S6E8 – SaaS Growth Strategy: How Founders Can Quickly Scale Revenue and Achieve a Profitable Exit with Jonny Staker.

In this episode, Joran explores how SaaS founders can create a smart growth strategy to boost revenue and aim for a profitable exit. Joining him is Jonny Staker, a seasoned entrepreneur with over 23 years of experience in growing businesses. Jonny shares a unique approach that helps SaaS companies grow just enough to exit profitably without chasing endless scale.

Understanding the Importance of a Profitable Exit

Joran and Jonny talk about why aiming for a profitable exit is more important than just any exit. While many think all exits are naturally profitable, Jonny explains why that’s not always true. For founder-led companies especially, planning for profitability is key. That means growing the business the right way and setting it up for a strong valuation when it’s time to exit.

Common Misconceptions About Growth

Jonny breaks down a few myths SaaS founders often believe. One is the idea that filling the top of the funnel with leads and relying on automation will lead to success. Another is believing content alone will bring in enough leads. He explains why founders need to stay hands-on with the sales process to really drive growth.

Identifying Common Mistakes in Growth Strategies

Building on the myths, Jonny points out common mistakes like outsourcing sales too early or depending too much on agencies. These can hurt growth if the company’s value and target audience (ICP) aren’t clear yet. He warns against spending heavily on lead generation without building a strong base first.

The Vanquish Effect and the 12 Pillars of Outbound

Jonny introduces his outbound strategy called the “Vanquish Effect”—a framework with 12 key pillars. It starts with understanding your ICP, followed by power positioning, which means making your value crystal clear. He also shares how to align your outbound efforts across platforms like LinkedIn, cold email, and calls for better results.

Leveraging Content and Building Partnerships

Content plays a supporting role, says Jonny—it should help nurture leads instead of being the main driver. He also talks about using referrals, partnerships, and affiliate programs to build trust and expand reach in the market.

The Crucial Role of Strategic Selling

Strategic selling is at the heart of SaaS success. Jonny says founders often miss out because they misunderstand the sales process. He recommends a consultative approach—listen first, sell later. Truly understanding a prospect’s needs helps build trust and improves close rates.

Enhancing Conversion Rates Through Effective Communication

To boost conversion rates, especially on LinkedIn, Jonny suggests ditching templates. Instead, use personalized and open-ended messages. He encourages founders to test and track connection acceptance rates to see what works best and adjust from there.

Overcoming Challenges in Founder-Led Sales

Founders wear many hats, and Jonny knows how tough that can be. But he insists that in early-stage SaaS, founder-led sales are non-negotiable. Talking directly to customers helps founders learn fast and grow faster.

The Future of Growth and the Role of Human Interaction

Jonny looks ahead with optimism. While AI and tools can make things easier, he says the human side of sales will always matter. In a world full of automation, genuine conversations will help companies stand out.

Final Advice for SaaS Founders

To wrap things up, Jonny gives one clear piece of advice: stay close to sales. Founders should focus on having real conversations and go deep in a few areas rather than spreading themselves too thin.

Key Timecodes

(0:00) – Introduction to the episode: understanding your audience

(0:30) – Overview of SaaS growth strategy 

(0:43) – Guest intro: Jonny Staker’s experience and Vanquish Consultancy Group

(1:21) – Importance of a profitable exit

(1:44) – Misconceptions about growth in SaaS companies

(2:28) – Mistakes in outsourcing and automation

(4:05) – Best practices for implementing a growth strategy

(4:53) – 12 Pillars of high leverage outbound

(6:21) – Approach to content and inbound leads

(8:09) – Importance of ICP mastery and positioning

(9:09) – Building effective and targeted lists

(11:03) – LinkedIn example for better conversion

(13:24) – Acceptance rates and tweaking processes

(15:13) – Balancing time as a founder in sales

(17:06) – Challenges in maintaining a sales conversion rate

(18:00) – Strategic selling vs product presentation

(19:55) – Importance of strategic selling for founders

(22:15) – Best practices to grow SaaS revenue

(23:55) – Overcoming challenges and obstacles in growth

(26:32) – Importance of manual processes before automation

(29:52) – Future of growth in sales with human engagement

(30:36) – Best advice for SaaS founders on growth

(31:17) – Advice for SaaS founders aiming for 10K MRR

(32:39) – Moving to 10 million ARR and replicating founder efforts

(34:35) – Summary of the episode’s key points

(36:31) – How to get in contact with Jonny Staker

Transcription

[00:00:00.000] – Jonny
If you don’t understand exactly who you serve, then you can’t effectively go and build lists to go and pick those guys out. Every sale happens in the prospect’s mind, not in the salesperson’s mind. So it’s got to take place in their mind first, and that’s the best way to bring it about. The companies that will grow the fastest in terms of the selling motion will do so by being human and having a level of human activity in there that others aren’t willing to do. Today, we’re going to talk about setting up a SaaS growth strategy.

[00:00:38.460] – Joran
More specifically, how founders can quickly scale revenue and achieve a profitable exit. My guest today is Jonny Staker. Jonny has more than 23 years of experience in growing businesses, either as an employee, founder, consultant, shareholder, or investor. So he’s literally seen all sides off the table. During this period, he has been a founder four times himself with three axes, and currently He runs the Vanquish Consultancy Group, where he helps B2B companies with their growth. He even trademarked the Vanquish effect, which we’re going to talk about today as well. Today, we’re also going to learn more about this unconventional strategy he has, which could lead to limited scale for your SaaS and the profitable access at the end. Welcome to the show, Johnny.

[00:01:21.010] – Jonny
Hey, Joran. Pleased to be here. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:24.140] – Joran
I’m Dutch, so we’re just going to dive right in. The title of the show even says achieve a profitable exit? Why is it so important to actually mention profitable just before exit? Like an exit should be almost profitable always, right? Or is it different in practice?

[00:01:44.440] – Jonny
I guess it depends on the goal. For most founder-led companies, the profitable exit is the big thing, really. And I know that it’s a strange world that we’re living in right now, and there’s a lot of guys looking to just come out and chase the next or any object. So it’s not always the headline for everybody, but of course, profitable exit is the key. You’ve built this thing, you’ve nurtured your baby, so you need the greatest multiple for it.

[00:02:14.720] – Joran
We’re going to talk about growth. I like to talk about misconceptions, mistakes. What is the biggest misconception people or founders have about growth that you see a lot of SaaS companies have at the moment?

[00:02:28.800] – Jonny
I’d say that the The biggest recurring thing I hear from founders is they want to go for volume immediately. They want to fill the top of the hopper with leads and just automate everything. They’ll try to put tech on it real quick, and they want to be hands-off. They’ll say to me, I want the pipeline to run itself and just pick up the sail at the end and deal with that. But the issue is it doesn’t work like that because you junk the pipe. As as it were, and you end up with disappointment when it comes to the number of calls that you’re booking and the number of qualified leads that you’re bringing into the pipeline. That’s the first thing. The second thing is founders expect content to drive inbound. There’s this big buzz around, how do I get my content and how do I get inbound to deliver leads? A lot of the content and creators out there are quite misleading in that. Everybody’s, how do I just drive inbound? I don’t want to do outbound. To me, both of these are the paradox that the founder has to be involved in every part of the sales process, from ICP segmenting to the full sales cycle and the sale itself.

[00:03:45.420] – Jonny
Content alone will not drive inbound. That’s what I’m hearing from founders.

[00:03:49.850] – Joran
So these are some common misconceptions, right? Are there any common mistakes companies make as well? Like you mentioned, wanting to automate things right away, wanted to go for volume right away. Any other big mistakes you see them making right now?

[00:04:05.150] – Jonny
Yeah, that’s the biggest one. Outsourcing is another one. They’re looking to outsource everything quickly and put agencies on it or at the next level, fractional stuff. Agencies and volume services too quickly. They don’t understand the business value proposition, so they just come in and pour gasoline at the top of the funnel and not a lot happens at the end. Outsourcing Coursing is another one that if it happens too soon, it’s dangerous.

[00:04:34.660] – Joran
Nice. Cool. Now, I guess we know the common mistakes, right? Let’s turn things around. If somebody wants to implement a growth strategy and they want to do it successfully, do you have any best practices on how to do it step by step? Is this maybe also where the vanquish effect comes into play?

[00:04:53.690] – Jonny
Yes, I look at the whole outbound motion as 12 pillars, really. I would call it 12 pillars high leverage outbound. But effectively, I would start with ICP mastery. Who is the ICP? It sounds like an obvious question, but most people have an idea. They can’t just pick that avatar out. Before we build our network or lists, is this the right ICP? Do we know where they’re hanging out? Do we know they are likely to convert on our service or product? That’s point one. Point two is obviously power positioning. Are we positioned in the right way with our value proposition so that our ICP will understand what we do and it’s a necessity for them rather than would like to have? Then we would layer up outbound prospecting, which look at differently. So right through the qualifying and the triage stage, leverage outbound. So platforms like LinkedIn, email, cold call, how we bring all those into play together. The content piece, I would look at content as part of a flywheel versus a direct inbound motion. Once we’ve connected or outbounded somebody, what do they see of us in our content? What do they make of us?

[00:06:21.860] – Jonny
Effectively treating that as we write our content for the last 100 people we brought into our world. Referrals, partnership Cribs, affiliates, those things.

[00:06:32.190] – Joran
Yeah. Maybe one question regarding the content that you mentioned, you’re targeting it towards the last 100 people you bring in. Does it mean if you talk about the funnel, you always focus on bottom of funnel content?

[00:06:44.600] – Jonny
I would always look at it like that. Particularly with things like LinkedIn, everybody’s trying to write content that just brings inbound. I’ve had clients who bring in a million impressions on a post, literally 600,000 to a million impressions. The inbound they get from that isn’t qualified, so it isn’t quality inbound anyway. So you can get lost in that and just get lost in the noise of all of this stuff coming in and, This is great, we’re getting tons of inbound, we’ll forget everything else. But it’s a mistake because the only way you should look at it, in my opinion, is wherever it is, whether it’s LinkedIn, whether it’s email, whether it’s cold call. However, those people were brought into our qualifying process, whether it’s the last 100 Connections or a website funnel or something like that. That’s who we’re writing for so they can understand us, the product, how we feel about things, maybe our contrarian approach. So it’s always just nurturing the outbound versus being an inbound machine, if that makes sense.

[00:07:55.490] – Joran
It makes sense. I did interrupt you. So we were talking about the 12 pillars, As far as I have them, ICP, mastery, positioning, outbound prospecting, support outbound with content, affiliates partners, referrals. That’s the last thing you mentioned.

[00:08:09.810] – Jonny
Yeah. And then there’s obviously events and workshops, which are handraisers, as We call it a fundraising event. And of course, the selling itself, so strategic selling, which is crucial in SaaS, particularly. Rather than product-based selling, it should be more consultative, more strategic. So that’s the 10th pillar where we focus heavily. And then tech, AI and automation, and sales motion optimization. What’s working? Where do we apply more pressure? As far as I can see, in my experience, that’s the 12 pillars of outbound that you need to do really well in all instances to succeed as a SaaS.

[00:08:51.480] – Joran
Yeah. The first two pillars you mentioned, ICP, mastery and positioning. For example, we even had April Dunford on the show. Talks about positioning quite heavily. I think that’s all she does. How important is the foundation, which I think are step one and two in your case?

[00:09:09.240] – Jonny
It’s totally crucial. If you don’t understand exactly who you serve, then you can’t effectively go and build lists to go and pick those guys out. I often see when we look at, again, talking about LinkedIn, but it could equally be ZoomInfo or Apollo lists that have been built. But when we go back and look at it, it’s often quite illuminating for founders and sales teams when we look at it and they say, You know what? It’s actually 70% non-ICP. I don’t really know what we were doing there. It’s crucial. You’re building lists that have been nurtured through newsletters, emails, outbound stuff, or LinkedIn connections. They’re absolute gold to start with. It’s obvious, really, that you should look at it like that, but not everybody does. That’s crucial to have that as just absolute gold. So there’s only gold entering my pipeline in terms of my ICP. And then positioning is obviously laid on top of that, which is once I’ve sought out my gold, how do I appear to them when they see a social profile or an email footer, particularly in founder-led sales? How do they interpret me when I approach them? And The huge difference you make in small tweaks in headlines, bios, content that you write, we’ve just seen night and day when it comes to conversions.

[00:10:41.900] – Jonny
Those two, totally crucial.

[00:10:45.080] – Joran
Let’s dive deeper in here. What is the best practice in this case? If people are listening now, that sounds great, but what should I then do or change? How can they increase their conversions by changing their headlines, changing their bios to make it conversion ready Let’s take an example.

[00:11:02.990] – Jonny
Let’s use LinkedIn as an example because that’s where you and I connected. A lot of founders are seeing huge results with LinkedIn. So what normally happens is everybody’s being educated into the norm and templates that we see online and the advice that we see online and a lot of the big agencies, which is we position ourselves as we help X ICP solve Y problem in Z time using X method. That’s norm best practice, but it’s often totally counterintuitive and quite a paradox that it can be the opposite. If you were to look at LinkedIn and you start to measure, Okay, we’ve gone out to 100 ICP in the last week and connected. How many of those accepted? You get right into the weeds of that. If you’re seeing less than 30% acceptance rate, so 1,300, it can mean that we’re repelling maybe 1,700. Now, a lot of common logic would say, We want to do that. We want to attract the core and repel the rest. But the issue with that is that according to the Chet Holmes pyramid, there’s maybe 1-3% ready to buy now, but the next 40% is open to it and don’t really know yet.

[00:12:34.020] – Jonny
Then there’s another layer which is they’ve not really got a clue, but maybe they’re open to it. If you take the logic of crystal clear positioning and speaking to one person, then you’re probably going to leave 60 plus % opportunity on the table. To summarize, first measure, and if we’re not getting 50 % plus acceptance rate, then we’re going to need to tweak it so that it’s not us. So a lot of founders will be founder at Vanquish so that it enables us to start an open conversation and bring in that 60 % who don’t know yet. And that’s been crucial to a lot that have been very, I only want that top three.

[00:13:19.030] – Joran
Yeah, and you said 15 % acceptance rate, right? That’s what we’re aiming for.

[00:13:23.870] – Jonny
No, 5-0.

[00:13:25.200] – Joran
5-0. Okay, wow. Is that doable? I have a pretty okay-ish profile. I think there’s definitely things I could approve, but I think if I would run an outbound campaign on LinkedIn, I don’t do it without any messages, though, but I think my acceptance rate is around 30%. Yeah, so 30 %.

[00:13:43.550] – Jonny
Yeah. So 30 is the baseline where I’d want to see anyone. Common figures out there from a lot of the big tools and tech will say 16 % is the norm, but it’s because, as you just said, they’re using connection messages, which a no-no, and they’re using very descriptive headlines, which ostracize a lot of the ICP who might be open to a conversation. When you flip that, 50% is easily attainable with a few tweaks, but it takes some testing and tweaking. We’ve got some clients who are 80%, so it depends on the niche, depends on the vertical. It needs to be tested and measured on a weekly basis to get to that.

[00:14:33.130] – Joran
Yeah. And again, it all starts with the foundation, defining your ICP, making sure that you actually who you target, what you deliver to them, and then adjust that on your profile and tweak, tweak.

[00:14:44.850] – Jonny
Yeah, just tweak, test, iterate. That’s a lot of the stuff founders are frustrated with. They’ll think, I don’t want to be in the weeds doing this stuff. But it’s being in the weeds and doing that stuff that moves it along when you think the difference between 20% and 50% is an extra 30% of your ideal client that you may be able to speak to this week. It’s night and day when you look at it at the end and you look at what revenue you’re able to achieve from that.

[00:15:13.310] – Joran
Are you struggling to find a cost-effective and scalable marketing channel, check out Reddit. We help you to have other people recommend your SaaS, and you would only pay them when they deliver you paid clients, making it a very cost-effective and scalable marketing channel. Want to learn more? Go to getreddit. Com. When we look at the 12 Pillars, the full growth program, where do SaaS founders struggle the most? Is it the foundation or the actual prospecting or even further down the line?

[00:15:43.780] – Jonny
I’d say that there’s definitely two key areas where the struggle rears itself. The first one is the outbound stuff. Founders are busy. They’re busy raising funds, they’re busy trying to build a team. They’re busy in the operations side. But it’s an irony in itself because many will say to me, I just don’t have time to build outbound. So they’ll try and hand it off. But founder-led sales are I think somewhere, they convert 60% more than sales-led. They want to hand that off and pass it off. So they struggle to carve out the time to dedicate to both building the outbound machine and putting in the work, oftentimes, if the company is less than 3 million in revenue, the founder should be the one doing the discovery calls, or the demo calls, and he should be the one triaging the qualifying process. So that’s an area where they struggle, and it’s usually, I shouldn’t have to do this. Why am I doing it? And when they get over that and throw themselves headlong into that being the number one priority above all else, then it massively It was the needle. And then, of course, the next one is, we’ve come through all of these other pillars.

[00:17:06.170] – Jonny
We’ve got our heads around it. We’re driving demos and we’re driving discoveries, but our sales conversion rate is low. We’ve got to 5, 10 of these discoveries a week, and we’re not closing or we’re just closing 10 % or less. So I think it then becomes, okay, we’re not selling strategically enough. There’s something going wrong in those initial calls whereby we’re not actually converting clients. Those are the two areas. And the right attention applied to both or the right pressure applied to both is where growth happens fastest in my experience.

[00:17:44.930] – Joran
Then let’s dive deeper to strategic selling. I think a lot of founders now are listening like, Maybe I’m not closing enough. What advice would you give? What could they change to actually sell more?

[00:18:00.110] – Jonny
The biggest mistake founders make is thinking it’s a presentation about them. I think that’s the case in all sales, but particularly, founders have got some element of an ego. We arrive at these calls wanting to whip out a pitch deck and start to talk about the company. It’s actually the opposite. The prospect will tune out at that and lose the thread, and you’ll feel that thread being lost. We focus a lot on this, so I’ll work with I found as probably 70% of my time is spent working on strategic selling. If you’re talking more than 20% of the time during a sales call, there’s something wrong, my clients will measure that using something like Fathom. It should be about asking the right questions. Primarily, my friend Scott Lees would say that the three main things are, do they have a problem? Do they recognize they’ve got a problem? And is it urgent enough that it needs to be fixed? And if we can get a yes to those three things, then we’re going to edge closer to a sale. So with some nuance, that’s pretty much how it is. I always focus on doing the opposite of what I’m doing now, which is talk less, ask the right questions, and listen.

[00:19:20.550] – Jonny
That’s the biggest mistake.

[00:19:22.590] – Joran
What I’m doing right now is try to shut up as much as I can, ask all the questions, and don’t talk more than 20 %. So that’s what you should do during a demo as well, ask the right questions. Because I think most founders struggle with that people book a demo, right? We even have it on the site like, Hey, book a demo, and you want to show the product, as in that’s what they book the call for. How should they overcome this mindset as in, They booked a demo. I need to show the product. I need to show them what we can do, and actually go to selling strategically.

[00:19:58.590] – Jonny
I think that mindset That is exactly it. They’ve booked a demo, I want to show the product. But it’s almost that that has to be kept in the back pocket. I will teach founders, basically, the part of the Vanquish method, but ultimately, it’s just 23 years of selling high-ticket stuff. I’ll teach them how to hold back from serving up the product too early, and it kills the sales. If you’re just looking to interject the solution or the product or the demo too soon, it’s going to kill the sales. We’ll always look at that consultative type selling and silo questions. For example, we have a 10-step process that we use, so it’s a 10-step closing process. But inside that, there’s silo questions, so we’ll just keep going deeper. And so ultimately, we want the prospect to be asking for it. We don’t want to serve it up. So if we do our job right in the strategic selling and a discovery call, the prospect will ask, How can you solve this problem? And a great way to do it is rather than say, Let me show you the product and how it can solve your problem.

[00:21:05.930] – Jonny
It’s more, Here’s how we solve this problem, ACME ink. There’s a short case study about how we did that. And that should prompt, Okay, I’m interested to learn more about this. Maybe we could look at a demo. How do you work? And so that’s as Justin Michael, another good friend of mine, would say, it’s a polarity shift. When they The prospect starts asking you, I want to see it. So that’s what I do is hold it back and drive that desire first from the case study.

[00:21:39.200] – Joran
Yeah, it’s really asking the right questions, making sure that they recognize they have a problem, and then in the end, they should be asking for the fix. Then from there, you can show a case study before showing the product.

[00:21:51.550] – Jonny
In a casual way, of here’s how we helped. What happens is the prospect will see themselves. They’ve recognized the problem, they’ve acknowledged it, and so they’ll see themselves in the case study. Every sale happens in the prospect’s mind, not in the salesperson’s mind. So it’s got to take place in their mind first, and that’s the best way to bring it about.

[00:22:15.570] – Joran
If we turn this into a best practice, we now know how to sell strategically. But if you take the 12 pillars, you take your learnings, and you can educate us on how to do it right, what is a best practice you can share to grow SaaS revenue?

[00:22:35.910] – Jonny
It’s a broad question. Founders are busy. They’ve been pulled from pillar to post. There’s so much to do. So everything’s done surface level. They’ll drop a piece of content out, or they’ll jump in and send a few DMs on LinkedIn, or they’ll go comment on someone’s post, or they’ll… However you want to look at it, email, they’ll drop into the cold email and tweak a template. Everything’s done surface level, and nothing really happens because there’s just so many things going on surface level. And as counterintuitive as it is, if you’re going from naught to a few million in revenue and it’s founder-led, which it should be at that level, then you need to pick a few things and go extremely deep versus surface level. It moves the needle the most when you start to really get into it. It’s like we’ve talked about, heavily look at optimize profile, spend the next month absolutely nailing the ICP and building world-class lists so we’ve got nothing but gold across all 12 pillars. If founders will go deeper on these things, It’s the fastest way slow down to go faster versus trying to hurtle through space at a million miles an hour.

[00:23:52.430] – Jonny
You’re tweaking little things as you go. Does that make sense?

[00:23:55.310] – Joran
Yeah, I think indeed. For example, even when you start with the foundation, if you do your ICP definition quickly, you’re not defining your goal. If you quickly do your positioning, you might not get everybody behind it and clearly state what you’re trying to do. If you’re just trying to do affiliates on the site, you’re not going to get the most out of it.

[00:24:17.670] – Jonny
Absolutely.

[00:24:17.950] – Joran
We always make it sound super easy on a podcast to follow the 12 steps, best practices. What challenges, obstacles you faced or your clients faced while trying to grow and maybe some common ways to overcome those?

[00:24:34.340] – Jonny
Challenges. So particularly with founder-led sales, the biggest challenge is it comes back to bandwidth. And how does a founder balance everything else that needs to go on in the business with selling, basically? And I think it does come back to that because when they’re able to figure that out, every case is different, but it can happen with an element of automation. You can start to say, Okay, we’ve got to put the time into testing and iterating and figuring out what works before we can apply any tech to it. Once we know the piece A works like a Swiss watch, we can put a piece of tech on it to take some of the load off the shoulders, but it’s jumping to the ladder that causes all the problems, almost like snakes and ladders, you’re back to the beginning. It’s bandwidth and overcoming it is looking at which pieces are going to move the needle fast enough that we can leverage and tailoring that to suit the founder. Everyone’s different. Some are happy to spend three hours a day on sales, some all day on sales. Others are like, Look, I’ve got an hour to give to this.

[00:25:50.420] – Jonny
So it’s about figuring that out up front and then looking at how do we leverage your time versus some tech, some automation, maybe some support, because it has to happen over and above everything else. I’d say that’s the biggest challenge I find.

[00:26:08.100] – Joran
I’m a founder myself, small team. It almost sounds like I have to do everything. At one point, you can’t do everything. We’re dividing our time in many different things, nail it, and then only then automate it. But you can automate it, but only if it worked when you did things manual, when you actually figured out how should you automate it.

[00:26:32.410] – Jonny
Yeah, because everybody’s got it back to front. So everybody wants to automate first, and it’s impossible. It’s almost like trying to go out and play a round of golf before you’ve ever been to the driving range. It’s just it’s impossible. That’s why many fail. They will come to us and say, We’ve tried agencies, we’ve tried automation tools, we’ve done all this stuff. It hasn’t worked. And it’s because you can’t go to the the end before we’ve done the beginning, which is, Figure out 100% what works and then say, Okay, we’ll take this segment and we’ll place that into some a tool. There’s no way to avoid that work. If it’s done upfront, if you’re willing to spend that time doing that upfront, it just makes everything else so much easier and revenue will grow so much faster.

[00:27:24.770] – Joran
With all the new tools coming on the market, a lot more people are going to automate things. How do you overall see the future of growth? What do you see things happening within the market?

[00:27:37.880] – Jonny
I honestly think that all of the tools and the tech, and particularly AI, whilst There’s a school of thought that says it’s a red ocean because it’s just going to be bots speaking to bots and AI selling to AI. I think that particularly for founder-led and for companies then that are able to train VP and then sales teams to behave in the same way that a founder would sell in the same way that they’ve sold, I actually think that it’s a great opportunity because being more human than human stands out in all of the outbound that I teach and that we do is totally counterintuitive. When you look at AI and that everybody’s hyper personalizing everything, The days of somebody else who I think you’ve had on this podcast, like Aaron Ross, for example, those days were superseded by AI in the fact that it used to resonate when you’d write personally to somebody and acknowledge something and take that time. Whereas now it almost has the inverse effect where somebody sees that and says, Yeah, they’re just using clay, or, Yeah, they’ve just run it through ChatGPT. It means nothing anymore. It leaves us with this opportunity.

[00:28:58.870] – Jonny
If everybody goes off, if other SaaS or competitors go off, automate everything, run everything through AI, we can train our sales teams and run our own sales motion by being far more human than that and making our messaging look brief, blunt, basic, maybe a little bit odd. There’s ways I teach to stand out in the inbox and get tremendous results doing that where people are inundated with messages, but they’ll say, It just grabbed me, it just stood out. So I just think that the future for me is the tools are there to be leveraged, but the companies that will grow the fastest in terms of the selling motion will do so by being human and having a level of human activity in there that others aren’t willing to do.

[00:29:52.620] – Joran
Yeah, it goes back to putting in the work and selling human to human. It makes complete sense. When I look at my inbox, on LinkedIn or email, you can clearly see which tool they’re using sometimes.

[00:30:04.690] – Jonny
You’ve got to beat that and look at what everybody else is doing and do the opposite. And I think generally with all of this, particularly in sales, that’s a great motto to print out and put above your computer screen. If they zig, you zag, and you’ll do okay.

[00:30:21.380] – Joran
Yeah. So I guess the advice here as well. You see all these growth tactics on LinkedIn, you want to then do the opposite of what people sometimes are saying. Cool. If you had to summarize What is your best advice on growth in one or two sentences for SaaS founders? How would you do it?

[00:30:36.470] – Jonny
I think the main thread is be willing to prioritize the founder-led sales, be willing to get in the weeds and roll your sleeves up and put that as priority over all of the other things that are demanding your attention. Nothing else matters in a company under a few million. It’s just sales prospect.

[00:30:58.070] – Joran
It’s easy to get distracted with all the other things, but in the end, focus on sales to move the needle. Nice. We’re going to dive to final two questions. When we talk about growing a B2B SaaS, what advice would you give a SaaS founder who’s just starting out and trying to grow to 10K monthly recurring revenue?

[00:31:17.030] – Jonny
I would say that conversations are the only metric that you should be concerned with. I’d say if you’re looking at your Google calendar for next week and it has three demos or three discovery calls on it, then you’re flat-lining, and that should be your only concern. So remove all of the noise and all the things that I could be doing, scheduling content, internal meetings, product updates, put all of that to one side and focus on conversations. So how many conversations can I drive next week with my ICP? And I think everything can be boiled down to those conversations. And if you have 10 to 15 of those a week, then you’re going to get to 10K very quickly. If you have two or three a week, it’s going to be a painful uphill journey. So conversations is, again, print that, put it up above the desktop.

[00:32:24.810] – Joran
Nice. So until 10K, MOR, focus on conversations with your ICP Let’s now assume we pass 10K MRR and we’re going to make a huge step. I know to watch 10 million ARR. What advice would you give here?

[00:32:39.520] – Jonny
I think, obviously, it’s then a totally different game. So we’ve stepped out of the feasibility of founder-led sales, which usually peaks out at around 3 million. Things start to break and it starts to become impossible to do. So we’ve taken it to three million on founder-led sales, which I’d advise any founder to commit to. The next phase is, obviously, we’ve built this wonderful motion across twelve pillars. We’re selling in a really human way. We’re driving discovery calls and demos from very meaningful one-to-one conversations. That’s great when it’s founder-led. So how do we then go and replicate it? So the biggest challenge and the biggest focus then is that Around that point, how do we find probably a VP of sales who shares the founder’s ethos and vision for all the things we’ve talked about, human-centric behavior, smart in the machines, that stuff, and is willing to do the same work that the founder would, because then that’s going to be VP plus founder. I think that’s the biggest challenge most then find is, how do I find the right VP that we’re aligned with? Then it’s a case of how do we train our teams so that we can duplicate the same efforts across those 12 pillars and it doesn’t break, and we don’t start getting people going renegade, not following up in the wrong way, trying to automate too soon, and almost undoing all the stuff we’ve done.

[00:34:19.450] – Jonny
I think the next phase is about replicating the founder in a VP role and then training a team to behave the way we do to maintain results at scale.

[00:34:35.880] – Joran
Nice. Love it. Let me try to see if I can summarize. So we talked about how founders can quickly scale revenue and achieve a profitable exit. Some of the mistakes go for volume right away, want to automate things right away, outsourcing things too quickly, bringing in the product too early will kill the sale during a demo. When we talk about best practices, a founder has to be involved in the sales process. Founder-led sales will convert more. I think you mentioned even 60 %. Don’t use an invitation match on LinkedIn. Sell strategically. Don’t talk more than 20 %. Ask the right questions. So figure out, do they have a problem? Do they recognize they have a problem? Is it urgent enough to actually get a fix for them? And if you sold correctly, prospect will actually ask for the fix themselves. When we look at the Vanquish method, the 12 Pillars, start with the ICP mastery. What is your goal? Get your positioning right. Does your ICP understand what you do? Then dive into outbound prospecting. Support outbound with content, focus on bottom of funnel content. Nurture the good leads you’re getting in. Then try to go for affiliates, partners, referrals, event and workshops, strategic selling, which we dived into quite a bit, and then try to automate things with tech.

[00:35:52.650] – Joran
Overall, I guess, go extremely deep on certain things rather than staying on the surface. And being human is a great way to stand out in 2025. When we talk about going to 10K MR, remove all noise as a founder, focus on client conversations with your ideal customer profile. 10 million AR, step out of founder-led sales mode at 3 million AR, and find people with the same ethos/vision, replicate the founder, and I guess, educate the team on the 12 pillars.

[00:36:23.350] – Jonny
Yeah, sounds great when you say it.

[00:36:25.510] – Joran
These are all your words, just summarized by me. If people want to How can they get in contact with you?

[00:36:31.540] – Jonny
How can they do? Obviously, I’m massively into LinkedIn, so I’ve got a LinkedIn presence there. Reach out, drop me a DM there, send me a connection request, or Johnny@vanquishconsulting. Io, and let’s have a conversation.

[00:36:47.060] – Joran
Cool. We’re going to add a link to your LinkedIn profile. Is there somewhere where we can also link towards the 12 Pillars of the Vanquish method? Is that something online?

[00:36:57.560] – Jonny
I’ve got a PDF on it which summarizes is that, which I’m happy to share with you or if you want to drop it somewhere. Other than that, vanquishconsulting. Io. There’s lots of stuff on that and great newsletter that’s a minute long, quite contrary and goes out every week all around the 12 Pillars.

[00:37:16.330] – Joran
Cool. Okay, we’ll see how we do it. Maybe you can add a link where people can download it. It’s a lead gen for you. We can share the 12 Pillars, and we’re going to add a link towards the book you mentioned with the constant approach to do the opposite of what normal people do.

[00:37:30.490] – Jonny
Yeah, I can send you that on selling, Kevin Kersey.

[00:37:34.380] – Joran
Perfect. Cool. Thanks for coming on. For people listening on Spotify, make sure to respond to the poll. Always happy to hear what you think of this podcast episode. If you haven’t done so, please leave us a review so we can boost the algorithms. Thanks again, Johnny.

[00:37:49.980] – Jonny
Thanks so much, Joran. Really enjoyed it.

[00:37:52.360] – Joran
Good. Me too. Thanks. Thank you for watching this show of the Grow Your BDB SaaS podcast. You made it till the I think we can assume you like this content. If you did, give us a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel. If you like this content, feel free to reach out if you want to sponsor the show, if you have a specific guest in mind, if you have a specific topic you want us to cover, reach out to me on LinkedIn. More than happy to take a look at it. If you want to know more about where it is, feel free to reach out as well. But for now, have a great day and good luck growing your B2B SaaS..