This week on the AmiSights Podcast, I sat down with Josh Sweeney. Experiencing the impact of various sales and marketing challenges over the years, Josh recently founded FounderScale. He has made it his mission to help founder-led organizations increase sales.
"We help founders go from founder revenue to scalable revenue," Josh explains that the key elements are simply what works for that particular B2B company. "Founders build their companies through expertise and relationships, look to other companies, and listen to their advice. I've found that lead generation models don't work for small businesses." So instead, Josh believes in demand generation before lead generation - "scaling up what got you here, and make it more repeatable and scalable.”
Josh has found that hiring a service to generate leads within 90 days doesn't work, and founders fall into the trap of trying different 90 fixes to no avail. "That doesn't work in small businesses; that only works if you have name recognition and an engaged audience, and you must build that first for lead generation to work." Josh's biggest challenge is ensuring that he's pumping enough of his sales & marketing dollars and sustaining those demand generation campaigns for himself.
His first multimillion-dollar company was a CRM consulting firm which he grew to a few million over a couple of years before he exited the company. He started FounderScale because of all the issues he had with that company. Josh spent more than 300k over a few years trying to scale sales and marketing, only to find out what didn't work. "How can we focus on sales and marketing results and education that work for founder-led companies?" FounderScale helps small businesses leverage HubSpot, which Josh found works best for a founder-led company because of cost and how it can scale.
Any founder looking to scale revenue, if you’re between 1-20 million, and you're a B2B company, tune in here: https://bit.ly/3ElJZhb