, be realistic with expectations and targets, give people space to breathe, let them take time off when they need it, make sure that people do take time off and have downtime. There’s flexibility. Also, how you exert pressure is really important. Positive pressure is required to motivate individuals, but negative stress inducing pressure and toxicity is not going to create a good culture. So you’ve really got to think of that mechanics of your culture, how you’re looking after your team with some of those elements that I spoke about and you want this to be sustainable.

[00:18:14.090] – James

Ultimately if you’re going to have an outcome, an exit, or you’re going to be in business for many years and you want to survive, you want to be successful, you have to sustain your own progress and your own well being yourself as a founder or leadership team. But you also need to enable that for your sales team.

[00:18:31.090] – Joran

Maybe. R1, practical question, because we talked about the salary versus commission, right? 50 50 salespeople do it for the money and then when they take time off, it basically means they can’t follow up on deals, they can’t actually close things. So they might, I don’t know if they lose 50% of their salary, but they might indeed go lower with their next month because they were off and couldn’t actually follow up on deals. Are there any best practices on how you still can make sure that people will take time off and they’re not worry about their next paycheck?

[00:19:04.090] – James

Well look, you can’t remove the worry and what you’ve got to do though is plan ahead. You’ve got to share the workload, you’ve got to hand over, have proper handover notes to other people on the team, other people on the business, you’ve got to make sure other people are involved so that balls don’t get dropped during that time off. As simple as that. You have to let people take the time off. It may have an impact, but over the year it’s only going to be beneficial that people have had breaks away from their pipeline and they will be able to spread their bets over that year and have positive outcomes.

[00:19:37.450] – Joran

100% agree here. You also have the sales community where you help I think also founders as well when looking at the site. How do founders can benefit from the sales community you’re building right now?

[00:19:48.830] – James

Yeah, sure. Our core focus in the sales confidence membership is helping salespeople and sales leaders upskill maximize closed business and revenue and also connect with other leaders on a regular basis in a peer group. So if you’re a founder one, you can use our network to hire and identify people and talent and promote individuals that you’re looking to hire. But also you can put your team through our developments and our membership so they get ongoing development, training, support around those pillars of mindset, well being and performance. And ultimately it takes off a lot of the load, especially at the early stages around how you build and develop and train your team because you just don’t have the knowledge, capacity or the ability to do that. So giving them access to our membership where they get access to mentoring, professional coaching, peer accountability groups, master classes that we bring in, experts, authors, go to market strategists and then also networking events is basically the perfect kind of opportunity for people to involve. And the reason why I created it is because I saw this lacking when I was in early stage SaaS startups in the UK.

[00:20:57.770] – James

Of course, when you were working for a ginormous company like LinkedIn, a lot of these elements are covered but not at the early stages. So it’s a very cost effective way to help your salespeople and sales leaders up level.

[00:21:08.420] – Joran

Yeah, and I think you mentioned really good points here. Like for the early stage companies where you also mentioned hire somebody eager young who are really going after for it, they don’t always have the knowledge, so a network or a community like this could really help them to get their knowledge up without you having to spend a lot of time on it. Yeah, cool. When we talk about building a sales team, we’re going to break it up into two different stages. What kind of advice would you have for a SaaS founder who’s just starting out and growing to Ten K monthly recurring revenue?

[00:21:38.470] – James

I would say you need to get to that ten K marker by yourself and then rather than looking for a closer, you should be looking at someone to support you with lead generation. So that’s either lead generation from using and driving outbound campaigns or LinkedIn networking via your own LinkedIn profile. So someone that can virtual assistant actually is a good way to start that. When you’re having conversations, someone is also booking meetings for you. Also you should look at getting a junior SDR probably too. So just fill your calendar with more meetings. Only when you are starting to get overwhelmed with meetings in your diary and you’ve started to generate more of that revenue, should you be considering finding a closer to close more revenue for you.

[00:22:22.540] – Joran

So I think the advice here as well, which we heard a lot in season one, so you’re basically saying to get the Ten K Mr do sales yourself and after that then you can get a closer in. But at the beginning make sure that you have somebody supporting you to get to that milestone.

[00:22:37.500] – James

Correct.

[00:22:38.130] – Joran

If we take it one step further and somebody has passed surpassed ten K monthly recurring revenue, they’re starting to grow to towards 1 million arr, which is of course a big step. What kind of advice would you give SaaS founders here? Yeah.

[00:22:50.950] – James

So generally at this stage of the business, you’ve probably got a couple of SDRs that are booking meetings and you need two maybe free closers plus yourself that’s going to be supporting larger businesses. What you would like to think is that on that way to 1 million arr, that you’ve got a proven track record, you’ve got a playbook that you’re iterating and developing your product adds value. What point in the kind of customer journey it adds value? You’ve got proofpoint, you’ve got testimonials, you’ve got a team of closers that independently close sales without any of your interaction or input. And that’s when you know that you’re starting to build a repeatable sales process, predictable pipeline, and that’s going to allow you to scale through 1 million arr. And then obviously you start going on a different journey.

[00:23:40.170] – Joran

Nice. We are coming to the end. Are there any things we haven’t discussed or any thoughts you want to share with BB SaaS founders regarding growing a sales team?

[00:23:49.370] – James

I just say ultimately have confidence that you will find a way to win more customers yourself. I know it’s so challenging. You’ve got so many balls in the air, so many things that you’re juggling, but ultimately you’ll give investors, potential investors, potential colleagues, potential co founders, anyone that you hire, more confidence. If you really can sell your product, maybe you should be investing in training and coaching for yourself. Even if you don’t come from a sales background or commercial background and you’re very product and technology led, this is a skill that will pay you back over and over again and it will compound over and over again.

[00:24:29.990] – Joran

Nice. So I think when people are going to look at this summary episode of season one, it comes back now. Like in the end, building a sauce is hard as a founder, but in the end, make sure you do the sales yourself. And good points in educating yourself because I think there’s a lot of tech founders out there who don’t really like to do sales, don’t have any experience with it. In the end, you still need to do it. I guess that’s the answer here. Cool. And then my final question. Is there anything you wish you knew ten years ago?

[00:24:59.360] – James

Good question. Wow. Everything takes longer than you expect. I wish my kind of expectation management was much more realistic because I would have saved myself from a lot of stress and a lot of burnout. Often things take two, three, four times as long as you expect. So learn to have patience a lot earlier on in your business career, I think is a healthy mindset to have.

[00:25:24.900] – Joran

Yeah, and I think a lot of SaaS founders can relate to this because in the end, everything indeed takes longer. Even though you think I now planned it and I took a bit of extra time, it often still takes longer. Cool. Thank you very much for coming on the show, James. If people want to get in contact with you, how can they do?

[00:25:39.920] – James

Yeah, the best way to connect with me is to connect with me on LinkedIn. So James Ski, c and founder of sales confidence. Also, you can visit salesconfidence.com or you can email me, James [email protected], and I’ll get back to you. Welcome. Any questions, anything that I can do to help or go into more detail.

[00:25:58.960] – Joran

Nice. What’s more, thanks again, James, and have a good one.

[00:26:02.210] – James

Thank you very much. Thanks for having me on the show. Great job.

[00:26:04.740] – Joran

No worries.

[00:26:07.110] – Speaker 1

You’ve been listening to Growing a B Two B. SaaS Yoron has been ahead of customer success before founding his own startup. He’s experiencing the same journey you are. We hope you’ve gotten some actionable advice from the show and we hope you had fun along the way. We know we did. Make sure to like, rate and review the podcast in the meantime, to find out more and to hook up with us on our social media sites, go to www.getreditus.com.

[00:26:39.610] – Joran

You.

[00:26:40.110] – Speaker 1

See you next time on Growing a B two B sass.

Meet the author

Joran Hofman

Back in 2020 I was an affiliate for 80+ SaaS tools and I was generating an average of 30k in organic visits each month with my site. Due to the issues I experienced with the current affiliate management software tools, it never resulted in the passive income I was hoping for. Many clunky affiliate management tools lost me probably more than $20,000+ in affiliate revenue. So I decided to build my own software with a high focus on the affiliates, as in the end, they generate more money for SaaS companies.