Moving beyond founder-led sales

Warmly’s journey from $1 to $3M ARR – and a repeatable GTM motion

Jan 22, 2025

👋 Hi, it’s Kyle and I’m back with a 🔥 edition of Growth Unhinged, my newsletter that explores the unexpected behind the fastest-growing startups. Up today: one company’s path from founder-led sales to repeatable GTM and 3x year-on-year growth.

Warmly, the signal-based selling platform, went from zero to $700k ARR and 100+ paying customers in 2023. The plan for 2024: grow ARR by 3x+ and reach 250+ paying customers in a crowded product category (revenue tech).

Spoiler: they did it 🙌

This puts Warmly on the T2D3 path – the aspirational growth trajectory where startups look to triple-triple-double-double-double their revenue, growing from $1 to $100M in just five years.

Getting there requires shifting from an MVP sales motion (with plenty of founder involvement) to a repeatable motion for building and closing pipeline. Here’s exactly what Warmly did – and what happened – according to co-founder and CEO Max Greenwald.

The starting point: From founder-led sales to MVP sales process

Going back to last year (as featured previously in Growth Unhinged), Max was heavily involved in the sales process. He closed Warmly’s first ten customers and then continued to sell even as he recruited a sales leader along with initial AEs.

Pipeline mostly came from outbound prospecting; notably LinkedIn sequences, emails, and calling into “warm” leads who showed interest on Warmly’s website. Their only marketing was essentially Max posting regularly on LinkedIn.

Warmly ended the year with an MVP sales process; they had a sales leader, two ramping AEs and two SDRs. Collectively, this pod was adding about $100,000 in net-new ARR each month. The product had a $10-15k average annual contract value (ACV) and a 30-45 day sales cycle. Seeing positive signals – and backed by an $11M Series A – Max was ready to shift gears.

Today, Warmly has a fully-resourced sales team of more than 15 people with a sales leader, three AEs, two ISRs, 10 SDRs, an SDR manager, a RevOps manager and a head of partnerships. They’ve adopted over a dozen new software tools. And they’ve tested everything from cold calling to agency partnerships to LinkedIn ads. Here’s how it unfolded, quarter by quarter.

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Customers: 100 → 130
📈 Key experiment: Automating top channels via full funnel orchestration in Warmly
⚡️ GTM strategy: Centralize Linkedin (social posting intent + outbound DMs), email sequencing, and live calling/chatting prospects on the website.
❓ Key questions: (1) Should we triple down on one channel? (no), (2) can we get AEs to $60k quota? (not yet), (3) can we get the same conversion rates for automated warm outbound? (yes)
🛠️ Key tools: Outreach (sales engagement), Seamless.AI (contact database), Sendspark (video personalization), Salesflow.io (auto-LinkedIn sequences), Warmly, (cross-tool autonomous sales orchestration)
🤠 Team: Sales leader, 3 AEs, 4 SDRs

In 2023, Warmly added about $100k in net-new ARR each month. Max knew they’d need to double this in 2024, which meant increasing qualified pipeline, finding repeatability in their core metrics (meetings held, SQOs, closed/won), and getting sellers to consistently hit quota.

Outbound was already working for Warmly. The question was: should they double down on one outbound channel OR should they shift to omnichannel outbound?

Shifting to the latter would require investing in automation. Instead of manually doing hundreds of outreaches, they’d need to do thousands of them – automatically. But Max didn’t want to totally lose the human touch; even if automation sends the outreach, he wanted people to manage the replies.

Where they’ve landed:

Gathering contacts through Seamless.AI
Pushing email sequences via Outreach
Pushing LinkedIn sequences via Salesflow
Layering in scaled video personalization (Sendspark) where reps make a video and then are able to personalize that for 100+ accounts (this is the classic “Hey - we made you this video” outreach, which sees high response rates of over 6%)

These automations drive ICP traffic to Warmly’s website – and most prospects come to the website before booking a meeting. Once a prospect is on the website, Warmly uses intent data to figure out who are the best leads and then tries “warm calling” them (via Warmly’s own tool), i.e. they ask website visitors to chat live. Max’s rationale was simple: “When a prospect is looking at your website, you're top of mind to them – why not call them now?”

It’s worth mentioning that all of the automated outbound did come at a cost. Warmly ramped up outreach to the point of sending 500 emails per week per rep – but they weren’t rotating email domains. Email deliverability eventually tanked (perhaps not surprisingly). To fix this, the team bought multiple additional domains, set send limits, and allocated time to rest/recover their existing domains.

Q2 2024: Doubling down on SDRs with an SDR hub

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Customers: 130 → 170
📈 Key experiment: Parallel cold calling while warm calling
⚡️ GTM strategy: In daily live sessions have SDRs blitz call hundreds of cold prospects on their headset in Orum while simultaneously warm calling until someone responds
❓ Key questions: (1) How many SDRs can we hire before efficiency slows? (seven) (2) is Eastern Europe the right place for our SDR hub? (yes) (3) does hiring in-house referrals work? (yes) (4) can we scale Linkedin social selling to our reps? (not yet)
🛠️ Key new tools: Default (inbound form deal router), Orum (parallel cold-call dialer), Spekit (sales process documentation)
🤠 Team: Sales leader, 3 AEs, 7 SDRs (+3)

Warmly’s social selling on LinkedIn worked quite well in Q1. Across the company, their social posts were able to organically reach about 100,000 people. As the team continued to post on LinkedIn, they kept seeing engagement but it resulted in fewer and fewer demos. “People got sick of us,” Max told me.

The team decided to spend less time on LinkedIn and test another channel instead. Warmly’s SDRs were starting to prove out the effectiveness of “warm calling” live website visitors. For Q2, Max wondered if they could layer in parallel cold calling blitzes to book even more meetings. They adopted a parallel cold-call dialer (Orum), which essentially calls hundreds of cold prospects until someone responds. (If a “warm calling” prospect responds first, the SDR will pause the parallel dialer).

The elephant in the room: cold calling, really? In 2024?

Max’s perspective was that it’s extremely difficult to launch a great sales org AND a great marketing org at the same time; he wanted to focus in one area first. Since the SDR model was already working, his thought process was to grow SDR-related channels as much as Warmly could as long as it was still profitable. (It’s worth flagging that Warmly’s SDR team is based in Eastern Europe and Max found they could hire up to seven people before efficiency started to slow.)

Max brought up another interesting point: outbound email and LinkedIn are becoming a marketing channel rather than a place where you book meetings. With email reply rates plummeting, it’s essentially another ad impression and you hope it eventually drives people to your website (which is where you capture intent). Marketing’s job will be to take cold leads and turn them hot; outbound is one lever for that rather than the conversion event.

“We’re entering a world where there’s not just one channel that works the best. You need to sprinkle your message across multiple channels, which is where AI and automation can help.”

Q3 2024: Layering in sales managers and RevOps

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Customers: 170 → 210
📈 Key experiment: Segmenting outbound and inbound, SMB and Midmarket
⚡️ GTM strategy: Specialize sales reps to focus on a method of closing (inbound/freemium for new role Inbound Sales Rep (ISR), self-source/SDR for AEs) while properly routing deals
❓ Key questions: (1) Will creating an inbound-only junior closing role to close smaller deals and pass off big deals to AEs create efficiency? (yes) (2) will segmenting AEs to specialize in SMB or Midmarket create efficiency? (not really) (3) will hiring a sales management layer speed up sales training & increase SDR efficiency? (yes)
🛠️ Key new tools: Cacheflow (flexible professional quotes), Capchase (upfront payments for monthly billing), Qflow (Sales rep activity summaries)
🤠 Team: Sales leader, 3 AEs, 7 SDRs, 3 ISRs (+3), SDR manager (+1), RevOps manager (+1)

At this point, Warmly’s sales team had grown to 11 with a sales leader, three AEs and seven SDRs. Max saw an opportunity to segment and specialize roles for their next stage of growth.

He started by creating a new role, the inbound sales rep (ISR), to create a buffer layer for smaller deals that were less qualified, but where Warmly could still close them. This would allow AEs to focus on larger, highly qualified deals without leaving money on the table. Another benefit of the ISR role: it created a pathway to turn SDRs into AEs so that Warmly could develop talent in-house. (Going into next year, Max sees three sales segments: SMB (the ISRs), Midmarket AEs and Enterprise AEs.)

The team was getting too large for one person to manage on their own. Warmly’s sales leader needed managers. They started with two: an SDR manager and a RevOps manager.

Max emphasized that the RevOps role has been especially valuable for team productivity. Warmly has adopted 50 (!) GTM tools. RevOps now owns the licensing, integrations, CRM hygiene and documentation that allows sales to focus on selling. “If RevOps can give each AE 50% of their time back, that more than pays for itself,” Max said. (RevOps also runs strategic projects like identifying the top closed-lost reasons and building processes to solve for them.)

Q4 2024: Adding partnerships and paid marketing

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Customers: 210 → 250
📈 Key experiment: Partnerships and paid marketing
⚡️ GTM strategy: Dedicate a full time rep to partnering with agencies & partners and give generous affiliate fees for referral deals plus drive awareness of our brand
❓ Key questions: (1) Does adding nuanced accelerators & decelerators for rep commission positively affect metrics? (likely) (2) will adding a company-wide ‘big deal review’ for cross functional visibility lead to higher closed-won for bigger deals? (unclear) (3) can we get Business Tier ACVs to $18k? (likely)
🛠️ Key new tools: Crossbeam (partnership CRM), FirstPromoter (affiliate tracking) Loyee (nuanced ICP builder), QuotaPath (gamified commission planning), Postal.io (gifting)
🤠 Team: Sales leader, 3 AEs, 10 SDRs (+3), 2 ISRs, SDR manager, RevOps manager, partnerships (+1)

As the outbound SDR channel started to show diminishing returns, Max looked for another channel to keep the pipeline growing.

The first low-hanging fruit: paid ads on LinkedIn. An ad agency had recommended testing direct InMails where Warmly would compensate prospects to take a demo. Warmly tried $79, $100, and even $101 per demo. “It started popping off,” Max recalled. “We got dozens of people who responded and booked a meeting with us.”

But these meetings were terrible. Unsurprisingly, many prospects just wanted the cash. It attracted prospects who weren’t a fit, folks who didn’t have a pain point that Warmly solves, and people with zero urgency to buy. Warmly spent $40,000 on the ads to generate $100,000 in pipeline and about $20,000 in closed-won sales. It wasn’t an attractive CAC payback considering sales commissions and the opportunity cost. (This is yet another example of why I believe the MQL paradigm is fundamentally flawed.)

A much better performing marketing experiment was a series of campaigns to rip-and-replace Warmly’s biggest competitor (6sense). Max found that picking a fight helped Warmly stand out with target buyers and play to their strengths. The competitive playbook included multiple different angles:

Created “vs.” pages on Warmly’s website (here’s an example)
Built collateral and training for reps on how to sell against the competitor
Used intent tools to find out which prospects were using the competitor (the data came from Bombora, Simlarweb, Loyee and a purpose-built bot)
Ran ad campaigns targeting these named accounts
Posted organically on LinkedIn about Warmly as a 2.0 alternative
Warmly investigated buying out contracts, too, but opted against that (too expensive)

An area that’s been showing the most promise has been partnerships. Since Warmly is a complex tool that allows for a number of different GTM plays, Max believed that agency or consulting partners would be well-equipped to promote the product as they advise clients. He tested the idea by reaching out to people in his network. To sweeten the deal, he offered a “whacko” 40% kickback for the partner’s first deal. (This goes down to 25% afterwards.)

There was interest, but agencies needed more than just the promise of a large commission. Warmly would need to new product capabilities to let agencies manage multiple accounts, trainings on how to use Warmly, partnership agreements, a dedicated partner sales rep (Warmly repurposed a top performing ISR), dedicated funnels within HubSpot, and a structure in their CRM for partners to get credit for referrals.

While it took some time to ramp up, after two months 12% of Warmly’s closed-won revenue is now coming from partners. Max aims to get this to 20% going into 2025. One surprising unlock: offering a free Warmly account for agencies as a loss leader. This way, agencies could use the product themselves and then be better positioned to champion it to their clients.

Reflecting on the last 12 months – and what comes next

Entering 2024, Max set out to transition from MVP sales to a repeatable GTM motion. He tells me Warmly hit their target of scaling from $1M to $3M ARR in a tough category (revenue tech).

While the steps mentioned above might seem obvious, Max emphasizes that it wasn’t at the time. “We failed at tons of experiments and took big bets all year long.”

Reflecting on the journey, the most painful aspect was the bloat associated with growing the team from two to roughly 15 reps. Sales commissions became “super annoying” (Warmly needed tools like Quotapath, commission software). Warmly ran into issues where SDRs were accidentally working each others’ accounts (they’ve since created rules of engagement). And they had to figure out how to distribute leads fairly across a large team of AEs (Max wanted to balance fairness with giving the best leads to the best reps).

This is only the beginning for Warmly according to Max. His goal is to 3x again in 2025, growing from $3 to $9M ARR. Curious about whether they’ll make it? Follow along with Max on LinkedIn.