#049 Teaming Up for Tomorrow with Tom Price-Daniel

Steven Morell: Welcome to our new episode of Speak Revenue. Remember, revenue is not a goal. It's a result! But a result of what? In this show, we turn our eyes from the output towards the input. We speak with sales leaders and entrepreneurs about their journey. So join us on our quest to uncover and learn the root causes of success. Let's unpack what works for them. And what didn't. Today with my guest, Tom Price-Daniel from the company Teamed. Tom, thank you so much for joining. Tom, real quick for our audience, are you? What do you do? What is Teamed and what makes Teamed so successful? 

Tom Price-Daniel: Steven yeah, it's a complicated question. Are you my therapist or is it a podcast? Who am I? I for the sake of…

Steven Morell: Revenue therapy.

Tom Price-Daniel: …yeah. Thank you very much. I need it. We all need it. For the sake of shortness and brevity, I suppose the version I give is that I've been a founder. I've worked as a CRO at several VC-backed organizations, had a couple of exits, a back catalog of errors and learnings to last a lifetime. buT today I'm the head of revenue and I lead our strategy here at Teamed team's, an employer of record. anD what makes us special is our USP, it's the marriage of Of service and affordability. We go above and beyond. We talk a lot about being smart, fun, knowledgeable people that create endearing moments, not just a job well done. Put simply, we care more than the competition.

Steven Morell: What exactly is it that you do?

Tom Price-Daniel: Yeah, great question. EOR is a word that we kind of band around, but if you're not in the industry and not in the space, it's not something you would have come across. There are companies similarly that you may have heard of, like Deel and Remote who scaled up extraordinarily quickly during the pandemic and raised a lot of capital. What an EOR is, it's a legal entity that employs workers on behalf of another business. Here at team, do we take full responsibility for all aspects of employment, including compliance, payroll, taxes, benefits. So if you think about that, we used to have these kinds of notions of businesses that were, across multiple geographies, you know, multinational corporations. We've all heard of multinational corporations. We give small, medium sized businesses. The opportunity to reap the benefits of that global workforce. So with a team, companies can hire in Portugal or in South Africa as easily, as Munich or Berlin.

Steven Morell: So the problem that you're solving is, I am a company in one country. I want to have a remote team that works from home, and when I wanna recruit and hire people that are not in my country, I need a legal entity through which I can hire them. Is that correct?

Tom Price-Daniel: Yeah, I think of us as a final wave of globalization. If I look at my iPhone, I think it was designed in a kind of Palo Alto, it was built in China and I bought it in London. If I wanna hire somebody in San Francisco, it's very difficult for me to do it if I wanna hire somebody in China. Even more complicated to do, we enable that, right? So if a company wants to hire China, it's pretty much as simple as them wanting to hire in their own domestic market. So we give people…

Steven Morell: Who is your typical…

Tom Price-Daniel: …remote workers, sorry, not just to remote workers, but to actually to the best talent, right? So it's not about working at home, what, where am I gonna find the best product designer for example.

Steven Morell: And actually it's also equalizing the location opportunities. I remember when in, in my last role I was the chief Revenue officer of a startup that is in a not so big city in Germany. And actually I can name the city. It's Stuttgart Mercedes Benz. Are there Porsches there? Bosch is there. So very high paying companies. I was hiring for SDRs and junior salespeople. You don't have them. They're just simply not locally on the market. So I started hiring first in other cities and then very quickly in other countries in Europe where I needed talent. So it's also about access to talent, right?

Tom Price-Daniel: Yeah, look, the world's dominated by kind of metropolitan zones. It's not dominated by talent. We kind of rebalance by giving all companies access to talent wherever it lives.

Steven Morell: Who is your typical customer? Or let's say who is your ideal customer?

Tom Price-Daniel: Yeah, so we typically work with startups, scale up and SMEs, from one 500 is our. Ballpark range. We tend to leave the enterprise. We have an enterprise offering. It's not that we can't and don't do it but typically those kinds of organizations lean to, to some of the more some of the older offerings in the market. Nobody uses the PWC type approach.

Steven Morell: Yeah. Yeah. Any industrial vertical. Is anything shaping there currently in the distributed remote world that you say

Tom Price-Daniel: Yeah, a really good question. In fact I just sat down with my team today and I think that, as revenue leaders, we need to be reviewing our ICPs on a really regular basis, making sure that, If we look at our buyer's journey, are those kind of story points, they reflective of the content that we're delivering and our efforts and our narrative. And yeah. Have we diverged at some point? I'm really big on thinking about ICPs and integrating it into our kind of offering in terms of, verticals and industries that, that kind of we look at, we have a kind, a generalist approach on one hand. So we're building pods, so we've got pods for different kinds of ICPs. And we've got a generalist approach on one hand. Because a lot of our work's inbound, right? We're a painkiller, not a vitamin. We have organizations that have a hair on fire need, we solve that need of their industry. However, we also work with a number of different other segments and we have targeted pods to that. So we have the bleeding edge of technology. So we've got a pod that looks specifically at AI, looks at Web3, looks at any kind of really early adopter deep tech. Now the reason for that is, we want to bet on winners. It's like a VC approach, right? We follow the capital of our money if companies scale. So we want to identify the pockets that are gonna scale. 

Steven Morell: Right. 

Tom Price-Daniel: Yeah. And then we also have a niche within accounting firms, which is a slightly unusual one, but there's a reasonable amount of accounting firms globally that are seeking to identify talent in other emerging markets that can support them. And we've just been well positioned to be able to provide them a service as well. 

Steven Morell: What is the persona inside a company that you want to talk to?

Tom Price-Daniel: Depends on the size. The persona could be the founder, it could be, if it's a start up it could be their first HR hire. They've got some capital they're looking for to expand. Could be the finance team. They've got, maybe they're working with Deel or Remote and they think that they're paying too much and they wanna look at other offerings.

Steven Morell: Mm-Hmm.

Tom Price-Daniel: Can be an analyst there. There's about five or six of them. They're fairly atypical within the HR tech space, though.

Steven Morell: And how do you go about getting into a meeting, into a conversation with them? You have inbound, so how do you generate inbound? Is that paid traffic? Is that organic traffic? Is that content marketing? How do you go about that?

Tom Price-Daniel: Yeah. So 60% is inbound. The rest from partners and referrals. Obviously they have very differing win rates. When I talk about targets for our team, and I look at the marketing division I'm very focused on win rates as a revenue leader, and revenue rate and win rates broken down by Swim Lane. So different activities, different win rates. So partnerships, much higher win rate paid lower win rate, much higher opportunity number. So yeah, predominantly they come through paid as an example, they'll book a meeting with us through our lead routing systems. They'll have a conversation with our team. And, we'll talk to them through our value prop.

Steven Morell: Real quick, what's the size of first, what's the overall size of the company

Tom Price-Daniel: So we're around. Yeah. We are growing at the rate of five or six employees a month at the moment. We're, but we're about 30 people now.

Steven Morell: Okay. That's impressive. Your growth in general is impressive. What's your growth rate currently?

Tom Price-Daniel: Yeah, it's around 300%. So about 3x.

Steven Morell: Nice. 3x. And you've been doing this for two years, three years, four years. You've been around for a while.

Tom Price-Daniel: Yeah, I've been around for three years. We were bootstrapped up until kind of a seed round last year. And we raised two and a half million in October of last year.

Steven Morell: Nice. Nice. That's a solid seat round. Congratulations. 

Tom Price-Daniel: Yeah, it's an interesting one. I think, with our growth rate we probably could have taken more capital at the time. Maybe we should have. We got some great investors.

Steven Morell: I think the race for the big round, just for the sake of the big round is over. Like us, we all have seen investors behave from good sides and bad sides. And the recent 12 - 20 months, I think there's a general move towards more sustainable finance rounds, more reasonable signs around. And having a good investor seems to be becoming more and more important. It should have always been just the size of the round.

Tom Price-Daniel: Yeah, I'm, I've, in my history, I've taken. I've taken some good money from some not so useful places. So yeah, not all money is the same. I think that's true. I think that the market is definitely shifting. I think that founders now need to be a bit more conscious or business leaders need to be more conscious of, gross margin, CAC payback, roots to profitability. They need to be much more thoughtful about generative AI and how they can use it to be a leaner operation, but still be a better operation. So there's a lot, there's a lot going on, I think, in space and it's hard to know the right answers. And a lot of people are making good tests and are kind. We'll see where we get to. But yeah, not not taking capital for the sake of it is a good thing.

Steven Morell: You mentioned that you're growing at the pace of five- six new teammates every month. That's a lot. Any of those are in your sales team?

Tom Price-Daniel: Yeah. Yeah. In fact we've just hired in our sales team today I put two offers out, which I was very pleased about.

Steven Morell: Nice, nice. So I'm always fascinated by the sales hiring and recruiting process. I know that you have an opinion on that. Share with us. How do you filter, how do you review, how do you decide in a remote setting even more challenging? How do you go by recruiting your sales team?

Tom Price-Daniel: Yeah, I look, I've got a bit of a thing against the king of the SDR. Hyper trained, outbound model. I don't know if any of the audience or listeners that are on here have had the opportunity to have people in that team. And I just think the risk of hiring those can be very high. There is a real desire there, there's a march to the next role. It's about promotion rather than learning. Not to generalize. Because there are some, I've worked with some absolutely fantastic SDRs, but I think that program, that SaaS program we put them on, I don't think is the right approach for a lot of companies. For some Sure. But not all. So I really don't look at that. I've got a pretty comprehensive framework that I do use. I look at what I call ICCT, which is intelligence, character coachability and track record. The least important to me is track record. There's a horse here in the UK that's very famous called Red Rum who won the Grand National many times. That horse was so fantastic an absolute subpar jockey could have won on it, right? And I think sales are the same, we really say, oh, how did you do it in your target? How much did you get over quota? It's actually not a relevant question. The relevant question is how did you do it against your peers? Because if the product has an incredible product market fit, then it's very easy to be the jockey on Red Rum. I actually want people that have been to companies that have terrible product market fit. That's to teach them a hell of a lot more than something that's flown off the shelves they haven't had to work for it.

Steven Morell: I absolutely agree. I guess you're eating your own dog food. Are you hiring abroad?

Tom Price-Daniel: Yeah. Yeah. So the offer to one was in the UK but the other one was in Lithuania. The candidates who got to the final round were based in Spain, Portugal, UK, Lithuania and Germany. So a real spread.

Steven Morell: Interesting Step us through your recruiting process. Where do you find them and what's the, you said the final round. What are the rounds?

Tom Price-Daniel: Yeah. Again, I've got a kind of a historic career. So my very first career was actually I owned an executive search business. Which I am early that helps. Yeah. So I've seen a lot of recruitment processes. I don't think there's one size fits all. I don't think what works for me and my company will work for you and your company. Although I think the framework works. I don't think about the process. I think that we've probably got the balance on recruiting a little bit wrong, and it's really easy. Now the market is a little bit. The dynamics changed a little bit. So it's a buyer's market, not a candidate market. It's really easy to slip into Some bad habits and you gotta that, I dunno how long we've been on this call, but maybe 15 minutes if this was an interview. My job is to give you as much information as possible so that you can make a decision. Because you know you way better than I'm ever gonna You. Particularly in 15 minutes. So I think there's the dynamic of information sharing I don't think is always particularly good. So my view is share as much as possible if that candidate needs more interviews, give them more interviews. Typically for us, we do a screen, an interview with one of the senior team, an interview with, which is typically me in this case an interview with another member of the team who has more of a cultural remit again, and then final round with people that have done the role. And then we take that information, we collate it, and we try to make decisions reasonably quickly.

Steven Morell: How long is the decision making process like from my first from the application till a yes or no? How long does it take?

Tom Price-Daniel: It's difficult Because if you open up the role you get a body of people that apply. The earlier ones have a longer one, the shorter one. But typically, what we want to do is we want to get people through a process in a couple of weeks. We want to set a 14 day target for that. And be comprehensive. Different roles require different things. I'm a big believer in references. I'm a big believer in tasks, although I'm not a believer in tasks that rob people of time and ideas. But I think you can do it in a way that shows critical thinking, which depending on the role level, is obviously more important or less important.

Steven Morell: I think this is and I wonder whether you agree. I think having a solid hiring process in place. Even if you're not hiring right now, having that process in place so you can start and stop it at any time is one of the most underestimated things that startups, especially in the early stage could do. Because if you agree that talent is your growth engine, having smart people makes you faster and better than having a process in place is already better than having no process in place, but having a process and a fast and quick and fair process in place allows the startup to punch way above their weight class in comparison to others, and even grab a talent that would usually not even consider joining them. Would you agree?

Tom Price-Daniel: Yeah, for sure. We've all been in companies that have gone through scaling and you look back and at some point you'll say, when we were a smaller team, we achieved more than we're doing now. There. We've all been in that situation, so absolutely a hundred percent agree that the difference between winning and losing when you are scaling is talent. And lots of people ignore that. Lots of people think that it's something else, but it's not. Because if you've got a product market fit that isn't a hundred percent ideal, talent will drag you through. If you've got a product market fit that is absolutely on the spot, they will drag you to the stratosphere. 

Steven Morell: Yeah.

Tom Price-Daniel: Yeah, I'm very much in accordance with that view. For us, look, in our team, we're extremely focused on culture. So I've got a golden rule across the people that we hire. Not everybody is gonna come in and knock the lights out. It'd be lovely if they did, but it's just not the reality. But my golden rule is that everybody tries their best. They do. They work hard. And if everybody works hard, if you've got somebody who's not knocking the lights out, they're gonna be contributing and they're gonna be doing and giving more than. Principally at cost to hire them or employ them, which is obviously the objective of commercial businesses.

Steven Morell: I think it was Kim Scott, the author of the book, "Radical Candor" who introduced the term rockstar and superhero Superheroes are people who are currently in a personal growth stage. They are more risk friendly, they are more creative. They do this. Leap large leap steps forward. But what you really need are rock stars who come in every day and who do their job solidly, like a rock. And that's why she labels them rock stars. And as you scale, the need for rock stars increases.

Tom Price-Daniel: I don't know who coined it, so I'm borrowing it but I often use a phrase that is explorers and settlers and similar vibes, You've got your explorers people that will go and create and identify virgin territory for you. And you've got settlers who will make it work. And the processes together. 

Steven Morell: And then you have city planners who are reducing the risk.

Tom Price-Daniel: Yes. Yes. 

Steven Morell: Then you have 50 planners who come in and reduce the risk and optimize the hell out of it. Let me ask you something else. So hiring is one part of the story, but once they're hired, you need to onboard them. You need to enable them. And I know that you do have an opinion about using frameworks, especially in sales. Let's talk about frameworks in sales.

Tom Price-Daniel: Yeah, 

Steven Morell: Your take? What framework do you use and how do you pick them?

Tom Price-Daniel: I think my starting point is that MEDDIC is bust, right? The cult of MEDDIC is a false prophecy. We've seen that 93% of companies are using MEDDIC. It almost blew my mind. It's a framework for sure, but it's just so inappropriate for most organizations. Even if we change some of the letters, it's a little bit adapted, right? It's fit for purpose in the right situation. For us, that's not the right situation. And for a ton of companies that have a faster sales cycle is definitely not the right approach. For me, the biggest thing about a framework is thinking about what is the thing that inhibits an opportunity to close. And largely the thing drives that is, when things go cold, when things go slow. So if we reverse it, what is the thing that is gonna create the highest win rate for me? And for that it is momentum. If my prospect talking to me and I'm engaged with my 

Steven Morell: Yes. 

Tom Price-Daniel: and I find reasons be engaged and I structure reasons to be engaged, and that's a critical thing, not just reasons to, but structure, reasons to be engaged, then I will maintain momentum, which will ultimately improve my win rates, which will mean that, we're creating more growth and more more revenue for the business. So for us, we use one called, BAMFAM. BAMFAM is my favorite. I love BAMFAM. I must talk about BAMFAM, everyday or every other day. And it's a book from a meeting. Super simple. Okay. Really simple. It's like at the end of the meeting I book a meeting in a week's time with that organization to say, look, I'm going to book 15 minutes, same time to discuss any questions you've got. Okay. When that meeting comes around, if they've not communicated with me for a week, they need to actively go into their email and email me as to why they're not attending the meeting. They've engaged with All of a sudden they're cold, they're gonna give me a reason. They're gonna tell why. Same thing when we get to the point of it's I've had a meeting, I've now sent you an MSA or a service agreement, or whatever it is that individuals have within their own companies. One week later, I had that meeting. In that meeting, we might not use it, but it's there to discuss that. Any questions you might have about that contract, how many times have we sent contracts out? And it's but boss, I sent the contract. I don't know what's happening. Did you ban fam? Have you got a meeting in the diary? they gave you a reason why they're not attending? So that one is a big one for me. And the second is to know me, like me, love me, right? So loads of organizations get this wrong. They just skip the like me bit, right? So they know me, love me. Here I am with my product. Okay? And that's not how we work in life. It's not how we work as human beings. The Eloquent way of that I think is the EVA framework, EVA framework, right? So engagement, value advocacy. I can't get advocacy without getting value, and I can't get value without getting engagement. So I need to focus on, Being and creating those engagement points, working with my buyer's journey to create the story points about where that bit goes. To create the value to create the advocacy and for advocacy, you could swap out, closing a client. It's the same thing within a sales framework as well.

Steven Morell: I never heard the know me, like me, love me framework, but I'm loving it. That's really refreshing. Let's talk a little bit about you . How do you get freshly hired salespeople into those frameworks? Do you train them individually? Do you have internal training material? How do you do that? 

Tom Price-Daniel: So look, we're a remote company. I think I should put my hands up. My general consensus is, most companies, screw up onboarding. Remote companies are the worst, the leaders of those companies typically have worked in traditional businesses where you get vicarious learning procedures. We don't have that within remote working. We probably don't put enough effort into the frameworks. As a lover of frameworks in recruitment, we probably don't put enough into those frameworks. The way that we do it is we try to do it in cohorts. So we try to get people to join on the same day if we can. It happens more often than not. We then try to do as much on the job learning as possible. Then we try to do as much training as possible. One of the things that I listened to, I can't lay claim to. I listened to somebody in my network talking the other day about how they would do serious training. So 2, 3, 4 days Training. Testing. And they can't go on, they can't go on to the role until they pass the test. I think that's a great idea. Something that I'm looking at adopting in our business is, can we do Pop quizzes if you like. You still want to try and create some kind of enjoyment out of it. Can do pop quizzes too, to see whether or not this is going in and whether or not they're up to speed. Because ultimately, once you get salespeople and they're on a call, we all have tech not all of us, but we have some technology that would tell us what's happening in those calls. But ultimately if they've got the confidence because they've got the training, they've got the information. They'll be, and they're gonna ramp up at twice the speed. And once you work out what you need, If anyone's done the king of the mass to say we need to hit 10 million in ARR, how many salespeople do we need to do that? How much time do we need? It's scary, right? Because once you add in, ramp up, it's like. The numbers don't always add up. And if you add in demand and marketing even earlier than that, it's even scarier. So you've really gotta focus on getting them ramped up in as quick a time as possible and really invest as executives and leaders invest in those new hires. Junior ones, medium ones, senior ones. Don't just bring them on board and hit and hope, don't do all the work. then, the kind of final bit if you like. That last mile is super important.

Steven Morell: I could go out with you for a long time. There's so much more to uncover, but we are running out of time. Let me ask you a final question. If I would have a time machine and you could write a postcard to the five years younger. Tom Price- Daniel with a warning, with advice, just one sentence that you consent to the five younger self, what would you write on that postcard?

Tom Price-Daniel: Yeah, that's a superb question. I worked in a business called Headstart that had the opportunity to be unbelievably successful. And I went through the exit. It wasn't unsuccessful, but it had the opportunity to be a life altering business for everybody involved. And we got fixated on our target market because we had one customer, an enormous customer that was like a black swan, but we couldn't convince ourselves it was a black swan. We didn't believe that if they were gonna invest the amount of time and money in using our product, that everybody else would. But their use case was reasonably unique. And so I go back to myself and say, go back and do that product market research. Continually reevaluate whether or not the sector that you are selling into. With the product that you have is the right one and can it be adapted? Is it the right space at the right time? Because if we had adjusted a little bit, if we'd taken our product perhaps out of that enterprise space into an SMB space, I just saw a product that's, in fact, I'm using a product to hire at the moment that I think is less sophisticated, not as good as we were five years ago. And I think it has just been valued at 700 million. That would be my postcard to myself five years ago. Don't be afraid to course correct. Don't take kind of sunk assumptions as gospel.

Steven Morell: Interesting. Interesting. It's a very different answer than I usually get for this question. I ask the question to every guest

Tom Price-Daniel: May not. The same situation…

Steven Morell: Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Thanks. Thanks for sharing this. This story is really educating Tom. Thank you so much for joining. All right, everyone, that brings us to the end of this episode of Speak Revenue. I want to thank our guest, Tom from Teamed, for joining us today and sharing his insights. Also a huge shout out to our listeners. Please visit our website at speakrevenue.com for a full transcript and additional resources. And if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a review on Apple Podcast or wherever you go for your listening needs. It really helps to get the word out. Also, follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, or wherever you can find us. We'll be back soon with another great guest. Until then, stay curious, keep listening, and stay safe. See you soon. Bye bye.