Building & scaling info + software businesses. Head of GTM @kendosalesai
Joined June 2022
- Tweets2.2K
- Following381
- Followers14.7K
- Likes3.2K
3 new enterprise deals signed at Kendo yesterday.
Need to crack how we do 10x more of this.
I've spent most of my career behind the scenes building systems, automations and processes.
Now I'm trying to become a MUCH better GTM operator.
A few things I'm focused on right now:
- Getting cold email to consistently generate qualified pipeline
- Hiring another SDR and building out the outbound team
- Cracking LinkedIn outbound as a repeatable channel
- Getting more consistent, high-quality content out from the team
Learning all this has been very fun, but I've got a long road ahead.
Who are the best people building and scaling B2B SaaS that I should be following on here?
We're onboarding more enterprise customers at Kendo, and I noticed a problem that was only going to get worse as we scaled.
Our developers were getting pulled into more customer Slack channels instead of building the product.
So I built something with Claude Code to fix it.
And it was ridiculously simple.
For context, every enterprise customer gets a shared Slack channel with our team.
Between general questions, feature requests and the occasional bug, there's a lot of activity across these channels.
And I don't want our developers constantly checking Slack just in case something important comes through.
So I built a simple Slack bot using Claude Code.
It scans our enterprise customer channels multiple times a day, looking for potential bugs or technical issues.
When it finds something, it automatically sends the message to a central dev escalations channel and tags the relevant developers.
Now instead of monitoring loads of different conversations, our devs have one place to see what actually needs their attention.
Tbh it was very easy to build.
I didn't need to pull one of our engineers away from the product to develop it.
Just Claude Code, a Slack bot and me cooking for a few mins 👨🍳
Small internal build to buy back time EVERYDAY.
Easy W.
This is the whole GTM stack we run at @Kendosalesai .
Curious what I'm missing?
CRM and booking
→ Close for the CRM
→ iClosed for booking calls
Finding companies
→ Apollo
→ Claude
→ Sales Navigator into PhantomBuster for contacts and LinkedIn URLs
Email and phone
→ Findymail
→ Treg for the enrichment waterfall
→ Apollo for contact data
Sending
→ Listkit for cold email and warmup (and some leads)
→ Phantom Buster (LinkedIn)
Calls
→ Close (Outbound dials)
→ Fathom to record on zoom
→ Kendo to score every call automatically
Intent
→ RB2B for website visitors, straight into Close
→ Apify for LinkedIn engagement and hiring signals
→ A bot we built that drops email opens into Slack
Content
→ Typefully for scheduling
→ A custom scrape and brief pipeline we built in house
One gap I already know about:
→ Not harvesting much with who engages with our content
What am I missing, and what should I be checking out?
We've built a pretty interesting signal-based outbound system at Kendo recently.
I've been calling it "daisy chaining."
Essentially, we're turning one inbound lead into multiple outbound opportunities.
Here's how it works 👇
Someone visits our website, starts a free trial, or buys an individual seat.
That activity triggers an automation. We capture their email, identify their company and enrich the account with firmographic data like headcount, industry and estimated sales team size.
We then search for relevant decision-makers at that company. Usually VPs of Sales, Sales Directors, CROs, etc.
Once we've identified them, we enrich their contact data, check for existing CRM records and verify their email addresses.
Qualified contacts get pushed into an outbound sequence, with messaging tailored to the original signal and their role.
So instead of treating a free trial signup as one lead, we're using it to discover an entire account worth prospecting.
Great way to get real activity to telling us which companies to prioritise.
7
16
977
One of the systems I recently built at @kendosalesai to help us manage our enterprise customers.
Every customer has a shared Slack channel with our account manager, developers, and wider team.
As we've grown, keeping track of conversations across all these channels has become harder.
So I built a bot that monitors our customer Slack channels and sends a daily report to our account managers.
It tracks who's waiting on a reply, how long they've been waiting, and how quickly we're responding.
Here's an example from one of our reports:
20 conversations needed a reply.
19 were answered.
Median first response time was 13 minutes.
One was missed.
It's very easy for a message to get buried in Slack when you're juggling multiple accounts.
Now our account managers wake up to a report showing exactly what needs attention rather than having to go through every channel.
Pretty simple automation, but the sort of thing that makes a big difference as we scale 👍
4
3
655
From generating millions together in the info space to building a SaaS company that hit $1M ARR in just 12 months.
Now we're going for $3M.
A lot of people have seen what we're building with Kendo AI, but probably don't know the history behind it.
@Lukealexxander and I have been building businesses together for years.
And Kendo is far from our first rodeo.
It started with Closer Cartel.
Luke had built an incredible brand in the sales training space, and I came in as COO to help scale the business.
Together, we generated millions in revenue and trained over 5,000 salespeople.
My focus was largely behind the scenes. Building systems, automations, managing operations, and creating the infrastructure needed to scale.
From there, we moved into software.
Luke had acquired Closify, and we decided to rethink how the business operated.
We revamped the platform, changed the revenue model, restructured operations, and worked on turning it into a more scalable business.
Eventually, we decided to exit and put our focus into something much bigger.
That something was @Kendosalesai
After years in the sales training industry, we'd seen firsthand how broken traditional sales training was.
Managers don't have enough time to coach every rep, new hires take months to ramp, and most salespeople end up practising on real prospects.
We knew AI could change that.
So we went all in on building Kendo.
12 months later, we hit $1M ARR.
It's been a crazy journey.
We've experimented with different acquisition channels, rebuilt processes, hired people, made plenty of mistakes, and learned a ridiculous amount along the way.
My role has evolved from overseeing operations and building the systems behind the business to now leading our GTM efforts.
And one thing has become very clear.
What gets you to $1M ARR won't necessarily get you to $3M.
In the early days, you can brute-force growth.
Founders handle everything like onboarding, customer relationships, and whatever else needs doing.
But eventually, that becomes the bottleneck.
Our focus now is building a predictable, repeatable growth engine.
Better outbound. Stronger sales processes. More efficient onboarding. Better systems. And a team that can execute without everything relying on us.
Looking back, everything we've built together has led us here.
Closer Cartel taught us how to sell, train, and scale.
Closify taught us about software and recurring revenue.
And Kendo is where we're putting all those lessons together.
Proud of what we've accomplished so far, but I genuinely believe we're only getting started.
$0 → $1M ARR in 12 months.
Next stop: $3M.
Back to work ⚔️
Sales & AI Systems = $$$
@MaxBatess has done a serious job of executing from the moment he joined.
True killer 🚀
Luke Ward retweeted
Introducing @Kendosalesai
The world's best AI training, management, and enablement platform built for sales people by sales people
