Hiplead CEO Conor Lee automates sales for B2B juggernauts
The Follow-Up Blog highlights industry trends, insights and keys to success from today’s top sales leaders and executives. Today we caught up with Conor Lee, CEO & Co-Founder at Hiplead, which helps B2B companies scale their outbound sales with high quality data, lead generation and Sales Development as a Service.
Conor Lee is currently CEO & Co-Founder for Hiplead, helping companies scale their outbound marketing and sales efforts. Conor is a serial entrepreneur and Hiplead is the third company he founded after ResidentC and TellFi. He is responsible for all aspects of the company’s health and credits his unique education of Y Combinator as the basis for his success. I caught up with Conor via email this past week to learn more about his experience growing Hiplead into a juggernaut in the sales automation space.
MH: What’s the “elevator pitch” for your company? What is your role and how are you impacting the business at a high level? Why did you choose to do this?
CL: At Hiplead, we help companies scale their outbound sales, with high-quality lead generation and sales operations automation. We’ve helped more than 200+ leading companies (including Lyft, Udemy and Import.io) setup their outbound sales process and make it into a profitable channel.
I’m HipLead’s CEO and Co-Founder. We run a lean business, with 4 full-time staff in our office in SF and a few more around the world. As you can imagine, I wear a lot of hats. I’m closely involved with all aspects of the business, including product, sales, marketing, success and hiring. Most of my time is spent on product strategy, marketing and sales.
I started Hiplead as a soloprenour in 2013, and have been lucky enough to be able to hire and build a great team and bring on a great co-founder. I feel like the entrepreneur life choose me — I’ve never had a “regular” job, I started out working in political campaigns and moved into tech later. At this point, I’ve started three companies over the last 9 years — I’m not sure if I can do anything else!
Of your past professional experiences, which has been the most important in preparing you for what you are doing today? Why?
My experience is a bit different than most tech founders. I started out working in politics for former San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, then took a job for a small political consultancy when I ran campaigns across California and the West Coast (and dabbled in lobbying), then I made my move into technology.
As a political consultant, I learned two really important things that have stuck with me as a tech founder. One, that the message and how you frame it matters considerably. If you want people to follow you into a early-stage company, or you want an early client to sign with you when your product is new, you have to correctly position what you’re doing and control the message. As part of that, you have to be able to stand in the shoes of your different audiences and see things from their perspective.
Can you tell me about a time or event in your life where you had to deal with adversity? Where things didn’t go as planned? How did you overcome these obstacles? Did this learning help you out in your professional career?
Sure, my second startup (TellFi, backed by Y Combinator) failed pretty miserably because my former co-founder and I were not honest with each other about our respective goals. We both said we wanted the same thing because it felt like the right thing to say, but in the end, we both wanted very different things.
From that, I learned that you need to lay out very defined internal goals first, and be honest with yourself about those goals. When things don’t go according to the plan, you have something to look back to. Setting clear goals and being very honest with myself has helped tremendously in the path to becoming a better manager. It’s much easier to make hard decisions when you have an internal backstop.
What is your team currently using for your sales stack? A major CRM platform? Anything else? What have you found good & bad about each?
We use Salesforce for our CRM, Outreach.io for sales automation, Cirrus Insights for syncing Google Apps with Salesforce, and HipLead (of course) for lead generation. We also run ads on LinkedIn.
As many people can tell you, Salesforce setup can be daunting, but once you get your reports up and running it’s pretty valuable.We’re big fans of Outreach at HipLead, and we use it to manage campaigns for our clients and for ourselves internally. It’s great if you have Salesforce, but less useful if you’re on another CRM.
How has the sales and business development software changed since you started your career? Is it getting better? What do you think the future of sales software is?
I believe that the growth and popularity of the Sales Development Rep (SDR) role has had a pretty large impact on B2B sales. The idea started with Aaron Ross’s Predictable Revenue, and since then, a number of sales automation tools have launched, automating things related to or being done by SDRs.
The next big thing to hit mainstream sales teams will be Account-Based Sales (ABS) & Marketing automation. It’s difficult for one or multiple sales reps to coordinate their interactions with companies who have multiple personas — so it’s ripe for innovation. The benefit of the ABS approach is that it works!
What do you wish you had learned in your first endeavor that you had to learn later? What advice do you have for your younger self or for those who are thinking about making a career change or going to start their own company?
I’d tell a younger self and younger founders to focus on problems that people are willing to pay for at that moment. Once you have found something that people are willing to pay for then focus on automating the solution.
Anything else you’d like to share with The Follow-Up Blog community? This could be what’s coming up for your company or you personally, or it could be your thoughts about how college/grad school or your first job impacted your journey to success!
If you’re interested in running outbound email campaigns, or getting high-quality leads, please reach my team at info@hiplead.com or sign up at Hiplead.com. Mention this blog post and we’ll give you 20% off all of our plans.
Thanks so much for the opportunity to learn about your serial entrepreneur journey from political pundit to three-time founder at a rising B2B juggernaut! If our readers are interested in automating their sales funnel check out Hiplead. And if you found this interview on The Follow-Up Blog helpful, please applaud and share with your colleagues!