Skyrocket Your Sales: Insider Tips from a Sales Guru

0:00Greetings, everyone. I'm excited to welcome Ramsey Al-Ramahi, founder and CEO of RevReply. Ramsey, welcome to the show. Hey, Ben. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Yeah, no, great to have you on. Looking forward to the conversation. Before we dive in about the company, tell us a little bit about your background. Yeah, so, like, I've been in sales my entire life. Sales leadership for the past decade, more notably as head of global sales with Paula.io. Went on to launch our own lead-gen agency, and out of that, RevReply was born. where we saw this massive pain point of people just dropping balls on leads ultimately, and got very obsessive over how do we convert better.

0:39And that led us to just focus 100 % on Red Reply. We just got done with Berkeley Sky Deck, celebrated out in Silicon Valley. Actually, like four to five times harder to get into than YC. We chose them for a reason, and we chose us, obviously. Demo day was in April, so it's been, I thought that was a fun grind, but it just gets harder and funner and funner. So no complaints. Yeah. Yeah. Appreciate the background. And so sales your entire career in so lead agency, so services or agency and then Rev Reply. So I'm curious, you hear a lot of service owners or agency owners who are like, boy, this is hard.

1:15And then try to create some technology out of it. Was the pain felt as you're running that agency business or has this pain just been felt your entire career? Definitely both. Yeah. This is thanks to the world of AI. When AI came out, it was like, wait, this is possible. And when we looked at all the different tools we could build, we knew we wanted to build something in the space. This is the easiest tool to build. So let's go ahead and go after that. And if you take me back to that day, I would never do this again. But it was definitely something now it's especially with what we're able to do.

1:50It's every day. It's like, I wish I had this as a rep. And that's a good feeling. I'm like, you want to, it just, it's just, you gotta, obviously you gotta love what you're doing, but it just gets you back in the good old days of how do I first day of the job as a new SDR, how do I get better at what I do every day? And how can I optimize more? Or how can I build something to help me in my earlier day to be better at my job? So it's kind of going back to the basics in a lot of different ways, but also leveraging the decades of experience in sales to know those little tiny micro-optimizations. There's no need to focus anymore on the things that move the needle by 10%.

2:32That's like a no-brainer these days. But it's how do you find that 0.01 here, 0.01 here, and find hundreds of those to give the aggregate of that extra lift, ultimately. Like I said, you get really obsessive over those little details and maybe that's where my OCD side comes from, but it's just, it's fun. We're having a lot of fun doing it. And that's a really unique connection. We're like the deep sea divers of convergent optimization. And you can't be a deep sea diver overnight. You go to walk the ocean floor. It's anybody that's going to try to do it, it's going to take them a while to get to there.

3:04And we've been doing this for almost not three years we've been at this. So it's kind of crazy, that whole journey where people talk about and saying it takes an average of five years or three years, but I've seen a lot of different ranges of until a company actually makes it, whatever that means. I'm like, yeah, we could do a lot faster. And the Legion agency space was really quickly. We were able to see that happening really quickly. We got to just sign a few million dollars in ARR over the first year. On the tech side, that's a completely different animal. Different story. Yeah. Building a platform, not just a tool.

3:34Went from a tool to a platform. And so it just, it's evolving a lot. Yeah. And I was going to say, I definitely were rewarding deep subject matter expertise today. And so let's talk about RevReply so we understand a little bit better. So what products and our services does it offer? Yeah. You know, what started out initially as a simple autoresponder, we just wanted something to respond fast to leads because we know speed to lead. MIT, Harvard, Brazil, HubSpot, Insights, Salesforce. So everybody knows the stats. It's more than five minutes or less. The first response gets most of the deals. Like, you know the stats.

4:08And that's crazy because just when you think that, like, it's actually, it changes or evolves. If anything, it's getting become more and more important. And that's where it started out. But then it's like, hey, we want to convert better. We don't want to just send a calendar link. Or how do we schedule follow-ups so we don't have to manually do them? Can it scan our calendars? Can we schedule a natural conversation written form? Hey, Ben, does Tuesday or two or Thursday or three work? Not yet in my calendar link. Because we know if you offer a morning and afternoon and a calendar link, that improves your conversion rates statistically by X percent.

4:42So it started off with like little things like that. And then we just got really into many different integrations and platforms. And how do we now become the orchestration piece of it? But then the tool started working a little too good, to be honest with you, not to turn our own horn, not to impress you, but impress upon you. then our customers all of a sudden go hey we can't do this anymore and we're like what do you mean look what we're doing for you we just three extra meetings like literally meetings on your calendar and after you start having a lot of a few of these happen like wait let's just unpack this a little bit realize if you have let's say 30 of your meetings are this crap and if i go take your meetings from 100 to 300 that means you have 90 meetings are crap and now joe schmo who's going to talk to you today is just a window browser versus Mary, who is a hot prospect that's ready to buy tomorrow that has to wait three weeks to be in a meeting.

5:35That creates different problems. So things like this that kept on happening were like, we have to go further down the pipeline. We can't just handle just the meeting booked because you can't solve one problem by creating a massive other problem. And so in the beginning, it was like, people are like, oh, you're creating great problem. We hear that often, right? Oh, that's a good problem to have. I will never say those words ever again, because a good problem to have is a small, tiny problem to have. That's good. But when you're getting a bigger problem that is causing more friction, people, sales reps, what they do to point fingers and go, not my fault.

6:07It's that platform's fault. It's that person's fault. You just fault that rep's fault. Especially in the sales world. As much as I would have liked to avoid that, it would force us to go further down the pipeline and how to help people convert better, qualify better, have a lot more autonomous aspects of it. So we can take care of the heavy lifting for reps. And this little tiny tool is now this, we're about to unveil this massive platform that goes from little a to Z, but I don't want to handle any cold out that I've done sales my entire life. I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to contribute to any spam.

6:39I just want to help convert. So that is my only thing I want to stay away from. So for all the emails and platforms out there, I have no interest in touching that game. Yeah. I know my inbox is flooded with really targeted cold emails. That's for sure. Especially when they say, would you like some commercial cleaning services? And I'm in my home office here. But okay. So makes sense. And so who is your ideal customer profile? So you're obviously going into sales teams. Is it horizontal? Any types of companies that are a great fit for this? It's a little different for us than I think when you talk to me, some other SaaS companies, but we're like, we, complex workflows are really good.

7:19The bigger the teams, even better, right? It gets just that usually bigger teams, complex workflows go hand in hand. But the one that is on the side is also high volume. So we have people with larger teams that are doing very well in complex workflows, but we have people who just don't have any complexity, small team, which is really high volume, which again, like that also makes it worse. So either one of those two or the combination of all of them, which is really the sweet spot. And typically, again, we used to work with really very simple workflows, but people that come to us now where they see a lot of value, people have already optimized for a lot of this stuff already.

7:57And they go, look what I'm doing. This is amazing. I'm going to go, okay, this is great. And how do you get from this to 2, 3, 4x? That's when it gets really fun because we're doing things that you can't do these days. You still have to have a lot of, it's not something you can't build. We could build a simple autoresponder tool in a couple of hours now. Two and a half years ago, that was not possible. So it's, that's why we, we forced us to go deeper, which was just probably the best thing we've ever gotten from the company or else would have been killed by now. So yeah, complex workflows, high volume.

8:30That's when it gets really exciting. And then generates a B2B sales then? B2B. Yes. Yes. And then our part is, yeah, that really critical piece. We have some consumer sales, but it's like almost like one of those sometimes like It's a consumer, but it's a consumer product selling to small businesses. I've seen that. But typically, it's B2B, 100%. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Makes sense. So B2B, either complex sales workflows, which is great, or say high volume, so it can tackle both. And what year did you found the company? Three. Officially, it was November 2023 is when we really started this, working on this idea.

9:07We had a lead gen company on the side. And it wasn't until almost, I actually, geez, I think happy anniversary a year ago, July 7th of last year is when we just decided to focus 100 % on RevReply. And then we started looking at accelerators because my co-founder and I, my co-founder, Jay Wu, he spent, he was a company called OfficeAlec for 15 years. Started his entry level all the way to CTO over the 15 years, 64 devs reporting to him. And he always jokes around me because he's dealt with billions of data points. I'm like, but look, we have 100 million. He's like, that's cute. That's nothing. But he knows how to scale companies on the tech side.

9:46I know how to scale revenue on the revenue side. But one thing that we had to really take a look at each other and look in the mirror to go, we're really good at scaling. But that zero to one game is a completely different animal. That's one big realization that took us almost two years to realize. until like we need help let's look at going into an accelerator and that was one of the best decisions we've ever done honestly really helped us hone in on what we see funds and all that is completely in a world for us we had you know nothing about that and how it works and and just building again building a platform versus building a tool or a services agency it was just two different worlds three different worlds yeah and yeah a lot of different stages to grow with the zero to one you know very different pretty hard and is that where you raise capital was it through the accelerator?

10:35Looks like you've raised a 1 million seed. Yeah, we just wrapped that up. So we got through the accelerator. We fundraised right towards the end, obviously, afterwards, all wrapping into Demo Day. Demo Day was in April. We were able to bring in AngelNV, it was actually a slash fundNV out of Nevada. My co-founder Jane lives there. And we got in contact with them about a year ago, and they have seen the evolution of our product, just like us as people and they have seen us grow when we talked to them like in in july of last year for the first time or even before that maybe and all the way till going through the accelerator they've seen us evolve personally professionally they've seen our product and our direction improved dramatically they've seen our traction improve all that and so it's been beautiful to see it come full circle of them they're like hey we don't typically lead but we'd love to take you on as a lead take to you guys on and lead this for you and so we just needed just needed enough honestly to get us to the next stage and so we've been the last handful of months has been literally just developing and building this new phase of rubber plywood a few design partners that we're very grateful for honestly and still managing and working the existing client base so it's kind of like managing this transition of what we have currently to what we're building and everything in between so yeah that's but i think to learn one thing that's this way fun to raise and never really end so yeah yeah i said that from the start and i'm starting to realize how that works now and so it sounds like accelerator is a good experience so is this was the the million dollar raise was this kind of pivotal for the company did you want need the capital or okay we can continue to bootstrap or raise some money so is that just okay we need another catalyst to continue to grow?

12:30All the above. Yeah, absolutely. So definitely we need to fuel, like we've been bootstrapped in this whole thing this entire time. And for this next phase, as you can imagine, going into a lot more of a complexity, we went from reply to meeting booked or meeting complete to any sort of engagement and down a lead comes in of any sort to fully close one, the complexity of that changes. The level of talent that you need changes as well, right? So the tool set that you need changes. A lot of those things are just completely, it requires a lot of more resources. And so that was definitely a big part of it.

13:11And it also allowed us to, okay, let's, we have our customer base, we are generating revenue, but instead of focusing on scaling more in the wrong category. Let's maintain that and put more resources into what we believe the future is of the new red reply, which is this entire autonomous conversion system from beginning to end. And so it buys us that in two different ways, like buys us the time and also buys us the resources as well to double down on what we need. And so it was a critical piece. Okay. And so interesting, and this is always interesting, especially with someone with a sales background, your go-to-market motion, and you're helping sales teams.

13:53So how is RevReply finding prospects? Yeah, it's been 100 % inbound. It's like fun because I'm partly embarrassed and proud at the same time to say that because we've been very fortunate, honestly. Because we're pretty well known on the Gen Agency community, they've been awesome. They've been very vocal in introducing us to their customers, that a lot of them are and have been users of our platform as well in the early days. So a few champions of ours. And that's been a great source. So you hear these things all the time. We're in a lot of - Build the audience first and then, yeah. Yeah, we're in a lot of Slack groups, WhatsApp groups.

14:30People talk about us on LinkedIn. We've never really turned on our GTM engine. And we have a phenomenal GTM engineer on our team who was actually a user of ours at one point as an agency, came on board because he just fell in love with the product. and now it got really like we got what was just phenomenal when it comes to like just being able to understand the complexities of all this stuff and every time we turn on the actual legion engine it's actually overwhelming and we can't service full of them because it's like we already have enough of what we're working on right now so we just want to get through this next phase before we turn that engine back on but we've been very lucky honestly in regards to just getting a smooth enough inbound workflow.

15:10But yeah, once this next phase is done, you bet we're obviously going to go back to turning on and eating our own dog food, this insane Legion engine that we've been able to build for ourselves. And every time we turn it on, it's like, okay, we got to just slow it down because we need to really continue focused on building this. And it sounds like this type of product, it sounds like the pricing model could either be usage-based or outcome-based. How are you pricing RevReply? Ah, that is such a... Million-dollar question on pricing. I had a hunch you were going to ask that. That wasn't what I was hoping you wouldn't ask this day.

15:44But it is, we've played around with a lot. The thing is, that's interesting, especially with a meeting booked. I could sit here and charge you a price per meeting that we got on calendar. Because I don't care about the quality. And I don't care. We're not doing anything to it. We're not adding any more top funnel. We're just converting better. And I know we can plug in and I can charge you that. And so that actually worked really well for that piece of, Hey, we charged a flat platform fee, small fee anywhere between one, two, 3000. And then we charged anywhere between 10 to 15 bucks per medium book.

16:18And that worked pretty well. But as we get further down the funnel, there's a lot of things that are happening that we have no control of, right? We have no control of the quality of the rep. We have no control of the product you're offering, right? We can't, It's a lot, it's a lot of difference. Are there, our design products right now, there is a flat fee and it just depends on the volume of contacts that are coming into your CRM. That's, we're trying to really stay away from a lot of this action-based as much as I see why people do it. Cause it's kind of like hitting you guys, I had against the wall, because if you charge a flat fee and somebody has a high amount of data, then that's like, you're getting eaten up by AI costs and you're not even breaking even, you're, it's a massive loss.

16:57or the other side, if you deal with action base, everybody has different definitions of what an action is. And someone's like, oh, it's updating one field of a record. Some people are like, no, just doing a full workflow. Some people are like, no, one step in a workflow. And it gets really confusing for a conversation with a prospect. And so that's why I'm a big fan of simplifying as much as possible. I love this Sierra and Finn approach of price per outcome. I think that's the world we're going in. But the problem with what we're doing to go in that world is it's hard. There's no consistency in regards.

17:32Okay. If a company product X is going to use this much with this many contacts versus this company product Y is going to have this many contacts, then it's going to cost us this much. It's hard to have some consistency. We're basing that off of the number of contacts ultimately, because at the end of the day, we layer into the CRM and all the, every, all the data points that you have. that is what makes the difference in how much more moving is going to happen within your CRM. Yeah. And it just seems like your type of product, yeah, a lot of different ways you could go that way in pricing conversations, probably even harder.

18:04But Ramsey, I'm curious at this stage of your business and with your sales experience and leading this business now, do you have a favorite number or metric or operational metric that you're using to guide the business? Yeah. Look, at the end of the day, it's ultimately tied to the metrics of the customer. And you work everything backwards, everything, even like incentivizations for our team, every aspect of everything is tied to that metric. So typically when a customer comes in, it's like, okay, they're converting. For example, we have one of our design partners, Rybin, for example, they came to us.

18:40They're doing about 100 ,000 emails like cold outbound per month. And they were converting 160 meetings across a dozen reps. And first month out of gates, we have 451, right? But we don't like, not to press you, but I'm press fine. Well, that's pretty cool. Without adding anything more top of funnel, we're converting almost 3x. But the whole team, the devs, our support team, everybody was, was like, hey, the goal is to get them more meetings. So if that's what they came in here for us to do, they want us to give them more meetings, then everything that everybody does with that goal in mind ends up just being aligned very well.

19:18So at the end of the day, that's ultimately what we want to get to. And everybody's going to work as hard as possible to get to that goal. So that's at least internally what we look at. But for us as a company, financially, obviously, it's also like retention is a really big one. We want to make sure that retention is clutch, especially the stage where we're at. When we approach investors and we say we have brought on 100 customers and 90 of them canceled, that's a different story than the same brought on five customers and all five have stunk. Right. It's a massive difference. Doing everything we can to make sure we work closer with our design partners to give them what they want and they've been free to us.

19:56And then we focus on just honestly just trying to do whatever we can to continue growing our MRR. So we're, yeah, that's the, we're not, we're trying to stay away from the, the error term, I know that's always a sexy one, but I think in talking to a lot of investors that I think the, the one to focus on is certainly just MRR at this point. at our stage. There's a lot more that we could dive into. Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But MRR, always, yeah, got to be moving up and to the right. A few stats figures or a few questions before we wrap up. Do you have, where is your company located? So I'm in Southern California and my co-founder's in Nevada and just I'm technically a lot in between both.

20:36So a lot of back and forth and obviously we have a little home base thanks to Berkeley Scott and then Silicon Valley in the big area. So a lot of, So West Coast is easy to say. Yeah, West, yeah. General West Coast. And our team is everywhere. Our team, we have people in Spain and Portugal and UK and Mexico and Pakistan. You'd see something, but yeah, everywhere. Yeah, yeah. A lot of places. And then what's your current team size? 12, including both co-founders. Okay. Yeah. Slowly growing, but we've got a good solid team. A lot of them have been with us from the start, Honesty, who've been phenomenal to see their growth within Honesty.

21:14And then we're, so you're about three years in, we're halfway through 2026. So I'm curious, as a leader of this business, like what keeps, what's top of mind for the rest of the year and or what keeps you up at night as you guide the business through this year and all the AI craziness? Specifically, specifically that, what you just said, all the AI craziness. I was talking to a VC a few weeks ago and he asked me the same question. And it's similar. It's like, what keeps you up at night? And I told him, I'm really struggling to figure out the value of AI compared to a human. Because if you, because one, it's important for me to know and present to prospects and people we talk to, because then I could give them a comparison and there's ways to do it.

22:00Sure. How much you pay them, how many hours they spend, all that stuff. Right. But then there's this other piece is like, okay, how much AI are we going to spend to actually replace this human? Because that's the more that you do, the more cost that it gets. And at one point, you're like, what's the cost benefit, right? And how much like copilot versus like fully autonomous. There's a lot of different elements of it. And, but then you have this other part of the equation that is like fairly unknown, which is you could give somebody who's really good with a tool set that kind of like sucks their job and actually get a pretty phenomenal result.

22:35But you could also give somebody who sucks their job that thinks they're good at AI that gets bad results. and the costs are the same, right? And there's no way to measure both of those. It's really hard. Sure, you can look at outcomes and all that, but to be able to go to a company and go, let me look at your outcomes and let me show you what you're doing and how we can make it better is a much more of an uphill battle. I wish there was a way to be able to tell that very easily. So if somebody could create a tool for that, that'd be great. That's what keeps me up. Ultimately, what we do and what we provide is deals a lot with that, right?

23:07Human augmentation or human replacement in some ways. how can we make what people are doing better and building an ROI around that ultimately is our business model, right? Yeah. That's a hard one. Yeah. Yeah. That will definitely keep you up many nights thinking about that one. So Ramsey, appreciate your time sharing your journey today. If listeners would like to learn more about RevReply, where should we send them online? RevReply.com. Just a nice and simple and easy. You could find me at Ramsey on Ramahi on LinkedIn as well. And if anybody ever wants even an audit of their pipeline or anything like that at all, I'm happy to give them any sort of guidance.

23:44You don't have to even obviously buy from us. I love this category. I love the subject. So if I could be of any help in any shape or form, even just for free advice, just being the awesome, I'm happy to help out. All right. Sounds great. You guys heard it. So reach out to Ramsey and check out revreply.com to learn more. And again, Ramsey, thanks for coming on the show today. Thank you so much, Ben. Appreciate you having me. Thank you. Thanks.