← The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
The Official SaaStr Podcast: SaaS | Founders | Investors
SaaStr 847: How MangoMint Increased Win Rates with an AI-Powered Stack
00:31:28
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the official Saster podcast where you can hear some of the best Saster speakers. This is where the cloud meets up today on the Saster podcast.
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B
So in this day and age, you've thought to run twice as fast as you did before to keep up or even get ahead of where you thought you wanted to be. So I cut. I started cutting. I knew I had to debloat very delete, delete, delete. The path to rigor, as I like to call it, is always going to come from subtraction. I go full ruthless. Some of my team members like to call me the pit bull. I go him. We consolidated everything into one operating system and today I'm going to show you that new reality. We're going to dive into the layers of how I created visibility and this is really where we started to see that everything changed. We have increased across Our team our win 7% in two quarters just by creating complete clarity around how to access the things that you actually need to be disciplined within the organization.
- [01:12]
A
Hey everybody. Saster Annual will be back. May 2026. The world's largest SaaS and AI gathering for executives with 68 VP level and above attendees, 36% CEOs and founders and 25% were AI first professionals. It's the very best of S tier attendees and decision makers that come to SAST Annual and AI Summit each and every year. Lock in your spot today. Use my code Jason100 for exclusive savings. Get your tickets at podcast.saster annual.com or just use code Jason100 when you check out. See you there. Saster annual and AI summit 2026. It will rock.
- [01:50]
B
Today we're going to dive into some tactics, but also the actual layers of how I have built a remote native leadership organization and grown a company from employee number five to 150. So I'm Marshalle Mooney, VP of Sales at Mangomint. We are vertical SaaS for salons and spas. And not only do we serve an SMB market, I like to say it is very SMB. So our software alone is roughly a 4000 ACV. We also have payment processing built in. So I'll talk a bit about that. But today I'm going to show you how I built a remote revenue organization with such rigor that we're creeping up on a 7.2x RR to OTE, which is unheard of in the very SMB market. So we're going to pop into it because the reality is AI is here to expose you and it's going to show your entire organization what you're good at and what you're absolutely terrible at. But the idea that the revenue's growing but we don't actually know what's going on. Not necessarily in the day to day, but those things that keep you up at night. So my CEO likes to say I only like to think about one thing in the shower. And I know if he is not deeply clued into what's happening with win rate, what's happening on the layer of if he wakes up and notices that one AE's win rate has plummeted, he needs to know where he can go without having to send me a message. So this is the real fear, not productivity, but actual visibility into the organization. So this visibility gap has only grown since many of us not natively moved into remote companies over the past five years. Some of us are hybrid. How many of you are hybrid? You've got some remote, some in office. Okay, great. I'm opening a sales office. So that might be contradictory to everything I'm saying right now, but we're going to employ the exact same rigor around that in office experience where we're incubating BDRs into our sales team that we do in the remote revenue organization. So we need a single source of truth. That's true. Nobody's really got it from what I've experienced. I sat at dinner last night. But what I've heard is that meetings are happening everywhere, especially in a hybrid environment. You've got some people who are in meeting in office, you've got some trying to zoom in. All of this creates decisions that happen in people's heads in those eight inches between their ears rather than on paper. Tasks live across different tools. I like to say if I walked into your office and I slipped you a note, you weren't in there. When you return to the office and you read the note, you're probably going to get back to me at some point or acknowledge that you received it. If I send you a damn slack message and I never hear back, it is very rude. So we've got to build rigor into how these updates go. Things are scattered. Knowledge isn't captured in any one place. So we've got to rethink the way that we build this. So I, of course I went all in on AI. This is also why I've been asked back to speak at Zaster, because I'm pretty hardcore about it. I'm like, why? Why would we ignore this thing? So I'm now two years into my AI journey Into go to market. And I realized that me going all in on AI was the actual problem my organization had. I installed everything I was running literally like the AI kitchen sink. It was just like, what can we throw in? And what I learned from that is that the more AI I added didn't help me understand what was even happening. For example, this was the first year I brought in an ea. I tend to be somebody who's, like, hypercritical of every single move that I make. I'm thinking about things six months in advance down to the point of, like, what shoes I'm gonna wear on stage. So bringing somebody into that brain, it was more of a vulnerable state of, like, shh. Do I really wanna show somebody what goes on up here? And I have this moment where we're onboarding team members and I've got fellow app from Chelsea trying to join, and then I've got this person sharing their granola notes, and I've got my notes over here on a notebook from 1999. So what I realized was actually what it made me feel like was that all of us were walking into this meeting. And honestly, it was embarrassing to me that my internal team couldn't figure it out. We're paying for these tools, and we're not using them with any sort of disciplines attached. So how does it start to feel? Well, like this. And the problem wasn't the tools. It was the fragmentation of how things were happening. Now, many of these tools have only been in our hands for 14 months. So I'm here to tell you that these things move quickly, and you've got to move even faster. How many of you know about the Red PR effect? Okay, what about Alice in Wonderland? Ever heard of it? Seen the movie? So there's a scene in Alice in Wonderland where she is running, and she is running so fast, and she is racing. Her heart is beating, and she realizes the trees are moving right there with her, and she hasn't gotten anywhere. So the Red Queen comes in and explains to her that's because the trees are moving with you. So in this day and age, you've got to run twice as fast as you did before to keep up or even get ahead of where you thought you wanted to be. So I cut. I started cutting. I knew I had to debloat very. Delete, delete, delete. The path to rigor, as I like to call it, is always going to come from subtraction. I go full ruthless. Some of my team members like to call me the pit bull. I go, ham. We consolidated Everything into one operating system. And today I'm going to show you that new reality. We're going to dive into the layers of how I created visibility. And this is really where we started to see that everything changed. We have increased across our team, our win rate, 7% in two quarters, just by creating complete clarity around how to access the things that you actually need to be disciplined within the organization. So I like to say let's keep the main thing. The main thing. Earlier I mentioned, what are we able to do? We are on the path in very SMB, like I said, an ACV of 4K and we're able to create reps that are producing 7.2 ARR to OTE. Is that good or is that great? Thank you. The AI rigor stack. This is what I'm going to introduce. This operating like model is all about first analyzing where we work. So for you, if that's in office, that's where you start. For me, it's not in office. In 2020, I was employee number six at Mango Mint. And we sat in this dinky little office where I annoyed our co founders, the four of them at the time, and basically ran demos while they were trying to build the product. And finally they locked me into a little room and I realized, you know what? I'm not going to commute to this office anymore. And then the world shut down and none of us did. So from employee 6 to employee 150, we've been completely remote. And what I realized is I had to recreate the idea of an office for people to understand how to integrate themselves into that type of environment. I'm seeing it even more now with bringing up a team that's fresh out of university, coming into the sales world, coming out of sales programs. And I'm going, are you sure you were in a sales program? Because I don't know what's going on here. So that is why we're opening a sales office. But I digress. The operating model needs to have three layers, but the clarity layer is all about the playbooks, the definitions, the things those ICs need to know, but they're never going to know inside out and backwards. So they need to be able to, for some, with a click of a few keys, for me, by dictation, to access everything that I need here. Number two is the cadence layer. What does that mean? That means when do things happen and how do we know when they're reliably going to be happening? So these are your reviews, your team updates, the rituals that make Your organization connected. And finally my favorite because this is where I've been able to give my rep 16 hours a month back, the copilot layer. So that's your AI triggers, your automations, the agents you're employing within this stack. So now we're going to dive in a little bit deeper and I'm going to show you like literally what it looks like on my day to day. So I'm in a meeting, we're recording this meeting, right? We're transcribing it, whether you know it or not. And then from there that meeting needs to go somewhere because I said I need to complete my slides. I'll have my EA Taylor follow up on that. This is where it goes. So working in Notion, that has become the main surface of my work. This is where my team's playbook lives. This is where the revenue organization's playbook lives. We even have our leadership playbook here, our handbook here. Let me tell you, four years ago I thought Notion was for nerdy bullet journalists who like to meet up on the weekends and talk about Notion. Today, if you you couldn't pry it out of my cold dead hands. So when I'm done with the meeting, by the way, I was chatting with the, the Notion agent this morning and soon I hope they will be able to automate this. This is still manual. I do have to dictate tell Notion to add this to my database. But this meeting information is going straight from my meeting into the database. What happens next? So the meeting's over. It now lives in that database. And let me tell you, I didn't build any of this. The agent built this. So this is about saying two sentences and getting something done. But what's beautiful is immediately post this meeting, which I laughed because my slides were very late in my opinion. So when I made these I was like, let's remove the timestamps so Amelia doesn't get too mad. Just kidding. So we've got that task. But if you look on the far side of the screen you can see these notifications. I did not set any of these notifications. I'm simply telling the agent or talking in the meeting saying, yeah, I'll have Taylor follow up with that. I don't have to take another action. By the time this has processed, added to the database, I will often hop out of that meeting, check in with my E at the end of the day and these tasks are done. It's not just because the automation has pushed the tasks for her. What happens in the next couple of slides really shows how the richness of this type of database is important. We've got tasks created. What's in progress, what's the priority? All of the notes are automated. What's really important though is that we have more richness to the data. So let's say I set a task for my EA based from the meeting. We need to follow up on 2026 incentive planning. How the heck does she know what 2026 incentive planning even looks like if she wasn't in every single one on one or she hasn't spoken to those revenue leaders that are working on their incentives for 2026? This is where we go back to the layer all about cadence. So again, we talked about rigor. Rigor is how you handle the disciplines you have in place. So one discipline we have in place here is our weekly updates. So within notion, every functional leader from every part of the organization, not just the revenue organization, posts a weekly update. This can be a template that you create. Of course, I created my own, but it can also be what works best for them. What are the main things? If they just had the main thing in that update, I'd be okay as long as the main thing, if that gets done, doing that one thing will then eliminate the need for all the rest of my questions. I'm good with that. Sometimes they're very lengthy, but either way, the access for this is granted across the people that need it, which would be Taylor, my ea. So she can now chat with her agent on that side to understand the task at hand, the context at hand, and be able to take action autonomously without me involved. So finally, let's move on to that final piece that lives in that communication layer. This is where we have our decision change log. This is something that I find gets missed heavily in remote organizations. Somebody changes something in the product and then one person trains over here, four of the AES. I've actually read the product change log. A few people showed up to the lunch and learn. But the other 50% of the organization has no idea where to go to see those internal changes. This could be something in the product, but if you take a look at here, these are real things that I've put into the change log from my original SO compensation plan updates and then access is granted for those who need it. So you can access what you need through the AI agent, but nothing that you don't have permission to access. The decision change engine has been a game changer for us because it's this idea. You know, I'll never forget in My, my first job, I was actually with a British man. He was a hairdresser. I was a hairdresser for 15 years and I trained in a Vidal Sassoon salon. So in that salon, I'll never forget asking him a question that was in our handbook. Loved that job. Learned so much there. But the one thing he told me that really stood out, it's not my job to tell you, it's your job to know. Sounded harsh in the moment, but I opened up that dusty handbook and there was my answer. So this decision change log needs to work the same way. This is us providing the information that you need to do your job damn well. And it's expected that you go there should you need this information. So remote companies don't die because people aren't working. They die because the decisions and the changes aren't communicated clearly. And your team does not like that feeling. They want this information. So here's the total stack. If we zoom out here, something that needs to be true and there are founders in the room. If you've got shitty data, your job is to go fix that and to find the people you need to make it better. The biggest challenges I hear from Rev Ops, from CROs, I speak with from our own head of data when he was looking at joining our company was purely around the actual integrity of how our data was set up. So we had the benefit of from day one having really beautiful data infrastructure. So that top layer is the deep knowledge, all of the communications that Slack and Notion. But when we go down into the system of record, we've got Salesforce for our sales team, we've got our playbooks, tasks, follow ups and Notion. But the data layer and the analytics are so important because none of this can run if people don't have access to the information they need. So Snowflake, which we are using the Snowflake intelligence, we've got all of our product, our revenue, customer data in one place. Very clean. We do all of our enriching. Our entire TAM database is in Snowflake, so all of that's living there. And then we've got Sigma. So Sigma BI tool that allows you to take this, put it into dashboards, we build everything there. I'm actually quite allergic to Salesforce reports. Sorry. But my thing is we really need to live and work all in the same place. Use it for something quick. But let Sigma be where we build out and let the source of truth from our data be that Snowflake layer, the automation layer is where a lot happens. I mentioned Everything in Notion, but it also is Slack. Slack is the second surface and the most popular surface for our ICs and for much of the revenue organization. But I also popped on momentum here. This has become a new layer of automation, but it doesn't provide a new login. All of the work done through Momentum pushes into Slack to keep us working in the office. So this is the whole system. Slack and Notion are where we live. Salesforce is that system of record for the accounts. You know, we could go into many paths here, but to the point where in Salesforce, I don't even use opportunities. I said that to a Rev Ops leader last night and he just about keeled over. But, you know, I realized for an organization like mine, our sales cycle is five days. We've got our sales team selling, our onboarding team onboarding on day three, our sales team closing on day five, our onboarding team taking the next one to two weeks to complete the onboarding. I needed all of that in one place. So we've built it out custom on the account so we can see everything in one place. So I really think deeply about the way you look at your data, the way you consume your data and to be obsessive about it. And if you're not obsessive about it, find someone who is and bring them in. So the magic is here. All the insights start with the AI prompt. They get pushed to the team. ICs do not have to go hunting for a dashboard. All of that data comes to them through Notion and Slack. This is the way that the information actually flows through the teams. So product and revenue data that's living in Snowflake comes into Sigma. I can build in Sigma. Our data team builds in Sigma. I don't love to build in Sigma. So I have a list that goes to that team. They build there. Everything that needs to be pushed to an IC then goes into a Slack alert. One example would be card fails. Where does that live for you right now? Does anyone know? Okay, interesting. I know exactly where that lives in my organization. When a Card fails, something doesn't go through. You know, the invoice is past due. This is going to push directly into Slack to the person who needs to see it. Customer call Data. This is Momentum. This is Snowflake. Slack alerts automatically to Salesforce and Notion. This does not take a human to make this data flow. This is all automated. The execution flows happen with those cadence layers. So if we have an internal meeting that's going into Notion, somebody posts an update that's going Into Notion I can literally have a conversation with my AI agent to understand how this layer is flowing and what emergencies need to be brought to my attention. Finally, should anything need to be pushed into an executive summary, we do use momentum for that. On the revenue side we also have that built out to where from Notion or Slack you can have that information float to the person that needs it. In our company we like to think of data and context flowing downstream automatically. There should be no need for this thing. You cannot find and reps don't need to go into dashboards. I cannot repeat that enough. They will not go and find out what their win rate is. You need to push it to them so where the team actually works. I thought this could be useful. This is kind of starred down the majority of the team. This is kind of secondary to their core functions. So if I'm a support team member I live in Intercom. However, most communications alerts, escalations. We're living in Slack. That's the office we show up to. Slack Notion is going to be where work happens so tasks are completed, decisions are made. Salesforce system of record reps are in there. I don't know 10% of their time. So very slim there. Snowflake and Sigma, very rare for most of the team. But even for the leadership team this is generally where we're going because the data we need that is is pushed to us, isn't there? So recently I decided to look at a trailing 30 and trailing 60 day. I didn't have that on our win rate so I did have to go into Sigma. We did have to build something new but it's not common. Okay, Slack as well. I'm going to dive into this just a little bit because I mentioned earlier I put a note on your desk you don't get back to me. That's rude. I have a whole rulebook on how to use Slack. One of the first things you'll onboard into my team is what happens when I send a message at 2am well I've had many suggestions. How many of you are like hey for when you get back. Okay, good, because I won't spend the extra two seconds to say that I also don't schedule send because that takes time to hit schedule send and half the time I end up hitting enter anyway. So it's all screwed up. Here's the deal. When I onboard team members, I teach them how we work. We work when we work and if you aren't working go ahead and set your notifications off. We're all adults Here you need to manage your time, your energy, your attention. That is not my job. So having this type of rigor around the disciplines you expect needs to be explicit. If you are assuming and it is not explicit, it will not happen. So for that fast async, using Slack heavily as the office, you've kind of got to think in terms of that and then communicate that to your team. So overall, this whole thing is about being really obsessive with having that high level of discipline, really low headcount for the volume that you're doing and maximum leverage among that. So I mentioned, you know, we're roughly at 150 people in the organization. They always say organizations break there. I've felt that this is why I went so hard into this. And over the next year we've employed a process where we're not going into 2026 with a headcount spelled out. I'm bringing on two AES here, two AES there. We've decided to be completely selective in our hiring process. So using these types of tools to ensure that we can maintain that ARR to OTE ratio that I mentioned, how do we actually have conversations among the leadership team where everyone understands the information necessary to select team members to add that really make sense, that makes sense for the business and makes sense to the main thing. So with that, a little takeaway, some things to think about. You want to go back, you want to run an AI rigor audit? What does that mean? Rigor is how we handle the disciplines that we've put in place. The disciplines are the actual actions we have in place. So where do your meetings live? Do you have some people using Zoom, some people using Google Meet? How do you condense it now? In an enormous organization, think of it by function and break things down. Find the blip in the radar that you don't know anything about and keep zooming in until you figure out what's going on there. Where do the decisions live? So we try to make as many decisions asynchronously as possible and only have a meeting should it actually be to. To sum up the solution, we're not going to sit in a two hour meeting, just like hashing through things that we could be reading or dictating to each other. So what tool owns tasks? Are your updates consistent across your leadership Org and are you using AI to enforce that rigor amongst the organization? If the answer is no to any of these, I'm here happy to answer questions for the next few minutes. Thank you.
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C
Hi, thank you very much. This was really useful because again, I run a fully remote team. And again, obviously that issue around communication where you've asked the question and it takes forever to get feedback in and just kind of curious about, like, how do you in a couple of really interesting things that are coming to mind when you're talking about maybe getting to your point around ensuring that people maybe change their status, that they are not in, they're not available if they're going to be away from their desk. Because again, sometimes you end up calling the individuals like, oh, I stepped away to get something done. But how do you kind of reinforce that culture where there's a lot more like responsiveness, especially around that communication? Because yeah, that's the, the entire breadth of the organization, especially when you are fully remote in that sense.
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B
So if I'm hearing you correctly, you've got a completely remote organization at this point. You're already witnessing where you've got ICs who are not available when you assume they would be. Maybe they're on a customer call, but you're not getting the responsiveness that you expect. So like I said, once you've established something, that becomes the status quo. So the two things that I would look at is first change management. So you're going to have to create a change. What does that change look like? If, if I were me in your organization, I'd probably take a couple dark days and I would just plan out, what do I expect? Because anytime we have an expectation, if it's not met, it's probably because we haven't been explicit about what that thing is. So the first thing I would do is sit down. Like, what is my actual expectation? Well, in my organization, all calendars are public, even mine. Two ICs, they can see if I'm free or if I'm busy. And if I'm free, I will respond to them, even if it's a hey, I'll get back to you in a few minutes. For the ICs, I can see every customer facing call they have. This was extremely important when we were really small. And now we have POD managers that have a pod of up to eight ICs. They need to be able to see their complete calendars. Again, this is definitely specific to the high velocity we run. Our AES are doing eight demos a day. They close a deal to two deals a day. Like, they have to be able to be rigorous and like really know what's going on with them. So first thing I do is audit calendars and truly understand, like I've done the Math. I know to close 20 deals at my organization, it takes roughly four hours per deal max. And these people, 30 hours a week. They can get into their quota, but they've got to be disciplined about it. It won't just happen by chance. So I know the math inside out and backwards. I know what the calendar should look like. I know what responsiveness should look like. And then I write that down. This is all written down. This is now documented at my team. One of your onboarding courses is going to be slack hygiene. What channels should you completely mute? I have all of our social channels completely muted. Occasionally I'll unmute, like the dog channel. That's cute. But then I mute it again because I need to be able to focus on the main thing. I do the same for my team. I teach them how to mute 55 Slack channels. Then I go in and I say, these are the channels that expect highest response, especially if it's like Async DM channel that doesn't need a response right away. If I DM you directly, that's because I am walking into your office and barging through the door and I'm like, hey, here's this thing. If you're not there, you're not there, but you're going to get back to me in a DM as quickly as you possibly can. So I'm writing that out. I am literally making this explicit. And then I'm creating that change model where we have a database. Here's the change that's going into effect. This type of change, I think you need multiple touch points. So I think you need to write it, I think you need to publish it. And I think you would have a meeting with all of the people who are involved in that change so they understand explicitly what that's going to look like going forward and that you have to enforce it. That's what I would do. Sweet. Well, with that, I'm happy to hang if you guys want to chat in person. Otherwise, I am on a panel with some fantastic Amelia from Saster, Ashley from Momentum, and we just added one of the new AI team members in Salesforce. So it should be a good panel. Hopefully, I'll see you there. Thank you.