Thoughts on Nooks' $42 Million Round
Some observations after spending so much time with their team
Pipeline Conference, the conference exclusively for SDR Leaders, is expected to completely sell out in the next few days! You can get a pass here.
When I was an SDR Leader at Outreach, Outreach became one of the fastest-growing companies in America, through 89% cold outbound prospecting, primarily through the SDR Leader persona. This seemed to defy conventional sales logic since traditionally you would prospect to the “decision-maker” defined as “someone who can say yes when others say no”. But while a CRO/CMO can technically override the wishes of their SDR leader when it comes to technology the SDR Leader will be responsible for, they rarely do.
Smart CROs/CMOs trust their SDR Leaders when it comes to selecting their own technology stack. They do it for the same reasons the CEO doesn’t micromanage the tool stack of the CRO/CMO.
However, since the CRO/CMO tends to sign the check, sometimes companies selling this software assume they were who they should have been focusing on all along. I mean, I would have assumed that if I weren’t on the front lines of the pipeline generation team! Some of our competition missed this, which ended up helping us go to market through this extremely valuable persona even more quickly.
I eventually left Outreach to start SDRLeader.com. Since I had been creating content for SDR Leaders exclusively for the 5 prior years, most SDR Leaders already knew me and SDRLeader.com grew very quickly.
Today, most all SDR Leaders are members of SDRLeader.com. For this reason we are vendor-neutral. Our members use all of the different technologies and we invite all companies to support our community. I do however, want to give a special shout out to Nooks for their early dedication to the SDR Leader.
A little over a year ago, Nooks was introduced to me by one of our SDRLeader.com members. They were a seed stage company that I hadn’t heard of, but they were building tech for SDR Leaders and I was excited to meet with them. If I remember right, they were a virtual sales floor and adding a dialer at that point. Despite their limited resources, Nooks bet big on us and sponsored almost every dinner SDRLeader.com has hosted since the day I met them.
I was particularly impressed with Rohan Suri, the cofounder who first reached out to me. Like most Stanford CS grads I’ve met, he’s clearly very bright and very capable. But more importantly for Nooks, he’s also maniacally focused on face time with his users. I don’t think he’s an extrovert, but despite that and despite his busy schedule, he personally went to every possible dinner he could. Sometimes taking red eyes or getting on a 5:00 am flight. Speaking to and learning from their primary users seemed to be more important to him than anything else.
The benefits of sitting down to dinner with hundreds of SDR Leaders are obvious from a GTM perspective. But just as importantly (more importantly?) he spent a lot of time with his core users and had a powerful, direct connection between his engineering and executive team and the SDR Leaders who would be responsible for implementing their product.
In some industries, SaaS companies ignore the user responsible for implementing their product, and instead focus on building a product that demos well to the person above them. While that model is very popular, and successful in some scenarios, I do not expect that to be successful in the current AI renaissance in pipeline tech. Net new pipeline generation is too measurable, and an inability to deliver after the sale will quickly sink the reputations of companies that ignore those who will be using their product. The winners will be the companies that focus on improving productivity of their users.
It was fun to see the announcement of Nooks’ $43 million round last week. More than $65 million total since I met them a little over a year ago!
Huge congratulations to Nooks! It’s well deserved and it has been fun to work together with them. I’m delighted that they recently signed up to partner with us on 24 more SDRLeader.com events between now and the end of next year.
Sales pipeline growth is back in style and it’s exciting to see so much innovation happening in our space. Congratulations to Nooks and all the other companies doing awesome things in our space. This is going to be a fun year for the SDR Leader.
LET’S GROW!
Sam