$5m in ARR? Your CRO Should Be Focused on These 3 Things

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Nathan Latka

Ceo, Entrepreneurs, Founders, Software, Business, Entrepreneurship, Saas, Startups

4.6 • 683 Ratings

🗓️ 1 August 2024

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Owner.com is a $20m ARR SaaS for restaurants that had F90 day churn of 30% before Kyle Norton joined as CRO. He fired 4 AE’s, narrowed the ICP focus, and got burn multiple down from 1.2x to 0.8x as they hit $6m in ARR. Today they do $20m. Can they break $25m before Dec 2024?

Transcript

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0:00.0	You are listening to conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom.
0:13.5	If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com. We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, cac, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to gitlatka.com and use our filtering tool.
0:30.0	It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at gitlidka.com. First off, I'm Kyle Norton.
0:43.3	I'm the Chief Revenue Officer at a vertical SaaS company called owner.com.
0:47.3	Series B, about 20 million ARR, sales and sales leadership for a long time, post sales for most of the last five or six years.
0:57.0	And previous to this, I was to Shopify where I ran a quarter billion dollar go-to-market unit there.
1:04.0	And so what we're going to talk about today is building unreasonable efficiency in SMB go-to-market, but a lot of the lessons learned are widely applicable.
1:15.6	Let me go back to the slide.
1:19.6	Oh, I'm clicking the wrong thing here.
1:23.6	Okay, so over the next 20 minutes we're going to talk about building efficiency. We're
1:29.0	going to stay focused on three main topics. One is the importance of staying focused in how to say
1:34.6	no to lots of stuff. We're going to talk about as we're growing, how to stay efficient as we hit
1:40.8	the gas while scaling headcount. That's scale smart.
1:46.0	And then we're going to talk about building operational excellence when you got a million things to do as an early stage SaaS leader.
1:52.0	But operating with some rigor and what are the sort of parado principles there to get the most bang for our buck.
1:59.0	I'm mostly speaking to companies right now that have product market fit, that have some
2:03.9	repeatability in their motion.
2:06.7	Your deals don't have to be massively repeatable, but they need to rhyme.
2:10.1	You can't be winning friends of the founder deals and think that we're going to slam
2:14.4	the gas on headcount and spend.
2:16.5	So that's really the audience here.
2:18.0	Couple of million bucks, some repeatability, and a lot of these lessons should hold.
	...

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