GTM Crossroads Podcast Ep9: Navigating the Pricing Landscape in SaaS

In this episode of GTM Crossroads, Brendan, Harris, and guest host Rob dive into the evolving landscape of pricing strategy in SaaS and services. They unpack the real-world implications of usage-based pricing, the role of buyer psychology, and how to position value clearly without causing confusion. The conversation highlights the power of retention, the difference between experience and impact, and how long-term relationships often lead to business returns years later.

They also explore the trade-offs between capturing value and driving adoption, the limitations of results-based pricing models, and why traction often matters more than perfection. The episode wraps with a look at RevPartners' new DIY product, built to serve the SMB segment with speed, autonomy, and best-in-class RevOps frameworks.

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Disclaimer

Please note that the GTM Crossroads Podcast is co-hosted by Harris Kenny (Founder, OutboundSync), Brendan Tolleson (Co-Founder & CEO, RevPartners), and Zach Vidibor (Co-Founder & CEO, Octave). Each episode features discussions on go-to-market (GTM) strategy, revenue operations, and sales execution from industry leaders.

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the individual speakers at the time of recording and do not necessarily reflect the official stance of their respective organizations. Statements made during the conversation may be speculative, evolving, or based on personal experience rather than company policy.

This transcript below is provided for reference and accessibility but should not be interpreted as official guidance, policy, or endorsement by any company mentioned. 

Transcript

Brendan Tolleson (00:01.277)
Gentlemen, welcome back for another episode of Going to Market Crossroads. I've got my man Harris here, of course, and there's a new guy, the mayor of Inbound, unofficial mayor, excuse me. Rob, are you going by a different title with Southbound coming up? Do we need to be mindful of what to call you?

Rob Jones (00:23.064)
Whoever's post, I think it was Matt Bolience about this was great. unofficial mayor of inbound, current mayor of southbound, his term limits expired. He will run again in 2025, but there are policies and procedures in place to keep the powers at be. So that's where I'm at right now.

Brendan Tolleson (00:41.427)
Yeah, it sounds like you may be able run for third term, know, things are happening these days. Yeah.

Harris Kenny (00:45.216)
always campaigning just no matter what.

Rob Jones (00:47.598)
fingers crossed i mean the campaign trail is warm say blazing and i really you know focused more on masters right now unfortunately tomorrow got got a stack of cash on tiger to now he towards the killings it was a bad bet i never said it was a good bet

Brendan Tolleson (01:08.147)
That's just what thought, okay. Well good stuff. We missed Zach this week. He's grown up, again, off of space, so he has got some things going on in his side, but Rob is a, or the dictator I should call him now, because there's no more terms, is filling in, and in fact, Rob is gonna be the moderator today, so I will play more of the Zach seat, and Rob is taking my spot, so.

Rob, the mantle is yours.

Rob Jones (01:39.976)
win for the audience I would say because they definitely want to hear from you and not the autocrat of inbound or whatever you know the whatever that is I mean just starting off yeah that's we don't get political on this show

Brendan Tolleson (01:42.611)
you

Brendan Tolleson (01:49.127)
benevolent dictator.

Brendan Tolleson (01:54.259)
you

Rob Jones (01:55.406)
I mean, just starting off the top, is you kind of made the master's joke, but one of the things that can kind of lead into where the conversation goes is, you know, what's on your mind today? What's going on that I feel like we can discuss? Brendan wanted me to ask what keeps you up at night. We don't have to get there yet, but what's going on in both of your worlds?

Harris Kenny (02:17.24)
Nobody jump in first, Brendan? Well, two things. And this actually has been keeping me up at night. I have been waking up very early in the morning working on this, which is like our pricing for Outbound Sync. Been in business for two years now. Got a lot of usage data and been picking up some interesting things about like actual adoption of these new tools that we talk about here every week, Smart Lead and Instantly in Clay. And I'm seeing like the actual utilization because a lot of them have these tiers. And then within those tiers, you have like an actual amount that you...

Brendan Tolleson (02:18.867)
Yeah, go for it.

Harris Kenny (02:46.776)
use the tool and it's pretty different I've found now looking at our data versus what's listed on pricing on different sites. So yeah, I've been working on that kind of the way I do these kinds of projects is I sort of obsess about it for a few days and I'm back and forth constantly with Chad GPT and I'll get on some calls with people, buddies and customers and just try to hammer through it rather than drag it out. then all this trade stuff for sure. I mean, we don't have to get into all the details of it, but it's affecting.

It's it's on my mind a lot. I'm just watching it, watching the updates, seeing what's going on. It's affected our pipeline a little bit in a positive direction. In the outbound space, there's always somebody who's, who's got some kind of opportunity they're pursuing. And when there's a lot of change, there's a lot of people seeing opportunities to run, you know, get in front of new customers. So, yeah, so those are, those are the two things that's not keeping me up at night as much. Cause the pricing, my pricing immediately affects my.

my quality of life within an hour of any change, whereas some of those other things have a bit of a longer tail.

Brendan Tolleson (03:49.971)
What's keeping me open? I as my wife is calling me twice in a row, which usually means something is important. Let me pause and then I will answer the question. Can I pause this? Is that right? Let's do that.

Harris Kenny (03:58.676)
Well, yeah, or you can meet yourself and then they can clean it up after.

Rob Jones (04:03.116)
Yeah, you can mute. We'll come back to you. How do you facilitate a roll?

handling it well. Yeah, so pricing. think a wise man once said that pricing isn't sexy to talk about, but it solves so much. What specifically have you figured out works, doesn't work, that's maybe something to experiment with that you don't really have data on? Can you talk through that a little bit? Because it's more interesting than I think you'd think. And there's a good reason that it could be keeping you up at night, right? Is if you can get it figured out more so, then that solves a lot of problems.

Harris Kenny (04:35.96)
So totally. we did a pre-seed round with Tiny Seed about a year ago. Tiny Seed's like a bootstrapped accelerator. And Rob Walling, the founder, he says over and over again, which is very similar to the quote that you just mentioned, pricing is the biggest lever that you have in SaaS, basically, to change your business. And I attended MicroConf in New Orleans a month ago or something like that.

And a guy spoke there named Marcos Rivera. He has a book called Street Pricing and he did pricing for Vista Equity Partners, I think it is. It's a private equity firm that does really big deals and they sometimes take public companies private and stuff. And so, yeah, I've just been kind of thinking about it a lot. I think, to me, the biggest thing for us with pricing was there were, this is our third era of the pricing conversation.

First era was like, the price doesn't, does anybody care about this at all, regardless of price? And then the second era was, can I charge a high enough price that I can find the people that really care about it enough that they're willing to pay maybe more than it should be, or just in high enough sticker price of three to four to 500 plus, up to $1,500 a month? And now we're entering the third era, which I think is gonna be...

usage-based and a little bit more informed by what's going on in the market. And I think that's much, much easier for people to understand so that they can map what they think they need to do with what we do and how we charge for it. So that's kind of the third era that we're going into right now. And I think to me, it's been really the number one thing I've been focusing on is the value metric of like, what are we charging for? What is the one thing that when you do more of it,

you pay us more and how you think about it in your terms. And so I could talk more about that, but that's the biggest thing. But I think for RP, it's been interesting seeing the approach to onboarding and how that's different and the cohort process and everything like that. So I'd be curious to talk about that too, because that's pretty unusual, I think, in the services space. And we haven't talked about that here on the pod at all, but I'm also curious to talk about that, because I'm curious how that's going and how that's being received. And it seems like, I think pricing can be a place for innovation.

Harris Kenny (06:55.307)
sure.

Brendan Tolleson (06:56.977)
Yeah, are you alluding to the self-service? Yeah, yeah.

Harris Kenny (07:00.182)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wasn't sure the exact terminology that you'd want to mislabel it.

Brendan Tolleson (07:05.139)
It depends who you talk to. Some people in our organization don't know acronyms, so they say the wrong thing. yeah, we use DIY, like do-it-yourself, as well as self-service. Product-led, human-assisted. I don't really know what we're gonna like. We're kind of testing messages to see what works, but in theory, it's a DIY product. But yeah, I'm happy to talk about that. Was the question what keeps me up at night, Rob? Is that where we started?

Rob Jones (07:32.14)
Yeah, and then you took a hopefully carry is okay and the house is no other issues there. But it was that and Harris mentioned pricing and then it was, think I followed up with your quote, by the way, the wise man was you pricing isn't sexy to talk about, but it can solve so much. And Harris kind of was like, yes, wisest man I've ever heard. Don't know who said that quote, but that's kind of where we were. And just specifically in relation to DIY, some of the higher tier packages that we offer, you know, it'd be interesting to

Brendan Tolleson (07:36.967)
Rob Jones (08:02.064)
compare, contrast, and kind of talk about value versus perceived value, and how do you create demand kind of using price as a lever.

Brendan Tolleson (08:08.337)
Yeah. Well, it definitely was about how stuff and it never seems to stop. So, but we're OK. I think, you know, it's funny, my wife, this is speaking of wise quotes like a.

A problem a money can solve is not a true problem. It's what she reminds me of. I don't know if I buy that yet, but I'm telling myself that. So it feels like a big problem every day. Talk about stressor. Outside of like getting the sewage out of my house, what keeps me up at night. There are a few things. I am like. The thing that I've been balancing recently. Is like, I'm really proud of the team, like.

pausing to celebrate, being very proud of what we've done in Q1, even posted about it LinkedIn today. Like the team did fantastic, all phases of the organization. It was a really fun meeting to share that with the team. But I'm also like looking ahead and like we've got to continue to execute. And so it's just trying to figure out how to balance the message of celebratory, but like we can't keep our eye off the ball. We got a lot to do. And so that's something that I'm, excuse me. And within that it's,

hey, what do we need to like focus on? Like what are those levers that really will move that needle for us to hit Q2? So that's very much top of mind for me. But I would love to talk about pricing because I have a lot of thoughts on our evolution on pricing as it relates to our service. And then to where you were going Harris, as we think about launching this new product. So that's a very fun and top of mind topic that I would love to unpack further.

Rob Jones (09:51.554)
Yeah, he kind of mentioned that. I would say the question for me is more, he talked in about Marco Riviera street pricing, a lot of being informed, right, with the data and what people or customers that you're talking with are telling you almost competitive analysis.

Is there a distribution to that of like how you go about figuring out pricing from kind of the data, experimenting with things other people are doing, competitive analysis, so taking people in the same field or in the same category and then just undercut it? How do you think through that as a founder whenever getting it right could be so impactful to the board?

Brendan Tolleson (10:33.053)
Well, here's how we start because you just went through this process with a change in your pricing.

Harris Kenny (10:35.744)
Yeah, I mean for us, and I think actually this might map a little bit to what you're doing too. I mean, Ableton Sync is fundamentally a data product. So, you know, one of the things you had is two by two matrix. Basically the idea is like you charge for what people see. So if they, it was a two by two matrix where it was like, if it's a high product or low product effort, and then high or low human effort. And so,

App on sync, the product is doing a lot of work, but the person is not. And specifically like the example in that, in this two by two is like snowflake is up there, but there are other examples of these data products where it's like how much you're using it now, but you don't have to move towards pure usage based. And so for us, like the number, the conversation, like what I found out colloquially ask is what's your volume? How many emails are you sending? And.

It seems like it's a really good question because it captures a lot of things. It captures like how much data are you able to generate or how many inboxes do you have or what's your capacity to send things out, but also like what's the size of your TAM, also like how big is your team, like all of those things kind of, in the outbound side, they get boiled down to how much you're sending. And the nice thing also about that question is it's not like a budget question. So people, you know.

It's not uncomfortable to talk about. It's like a little bit separated from some other, it's adjacent to, but separated from some sensitive topics. And so I think for me, for us, focusing on that, it's also allowing us to get away from a conversation that was really hard to have, was, how does this compare to make or Zapier? And it's hard for me to explain, like, well, there's like literally dozens or hundreds of little things that we've

shipped that capture that, that make it easier. We started as a low code integration and I would find I would try to acknowledge it and talk about it and people would like, okay, like I trust you, but I still don't, I'm having a hard time understanding it. And so basically we like have stepped away from that and we have put the consideration, the value metric in a term that they're already thinking about, which is how much am I sending? And so now basically if they say, well, I'm going to build this myself from scratch, totally on my own, I can say like you.

Harris Kenny (12:55.148)
there are lots of this you can do. There's a lot of uncertainty about how you do it. And there are some things you won't be able to do unless you hire a software engineer. And so, because it's like, I can't answer that question for them fully in depth about every single thing that's different and every single thing they're gonna have to think about and every single weird edge case that might come up. So all I can say is like, we think about it the way you think about it. And if you wanna buy a product that solves this problem the way you're thinking about it, that's what we do.

You send 10,000 emails a month, we help you get 10,000 emails a month into HubSpot. And that's what we bill for. And that's how this works. And once it's in HubSpot, we have super packages for workflows and reports. have a knowledge base that shows you how it works. have, we have a CSM who's gonna help you use the data or whatever. And so just like the immediate initial reaction we're getting from people is like, okay, you're thinking about this the way I'm thinking about this. The actual price itself is secondary.

it from what I'm finding. so anyway, so we were like fighting this asymmetric thing that we were kind of losing because we were getting pulled into this like confusion over like what probably, you know, how do I do this? How would I do it myself? And it's like, that's huge. mean, I've spent two years trying to solve this problem. we're talking for 30 minutes right now. I, I, can't cover that. It's impossible. And so I've found it much better to be like, listen, let me meet you where you're at. Here's how you're thinking about it.

And I don't know how that compares to like a CRM implementation. I I ran at Solutions Partner Agency for a little while, but I suspect there's this similar thing of like, okay, so like RP comes in, but like then what? And so I don't know what the equivalent thing is of like when their go live is or how soon their sales reps are finally just in one place instead of seven tabs. I don't know how you translate that, but for me, for us that it seems like it's like, okay.

Brendan Tolleson (14:41.287)
Yeah, think to quote a southbound keynote speaker, Donald Miller, it's the whole, if you confuse, you lose. And so I you found a way to speak the language of your buyer. And that's kind of like the baseline metric. And I think having something that serves as an anchor to compare it to is really, really valuable. So for us,

Like when we first got started, when Matt and I were figuring out how to price for RP, we actually didn't talk about implementations because that wasn't the right way to think about our product line. We were more of a managed service model and talking, it was more of, how do you solve for Robops? Do you hire or do you partner? And so that framed it for that go-to-market leader, whatever that's a VP of sales or a CRO or even a CEO, depending on the organization.

they were framing it of, okay, I can think about this as a W2 spend. And so therefore that already sets at least a common understanding of what the price point will be. Because if you compare it to a HubSpot onboarding or implementation, like...

You can buy a husband implementation for $3,000 for marketing hub. And like we're charging, you know, in the, some, some instances, $20,000 a month for our service. And it's just like, if you try to base it off of that, you are creating a really too much friction for the buyer. So that's like, I would say.

Harris Kenny (15:50.903)
Right.

Brendan Tolleson (16:08.947)
you need to make sure it's consumable and then you need to have a comparison for them to have some appetite for how to know. And then that gets into the differentiation of, why can we charge X percent more or less potentially than other options that are out there? And so that's kind of how we stack it, at least how we started with the services side. This new product that we've come out with is a whole different animal that we can certainly talk about because

I'm very excited about it. And Rob, you've been assigned the honor to build that. So we can have a fun competition.

Rob Jones (16:45.036)
Yeah, any plugs from either of you would help my life out and my OKRs in Q2 a lot. So feel free to just take the rest of this episode to talk about them.

Brendan Tolleson (16:53.331)
Do you feel a pressure Rob? Because I just said what keeps me up at night is something that you are responsible for.

Rob Jones (16:58.678)
I've been involved with the last, I don't know, two or three or four primary OKRs, so I think I have built up a little bit of cache when it comes to that.

Brendan Tolleson (17:07.123)
There's a nice little flex there, you know?

Rob Jones (17:09.102)
Hey, mean, the mayor of Inbound's got to make money somehow. You said a couple of interesting things there, Brendan. I'd like for you to talk about that, but both of you, the confuse you lose, there's this translative, if that's a word, a translation element that helps speak the customer buyer. And one of the things in demand that I've found difficult, I can only imagine for sales, especially with HubSpot reps, is their assigned territories or they're assigned based on company size, right? SMB mid-market enterprise.

you

pharmaceutical reps or cars that like I find a lot of other places it's industry or whatever base and that requires a very specific set of to quote Liam Neeson linguistic skills, right? If you're in healthcare, you need to be very familiar with HIPAA. If you're in, you know, you could go on and on. And so I really liked that perspective of speak their language almost translate your offering or your product or the value into what they already see and are familiar with just from a linguistic perspective, but

to follow up with a metaphor. think also kind of what you were saying, there's an old story that is a freight liner has got a big issue with it. won't, you something's wrong with this massive ship to make it a little bit shorter. They hired a guy to come out 500 bucks. He worked in toiled for hours. Couldn't fix it. Next guy, a thousand bucks, you know, sent similar. They spent $2,000 on an expert or somebody that was, you know, self-proclaimed could fix the issue. Nobody. And they found this one guy, this old guy that been doing it for years and they

engineer he said it was gonna be 30 grand to fix it so they said well I mean it's a two million dollar or more ship whatever the the metaphor says there but the point is it he fixed it in ten minutes and they were like we're not paying you 30 grand for this he was like you're not paying me 30 grand for the ten minutes you're paying me 30 grand for the 30 years it took me to learn how to do this in ten minutes and I think there's an element of what Harris you were saying specifically like some of that you just have to meet them where they are and kind of speak in your terms and all

Rob Jones (19:10.04)
be able to highlight the value differentiation that you're providing in a way that they can understand.

Harris Kenny (19:16.148)
Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I definitely found that. feel like it resonates and then you say, and this is what it costs. It's such a different conversation than, at least we'll see. mean, it's early right now, but like the difference already is like night and day feeling like versus what we were doing before. what I was trying to do before where I would kind of talk through it. And I was just like, I was really, really gatekeeping. It's like, you really had to care about this to decide to sign up for our product.

Because I was not making it easy for people and I think that like one thing that we've done that's a little I suspect that I know how how hard your team works because we've had some exposure I've had some exposure to that and just seeing the level of delivery Sometimes that means you don't charge for things too, right? Like there are features that I before was like, I'm gonna feature gate this and I'm gonna have to be on a higher plan for this But I found that in practice I just couldn't enforce it

Rob Jones (19:45.08)
Hmm.

Harris Kenny (20:12.418)
Cause if they say, I want to be able to do this in HubSpot. I just didn't feel comfortable being like, well, you have to be on this plan. I would always be like, well, fine, that's fine. You can just, I just really want you to use what we're doing. I want you to find it helpful. And so like, maybe that doesn't mean like capturing value at every single point on the curve. There's certain things where like, this is valuable. I know it is, I'm going to charge for it. But there's other things where it's like, listen, this isn't the core thing. And if this is going to make it easier for you to adopt what we're doing, like that's fine. Just, just have it, just take it. So I'm sure like some PE person out there is.

squirming or licking their chops thinking about all the like money on it but I feel like that's the other side of it is like Know the value capture the value, but you can't constantly be like trying to get every last thing out of them, you

Brendan Tolleson (20:53.171)
Yeah, mean, that's something I've been talking to a few of our teams that we've launched. It's not just our DIY product, but I think to where you're going, Harris, is our all-bound product. And we cannot underscore the importance of traction. We've got to get.

at BATS, we've got to understand what resonates with the buyer, where they see the value, understand the data. You can always change pricing, but if you don't have traction, then you don't have a product. so, I'm firm believer that go to market and brand is far more valuable than the product. And so we've got to make sure that we understand how to get that traction and the demand to then inform the value of that product.

So that would be to your, think where you're going here is my encouragement would be for, and what we're trying to push for is like, get adoption and then we can iterate once we know what the key hooks are and what people are actually using. But if you don't solve for the customer in that sense, then it's going to be a really painful, least I've found it to be very painful. mean, when, when, when Matt and I were starting with even just RP and I know I talked to you about like having at least a like common understanding denominator of how to price.

I mean, it's just like get stuff in. Now, is that sustainable? No. But like for the beginning phases like that, unless you have just an amazing product or an amazing ability to market, you got to start somewhere.

Rob Jones (22:27.438)
I'm in a true RP fashion taking a bunch of notes for next questions. so a couple of ways I can go here, I think.

Retention is what keeps I don't know if it's Brendan or his sewers or whatever's going on with his house But I feel like that keeps people up at night too, especially with a services company or subscription based PLG company So something came out yesterday This was a podcast clip from maybe six seven years ago, and it was a study Gary V was in it, but it was it was something published I want to say by HBR whatever it was it said of they did a study among restaurants first-time customers There was a 40 % chance they'd return

Second time, if they did return, it was 43%. I think the third time, once they'd been back and experienced that value, there was a 74 % chance of them coming back to the restaurant and almost becoming a regular or becoming one of their spaces. The interesting part of that to me is it takes more at-bats to create the value or the perception of value or experience. Really what we want to create is an experience that drives recurring value. But the food reviews did not line up with that as much.

And so there's this question of like, especially with us, maybe Brendan, this is more to you, but how do you, how do you differentiate value based on the actual service or product that it is versus how much value is in the mechanism of delivery, like our operating principles, the way that we go about providing the services themselves. So is there a distinction there between a product slash service versus the overall delivery mechanism, the operating principles?

Brendan Tolleson (24:02.707)
I think you're capturing two concepts. think there's the experience and there's the impact. And I think they're, we can have a fun debate on which is more important. But I hold this kind of and, like it's an and statement to me. Like those are, if you get the, like if you use a two by two of experience and impact.

Like if you get that top right quadrant, like amazing experience and high impact, they're not leaving. And if they do leave, then to your point, you will get that review and that will lead to a community movement of referrals. And one of the things I've been starting to think about, even as you were saying that question, I mean, we're now in our, we're starting our fifth year, I think, at RP. And one of the things I've been, what you triggered for me is like,

we need to be thinking more long term. I mean, think about it in five, 10 year increments.

And the reason why I say that is even what you just described, Rob, we have people coming back to us that were, didn't use us, haven't been with us for a year or like two years. In fact, there two, was just on a pipeline call and two deals. One stopped working with us a year ago. The other one stopped working with us two years ago and they're coming back. And then there are other ones where they've referred us to another company. It's just like these, there's so much value, even if you don't see any initial engagement by doing those two things well in terms of experience and impact that.

I just, the longer the time horizon, the more emphasis I think we put on those things as opposed to how do we extract a transactional benefit to the RP brand as opposed to solving for the customer. So I don't know that answers your question, but that's like very much what I heard you say that that's what I was thinking about.

Rob Jones (25:52.918)
I mean, I just have a weird follow-up question that's kind of guiding a certain response, but when you say they came back, are you talking about the company or a specific person that engaged with us? Because I know there have been both.

Brendan Tolleson (26:03.731)
I think in this instance...

I think it's the company. It's not that the person didn't go to another company and now he's coming to us, although we have had that. This is at the company level where it's like they, two years later, like, hey, we need this help on this area. And we had a great experience with you all, can you come help us?

Rob Jones (26:29.87)
Talking about pricing earlier, this is kind of a weird non sequitur. See if I can make it into one. Talking about prioritization, right? Things you're thinking about doing now with DIY as a priority, with margin as a priority, like figuring out pricing, Harris, as to what you were talking about. You probably both know this better than I do, but the whole Warren Buffett, like write down your top 10 things, cut it in half.

Cut that in half and then do the one thing. How do you figure out what that one thing is and how often can it change or should it change?

Harris Kenny (27:10.486)
Well, I think we've talked to this a couple of times, but it depends on your business model. mean, we're bootstrapped. mean, we did a pre-seed round, but it was basically to help me shut down my agency because I've got a young family. And so we have, you know, for whatever reason, they want to eat fruit and berries and yogurt pouches at pretty alarming level. And so I need to keep buying those things. and so it helped us with that, but it really wasn't like, you know, we raised a bunch of money. And so that is, a forcing function for us. And I think pricing is part of that because you can see like,

if you focus on closed one deals. one of the things that in that street pricing book is like the idea with street pricing is it's like what happens on the street is real or whatever, right? It's not like something in your head. It's like reality. Sometimes it's gritty or whatever, but it's like it's where rubber hits the road kind of thing, right? And so think when you look at like how you tie like the ability to get someone in the door,

If they say yes to things, if they say yes at certain price points and then they use the product, you start to see like where there is, where people value it and what's important to them. And so for us, for example, like agencies were really big. we have had a very successful partner program with agencies because what we do is really complicated and a lot of internal teams just frankly don't have the resources or the time to stand it up. And so in that way we were able to see the, we were able to provide them a service level. Cause I ran AC before the, where

I like understood kind of what they were going through and then impact because we're able to help them retain their clients because they could show their clients in HubSpot. Hey, look, this is actually revenue that we impacted for you. Yeah, we got X number of replies, but 2X is actually the pipeline impact because these deals came in through other channels and whatever, And so to me, think pricing is like where someone commits and they say, if you combine pricing with your data, your actual like closed one data, it helps you make

prioritization around that. And so we focus on an agency program a lot. And then, and then within that, because we're bootstrapped, like we can only do so many things at a time. So, you know, something where people are getting impacted is LinkedIn and using LinkedIn. And so we're looking at how do we support multiple channels with our product as well? Because we can't do a million things. We can't support a million other things. can't, you know, people ask us about a million random CRMs. And right now we're just focused on the ones that

Harris Kenny (29:34.966)
where we know there's a market, we know there's serious teams, and we know there's an ecosystem that can support it. And I'm sure all these other CRMs are great, but we have limited time. So, I mean, that's kind of how I think about it is like, we try to use those constraints as an advantage to try to just focus on the thing that matters the most to our users. And because we have like a really narrow lane, we can do that. We don't need to be a billion dollar company. So we don't need to solve billion dollar problems.

We could just save someone a couple hours a month. If someone said that explicitly to me, they saw the dashboard and they were like, okay, well that alone is gonna save me hours. Let's do it. So it's like, okay, cool, awesome. So that's for me how we use pricing to make decisions, make tough decisions. I there's a lot of stuff I wanna do. I'm a founder, I love to build features. It's the most fun thing in the world, but it's not actually the thing that really sometimes matters to customers.

Rob Jones (30:04.333)
Right.

Brendan Tolleson (30:22.547)
you

Brendan Tolleson (30:32.829)
Yeah, I think the blessing and curse of a founder is that they have lot of ideas. And so how do you narrow focus to maximize impact? And I'm not great at that. To answer, directly answer your question, Rob, and that's why I have a team around me to keep me focused on, we can only do a few things really well. And so what are those things that we want to prioritize of the 20 ideas that you have?

So that's the honest answer is that having a team to keep me accountable and to push me to drive focus. mean, you saw Rob, even in the Q1, we hit the numbers in large part because we said we're only do a few things really well. so making sure that we do that again in Q2 of.

It doesn't mean we're not doing those things, it's just when do we do them? And so what are the one or two things? Kind of like Rob, you think about the operating principles in the RP way, it's like, hey, we got 40 principles, but no one's gonna remember all 40 principles. So how do we distill it down to the four principles that are in the RP way that everyone can remember? And so it's a similar concept, but how do we apply it to using OKR as an example? How do we use that for what are the priorities for every quarter?

I think we're getting better at that, but it's been painful to get to the point where we can do fewer things, but do them well.

Rob Jones (31:58.328)
There was something that stood out and this is also, I feel like top of everybody's mind. I've heard Darmesh say this. I've seen weird models built for this. It's more for agents, AI and kind of the SaaS. But there's ROAS, is a return on ad spend. There's ROAS, which is RevOps as a Service, kind of the acronym. And then there's a concept of RAAS, which is results as a service, as a pricing model.

Harris Kenny (32:23.543)
Mm.

Rob Jones (32:23.992)
What do we think about that? I mean, the extension of that to a managed service company seems not smart. Like it seems like that would be incredibly difficult to figure out and execute.

Where do you see the future of that going and when? I mean, I know that's kind of out there. It's been floated. I know people are working on it. To your point earlier about like some P.E. with a handful of money is going to attempt to figure it out. But is that something that you guys have seen to think about? What's your opinion on that?

Brendan Tolleson (32:56.179)
I conception makes a lot of sense. The idea of a performance-based model, kind of, this idea you're on the same side of the table and you're motivated to achieve the same things. So I think I'm not, mean, in fact, we've looked at it for the Lbound product and I don't think I'm opposed to it. But there is an element, I think it can be.

Harris Kenny (32:56.364)
I'm... Yeah.

Brendan Tolleson (33:20.783)
If it's set up properly, I think it makes a lot of sense. At the same time, it can get very contentious, very fast. And so a lot of this is a reaction to, I hate to say it, but bad digital marketing agencies and bad outbound agencies that had vanity metrics that didn't actually tie to outcome. And so people now are, it's a repudiation of that. And they're also just have budgets that are being shrunk. So how do I achieve

Harris Kenny (33:37.101)
Mm-hmm.

Brendan Tolleson (33:51.069)
revenue and so a performance-based model is a way for that to happen. So I think so long as you have a mutual understanding of what's the definition of success, how do we define metrics, meaning for example, what's an MQL, meaning marketing qualified lead, what's a sales qualified lead. If you have the foundation in place and you have tools like AppOut and Sync that can track that data, then I think it's fine.

those things usually don't happen and then it becomes very contentious very fast.

Harris Kenny (34:22.6)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean there's a lot nested in that I Mean from our vantage point like I've talked to a PPL paper lead agencies before They run really different businesses, I mean for them I just dropped a little fidget here on my desk For them, you know, they they tend to they they focus on the ones where they know they can get results which is awesome like

that makes sense for them. They're optimizing for that. And so they go find those companies where for whatever reason the offer or the channel just hit and they go and they run that and they do extraordinarily well. But I think the problem is a lot of the time it's just like fog of war. You you just don't know. So you have all this uncertainty. I think most companies are in this situation where it's like, sure. I mean, I've heard so many times, if I could put a dollar in and get $2 out, you know, we happy there's there's no limit on the budget. We're like, well, yeah, man, like.

Duh, of course, but like nothing, know, not street rising, that's not anything. mean, sure, okay, sure, yes. You know, everybody wants that level of certainty in life, you know. I can't even get my kids to brush their teeth sometimes. So it's just like, know, the simplest things can be a lot harder than you might think. you know, I think like, and so what happens is that a lot of people, a lot of agencies end up.

Rob Jones (35:22.734)
That's not street pricing.

Harris Kenny (35:45.624)
doing more of a retainer model and that allows them to scale better and develop better resources. And so they don't have to take the risk associated with the results model. And so they're able to do better work, take on risk of your projects and then actually lower the risk because they're so good at executing. And so like, I think the narrow nature of when pure results budget or model works, it's so narrow that those companies don't scale. And so then who's gonna serve the other everybody else.

It seems like it's people that have a different business model that allow them to accrue resources, accrue the human capital, the talent to sift through really complicated problems and come up with better answers than the internal team would have. think a blended model might be like more feasible for a lot of the types of companies that we tend to work with, where you have this like base plus kind of thing. and

You know, but it, yeah.

Rob Jones (36:41.708)
I think kind of to step in, maybe this will help because it's how triggered this. It's kind of like what Brendan was mentioning with impact versus experience. There's results and there are outcomes. Like I would say it's a hot take, but it's a point you could discuss of marketing being the original results as a service that didn't really drive revenue growth. Like we need, you know, 10,000 MQLs or leads here. They are. We actually churned, but you know what I mean? Like there, there wasn't the overall outcome or business impact.

Harris Kenny (37:08.781)
Mm-hmm.

Rob Jones (37:11.632)
which is part of what, know, shout out to me, Brendan, Plugin RP, that's what we can help deliver. And I think that's kind of the same approach we take to it. It's less about a specific result and more about a chain of results that leads to this desired business outcome.

Brendan Tolleson (37:28.083)
Yeah, I think the point, kind of your Megan Harris is that while it's understandable why the buyer wants that, it may be short-sighted of what they actually need. that's why I was mentioning, like, the definitions are really important. because you're right, people will figure out how to gain the system and they will find, hey, okay, that's the North Star Metro they care about. We'll figure out how we can get to that number and just use it and put some really low cost resources to it.

it becomes a really bad model. I it's just like you wouldn't, we're very much, I think about the base plus when we're thinking about the variable concept. And it's just like, mean, for us, it's just like an employee. like you wouldn't.

you wouldn't do an employee at just a variable only model. But you would do a base variable because it gets that same intent. But you do want somebody that's taking ownership and thinking about it. And I think what we found in what I've told companies in the past when they were prospects for us, like the...

we care about retention. like to us, that is a much bigger driver for accountability and value and like serving you well is if we keep you as opposed to like how do we extract the most money out of you on a month to month basis. So that's kind how we've been positioning it more of you want us to be viewed as a partner as opposed to like a mercenary. And those are two very different mindsets and different approaches for how you get served.

Rob Jones (39:05.58)
Yeah.

I mean, I've experienced that both from the sales and demand part. And it's interesting to think about how to position it in sales and then how to translate some of the outcomes people may not even know they need or are looking for to what an offering from us would be. I think we're close to time. I would be remiss if I didn't let Brendan plug and describe DIY here, because it is pretty cool. It solves, to your point about results, impact, value. I think it kind of bridges that gap. And it's all weirdly, it solves for a lot of

things that I feel like have happened since COVID, right? Which is like, I don't want to be on another onboarding call out on time. I'd rather, I have some experience. can knock it out. It's like pace at your own pace guided. But Brendan, if you want to, you want to hit us with the,

Brendan Tolleson (39:50.803)
Sure. Well, yeah, think we'll start first with why we created it. so when we started RP, we had this really silly, it seemed silly at the time, but it's like, we had this big, hairy, audacious goal that we want to be the most strategic and influential partner in the Hustle. And I'd say by and large, we were actually doing a pretty dang good job with that. And one of the things that we talked about, sorry, now that we talked about it, Yamini, this is what Pepsot talks about, is...

Hustles has a bimodal strategy and their bimodal strategy is, hey, we want to be able to serve the SMB market and the enterprise market, which is a little bit, it seems a little bit, it's funny because we talked about focus earlier and those are two very different markets. So like, how do you do that? Well, and so we wanted to figure out how we could solve both the corporate kind of commercial segment, meaning 250 employees, 2000 employees, but also this SMB market. Because whenever you look at Hustles earnings calls,

They have about 10,000 customers on a quarter. Now this isn't public, but I would imagine about 80 % of those are in the SMB segment, if not more. And so we were trying to figure out how can we create a solution that allows us to do the SMB market, but also the enterprise market. And so what we thought through was, our core practice is going to be more for the upmarket, but there's this huge market down below that we want to be able to serve. And so that's what kind of...

started this idea of how can we create a low cost offer, like high value, low touch offer that would resonate with that market. And so that's what we try to solve for. And we realized kind of the buyer behavior is in that segment is like, hey, I would really love a frictionless buying experience where I don't have to talk to an agency and that I can actually have this implementation embedded inside my HubSpot instance so that I am actually doing it on

on my platform, on my timeline. And that's, and Super actually allowed us to be able to do that. And so that's what we launched. so it's really more for the SMB market. Persona is either kind of like a VP of sales that's at an early stage, could be a director of sales who doesn't have the budget to bring on somebody like us. And so they have to do it themselves. And so giving them best practices and playbooks that we've built over the last four years, that they have access to those resources so they can build quickly.

Brendan Tolleson (42:18.579)
ultimately scale their organization. And so that's what it is at high level. And then we price it actually below what HubSpot chart is for onboarding. So you're getting a frictionless buying experience, you're getting best practices, and you're getting a fraction of the cost. And so that's the offer. It just came out, and we're pretty dang excited about it.

Rob Jones (42:39.95)
a weird way, you know.

to able to democratize revenue operations to make it actionable and accessible. It's kind of a core focus of REV Partners as well. And I have pushed this for a while with REV doctors and all this, what you're democratizing is the expertise and kind of the support. it's very, to me, the metaphor works well with healthcare, right? Like onboarding that's done based on best, it's almost preventative care. You don't need that level yet. So it doesn't, I don't think, because I've kind of struggled with this on how to position it, but I

Brendan Tolleson (42:46.823)
Yeah.

Rob Jones (43:12.184)
think it cannibalizes the other. It's just a level of need, readiness, timing, a lot of the stuff that we can't control and making offers that suit both. I think with the intent as like, hey, if almost results based tiering, right? Like if this DIY works, you're probably going to need copper, which is a kind of admin function with, you know, that kind of thing. If you're growing, we... Go ahead.

Brendan Tolleson (43:32.359)
Yeah, think it's, yeah, it's a value first concept and we can grow with them. And so assuming they continue to their business, then we're here for them. Sorry, my wife's calling for the second time. So this is probably another sewage issue. So I probably need to go.

Rob Jones (43:54.05)
I would hit the unrecord button. I just figured out my talk track though, so that's good.

Harris Kenny (44:00.792)
All right, well, do we want to wrap up?

Brendan Tolleson (44:03.559)
Let's wrap up and I'll call her right back.

Rob Jones (44:07.15)
You are the producer on that side.

Brendan Tolleson (44:12.207)
I didn't know if you want to like a concluding thought or I can.

Rob Jones (44:15.298)
Thanks for tuning in today on another great episode of Go To Market Crossroads with me, your host, the mayor of inbound, Brendan Tolleson and Harris Kenny. We'll see you next time. Stay awesome.

Brendan Tolleson (44:26.141)
Thanks, Rob. See you here. Sorry, guys. Let me just do this.

Harris Kenny (44:27.458)
Thanks, Rob. See you,