RevOps at the Seed Stage: Experimentation, Automation, and GTM Strategy

How Verisoul's small team unleashed huge impact

Typically, I share content derived from my own experience leading RevOps at VC-backed SaaS startups (typically Series A/B/C) and blue chip companies. Today, however, I wanted to share insights from the opposite side of the spectrum: a 6-person start-up. A small startup is unique both in its willingness to try the latest tools and tactics and its constrained resources (Verisoul only has ~1.5 team members dedicated to RevOps). This combo has led the team to 1) automate the vast majority of their work and 2) leverage the most innovative tech at their disposal.

Whether you’re trying to build RevOps from scratch or looking for creative tactics to spice up your existing GTM motion, this story is for you.

To tell the story of RevOps at a Seed stage company, I’ve enlisted the help of Joey Maddox, a former B2B SaaS investor turned Chief Strategy Officer at Verisoul. We’ll touch on 4 components of his story:

1. Scrappy ways to find ICP: Unique approaches to get GTM off the ground

2. Automating everything: Auto-enriching and auto-scoring TAM

3. Unifying the GTM motion: From tactics to uniform strategy

4. Connecting the dots: Linking marketing, sales, retention, and finance with one metric

Scrappy ways to find ICP

Unique approaches to get GTM off the ground

A classic paradox for horizontal solutions: in a world where you can sell to seemingly every company, why is it so difficult to find the right buyer?

Verisoul, for example, helps prevent fake accounts and bots online. They could in theory sell to any company with online account creation. However, a large portion of companies either 1) don’t care enough about fake accounts to pay for a solution or 2) are incentivized to keep bots on the platform to hit new user growth targets.

Thus, the team treated every GTM exercise as an experiment, and sought to focus demo discussions on the problem vs the solution to better understand customer needs by industry. This scrappy approach to GTM meant nothing was off limits. New campaigns, conferences, content, ad words, industries, and more were discussed AND implemented every week. Some of my favorite scrappy campaigns:

• Content partnerships: Reaching out to every vendor they used to write product review case studies; this helped Verisoul improve their SEO (examples for Retool and Relevance AI)

• Competitive pages / ads: Creating comparison web-pages and then bidding on competitor search terms

• Foray into account-based marketing:

  • A SOC II, two socks campaign where the team sent pairs of socks to all enterprises they had ever spoken with after SOC II certification

  • A king-cake campaign on Mardi Gras for AI companies in Austin

Though the degree of success varied across each campaign, the team started to fine-tune its ICP. The three primary reasons to use Verisoul became clear: direct hard cost / fraud tied to fake accounts, compromised data integrity, and user experience. Furthermore, these were most prevalent across four industries: PLG SaaS, Social & Dating, Market Research, and Gaming.

💡 Industrial logic > metrics. ICP evolves over time. From start-ups to enterprises, new products, features, buyers, campaigns, and market tailwinds can influence who is buying the product. While top of funnel metrics are of course critical, ensuring the industrial logic and ROI is there for the customers is foundational. High demo count and even high customer conversion may signal the product is resonating with a new segment of the ICP, yet without industrial logic these customers will churn over time.

With these four segments in mind, the team sought to craft the list of every potential customer in their TAM and enrich them with dozens of features. With today’s tools, this was much easier than it sounds…

Automating everything

Auto-enriching and auto-scoring TAM

When building the stack, the team targeted three key features:

1. A view of every possible buyer across their four primary verticals

2. Detail on where in the marketing funnel prospects are (Aware of Verisoul? Demonstrated interest? Simply identified?)

3. Enrichment / scoring for every single account based on 50+ features

The output would have thousands of companies with the following prioritization:

Two years ago, this would be improbable for a small TAM. Impossible for a large one. However, the team’s background in computer science and recent advancements in AI enabled them to engineer an interconnected solution.

1. A view of every buyer: The team used web scrapers, Keyplay, Apollo, Open AI, and more to identify >10k customers across their target markets.

2. Marketing funnel: The team routes every interaction to Hubspot, including LinkedIn likes, LI profile visits, LI messages (with AI categorization), emails, meetings, and web visits by page. Getting this data into Hubspot often required making direct API calls inside of Zapier, Relevance AI, and Clay; existing “integrations” for tools like HeyReach (a LinkedIn sequencer) were limited

3. Account scoring: The team build a variety of enrichment workflows inside Apollo, Clay, Relevance AI, and Hubspot (per the graphic below)

The final outcome? Not only does the team have 10k+ companies with their tier / funnel in Hubspot, any new engagement gets auto-logged and the company auto-enriched before being added to Hubspot.

Unifying the GTM

With the TAM organized, we unified all of our approaches to make sure the right people were getting the right messages.

This involved mapping their entire top of funnel approach on a page. The framework for the GTM approaches is simple:

• Vertical vs Horizontal: Targeting within vs across industries

• Ongoing vs project-based vs partner: Ongoing projects are weekly / monthly rituals; project-based activities are one-time in nature. Partnerships are an entirely separate category altogether, with a number of different flavors

In addition to acting as a nice forcing function for reflection, the exercise also allowed them to better think through prioritization and spend. Spending $10k on a conference might “feel” like a good use of time, but how would it compare to $10k on ads? Or sponsored content?

The question required the team to link marketing, sales, retention, and finance.

Innovative tactic from Verisoul: LinkedIn audience building

With recent struggles in email marketing due to the proliferation of sequencing tools, the team has adopted a new approach I’ve seen getting traction across the RevOps landscape: LinkedIn audience building.

It’s simple:

1/ Add any relevant prospect on LinkedIn

2/ Never try to sell them via messages; simple notes are acceptable, but nothing to spurn the relationship. Remember, LinkedIn messages never go away 👀

3/ Post occasionally, and trust that high quality content will be viewed by new connects

Watch your “inbound” sales skyrocket with this hack!

Connecting the dots

Linking marketing, sales, retention, and finance with one metric

The Verisoul team takes a rather finance-y perspective to their GTM prioritization, rooted in one of the most important RevOps metrics: CLTV/CAC. They estimate customer lifetime value (with the likelihood of conversion in mind) and back into an investment with a target CLTV / CAC ratio.

As a reminder, the two components of the equation are:

Customer lifetime value: (ARR * gross margin %) / (churn rate + discount rate)

Customer acquisition cost: S&M spend

With a target ratio in mind, they can easily make investment decisions.

For example, a $5k ARR deal with 50% likelihood to close, and an estimated 80% gross margin has a value of $8k with a 10% churn rate (tied to customer retention) and 15% discount rate (standard). If they want a 10x CLTV / CAC, they need to spend <$800 on this prospect!

The key takeaway

There’s a lot to learn from small start-ups. Without entrenched behaviors and bureaucracy, start-ups are able to rapidly iterate on their GTM and test all of the new tools. Their lean nature and low-budgets often require return on spend to be significantly more efficient. As a result, these teams tend to create innovative solutions that are useful for anyone, whether you’re in the same spot as Verisoul or where Verisoul plans to be in 5 years.

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