Mat Sherman

PSA: If you run a startup or growth-oriented SMB, I want to build you a 13 week cash forecast for f͟r͟e͟e͟. Seriously, no obligation to engage Margin whatsoever. I talk all the time about how insanely valuable a 13 week cash forecast is for startups and fast-growing SMBs. Now I’m going to put my money where my month is... If you’re the least bit intrigued, DM me or comment below, and we’ll jump on a call to discuss next steps. I can only do this for a handful of people, so reach out ASAP if you’re interested.

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We sent out a survey after last year's Utah Tech Week. It had an NPS score in the high 70s. 💅 That said, we had 4 main bits of constructive feedback that were the most recurring. 1. There should be more *tech* in Utah Tech Week. Too much emphasis on the business side of things, and not enough on the tech. 2. Better representation. Not just race and gender, but lots of the feedback was about underrepresented industries/verticals. 3. Too much time in the car! 4. Keep the quality of events high! We'll discuss each of these in at our event tomorrow at 3pm at Pelion. (link in comments) 150+ founders/community builders/event hosts attending our event, which to my knowledge is the largest gathering of community builders in Utah. Stoked at the ways our community comes together to build. Come tomorrow! And also, lmk if the comments if you feel like a community/industry/group that you're a part of is underrepresented.

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https://lnkd.in/gZ3s8ddj Hubleed updates this week: - add an administrative dashboard for qualifying leads. - Watches bet feeds on supported sites for high quality players. - Compares player names to telegram accounts or similarly named accounts. - Filters out low value players and places an alert for team members to cross promote them to other partnership sites. - Sends a message to any players who have authorized the bot if their account catches a rain or tip publicly. - Accept bet ID submission for challenges & tip those automatically. - Broadcast announcements for challenges 24/7 from a schedule. - Connect exchange and apps with discord. - Add a smart contract for managing funds. Want to partner with us? Send me a DM.

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Does your business send out influencer packages? Just last month Vamo helped multiple Utah companies deliver 100s of influencer packages across the Wasatch Front. Shipping heavy boxes is expensive, companies utilize Vamo drivers to send them all out in a few hours for a fraction of the price. Does this sound helpful? Shoot me a message. (We can do this anywhere, not just Utah) #influencers #delivery #utah

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Struggling to scale your mid-market business? Scaling isn't just about getting bigger – it's about getting smarter. In this week's The Wise Exit newsletter, we're diving deep into scaling strategies for mid-market firms. You'll learn: - The difference between growth and scaling (most get this wrong). - 5 key strategies to scale your business without losing your shirt. - Common mistakes to avoid (we see these all the time). - Case Study: How Zapier scaled without traditional VC funding. Whether you're planning to scale, sell, or just curious about what's next, this issue is packed with insights you can't afford to miss. Read the full newsletter here: https://bit.ly/3LHo7Ra Don’t miss out. P.S.: Follow me for more content like this.

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🧪 CRO Case Study Episode 54 One A/B test → 930K plus revenue 🚀 Swipe to learn how one A/B test added over $930K to our client's annual revenue. The Results Breakdown: +$77,558 per month +$930,696 per year (forecasted) +$0.58 revenue per session Bookmark this!

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Startups building sales teams in Utah... I’ve talked to >5 founders in the last 30 days that want to build GTM teams here. Makes sense to me... If you're on the fence, here's a handful of reasons to lean in: Note: the culture is uniquely different than most anywhere else. All of these reasons are based on this culture. → Everyone knows everyone. For the most part, it's an extremely small community. Everyone seems to be 1 or maybe 2 degrees removed from someone else. This is deeply rooted in the fact that a good majority spend their Sunday's at church → It's an extremely competitive environment. In a community where a lot of people believe the same thing, drive similar cars, buy similar homes, have the same looking kids... it breeds an extremely competitive environment to stand out. Many attempt to do this with their careers. → Since everyone knows everyone, college grads come with an immediate network. Not just college friends, but people they've networked with their entire lives. This makes recruiting a hell of a lot easier → Since there's an extremely high bar to 'stand out' amongst the crowd, many of the high performers are coming from even higher performer families. This means broader networks and an expectation of their lineage to keep performing high → Many are married young, with kids and a mortgage. I was one of them. 22, married, mortgage and 1st kid on the way. 25, married, two mortgages, 2 kids and a 3rd on the way. This is kinda normal here. You gotta perform early in your career to make it work. What else am I missing? What companies do you know of building GTM teams here? If you're considering building a GTM team in Utah, shoot me a note. Always happy to chat.

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Well said, Jen Abel. And even beyond these ARR guardrails, startups often instinctively throw in enterprise and SMB as dual strategies. Or direct and PLG. Outbound and channel. And more! #startup #sales #GTM #SMB #channel #enterprise #PLG #directsales

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Most CRO agencies go straight to A/B testing. (We didn't - and it made an additional $800k MRR for our client) Here's exactly how we did it 👇 Dr. Squatch was already successful, but they wanted to scale from $5M to $100M+ in revenue in under 2 years. Most agencies would jump straight to A/B testing. We didn't. Instead, we started with deep customer research: - Implemented heatmaps - Monitored social feedback - Analyzed purchase patterns - Conducted customer surveys Customers were already buying multiple soap bars... but the product pages weren't optimized for this behavior. Here's what we did: 1. Added quantity selectors to product pages 2. Set default quantity to 2 bars 3. Redesigned the checkout flow 4. Enhanced product collections 5. Improved subscription offers The results? 📈 54% increase in revenue per soap purchaser 📈 $800k+ additional monthly revenue 📈 $9.6M+ annualized revenue impact But here's the real lesson: The biggest wins don't come from random A/B tests. They come from understanding customer behavior and optimizing for existing purchase patterns. --- 💬 Tag a founder who could benefit from this. 🔔 For more CRO and growth insights, follow along.

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These are the 3 most common "omission" finance mistakes I have seen SMB owners make: 1. Lack of clear goal 2. Don't understand the economics of growth 3. Don't know the difference between earnings & cash flow All are easily solvable.

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If you're an early-stage founder and you're thinking of hiring your first AE, these are the three most important things you need to know. 1. Hire your first 2 - 3 AEs from your network. If you expect to hire someone you don't know directly or don't know via someone you trust, that is a very high-risk strategy. You're essentially hiring someone off the street and expecting them to be successful in what is probably a very dynamic and challenging environment (i.e. a startup). The cost of getting these first AE hires wrong is very large. The blast radius (as we call it at Crane Venture Partners) of bad sales hires is likely to be most of your runway. Use your network to de-risk this. Don't have a network that would allow you to hire AEs? Time to start building it! You should be thinking about these hires from the day you start your business - and if you haven't, start building this network today. 2. Don't hire AEs to close deals you haven't already built a successful motion for yourself. Don't hire AEs to sell into the types of companies or markets you haven't already been successful with. If you do, there is a very high chance they will fail. Even great AEs who already know how to sell well won't know how to sell your solution to your personas, delivering your value, with all the nuances to your sales cycle that can make them successful. Work out a (even semi-) repeatable motion yourself, hire great AEs, teach them how to sell your specific solution to the types of customers you have already sold to (because you will have worked out a hundred things that you need to do well that you're probably not even aware you're doing). Again, blast radius. Too much risk to NOT do this. 3. Don't skimp on your hiring methodology. You might think you're saving time, but you're actually wasting it. You can burn your entire runway by making a bad sales hire, I've seen that literally dozens of times. Take the time to build a hiring scorecard and a detailed interview process that will find the perfect candidate for you. Using your network will help this, but you should never shortcut the interview process. At Crane Venture Partners we favour the Who hiring methodology - you can find a copy of the book on Amazon (in the UK) - I'll put a link in the comments. This book is worth its weight in gold. As is the hiring process you can build from it. Anyone else got dos and don'ts for hiring your first AE?

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PE investors / operators: have "hire additional sales capacity" on your VCP or annual plan? HIRING new reps is only half the battle. For the ROI math to math, gotta then make 'em productive. As quickly as possible. But when it comes to making reps productive quickly, B2B companies face two big challenges: →The average tenure of a B2B sales rep is less than two years, YET... → Reps hit their peak performance two to three years in. Translation: Most reps leave before they’ve reached max productivity. Eek. In many cases, weak sales onboarding is to blame. But taking a more intentional approach to sales onboarding has a bevy of obvious benefits: • Reducing sales turnover • Shortening time-to-revenue • Higher odds of achieving your rev targets Hit on this in the book in Winning Move #32, but check out the vid below for a deeper dive on the P's and Q's of sales onboarding ▶️ * * * * * Found this helpful? Plenty more where that came from. Check out the Winning Moves Platform: the ambitious PE leader's toolkit for accelerating value creation. ↳ A digital arsenal of resources, how-to's, and tools to help private equity leaders make value-generating Winning Moves with confidence. Link in the comments below. ⤵️

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Would you hire a recently fired VP of Sales to lead the GTM strategy for your $500K start-up, especially if that candidate had absolutely no industry experience? Likely not, right? Well, LinkSquares did. And I bet they were happy with that decision! So, what's the story? How (and why) did Steve Travaglini (Pavilion 2023 CRO of the year) get fired from one VP of Sales role, after scaling sales from $0-$7M, only to lead growth at LinkSquares from $500K to $50M in ARR over the ensuing 5 years? In the clip below he talks about what he learned in the early days of their rapid growth and what he would change going forward. You can hear the entire episode for yourself on today's episode of The GOATS of Growth podcast, but if he were one of my candidates, here is how I would summarize his attributes: --Gritty --Resilient --Adaptable --Resourceful --Optimistic --Humble And, most importantly, a STRONG bias towards action which was, in opinion, the bedrock for their strong sales culture. Steve, I had been looking forward to interviewing you for a long time and I'm happy I finally got the chance. Thanks for being such a great guest! Please follow Steve to watch as he builds his own startup, Winrate, in public. Listen to the full episode here: https://buff.ly/3Cjhr6Q

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Three Things I Learned In SaaS, Sports, Tech, & Live Events:   1. They really will steal from you.   In the early days of TicketManager, we’d get calls from “Strategics” looking to “learn more” or “invest.” They’ll say things like they “have sincere interest” to get you to let your guard down.   Everyone around us told us this was normal. Don’t be too guarded. Just build and trust that they won’t steal from you. They almost shamed us for being so arrogant as to think others would take their time to steal from us.   They were wrong.   They all stole from us.   GMR, a major agency, feigned interest and even attended our customer conference in the mid-10's. They hit the market with a copycat just over a year later.   MSG took us to the contract phase—even assigning a project manager—and then built a cheap copy that looks exactly like our tech. The UI is so similar.   A private equity software currently for sale told us, after we rebuked their interest following two months of diligence, they were going to build a competing product. I respect they did.   A major, now public, ticket marketplace spent months in diligence with us then, in the StubHub case six years later, tried to testify they didn’t have “any real interest” in doing the deal and their IOI was “just preliminary.” (On the bright side, they were a star witness for us. They tried to bury us and it was so gross it backfired.)   And StubHub spent two months feigning interest in us before deliberately trying to crush our business, leading to four years in court and a $16m judgment.   Investors and bankers are wrong. Guard it all and protect yourself.   Yes, some sell and that’s the process, but others are just phishing. Protect your fish as best you can.    2. "I don’t give b--w jobs but I know when it's being done wrong"- Bill Maher.   When starting a business or becoming a new leader, there is so much pressure to let your team do their job and trust the experts around you. And that's great advice - most all of the time. But….there will be times those teammates or advisors have bad ideas. And you know they're bad ideas.   When that happened, I found it hard to stand up for myself.   An example: Back in 2013, right before we signed our largest customer, two of our advisors were adamant we sell the business for $10m and "find something more scalable." They spent an entire drive to dinner trying to convince us it was the right course of action and leaning on their vast experiences. I'm glad we didn't listen.   3. Scott Galloway is wrong: Part one million   Walking through baggage claim on Wednesday returning from the All-Star Game I mentioned to my wife I'd be working long hours the next few days as I'd been out of the office Monday and Tuesday.   Her response: "Tony, I didn't see you. You were at work events from the minute we landed"   Ignore the cynics. They only know their own path.   Do what you love and you won't work a day in your life. 

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As a founder, hiring your first sales rep is a pivotal moment. It's the bridge between your initial traction and scalable growth. But it's also fraught with risk. Here's how to nail this critical hire: 1. Look for a builder, not just a closer Your first sales rep needs to be comfortable with ambiguity. They're not just selling - they're building your sales process from the ground up. 2. Prioritize industry knowledge At this stage, deep understanding of your market is more valuable than a rolodex of contacts. They need to speak your customers' language fluently. 3. Assess their ability to wear multiple hats Can they handle everything from prospecting to closing to customer success? In the early days, your sales rep might be your entire go-to-market team. 4. Test their resilience Early-stage sales are tough. Rejection is constant. Look for someone who can stay motivated without a big team around them. 5. Align on metrics Be crystal clear on what success looks like. Is it revenue? New logos? Close rate? Make sure you're on the same page from day one. Remember: This hire can make or break your growth trajectory. Take your time, run a rigorous process, and don't settle. What other traits do you think are crucial for an early sales hire?

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3 biggest retention marketing mistakes DTC brands make: 1. Idealizing your perfect customer journey instead of analyzing feedback & testing 2. Investing in retention too late & only when acquisition stops working 3. Not building an ecosystem of strategies that work together

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Picture this scenario: You're the CRO of a Series A startup. You hired and onboarded a team of BDR's and AE's. New logos are coming through the door often and your ARR is on the rise. Your BDR's are going above and beyond setting meetings, understanding the product as well as how to give an initial demo. Your AE's are discovering product market fit in new verticals and are bringing whales into their pipeline, which go on to closed-won. You now have successfully raised a Series B round. All of this growth and momentum is an exciting new challenge and you now need to invest most of your time and efforts in orchestrating the funnel of leads coming in from marketing, inbound, and outbound, the sales cycle, the offerings, and the post-sales process. You decide it's time to hire a VP of Sales. Do you let the VP of sales bring in their own AE's or do you push to promote your BDR's to the AE position and existing AE's to strategic or team lead while only bringing aboard a new BDR team? It is a matter of preference and experience. In my experience and the conversations I've had with sales professionals, the former happens more than the latter. Have you also seen the same scenario play out? What has been the result? What would you do?

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Yesterday PitchBook dropped some new data showing Q2 activity up, and Modern Retail and Anna Hensel published a great article on Zombie brands. Sean Frank summarized it well. So what is the actual state of affairs? Do things suck? Or do things not suck? My take: We live in too much of a black and white world. Nuance and grey area are important. Take the Non-Alcoholic category for example. Twitter takes are hot that either Alcohol is DEAD, or Non-alcoholic is FOR SURE a fad. For me, the answer is in between. I don't need NA to take over the whole store, or even half the store. I need it to grow its shelf space from 1 to 1.5, or 2. Incremental changes, across a wide number of stores. That grows the market. It's not all or nothing. The current investment cycle is messy. There are large amounts of zombies. There are also large amounts of good companies successfully raising capital, quickly, that may trade at revenue multiples in the future. Both can be true, at the same time. Discerning investors and operators will continue to focus on fundamentals.

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The more startups I work with, the more I believe having a distribution advantage from the early days matters. If you build it, they will not always come. If you build it AND market it, they will. We're hosting a GTM Summit at Pear VC in early Sept focused on how to build your GTM from zero to 1. If you're a founder working on this stage, I'd love to see you there. We have a great lineup of speakers (including some of my favorite GTM experts like Armando, Rosie, and Alexa) that will share their hard earned lessons and mistakes in scaling GTM. RSVP link in the comments.

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