How we’ve 4x’ed our ARR past $3 MN using our brilliant LinkedIn strategy

so instead what we did was we, um, we went

and did, we are selling a lot to marketing people and marketing

ops people, commercial ops people.

And they spent a lot of time on LinkedIn.

Um, so we basically, uh, built up, uh, an audience on LinkedIn by

talking to, to, to these people.

Mm-hmm.

And that has been probably our most.

Successful, uh, growth factor.

Hello everyone.

Welcome to the B2B SaaS podcast.

Today we have Lar Gro Guard with us.

Hey, Lars, welcome to the show.

Hey,

Upendra.

Hey, Upendra.

Thanks for having me on the show.

All right, LAR, so let's, let's try to understand

what your company does, right, and why customers pay you money.

Can you talk a bit about that?

Yeah, so, uh, I'm the CEO O of a company called Dream Data and

a co-founder of the company, and we help.

Mostly B2B SaaS companies understand how that go-to-market strategy

works, both at sort of a strategic level and at a more tactical level.

So which things they do lead to new customers, which things are cost

efficient and, and that kind of thing.

All

right.

So, uh, I wanna deep dive into this a bit, right?

So what, can you just pick one of your customers right?

And help me understand right, how you are helping them.

Exactly.

You can talk a bit about talk, you know, the specifics here as well, right?

What your product does exactly right.

And how you are able to do that.

Yeah, so like a typical customer for us would

be a, like a B2B SaaS company.

And, um, we would offer.

Basically, um, tracking of everything that goes on on the website.

And then we would be pulling data out of the CRM system.

There are various advertising systems and the marketing automation platform,

and we get all that data together.

And once you have that data in one data platform, you can do things like

say, okay, um, how much revenue did my marketing team contribute last month?

Or you can, from the marketing team, you can say, Hey, I spent.

$50,000 on Google ads last month.

Was some of that actually effective?

Did some of it, uh, impact the pipeline?

Was some of it like without any impact?

And then you can, uh, remove spend and you can sort of readjust your spend.

And then you can also like for, for ad platforms, you can feed some of the data.

Uh, directly back to the ad platform so that they can optimize

the ad serving based on that.

Alright, so

what, where do you pull in all of these data from?

You mentioned ad pla ad platforms.

Are there any other data sources that you typically sort of pull in data from?

Yeah, uh, so like we mostly work with PB SaaS companies,

so very often LinkedIn ads is a big source of, uh, of advertising

leads, uh, Google ads, especially search ads, but also display ads.

Um, B2b sas, like we are big on T2 and Cap Terrace, so review

platforms are also important.

Mm-hmm.

So that's, uh, some of the platforms we pull data from.

And then, uh, big CRM systems like Salesforce is of course a very big one.

HubSpot is a, like, also becoming more and more popular also in midmarket.

Um, and then we have tracking data, which either we have our

own tracking infrastructure or we can pull data from products like

segment.com.

Got it.

And, and do you have any intelligence added on top of all of this data?

Right?

Is that your product or are you just, you know, showing all of this

data in a nice, easy to use fashion.

I think the big, uh, of course there's like, at the end there's

some intelligence, but I think the very hard part is actually, uh, stitching all

the data together into one data model.

Um, that's where if you wanna build this yourself, that's where

you're gonna break your neck.

Because you're pulling data from maybe 10, 15 sources, maybe 20 sources.

Each source has a representation of the user of the company, uh, maybe a

representation of business value and representation of something somebody did.

So there, like every object in your data model exists in all these

systems, and now you have to duplicate everything, stitch it together so that

you could basically say, Hey, this pipeline deal I created yesterday.

Okay.

Which company was it for?

That's easy.

Who were the people?

Who were the other people I already know in other systems, and what did they do?

And if I can associate some money, I spent what, like how did that impact?

So tying it all together.

Mm-hmm.

That's really the big sort of, uh, effort of our product.

And then once you've done that, you can apply, um, Different types of

advanced statistics on top of it.

We also do that.

Um, but typically, like if you are say, a data team internally in the company,

that's probably what you like to do.

Yeah.

What you hate doing is all the stitching of data.

Um, so we have a lot of, we have customers that use our product like

very tactically out in the, like looking at the data in our product.

But we also have lots of customers that are.

Basically just taking our data models, putting them into BigQuery

or, uh, snowflake and using them there in their own, uh, as part

of their own data infrastructure.

Got

it.

Let's talk about your customers here, right?

So how many customers, paying customers do you have on your platform as of today?

Uh,

so we have a hundred paying customers, and then we have

roughly three to 400, uh, free customers.

So we have, um, a very sort of, Super useful free product.

Okay.

Have to think it's useful.

But basically, um, if you're using Google Analytics for your web

analytics, um, it's uh, not that great for B2B companies because you

typically just tech counting people.

Um, so we have like a B2B equivalent of, uh, of Google

Analytics that we offer for free.

So we have like four to 500 customers on that, that are free.

Yeah.

And then we have around a hundred paying customers that are using sort of.

Pulling in all the different data sources and getting the

product.

So I wanna get a sense of how big these customers are.

Right.

Typically, how much do they pay you on a, on a monthly or on

basis?

Um, so the average customer is paying roughly 30,000 euros of dollars annually.

Um, but we have customers that are sort of stepping into the enterprise

sector, but we are definitely sort of, uh, s and p midmarket, uh,

type of company at the moment.

Got it.

So that, that makes a lot of sense.

And I wanna understand your growth as well, right?

Before we, we move on to your, you know, you know, growth journey, right?

So like last, last year, 12 months before today, right?

So we were you, how many customers you had on your platform?

So

we, last year we roughly, uh, four x both our revenue

and our customer base pay customers.

So we had like a, a very good, uh, year of growth last year.

Um, so you essentially moved from 25 to

hundred odd customers in an year?

That's what we did.

Yeah.

Something like that.

Yeah.

Alright.

So we are also at the beginning of the journey, so, Growing from a small pace.

You can have some really he growth numbers, but it was a

really good year for us, for sure.

Let's,

let's talk about this, right?

So where you're getting all of these growth and customers from, like

what's really been working for you?

Yeah, just, just start for your top funnel so that we could deep down and

understand how it's all working for you.

Just purely from a top funnel perspective, like what's

working for you as of today.

I think we've tried many different things and some things were not that effective.

We did, uh, outbound sales, which is, uh, maybe you go to go to a

tactic for early stage and it.

Maybe also because of the people we were, it didn't work very well for us.

Um, so instead what we did was we, um, we went and did, we are selling a

lot to marketing people and marketing ops people, commercial ops people.

And they spent a lot of time on LinkedIn.

Um, so we basically, uh, built up, uh, an audience on LinkedIn by

talking to, to, to these people.

Mm-hmm.

And that has been probably our most.

Successful, uh, growth factor.

All

right, so what do you mean by building audience?

I wanna understand this, right?

So is it you being, establishing yourself as a brand or influencer

or like, is it that company's brand?

Like what's happening on LinkedIn?

Just deep dive into

it.

Me and, and other people from the company.

So we made a sort of a mission for everybody in the commercial team

to be very visible on LinkedIn and communicate to, uh, our sort of core

audience, our I C P and core persona.

And basically engage with them and talk about things that they care

about, which is marketing, uh, B2B marketing, b2b SaaS marketing.

How you do it, what work with this, and what are the pains?

Uh, basically I think it, it's not that hard if you, if you're super excited

about yourself, it's just talking about the stuff that you love and

building connections with these people.

And for salespeople.

Cause sometimes we have salespeople that would come in from other, um, verticals.

But that is part of their onboarding is, you know, stepping into this, um,

social media, uh, selling strategy and, and building up their audience.

Okay.

So does that make sense?

So, uh, I wanna understand a bit more here, right?

So, so just help me quantify, right?

So, so out of, you know, you, you hired on, you've got on 75 new customers, right?

Mm-hmm.

So what proportion of these customers have actually discovered you through

this social media strategy of yours?

Yeah, I would say probably 50 to 60%.

Uh, and

what about the rest?

40?

Can you just help me close

that?

So the rest I think we have, uh, so our product solves some problems

that, that people are actually looking for solutions to, like,

for instance, revenue attribution.

It's something that a lot of customers out there are looking for solutions to.

So for these say high demand searches, we rank really well and we pay for them.

So we also do, um, paid search.

And then we also have a sort of quite aggressive strategy on

review building and building a presence on, on G2 and Cap Terra.

And, you know, if you are enterprise, you're, you're doing a lot of, uh, yeah.

Uh, talking to, um, analysts at, at Gartner, et cetera.

But for our market, we're better off investing in, um,

in T2 and just like getting our customers to talk about us there.

And that's also very effective.

Okay.

And then we have.

Because we integrate with a lot of different technologies.

We also have sort of a trickle of customers coming

in from those technologies.

So, you know, you are on HubSpot, but you're looking for someone to

fix attribution where you, okay, you'll find us, or you're on segment.

You know, you'll find us.

Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Got it.

And, and this is your top of funnel, right?

So, so just, yeah, I think obviously I wanna talk, focus on the most, you know,

brilliant thing that you're doing, right?

So just talk about this LinkedIn social strategy, selling strategy that you have.

Just, just talk clearly what's happening, right?

So how many people on your team, what exactly do they do on a regular basis?

Do you really go and connect to these cold, you know, peop leads out there?

What's the exact strategy?

Just, just talk about that

process here.

So the, the strategy is like one, um, make sure you use up.

Uh, all your connections.

Mm-hmm.

And to make sure that you understand that you talk about

something that people care about.

Don't talk about your product, don't talk about yourself, but

talk about the problems that you share with your customers.

So you're a salesperson, you're selling, okay?

Talk about selling that will help you engage with an audience that

cares about selling and go to market.

Don't tell them that your product is gonna be fantastic and solve

that problem, but just talk about.

You know, how you use your own product or how you have, you know, pains with

your boss or whatever it is that is like something that you care deeply about.

Just be, and be quite consistent about talking about that.

That's how you build an audience.

And it can be, things can range from very serious topics.

So it could be like, uh, you know, you're struggling with your boss or, uh, Like

burnout or like, you can have different things that are like, like heavy topics.

Mm-hmm.

Um, which are relevant, but you can also have very light stuff like, uh,

you know, memes or you post like, you know, repurpose, uh, memes.

And we have a lot of success with that.

Uh, so, so

how many folks in your team sort of do this on a regular basis?

Right.

So And how many followers do they have?

Like typically?

Yes.

So we have, uh, around.

Like eight people doing this, uh, very regularly, and the most successful of

them have like plus 10,000 followers.

And if you're new to it or not as active as the best of us, then you might be

at a couple of thousand followers.

So,

And do you as a company, you know, focus on

building this audience as well.

Right.

How do you grow that 10,000 number to let's say 20,000?

Do you have any tips or tricks there, or it

just happens organic for you?

Yeah, I think we made a conscious decision to make this, uh, personal.

So I think that's also maybe the risky part of it.

Uh, it is not as such a company asset.

It is more of a personal asset for the commercial person, for the

salesperson or the CS person or.

The marketing person.

Um, and that works really well on a platform like

LinkedIn where it is personal.

Um, of course it, it is, you know, in that sense, a bit risky because it is not

dream data that has all the followers.

It is Laura who has the followers, or Stephan or, yeah.

You have to live with that.

Okay.

So it's, it's just you depending upon your team, you know, teammates

to sort of go about doing their business and getting things done.

Right.

So you don't have any, you know, particular strategy or, you

know, vision around how many followers do you wanna grow to?

It's just happening organically.

Is

that how it's, I think it's, it's, its, it's happening

organically, but also by us talking a lot about it and leading around it, uh, making

space for it, uh, making sh and also, you know, Like talking about it as something

that is important to the company.

Got it.

Because that is building a lot of pipeline.

Right?

Got it.

It is.

Let's, yeah.

Yeah.

Let's move on to your bottom of funnel, right?

I mean, you've, you've got, you know, great, I guess great

sort of leads coming in, right?

What happens, how do you close a $30,000 deal, right?

Like, what happens after that?

Do you have any sales tips sort of trying to chase those leads and close them out,

and how does your sales cycle look like?

Yeah, so we have like an inside sales team, uh, that

will engage with inbound leads.

And the typical inbound lead for us is someone signing up for the free product.

Mm-hmm.

Or somebody requesting a demo.

Um, And I think we also early on made a decision to have a very scalable

product so that we could offer free trials and, and have a free product.

So that's part of our maybe DNA as who we are as product people

and, and company builders.

Um, so that's a fundamental part of our sales cycle, is letting people

try the product so that they can see that it actually works and that

it does what we promise it will do.

Uh, so that's fundamental.

And then apart from that, it is you, you can say, Because you're trying

the product, it becomes a bit more of a, say, helpful sale where the

salesperson is maybe less aggressive on pushing the product and more

sort of a helpful person trying to.

You know, a bit like customer success type of person, helping the customers

see the value of the product.

So

how many salespeople do you have on your team as of today who actually

managed to close this 75 deals last year

before

people, poor people ended up closing 75 deals

approximately of 20, $30,000.

A c v?

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's insane.

Last year.

That seems insane.

Like, like what's, what's, it's a good thing, what's,

how is it even working for you?

I mean, like what's really been working, right?

Is it just your product is too good or what's, what's, do you

have any insights over there?

I mean, it's just too good and then too

good.

The grocery, I think the big I, I would say.

The big thing for us has been this, the ability to let people try the product.

Um, that's been very important for us.

Uh, and as, uh, as part of our sort of way

of, of doing this talk about what happens, right?

Let's say inbound discovers you, right?

And they start trying out your free product, they, they

derive some value out it.

Yeah.

At this point, what happens?

Does your sales salesperson jump there and what exactly does he do and how

do, how does he end up converting that?

Let just talk about that

process.

Yeah.

I think there are two paths.

So one is like you're signing up for the free product and

you're actually just using it.

Then we will qualify you as ICP or not like I are you sort of

fitting our ideal customer profile.

If you are, then we will have somebody reach out in, in a helpful way, say,

okay, can I help you try the product and see if this is something that

you might consider buying as well?

Okay.

So that's sort of one path.

The other path is like a demo request, which is more of a standard

journey, which is like you, you come in, you ask for a demo, you book,

uh, in the calendar of a rep, and then we would typically go through.

You know, the steps of, of, of a normal qualification.

You'll talk to, talk to people, try to figure out if they have

a problem we solve, et cetera.

And we would also very often throw in, uh, like trying the product.

It depends a bit, the larger the company, if you're a large company,

can be hard to try a product because maybe the, the biggest commitment

for a large companies, maybe not the money, it's more giving us the data.

Yeah.

Um, so, so they are more.

You know, they're not willing to actually try the product because getting to a

stage where they can commit to giving us the data actually requires them to

go through the entire buying process.

So, so, so are,

are, especially, are most of these customers trying out a revenue

attribution platform for the first time?

Are, are they trying to switch from somebody else?

Like what, how does this, you know, it varies data

look like.

It varies.

Uh, so European customers, very often it's a first time purchase.

Uh, the US customers very often have, uh, had experience with other, uh,

platforms and are second or third time buyers of a similar type of product.

Um, got it.

Right.

Then let's, let's talk about your churn, right?

I mean, I guess like how, how are you manage, like how are you able to sort

of keep hold of your customers, right?

So are they churning out, like how does your expansion rate look like?

I think like, uh, churn and expansion is where

we are working a lot right now.

Uh, we are, you can say our product is an analytics product, and right

now that that's, At least for a lot of our customers, that is what it is.

And it means that you are relying on people to look at the product and use

the product and put that, those, like do their own analysis and put it into action.

Mm-hmm.

So we are building up a lot of capabilities of the product to make

sure that you can have, uh, say, set and forget type of features

where you connect and then the con the product continues to deliver.

Um, Value, also you not continuously accessing the product.

So we do a lot of work in that space.

And then the other end is that we are.

We very much like customers who work directly with the data and built

the data into their daily processes.

And I would say if, if we managed to get those things happening for our

customer, then we have very, very low churn rates and nice upsell also.

So

do you have any initial numbers on how your

expansion expansion looked like?

So did you manage to convert any $30,000 deal to that say $60,000?

So,

Not, uh, we we're not there yet.

I think that for us, we've been focusing on driving quite high, uh, contracts as

the initial contract, and that makes this sort of very big expansion quite hard.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, I think we're maybe leaning a bit towards trying to, maybe we're, I'm not

sure about it, but I have a feeling that going for a slightly lower entry point.

Sort of a can cut the time of the sale.

I don't think we have a very long sale cycle, but you can have more

success in sales if you have just,

just like, how big is that sale cycle?

Is it in months?

The quarters?

How big is that?

Yeah, like 60 days.

60 60 days from initial contact to closing a deal on average.

Got

it.

Um, let's, let's move on to your backstory, right?

So I wanna understand like, when did you start the company, right?

What's the story

there?

So the story of the company is basically, uh, we, we are three co-founders and

two of us work together in another SaaS company, and we had all the

problems that we're solving now.

Um, so we had a ton of data from different go-to-market systems

and a lot of tracking data.

And the last thing we wanted was to spend like two years

building, uh, data infrastructure, spitting all this data together.

But there really wasn't any way around doing that.

Um, and you know, basically we said, okay, one, so we solved it in that context.

It was a company called Trustpilot.

Mm-hmm.

And that was great, lots of value out of that.

Um, we had insights that we could never have had any other way and

lots of nice automations based on it.

So it was great, uh, very successful pro project in the

company, but at the same time we're like, why is this not a product?

Like, why did we have to do this when we were using HubSpot, Salesforce

segment, Google ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, like we were using all

the standard stuff, like why did we have to sit for two years and build data

pipelines That just didn't make sense.

Mm-hmm.

Because it was so standard.

Yeah.

Um, so that was the fundamental, uh, and, and where did you get, where

did you get your first few customers?

First couple of

customers?

Uh, the first customers, I think what we did is we are sort of coming out of

a product and engineering background, so we were quite careful about not

assuming that other people would want what we thought was a great idea.

So we basically went out, pitched, just based on a, you know, deck,

uh, to our, to, to network in Copenhagen, where we were from.

Mm-hmm.

And try to find like, if anybody else in similar situations to the, we

had an idea about who we were gonna be selling to, approaching them,

would they actually pay for this?

And at some point when we had a couple of people say, okay,

we'd actually pay for this.

Like, okay, great.

Pay us.

And then we built sort of initial prototypes with them.

Um, that's how we got started.

That's, uh, maybe, uh, it's like 18.

2018.

Yeah.

And how many folks do you have on your comp team As of today?

Right.

How big is your company?

Oh, 35

people now.

And how many

in the GTM go to market?

The go to market team is like 12 people.

Got it.

And yeah, just, just, uh, did you raise any external funding so far to build

your company?

Yeah, so we raised actually three on three occasions.

So we raised, um, that 19, uh, from Seed Camp in London and some other

investors, some local investors as well.

And then in.

2020 also from a London investor and an Icelandic investor.

Um, and then we just raised a Series A from a German investor, um, end of last

year.

Got it.

Right.

So one last question here, right.

So where, what's the vision here?

Where do you see your company growing in the next five years or

so?

So the big vision is automating a lot of go to market based on the data.

I think that is our big vision.

You can say Amazon does not employ a million salespeople.

And we don't see any reason why a sort of B2B company shouldn't be able to,

um, to have some of the same levels of automation that a company like Amazon has.

Uh, but one of the big things holding back those companies is data.

And we are, we are like, we wanna solve that problem and we wanna

be sort of the foundation for companies in the B2B space becoming

as automated in that go-to-market.

Uh, motion.

Alright LA that's a big

vision.

Yeah.

Alright, LAR, thanks for taking the time to talk to me.

Hope you scaled dream date at a much, much greater heights.

Thank you.