Building A $1.4M/Year Sales Consulting Business From A Basic Website
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
Hey! My name is Kyle Vamvouris and I run Vouris. We help B2B Software and Service companies increase their sales by building a repeatable sales process. We have two flagship programs, The Nest and Accelerate.
The Nest is our group coaching program for founders who are looking to build a repeatable sales process. Accelerate is our hands-on consulting program where we act as an executive revenue team working side by side with B2B SaaS and service companies and helping them build a repeatable sales process.
I started the company 3 years ago and we do around $120,000 in monthly revenue, have roughly 5,000 monthly website visitors, and I keynote speak at conferences.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
I dropped out of college after 2 years to pursue stand-up comedy. While working as a comic, I started cold calling as an SDR at intuit. 10 months later I was promoted to an account executive. I decided to write a book in 2017 called Cold to Committed, to teach SDRs how to book meetings through cold outbound prospecting.
After that, I ran the SDR team at a financial technology startup based out of San Francisco. I scaled that team from 3 people to 14. We grew the company from $120M in assets under management to 1B in less than 20 months. It was my first time scaling a team and I learned a ton. I went on to repeat that success at a global supply chain software company, this time running the inside sales team. We 5xed revenue in less than two years.
It was at that point that it became clear to me that I was really onto something…
So I started my own sales consulting company. I didn’t take a paycheck for 10 months, which was very scary as the sole income earner for my family. Fortunately, I was able to leverage my sales experience to get initial customers and that helped me develop an offer that my buyers wanted.
Now, over the past 3 years, my team and I have worked with over 60 B2B SaaS and Service companies, helping them build data-driven sales teams and repeatable sales processes, leading to over $100M in sales.
The biggest thing I learned was that getting enough customers to pay my bills was easy.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
I first went to the top of Pinnacles National Park to set some goals for the company. My goal was to do $150k in revenue in our first year of business, we did $600k.
We started off by building our Accelerate offer. This is a very hands on program where we work side by side with our clients and help them build a repeatable sales process. At first, this started off as us giving coaching to the Founder/CEO. We charged $5,000 a month for this service.
Early days with Accelerate were great, but one challenge we had was getting their team to execute at a high level. So we increase the servicing model touchpoints, which allowed us to work closer with their broader team.
This meant more meetings, more async communication, and more people to communicate with. So we raised the price to $8,400 and we saw results skyrocket for our clients.
A big part of the new Accelerate offer was a group coaching program that we called The Nest. We did not sell this stand alone at this time, it was just for the team of our Accelerate customers. As we saw how much value the team was getting we made it Founder focused, so the CEOs and Founders of our clients could get even more guidance.
This led us to sell this program as a stand alone group coaching program at the end of 2022. Originally we were charging $1,700 a month, but ask we realized that some Nest customers would upsell into Accelerate, we changed our pricing model.
As of writing this, The Nest is $1,700 for 1 month, $8,000 for 6, and $11,000 for 12. This makes it accessible for more founders, and we get the opportunity to help more organizations grow.
But it wasn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination. I started by selling whatever I could. My website didn't even have a service page when I first started. I discovered that there were a lot of companies that have an underperforming sales team and needed guidance on how to improve it.
The combination of my experience running teams with my data-driven approach was a great match for these early customers. I struggled with scope creep early on so I kept iterating the offer until the boundaries were very clear.
Describe the process of launching the business.
Launching Vouris was fairly simple. I kept the website very basic at first. It was a blog with no service page or any real call to action. My initial focus was to write content that would rank on Google.
Every week I would write and publish one article answering a specific question about the sales process and sales teams. I had saved up enough money to last over a year without an income, so I didn't pay myself anything. I spend around $2,000 on the initial things I needed for the business (website, logo, software, etc.).
The biggest thing I learned was that getting enough customers to pay my bills was easy. The challenging part was scaling my business because my time was limited. I waited way too long to hire someone to help me service our customers and if I could go back, I would have hired someone 3 months earlier.
You will always want things to go faster, and this will hurt your decision-making. Be patient and trust your process.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
SEO has historically been our biggest driver of new business. I didn’t hire an agency or freelancer, I just focused on writing really good content that answered very specific questions that people were searching for. It took a year before we really started seeing results from this.
This was daunting because I needed to do something over and over again without results. How I remained consistent was by listening to people who had a lot more experience than me tell me it would work.
I showed my blog posts to mentors and coaches to make sure I was doing things the right way. With their guidance, I was confident that I would see results.
Here is how our organic traffic grew:
The next thing I did was focus on my brand on LinkedIn. I had been creating content for a while, but my audience was small. I put a lot of energy into building my audience and it grew consistently. I got one deal early on from LinkedIn but nothing else since. I use it primarily as a nurturing tool to stay on top of my mind with potential customers.
Finally, we did outbound prospecting via cold email and calling. This has always been effective for us, especially early on because it allowed us to speak directly to our buyer. We weren’t reliant on just SEO, which was inconsistent.
If you are just starting out, I highly recommend creating long-form written content every week. Use that content to create long-form video scripts, short-form clips, and written content for social media. This helps with SEO and organic social, and you can send the videos to potential customers, which gives you a lot of authority.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
Things are great, but this year has been very challenging with how the economy shook things up at the beginning of the year. We have been profitable since the very beginning, which is something I am proud of.
We have grown a lot and one of my top priorities is creating better systems for our team to use to service our customers. Creating SOPs has been very top of mind for me.
Our main goal is to scale our new group coaching program called The Nest. We have strong margins on it (roughly 80%) and it provides a ton of value to our customers. The main way we are doing this is to continue creating excellent content and to beef up our email marketing. Right now our best way to convert our email list is with webinars, so we are trying to figure out other ways to do the same.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
The mistakes are infinite, and I don't see any signs of them stopping! Here are three things that I wish I did much earlier than I did.
- Hire fast and fire faster - I spent way too much time with people who were not a good fit for the role.
- Don’t stop what’s working - This might seem obvious but when so many things don't work, and something does, it’s easy to keep searching for the next best thing.
- FOCUS - There is so much that we can do as entrepreneurs, that it can be easy to drift away from what your customers love about your product/service.
As for what has gone well, I believe we have always done a great job providing value to our potential customers. I’ve never worried about giving too much away for free. What I have found is that giving great material away for free, builds a lot of trust with your audience. So I intend to keep doing that.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
Notion is by far my favorite tool that we use. It’s so flexible that I can build whatever I want and do not have to work around software limitations. We moved away from it once, but I was ecstatic to come back to it.
We manage all of our marketing with rainmakerai, which has been fantastic. It is so powerful and for the price, we get a lot of value from it. Our marketing would be a fraction of what it is if it wasn't for rainmakerai and Frank Kern’s programs.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
Here are a few of my favorite books: Profit First, Advantage, 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, Extreme Ownership, Buy Back Your Time, and Scaling Up.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Listen to your customers to figure out what they love about your product or service. Ask them what would make it better, and do that. Also, if potential customers are not saying no because of price, you need to raise your prices.
Another thing I will add here is this: you will always want things to go faster, and this will hurt your decision-making. Be patient and trust your process. Let that desire for speed drive you to execute faster, not change too much and drift away from what’s working.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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