The background

Luke Sophinos built Course Key, vertical software for trade schools, over 11 years before selling it to PSG. The company is now called Portico.

His first revenue came while he was still a college student. "I still remember everybody taking out their credit cards in the lecture hall to pay for our app, and it was a cool feeling," Luke says.

Was he the big man on campus after that? "No, I was just a tech nerd that liked building stuff."

Stop trying to grow your TAM

After building one vertical software company and now spending his time around dozens of them, Luke sees the same mistake over and over.

"I constantly see people try to talk about how big their TAM is and how big their ICP is," he says. "I'm a big believer in shrinking the TAM and not growing it."

The logic: go small, monopolize that segment, then expand and monopolize the next one. 

"That's such a better path to success in terms of retention and revenue growth than trying to be all things to all people."

It scares salespeople. They watch leadership cut the ICP smaller and smaller. But Luke says seasoned execs understand why it works.

Test channels like a maniac

Luke's advice for founders setting up a sales motion: spin up two or three channels at a time and test them obsessively.

"Maniacally testing each channel and understanding how long it takes, how effective it is, what's working, and what's not working, and then shutting down channels that aren't working and reinvesting more and more dollars."

What he's found: one channel usually produces about 80% of the value. The job at the earliest stages is figuring out which one.

For Course Key, it was field sales

Course Key had ACVs of around $100,000. That meant outside sales. Heavy hitters on airplanes three weeks a month, 20 conferences a year, dinners, and long sales cycles.

"The ACVs made it work," Luke says.

What makes a great outside salesperson different from an inside sales AE? "They're people connectors, and people want to be around them. It's a very different persona. They like airplanes, and they like going to new cities."

Measuring conference ROI on a longer timeline

With longer sales cycles, Luke couldn't measure conference ROI on a quick turnaround. Course Key tracked spend going in, then evaluated results on a 30, 60, 90-day basis, and sometimes up to six months.

The metric that mattered: whether they moved a customer forward through the funnel at that particular event.

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