Side Hustles & Personal Brand Building - with Amy Volas

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, CEO of RevUp Squared and the host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B SaaS industry thought leaders, executives, and people just like you to discuss how they use metrics, key performance indicators, and benchmarks to enable better data-driven, metrics-informed decisions that accelerate revenue performance and increase enterprise value. If you'd like to gain insights into how your metrics measure up to industry benchmarks, you can learn more at revopsquared.com. Now, on to today's show. Welcome to today's edition of the Metrics of Measure Up podcast. We're fortunate to have Amy Volas join us, who's a real thought leader on LinkedIn regarding all things sales related and specifically sales recruiting. Amy, thank you so much for joining me today.

**Amy Volas** (1:00)
Ray, thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk about all this, so appreciate the invite.

**Ray Rike** (1:04)
Before we jump into the discussion itself, do you mind just taking a minute and introducing yourself, your background and what you're currently doing?

**Amy Volas** (1:11)
Sure. So I'm the founder and CEO of a company called Avenue Talent Partners. That is a search firm to help bring stages of startups, hire experienced enterprise sellers, sales leaders and executive sales leaders. So we're quite specific about the lane that we swim in. It comes from my background of being in sales, specifically enterprise sales for 20 plus years. Really proud to say that I've sold over $100 million of revenue and counting. And through that have learned a ton of lessons. I've been both a seller and a leader. I've sold products and services. I've worked for big companies. I've worked for startups. And all of that kind of culminates to this point of what I do and why I do it and what my background is. So that's me.

**Ray Rike** (1:52)
Well, thank you so much for joining us. And I know that with your following on LinkedIn and some of the positive comments I see, we are fortunate to have you today. So let's start today's podcast with some of the benchmarks that we've conducted in the first half of 20 for the B2B SaaS industry. These are all part of the RevOp Square KPI benchmarking index. Number one, ARR growth is down over 50% versus the first half 20 plan. And in fact, new ARR is down almost 70% against the plan in first half. If you look at the efficiency of getting new ARR measured by the CAC ratio, the CAC ratio has actually increased by about 25% in the first half of 20 versus FY19. What that means is for every dollar of new ARR that's being generated in the B2B SaaS industry, it's costing now about $1.60 of sales and marketing cost. So with that as the backdrop, based upon your role both as a practitioner and as a recruiter for multiple B2B SaaS companies, what are the major impacts you've seen to B2B sales in the last six months, both from a business reality perspective, but also from a sales professional psyche perspective?

**Amy Volas** (3:06)
So I think and I promise I'm not trying to shamelessly plug this, but I'm really dialed in to I think I'm going to start psyche first. For the last almost 30 weeks, I am co-hosting something called Thursday Night Sales with Scott Lees. And it is an opportunity every week where we spend hours in an open Q&A. It is not recorded and it's really an ask us anything of what's top of mind. And there are varying stages of people in their sales career. So you have people coming straight out of school and you have people that have been in the trenches for years and years. Everything in between, we have sales leaders, we have marketers, we have founders. And so it's a really fascinating thing because the common theme here, I think, is how do I adapt? How do I feel like I'm part of my company when everything is sort of up in the air? What is normal? What does that look like? And on the flip side, people coming together to be like, wow, I've checked off those boxes and I've challenged myself and it's fascinating. The common theme here is I think people feel a bit fatigued. And I know I feel the same way. I've never worked more than I ever have. And I'm not sure if that's because we're all at home more than we've been, or it's a nice outlet and a coping mechanism, or the table stakes are higher than they've ever been because the market is all over the place, depending on what industry you're in. And if you're a seller that sells to different industries, you've had to adjust to that. So from a psyche perspective, I think that there are really shining, bright moments. There are hopeful moments, there are scared moments, and there are overwhelming moments, which I feel like this is my third downtime in my career, or weird, funky time, my very first pandemic. But I think that's also part of sales, is it is a roller coaster ride. And I think that there is a mental resilience that you build up when you've been in it for a really long time, that's required. This mental resilience is something that I don't think any of us have seen before. So that's a really long answer to saying it's all over the place.