We explore the founding journey behind a high-growth SaaS business (Reachdesk), with its founder, Alex Olley, highlighting the importance of grit, cultural alignment, and hiring for mindset over pedigree. We discuss how their values, “be bold, learn fast, get things done”, shape a resilient team and how a structured, scorecard-driven hiring process ensures long-term success. The conversation also touches on the power of team-based wins and embedding customer-centricity into every role.

Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast with

myself, Matt Best and the wonderful Jonny Adams. We're

joined today by the fantastic Alex Olley from Reach Desk, so

founder, and now CRO at Reach Desk and Alex, it's brilliant to

have you on on today, and we're going to talk about a couple or

a few specific things that we're super excited about. So firstly,

we'd love to understand a bit about your background and your

the sort of founder story, as it were. We find that our listeners

really, really, really value that insight and your

perspective, what's gone well, what's changed along the way,

and those sorts of things, and then your approach and

methodology when it comes to kind of sales. It's something

that we talk a lot about on this podcast. It'd be really

fantastic to hear. And then, as ever AI comes up, the importance

of AI, but also the importance of balancing AI with a kind of

human centric approach. We'll dive into that as well. So

really looking forward to that conversation today. And thank

you so much for joining us.

Oh look. Well, firstly, thank you for having

me. I don't get to do this in person as much, so this is, this

is a bit of a treat, actually, in the studio looks awesome, but

yeah, I suppose we actually don't know each other that well.

So I'm kind of introducing myself in many ways. So I used

to be this, essentially the CEO. When you start a company, you

kind of look around with three other co founders, who is the

CEO here, and I was like, It's me, but we, we decided from

like, literally day one that this was, this was going to be a

product that was going to be really well suited for US

market. And by going all in. We knew we had to change things.

But actually, at the same time, I've been in sales for 15 years.

I've been ahead of sales. I love sales and marketing. I kind of

always wanted to be the CRO I don't think I really wanted that

CEO title long term anyway, but yeah, I love everything. Go to

Market, and we're in this fortunate world where I kind of

sell to myself, as it were, you know, where we built it for

sales and marketing teams. I'm one of the personas, so it's

kind of easy before I was saying like E commerce tools. And I've

never been in E commerce. I never really understood what was

doing. So I love the world that we're in. And yeah, I'm keen to

get into it and start chatting with you guys. Fantastic.

And that's brilliant. We'll dig a bit more into that,

into that, into that, that journey that you've gone on from

sitting around a table, presumably, or maybe in a bar

just debating who should be the CEO, who should take what role,

as is customary on the growth workshop podcast, we'd love you

to answer this question if you were to choose two people to be

on your personal board of advisors. These are people who

would advise you personally on life, on work, on your business,

on all facets, who would they be and why?

Look, I think it's really hard one don't be

offended by if I don't if, if my mates are listening and then

they're not getting chosen, then don't be offended by click. I

think that there are two people have had massive impacts on my

life who I would actually like. I would love to have them on a

continued journey. And one of them is actually Jay, who I

started reached us with. Now he and I, we met in 2012 I was one

of his first sales hires in his company. Yieldify, amazing

journey, like we went from like zero to, I think it was 12

million in a year, and it was like colossal initial growth. He

taught me a lot, and we ended up starting reach desk together,

and at times, there were a lot of clashes, actually, because it

was a different relationship. Was no longer his sales leader

or anything, or that AE the same level, but he helped me so much,

like he was that we were talking about before, he was that

mirror, that person that would ask me the hard questions. But

also you need someone that's telling you doing a good job. I

didn't have that for many people, particularly when you're

found it's quite lonely. Very few people are saying you're

doing great, by the way, all you think is, I want to do better,

and I want to do more, and you're trying to reach that next

milestone. You get there, and it's the next thing. And he was

the one saying, enjoy this moment, enjoy these things.

Like, I remember there was a day when we'd lost a load of deals.

You know, there was some, like, five or six people. I'm

thinking, this is awful. What am I doing? I've given up

everything. I've given up, like, a decent salary, and really

great company can build something. And he was the one

saying, dude, don't worry. Like you're just in the struggle. And

there's always a breakthrough around the corner. Having

someone like that is gold. The other person that I probably

bring on is guy called Fergus. And Fergus was Marc benioff's

right hand man. He's actually in benioff's book Behind the Cloud.

I actually didn't know that at the time, and it's funny, the

way I met Fergus was actually during our series B due

diligence. I had this moment. I was called into this meeting,

and I was like, Guys, what's this meeting that's happening?

So it's an investor, they wanna do some due diligence. I'm like,

okay, just present your normal stuff that you presented to all

the other investors. And I remember presenting things, and

it was supposed to be half an hour meeting, I think it turned

into a four hour meeting. And there was this guy called Fergus

who was just asking these constant, like, really difficult

questions about, like, sales, velocity by Channel and metrics

and enablement and scaling and all this stuff. And I was, I

don't really know what I'm doing, and I'm remember calling

my founders up afterwards. So I think I just lost us our series

B guys. What was that about? Anyway? So they actually came

back to us, and they wrote a report, and I think it said

something like, Alex is a decent sales leader, or something like

that, a bit sort of middle of the line. And it was Fergus

report. I think I'm allowed to. This, but doesn't matter anyway.

And I actually, I messaged him afterwards. I said I didn't get

it. You told me a new one there. And that was that was putting

one that the most intense meetings ever. I thought we'd

lost everything. And he's like, Yeah, well, I'm just trying to

test you. I'm trying to pressure test you. And I said, Well,

you're clearly full of knowledge. Can we work together

and you level me up? And he just said, Yes. I was like, wow,

okay. And I looked him up and went, Oh my God, this guy's

actually, like, He's a beast. He's done it. He's taken

Salesforce, I think he joined at 5 million, error, and he left

Salesforce, and they're like, one half billion. So you talk

about like, I'm at the zero to one guy, the one to 1010, to 50,

blah, blah. He's like, there for five to one point, however, many

billion. And those sessions with him just took me to a totally

different level. And I thought, I think I had too much ego, and

he kind of brought that me back down a little bit. But it was

just like, here's a problem. I think it's, I'm sorry if this is

a really stupid thing to be bringing to you. Can we work

through it? And most of time, you're like, it's not stupid

problem at all. Actually. You think if actually, you're

thinking about the right things, but you just think about the

wrong way. And those conversations would translate

into massive impact. And so from a go to market standpoint, I

would always want him with me.

I think that's so interesting and quite jealous.

You've got these amazing advisors around you. No offense

to my advisors. Of course, I'm curious to know a little bit

more about reach desk as well, and maybe where the origin is,

because we don't have a problem in the world about ideas. What

we have a problem about is activation, implementation,

right? You know, I think actually, was it smaller than 1%

of ideas actually become to something as successful as what

you're building. And for the listeners, you know, what is

Reach Desk, it would be great to have a bit...

Sure, if you boil it down, we help companies create

and accelerate pipeline using direct mail, gifting and swag,

like you can do that for your existing customers and employees

too. That's ultimately, ultimately what we do. And so we

started it because essentially, when was this, about 2017 I was

seeing. I had SDRs, A's in my team. We weren't seeing the same

results from calling, from emailing, as perhaps we used to

when I started in sales. I had a desk phone and a print out

sheet, and that was it. It was like, these are your people you

need to call. And it was just smashed through the numbers. But

back in whenever that was, that was 15 odd years ago. You could

dial 10 people and you might have five conversations as

unheard of, right? But so that that that's taken to ridiculous,

and then where we are today and in the middle was kind of reach

that square, and you saw the rise of these sales engagement

platforms like outreach and sales loft. We just weren't

seeing the results that we wanted. And I do remember it was

working for Danish company, and the CRO asked me to go to

Denmark. These results aren't great. The pipeline, it's just

not really growing. You need to bring some ideas to the table,

and we discuss certain things, the standard stuff that you'd

expect. And is that? What else you got? I said, I wish some

people gifts. And there was this really awkward, like, it felt

like five minutes. It was probably in about 10 seconds,

and he just burst and laughing in my face. I was like, Oh, what

have I said? I may as well just like, hand in my notice now. And

he kind of literally just like, are you? Are you joking? That's

your solution. It's like, we're going to send people gifts. We

didn't know was we'd already started doing it, and we had, I

used to give my SDRs, like my what, my company card, and we

would go on these shopping trips, and we'd research our top

accounts and our prospects and everything. And we would go and

buy these, like, custom gifts and have their names engraved on

it and everything. Then we would send them to their offices, and

soon as they arrived, we'd call them, and we were getting that

5% response rate on email. We were getting like, 50 to 75% on

sending people stuff, someone's who's done really well. And I

still remember this moment where one of the STRS Charlie sent, he

sent this amazing they it was the CMO of pretty little thing

fast fashion brand, right? They'd just done their unicorn

campaign, and he sent this, like, personalized unicorn with

this like gold embossed notebook, and he'd done a lot of

research on it, and he'd been trying to get through to her for

about a year, right? And the moment it landed, she called

him, and she said, I don't know you guys, what is it you do?

What do you want? And the next day, we're on a train to

Manchester to meet her. We sat in her office and we had this

meeting. And so what we started doing is the company I was at

the time. We had five offices around the world, and people

heard about this story. So everyone started doing the same

as us, doing these personalized campaigns, going on these trips.

And we would, we would get super creative with them. We do we and

we it would be holistic as well. We do it as part of email and

video follow up, and it was done really well, but then it broke

because no one knew how much we were spending, no one could like

track it. We had this new marketing director who basically

shut it down. Said, we're not doing this anymore. Guess what

happened? Our response rates dipped, our pipeline dipped, and

that's when I started looking into solutions to help automate.

This. You know, we were only in Europe. There was no one doing

anything to help European companies. There were certain

companies starting to do it in the US, but no one was really

thinking about the international side of things. And I called Jay

and Milan, the two brothers who'd founded the business I was

at before at yotify, and I actually said, I was like, What?

What do you guys do? And they said, we got the same problem.

Everyone spoke to us like we're actually doing this. I thought,

this. I thought we were the only guys doing this custom gifting.

We're doing it, and we can't figure out how to scale it

either. So we realized it's a widespread problem, validated

it. And it's one of those moments where I think you

mentioned that the meeting in the bar, we met in a bar in

London, Victoria, and kind of that day, almost instantly, just

said, Let's build another company. And it kind of just

happened there and then. And I think I went home and spoke to

my wife, was that I'm going to start a business with guys from

yotify. What do you think? She was like, Yeah, great. Don't

think, I don't think she thought I was, I was serious. You know,

we're building and then that was it really so it was based off a

problem that we saw, yeah, and we wanted to make sure that we

could build something that wasn't just a US based business,

but at the same time, most people I spoke to in Europe, the

problem I had was that I'd speak to people in Europe and they're

like, gifting really similar response to what I got when,

when I said it to my CRO everyone I spoke to in the US,

they were like, Yeah, we do already. It's we've got loads of

budget for it. And this is, like, part of our our culture,

and like, gifting out there, within, like outbound and ABM

was absolutely massive. And so we decided to build a business,

and then at the same time, we were like, We need to get to the

US fast.

That's crazy. So I guess that's your that. I mean,

that's starting to feed into that sort of founder story. I'm

really interested to understand, as you were going through that

build process, were there anything specific areas or

things that sort of those hurdles that you had to leap

over that you could share with the audience? And a bit of

advice, perhaps?

How long you got?

That's often the response, Alex, but yeah,

there's a couple of kind of key things that you're like, you

know what? I don't know, made that mistake, or saw that

opportunity that I haven't seen before or since, that could be

useful.

Our first biggest hurdle was, how do you get to

the US? But I still have to think about, how do we have the

right team in the home territory? I'm an advisor to a

number of businesses. I see this common mistake of like, we

basically the home territory gets left behind, right they go

to the US, and they forget about what the relatiview, and that's

usually where the culture is. And one things I learned is

you've got to take it with you. Now, when I've tried going into

other countries in the past, I felt like I could just hire a

squad on the ground, and it's never worked. For some reason

when I've taken people with me, I mean, so when we went to the

US, I went myself. I brought key people with me who could share

that knowledge, who could make sure that you know when I'm not

there, the culture of how we do things, our DNA is maintained

and really instilled those. Those things were pretty

critical. But like, I think if you my approach to everything,

we call it, actually, it's, I didn't coin this. It was Adam

from ebster, who works with Guy Rubin, and call it the caveman

theory. And it's basically like going, you need to go and get

your food club over there and bring it back to the cave. And

that's what outbound is to me. So at the very beginning, and

every business I advise, I make sure, as long as it makes sense

to have this sort of like outbound method to what you do,

because of the particularly early stage, particularly early

stage is one of the easiest things that you can control. I

see loads of companies now trying to spend too much time on

building a brand, and they talk about distribution, but it's

actually not distribution. It's that at the beginning, zero to

one is brute force, and you have to go and get it. And that

lesson is so underestimated. And whenever I tell people that it's

particularly that early stage. They come back to me, like, I

get it now I've just got to go out there every event. I'm there

we, like founders, are dining together. They're pushing

forward, and I see too many companies that aren't prepared

to do that. And my word, I'm glad we did.

It's fascinating. Just that sort of mindset piece.

I think it's important. But the I want to just step back into

the culture. How big is your team now in the US?

It's about 70 people.

How did you scale that and scale the culture as

well?

How do we scale it so the culture, as I said, you

have to bring people, yeah, and you've got to insulate them. And

it was only I remember this point. I remember hiring a

couple of people, one of them still with me today. And when I

was hiring people at the beginning, I was thinking,

mainly, yeah, can you do the job? You got to tick the boxes,

but do you match our DNA? Like, if you don't, you don't make it.

And I remember having people, I think you could be an athlete

beast. You could crush it here, be just the wrong fit. And I've

seen companies tumble as a result of, like, hiring bad

apples. That was one of my number one things I was looking

for. It's like, Are people gonna like you? Are we gonna like

working with you? But also, we do have a certain hustle to our

to our culture. It's not, are you good people? Do you want to

get beers and have families like I expect people to show up a

little bit early and work a little bit late. I expect you to

be in the zone the entire. My time, I had to embody that. And

I'd say to people, if I'm not like that and I don't embody

that, call me out on it. But you have to lead by example. You've

got to hire people that are going to embody that too, and

that's how you scale it. And I'm not gonna lie, I had moments

where I got it wrong. I got the wrong leaders. I think, you

know, the gyms of the world, great examples. One, because

they're hungry, they want to move up the ranks. But I did

hire leaders who didn't embody that. I think I did make the

mistake of looking at their CV and their experience too much.

And I'll put my hands in the air and say that those are mistakes,

not necessarily just here in previous businesses too. Getting

that right is so important, because the moment you don't and

people are disconnected, they that you start getting the

messages being like, what's happened, and there's that awful

Slack message you get going. I remember once someone was

saying, like, what we done here? Oh god, it's my fault. And so

I've prioritized the mindset, the mentality, all those things.

I actually wrote them down. It's the type of attributes I wanted

for people, and that's what we'd hire for, and that's in our

hiring process that values that culture piece is really

essential. And we built this really robust hiring process,

which is almost like a sales process. It's like four steps.

There's non negotiables. If we're not unified on it, if

we're not unanimous, they don't you don't allow people in. And

it's literally like scorecards. It's relentless. And that's

where you asked about scaling. You can scale hiring and

building out a team when you've got that in place. I see too

many companies are just like, Yeah, cool. They worked at Adobe

or Salesforce, and like, they're just going to bring all that

experience and they're going to save the day. And you've just

got the wrong person.

Clearly, I'm enjoying this. I mean, as a

host, it's like, I think if the audience was hearing it's like,

Alex, you're sharing some great insights, but just give us the

answer, right? And you're on the it's like a trailer this

particular piece, because you sort of go and then, because the

two things I'm really curious about as you describe that, and

we often talk a lot about culture, Matt and I have worked

with a mutual client for four years. They went from detesting

the word sales, physically maybe being sick around the word

sales. Now the manager is actually using the word sales

for years, but that's culture, right? That. And it takes a lot

of psychologists would say it takes, you know, three, three

plus years to change culture in a large organization. My point

being, though, is you've started to tease us a little bit with,

you know, you've got this list. What's the list I'm interested

in? Maybe just share a couple of those things that you that you

recruit for, it would be really interesting, because you alluded

to one before and and maybe I'd love to hear the values that

you've got as a business, because values match up to

culture. Values then enables a business to run the right hot

and cold behaviors. Values would be great. And also, what are

some of these other things that you look for when recruiting?

Yeah. So the attributes, let's break it down.

The attributes are different by role. I look for pretty similar

things like BDRs and AES. I tend to have like a so my strategy is

to hire BDRs that can translate into AES in the future, ideally.

And what I look for when I'm hiring those kind of roles is

coachability, curiosity, prior success, work ethic and

intelligence. I'm not. I'm not I'm not bothered, like, one of

the best times I made he didn't go to university. I don't even

know what his grades are to this day, but it's just like,

unbelievable, because the intelligence part wasn't about

your degree or anything. It was around I understand your market.

I understand where you fit. I understand how you can position

yourself. I understand the trends that are going on, and

when people can demonstrate those kind of things, I'm like,

You're clearly really smart in the way that I need you to be.

And that's, that's the mistake I see companies make. They think

we need intelligent people, but they need to have this kind of

degree or this, these kind of grades that doesn't help you,

like, it might do it if you're GSK and you're you need someone

who's going to, like, protect your IP or something. I need

people to sell so I need them to understand my market. So that's

the intelligence side of things. Prior success can be anything.

Let me give the example of Ben. He was a professional ice

skater. He can do a back flip on ice skates. Not many people can

do that. To get to that level, you need to have, like, trained

to a certain degree and and it kind of goes back to the

underlying bit is that sort of grit and that resilience. But

prior success can be anything, really it can. What I'm looking

for is, I'm looking for people to demonstrate they've done

something to a level that very few can achieve. And that might

be that you were a really successful sales rep in the

past, but if your prior success was, well, I was an account

executive before. All right, where were you on the

leaderboard? Is the question I usually ask, and I'm going to

validate that with your old boss. And if you're not, if

there are 10 of you and you weren't one of the top two,

probably weren't very good. Simple as that, the work ethic

you can test within the interview process, with their

diligence on following up, and their attention to detail within

their presentations, that kind of thing. I asked a question

around like, describe your your ideal work week that helps you

be successful. And then what I'm looking for is, like, a

systematic approach with no gaps in it, where they're like, Okay,

so I get in at 830 I start at 845 because the day before I've

prepared 845 to 930 is dialing, and it's like, bang, bang, bang,

bang, bang. And do all my follow ups. I'm not that's what I'm

looking for. Ultimately, that's work ethic. And then everything

surrounding the interview. Process is, I'm looking for

those kind of things. The connect with me on LinkedIn,

saying, love this, whatever you spoke about...

It's a sales process.

Exactly.

And it's a buying process as well. And if they've

got some emotional intelligence, which I think is your beast

around intelligence as well, they should see it like that.

You know, absolutely resonate with that the values of the business.

Yeah. Be bold. Learn fast, get things done. Be bold.

Learn fast. One value, Oh, wow. Get things done. Okay? Bold,

learn fast. Get things done. I'm like that. I'm relentless,

right? I take I'm a big risk taker, right? I'm big on

learning from my failures, so that I've always like day one, I

was like, you will make mistakes. You will make mistakes

all the time. That's fine. If you keep making the same

mistake, it's not okay. So we've got to learn fast, but we've got

to take risks. We've got to learn fast. But I'm all about

scoring 70% on the exam and getting things shipped rather

than trying to perfect stuff, and I ask questions in the

interview process like give me an example of a moment when you

took a big risk and what you learned from it. It's as simple

as that, and so long as they can, doesn't matter what it is.

Sometimes they can articulate that. I'm like, Okay, you are

part of our values. I've heard some crazy things. I'm like,

this is brilliant, because I'm surprised you took that recipe.

You learned a lot from it, whether it went bad or wrong,

you're learning from it, all right? Treat people like people.

It's pretty, pretty self explanatory, right? That's what

we're all about. You don't need to be like that. We don't

tolerate it. And when we see it, we call it out, deliver

happiness, which is like, that's basically what we do at reach

desk. It's kind of the foundation of what we do.

Obviously, we send gifts and things, but we do that because I

think happy people means happy customers, and we want to try

and embody that in our culture, and then probably my most My

favorite one is win as a team. Win as a team, win as a team.

There are no individuals, as much as you know. There's the

sad truth to sales that the person who closed the deal gets

to ring the gong, and that's that. But we don't celebrate

like that. Our Gong channel celebrates the BDR that opened

up the opportunity. It tags the solution engineer that was on

the call, because we're like, when we and that seems like such

a trivial thing, but I think it's so important, and we shout

each other out with we don't have this culture, this sort of

toxic sales culture, which I was part of before. It's like, you

know, chess beating the sales mentality. It's like, you do win

as a team. Without that BDR, without that solution, engineer,

without the CSM jumping on to talk about the experience

they're going to get, we've, we've won deals because that's

our approach, whereas our competitors are just like in

that one lane, and they have, I'm not saying all of them are,

but some of them are like that. And we've had the feedback from

prospects. I asked them, I interviewed them. They say, why

did you choose us? They're like, You sent an army, and we felt

that that's what we were going to get. And the experiences,

which is way better.

Love that, massively resonate with, you

know, teams win deals, and you know, you can see that with the

evolution of a more complex buying cycle, more personas,

more stakeholders. And we know, because as a consultancy, we

have to go in as a team. Because how can you deliver a project

that's multi millions over multi years with just one person, it's

impossible, but that ability to match up to those personas and

have the ability to match up to the behaviors as well, right?

It's so crucial. I know there's loads to unpack on that comment.

I completely agree, and I love it's a sort of

element of simplicity there, Alex, it's like the clarity that

you have. It's like, this is what I need. This is what I'm

going to get. I've got a method for getting it. I think this is

also interesting. I wondered if we'd surveyed all of the, you

know, the sales directors and even CROs like yourself out

there in the market, said, how do you in an interview recognize

or measure whether someone's going to align to your values or

not? I wonder what the response rate? I mean, there's a there's

a poll there, but like, you clearly gone, I can understand

whether they're going to align to this value by asking them

this question. And so often it's actually about, Okay, talk to me

about your experience. What's your process for, for closing a

deal, like, all of that stuff, or, like, talk to me about the

different clients you've worked with. But to your point,

actually, it's the it's the underlying behavior that you're

looking for, because you can train in that other stuff. You

can help someone understand it, as long as they're demonstrating

the right capabilities or the and the right desire. It feels

like desires are kind of big thing in there as well.

Yeah, big time. And I think the thing I learned with

these things is, like, I've spent so much of my time

documenting this stuff, and for people listening, I've literally

got this document. I have templates that I can share, but

like, think about that, that that sales hiring process. There

is a document which says stage one internal talent team, they

ask these questions. And part that, by the way, is actually

candidate experience as well. Because I've been, I hadn't

interviewed for a long time now, but I remember I used to and I'd

be asked the same question over and over again, and I these guys

talk about about stuff this is awful, yeah. And so part of it

is like, Hey, are we on the same page about like what we're

asking so that we can actually test for different things?

Otherwise, we may as well just have one stage. And so I treat

everything that way, and I do like internal memos, and I put

things in Google Sheets which basically like this person is

going to ask these things they are testing for these

attributes. Really critically, this what a model answer looks

like. Here's a score out of 10 if they don't. Make this score,

they don't get through great stage one. Stage two,

attributes, questions who's up, who's involved, and it's just

that it's a systematic approach that we've put into our ATS

scorecard comes up. We can we have an unbiased way of looking

at things going no, this person doesn't make it simple as that

speeds things up, gets everyone aligned.

And it saves you a ton of money, yeah, because we

know that, you know, Miss hiring is five times the salary, you

know, and we've all made some really shocking hires, haven't

we, and it comes back to a robustness of recruitment

process. And I think when you go back and you recruit and you go,

do you know what that was interesting, what was the

recruitment process like for you? Do you know what, what I

really liked was the rigor, and that rigor, where they feel like

they're achieving something at each stage as a candidate keeps

them bought in. And recently, we've had someone, you know,

when we've been doing recruitment, actually drop out

at stage three, because we've got four stages best that they

drop out at Stage Three rather than cruising to stage four,

thinking there's some mutual and then all of a sudden they're

going to drop out three months later.

Indeed, thank you so much for joining us, Alex. We

look forward to having you again on part two.