An Interview with Sopro’s CEO, Ryan Welmans

Hi, Shane, really good over here. Thanks. Yeah, great to be with you. Big fan.

So yeah, I’m over in UK. And yeah, grew up south of England. So this is a little village that nobody’s ever heard of, town called Fay gate. Must be about 100 or so houses, couple of fields, bit of woods and and not much else. So yeah, that’s kind of rural English countryside setting. And, yeah, moved down. I’ve been, you know, been around the world since, but, yeah, I’m not too far from there. Now. I’m just over in Kent, just about an hour away from where I grew up now, so I’m just outside of London.

In my high school, that’s probably about 1000?

Yeah, I think we probably is that an hour’s bus ride. I think it’s my school.

Yeah, medium size. So I was so to start with, I was one of two twins, and then about 14 years later, we got a another brother added to the pot. So three boys in the house. And as you can imagine, things kind of get, get a bit competitive in that that sort that, that sort of landscape.

Oh, I do have a, and it’s a, there’s a couple of different types. You’ve got fraternal and you’ve got monozygotic, where you are genuinely identical, and it’s the latter. So we are very, very similar. And yeah, if it still blows people away, you kind of get the mannerisms, and people do a double take. And, you know, nearly 40 years later, we don’t look, I would say we don’t look and be like each other, but still, you know, but I think everybody else does.

Yeah, not the really, not the really funny stuff, but we did a bit of that at school, you know, switching lessons and and stuff. Yeah, he always used to get me in trouble. So it’s a kind of full of stops of that. But yeah, there’s a lot of fun to be had as a as a twin, actually.

Yeah, big zero from Faygate, I’m afraid. Yeah, so maybe that, maybe that’s the interesting thing about it, that was it, nothing’s ever happened in Faygate.

Tyler.

You laugh. But they would actually, they would actually not know.

So I went to University of Sussex down on the south coast, and that’s in Brighton, UK, a good introduction to Brighton, actually. And actually, Brighton has played a bigger part in my life ever since, and I’ve lived there on and off, and actually where so bro is headquartered as well. But I was, I was studying computer science with artificial intelligence back in I think I was close. Last of 2000 if you’re doing maths on that. So, yeah. And then kind of lived in Brighton, and, yes, stayed in the area more or less ever since. I’ve done stints in other places. Lived in India for a bit, which was good fun, but yeah, now I’m yeah, not too far.

Yeah, and, you know, kind of obviously getting into coding. I mean, you know, Java was a hot new thing back then. What were we doing? The theory of of artificial intelligence. Is it possible for a machine to I think it’s the what is it? I think it’s the Turing test. The hot debate was whether a machine would ever be programmable to pass the Turing test. I think that. I’m not sure if that one’s been settled now, or whether the argument goes on, but Yeah, certainly the AI side was, was just coming out. It was a toss up between AI or cybernetics, I think at the time, which was the other, the other hot property. But, yeah, I went there. And actually, I think Brighton probably was the carrot that that swung that decision in the end.

So I, I actually landed in and secret here, like it or not, the so I left university with, I wasn’t into coding, to be honest. You know, it’s, it’s not for everybody. And two years into that course, I just, it was a very vocational degree, and I decided I was not put on this planet to type out code, so I got into sales. And my first roll out of uni was door to door sales. And this is, this is terrible, because I was, we were knocking on doors around South London, selling membership to golf clubs, local gym membership for cash. And you can just imagine the success rates of a location like that was pretty hard to believe. But, yeah, character building, soul destroying. Yeah, it’s all galvanizing stuff, isn’t it? But yeah, that was, that was what I found myself doing first. Didn’t do it alone in number two weeks. I think I managed to stick that up.

I’m very fortunate to have a technical co founder at Sopro and and, you know, shout to our our founder, Rob, he can code in, I don’t know what the count is now, maybe 35 different languages. And, you know, it’s just just brilliant on that front. But I know he certainly never had a coding lesson in his life. And I think it’s one other thing. We’ve had this conversation before. And I think he would say, if you’re, if you need to have lessons, then it’s probably not for you. Because the real superstar coders, they’re, they live and breathe and, you know, it’s a part time, it’s a hobby, it’s it’s fun, it’s what they do when they’re not working. You know, you. And the idea of being taught it is a just…

I think there are so many lessons you can learn from doing a real kind of diverse mix of roles. And I don’t mind saying—I’ve done some of the most menial and sort of simple roles over the years during university holidays. Whether that’s packing boxes in freezers or pills in pharmaceutical production or whatever it might be. I’ve also done the call center side.

Yes, some roles have an element of repetitiveness that’s not going to be suitable for everyone, but there’s so much they teach you. I actually look back quite fondly on most of those scenarios. Satisfaction is definitely possible in more or less any role environment—if it’s done properly, and if the employer configures the working day in the right way.

It gives you a sense of what is possible and what isn’t. When you start building a business and creating role types or job descriptions, you begin to understand the limits of what people might want to do—or not—and what would make a role interesting. If you’ve had a bit of experience doing a whole variety of different roles, at different levels of seniority as well, I think you’re just better able to do that—drawing from your own experience.

Yeah. So we—well, I think pretty much wherever you go in the world, and this is going back all those years ago—but it’s still true in a lot of places. Wherever you go, big businesses, small businesses, pretty much every sector, B2b sales in particular , it’s just… it’s been broken for a long time.

What you see is salespeople doing the wrong stuff quite a lot. The kind of salespeople we’re surrounded by at Sopro—they’re fantastic at pitching, proposing, closing, negotiating. That top end of the sales funnel where live interactions happen—that’s their skill set. Their skill set is not necessarily CRM administration, or searching the internet for the next opportunities, or looking for contact details, or sending repetitive introductory messages, or making calls.

But actually, if you look at the distribution of time, 80% of their time is being spent doing stuff they’re not very good at, and they’re only spending a little bit of their day doing the pitching, proposing, and closing. That was—and still is—the situation.

If you think about the importance of that part of any business… what kills more businesses than anything else? It’s lack of revenue. Insufficient revenue to meet costs. Where does that come from? Lack of customer traction is going to be the primary cause. So solving this is incredibly important, particularly for smaller businesses.

It’s crazy when you think about it, but that was it. We knew that if we could solve—or even go some way to solving—that, there’d be huge demand for it, pretty much everywhere.

So what we set out to do was map what we thought would be,in our opinion, an unimprovable B2B sales process. If you had access to all the data in the world, all the people, the technology, the processes—everything you could possibly want—we put that together as a sequence. Back then, it was about nine or ten steps.

First of all, you’d build your customer profile. Then you’d source a list of companies. Then you’d find the right job titles in those companies. Then you’d source the contact details. After that, you’d put together a personalized message—one-to-one— going out to each one of them. And then you’d probably want to do some follow-ups—maybe a couple of follow-ups. It’s really an engagement sequence that you put them through.

You’d need an incredible sort of visibility into the performance of your campaign—segmentable by industry, company size bracket, or job title—so you could quickly refine and retarget based on what was working and what wasn’t. All these things that go into it.

We put that together as a broadly manual set of processes, knocked out a bit of marketing collateral—a couple of slides, a sales deck—and dipped our toe in the market with that proposition.

And this is going back, yeah, you’re right—close to seven years ago now. Very quickly, we were kind of pulled in. There was a lot of traction very quickly.

And we used the service. We did it—we were actually using it to get our first sales meetings. And we’ve been using it ever since. We’ve been our own biggest customer. It was a great demonstration of the model, too. Because people would ask, “Well, how do I know it works?” And we’d say, “Well, we’re sitting here talking about it, and I contacted you this way.”

So yeah, that’s how the idea came about. Well, trying to solve b2b sales, what would it take? And we put that process together in a manner that could be packaged up and offered on a per-prospect basis, in a scalable way to businesses.

So if a business wants us to engage with 1,000 prospects a month—or 2,000—depending on the size of their sales team or their market, we can easily scale that up or down against a fairly consistent outreach model.

And really, the principles of the Sopro outreach service haven’t really varied significantly since then. We’ve had all kinds of technical improvements and enhancements—loads of cool stuff we probably never thought possible back then. But in principle, we’re still identifying and engaging with new prospects on behalf of businesses to power their sales pipeline.

Yeah. So I think compliance is just a bit of a housekeeping point, to be honest, and it’s not something we necessarily lead on in our sales process. People are increasingly aware, particularly in the UK and Europe—we’ve got the GDPR, which came in fairly recently—and now it’s on the mind of businesses in the US prospecting into the UK because that activity falls under local regulations. Likewise, local businesses prospecting to other countries might not be sure what the local compliance requirements are. So, it gives a bit of peace of mind, but compliance really isn’t what’s driving campaign performance.

We position ourselves as a sales engagement platform from a technology stack perspective, that is what we are. The big difference with Sopro is that we’re a fully managed service. It’s a platform that comes with a driver. We often compete against lower-cost platform solutions where you would have someone or a team responsible for driving an outreach strategy through a platform with varying degrees of sophistication. Not every business is an expert in doing that or has the right resources. It can be quite expensive—suddenly you’re employing a team to run your platform. Are you really saving $800 a month or whatever you thought you were saving? No, you’re actually spending an extra five or 10 thousand. That’s the big difference.

There are very few competitors out there that take this approach, where everything is done for you. We’ve got the best in the business—drawing from our own experience—to put insight into your campaign before it even starts, making sure it’s set up in the right way, and then optimizing once the campaign’s running with weekly or monthly reviews. We regularly double performance from month one to month two just by reviewing the end-of-month performance, switching off segments that are underperforming, and doubling down on the segments that are delivering results. And its so simple to say but most businesses, when doing this sort of stuff internally, just don’t have the experience, resources, or sometimes the tools to be able to do that.

Yeah, we’re probably a little past that now we’re, yeah, I think we were on track for about $14 million this year. Close of Yeah, we just coming to Q4 now.

Yeah, I think there’s almost two questions in that: one is, what are we doing prospecting-wise, and why is this way of doing outreach so effective? And I think there are so many points that go into that—the approach, the steps, the tech that we obsess about in every conversion rate in the journey, right? You’ve got everything from your email delivery—even before your email delivery rates. So, for the prospects we can identify, what percentage of those are we able to find emails for? Then, of those, what percentage are we able to deliver emails for? A huge success for our operations team recently was increasing email find rates by about 2%. It sounds like such a tiny increment, but you wouldn’t believe the impact that has. Doing that incrementally, time after time, on every single one of these, you get marginal gains that compound into huge multipliers of increased performance.

We know how to get your open rates up with subject lines that are appealing and nothing like a marketing email. We know how to get your emails into a high percentage of inboxes because we’ve got an email awesomeness checker that every email runs through before it goes out. It checks for words that junk and spam filters look for, like free cash and medical supplies—words that sometimes unexpectedly do get used. People wonder, “Why am I not getting into the inbox?” and then, oh, right, there’s that word. It’s obvious when you see it.

When we go to open rates and response rates, we handle the messaging for all of our clients. Clients usually have really good marketing copy that sits fantastically on a website, but it’s not always the description of your product or service that you would put in an email introduction. If you think about it, that email is meant to get a meeting locked in—it is not to sell a product or service. So we rip it up and write, “I’d love to have a chat. I’m just around the corner. Let’s grab a coffee next Thursday. I really think we can help with this.” That’s the kind of note that’s going to get responses when it’s done in a personalized way. Drop in a few personalized points as well.

We’ve got this obsession with every point in the prospect journey that’s compounded over seven years to become fantastically effective. Most of our clients come through referrals now, so we have a relatively strong foothold in the space. But I don’t think that necessarily helps you scale a business. What your question was getting at was, how do you get $14 million with a prospecting service? That comes from being a tech firm.

Our clients get an agency experience, but in practice, we’re a tech firm with 45 developers building systems that enable teams of real experts to handle multiple campaigns through a framework of campaign delivery that systematically ensures every single step gets done on time in an absolutely bulletproof format. And if you think about it, right now we’re running 600 client campaigns. Today, each campaign has potentially four stages of messaging—message one, message two, message three, message four—all going out on the same date to people in different stages of engagement. Just the sequencing challenge for delivering that volume of personalized content is a hugely technical process of scale. So really, you’ve got to be a tech firm to undertake that kind of scaling challenge.

Yeah, well, we’re going to pick up a couple of multi billion dollar acquisitions. Um, okay, so, yeah, I can send it out, and so we see a market. And, yeah, unfortunately, it’s probably not the exciting, you know, we’re going to get to this point and sell, or anything like, really, this is a, I think we always have a, always a duty to to take this prospecting model to as many people as possible. It’s so effective. So we see a doorstep market for us, which is UK, Europe and the US, which is where most of our clients come from. We can see 10 million businesses, just over 10 million that fit the profile of a Sopro client. This is B to B sector, right size, brackets. And so 10 million businesses. If we’re the right solution, conservatively speaking, we want to take 1% of that market share, so that’s 100,000 clients. So we’ve got 600 clients on the books at the moment. We’ve got a long way to go to get to 100,000 now, the challenges you’ve probably already guessed is, if we’re, we’re a 200 person company at the moment, 600 clients. So you’re talking about a ratio of roughly three to one. So hang on, we’re going to get to 100,000 clients. 33,000 employees in the business, acquiring new facilities every two and a half months. You’ve got these practical ceilings operationally to actually achieving that kind of scale. So for the last two years, we have been developing a fully self service SaaS platform, effectively a self drive version of sopro, which is an interesting take considering the earlier conversation around with a platform with a driver, and it’s a really, it’s our take on delivering that platform in a manner where actually all of the all of the things that make the difference that so pro do, like, for example, we do the messaging for every campaign a SaaS platform is never going to be able to Write your emails. But this one comes with an integrated writers portal, with your selection of experienced freelance writers that have got ratings and feedback and literally, you know, and then actually, your your messaging template requests are fulfilled within the platform, so, you know, and taking similar approach to solving all of the other channels where challenges, where we’re actually a person is required and does make a difference. And, yeah, that’s going to be that’s how we solve this scaling problem. Because at the moment, there’s no real limitation, you know, our so our scalability is, is really restricted by the rate that we can hire people to service our growing client base. Uh, it’s not sales itself. So that’s, that’s what we’re doing, just effectively, a the addition of a complimentary product channel within the in the mix. And yeah, it’s March to 100,000 clients. And then ask me the question, then.