Salesloft MCP Demo Server

# Customer Interview Transcript: Michelle Lee, VP Sales ## Restaurant Technology Company ($40M ARR) **Date:** January 15, 2026 **Duration:** 32 minutes **Interviewer:** Sarah Chen, Enterprise Sales Director (Salesloft + Clari) **Interviewee:** Michelle Lee, VP Sales, Restaurant Tech Solutions **Setting:** Virtual (Zoom) **Recording:** Yes **Transcript Status:** Cleaned & analyzed --- ## Opening & Context Setting (0:00 - 2:30) **Sarah:** Michelle, thanks so much for taking the time today. I've been following your company's growth—40 million ARR is fantastic, especially in the restaurant space. Before we dive into anything, I'd love to understand your sales motion a bit better. You're not just selling to big chains, right? **Michelle:** No, not at all. That's actually one of the most complex parts of our business. We serve about 150 restaurant brands, but they range from corporate-owned locations all the way to heavily franchised operations. So we're essentially running two parallel sales motions, which is... honestly, it's a headache sometimes, but it's also where the real margin is. **Sarah:** Two separate sales motions—that's a really important detail. Walk me through what that looks like practically. **Michelle:** So for a corporate-owned brand like Ours or Sweetgreen, we close a deal with the central procurement team. Corporate mandates the tool, rolls it out, and everyone uses it. Clean handoff, clear KPIs, predictable expansion. That's maybe 30% of our revenue. The other 70% is franchisees—thousands of them. We might have corporate stakeholders saying, "Hey, this is our recommended solution," but the actual owner-operators, the franchisees running 5, 10, maybe 50 locations each, they're the ones who say yes or no with their wallet. And they don't care what corporate recommends if they can't see ROI in 60 days or if it costs too much. **Sarah:** So you're managing two different buyer personas with two different decision criteria. **Michelle:** Exactly. Corporate cares about brand consistency, compliance reporting, territory management. Franchisees care about: "Will this make my life easier? Will I get the money back? How much am I paying, and what am I getting?" --- ## Pricing Sensitivity & Margin Reality (2:30 - 8:15) **Sarah:** That makes sense. And I imagine price sensitivity is... significant, given restaurant margins. What's your experience there? **Michelle:** *laughs* Significant is one word for it. Restaurant margins are genuinely thin. A lot of our franchisees are running 5-8% net margins on sales. Some of the better operators get to 10-12%. When you're operating at that level, every dollar matters. A software tool that costs $500 a month needs to either directly save you money or directly make you money—ideally both. **Sarah:** So it's not aspirational selling—it's not "this will help you optimize later." It's immediate ROI. **Michelle:** Right. And honestly, we've had to build our pricing and our entire value prop around that. We show franchisees labor efficiency gains. We show delivery platform integration—which, by the way, is non-negotiable now. You *must* integrate with DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub. If you don't, you're dead. **Sarah:** Let's come back to that. But first, labor efficiency—that seems tied to something bigger than just margin. **Michelle:** Oh, absolutely. The labor market has completely shifted our conversation. Two years ago, our pitch was all about growth and scale. "Double your throughput, open more locations." Now? Every franchisee is dealing with a staffing crisis. They can't find people. Wages are up 15-20% year-over-year. The math is breaking. **Sarah:** So the pitch is now: "We'll help you do more with fewer people." **Michelle:** Exactly. We're selling automation. We're selling labor efficiency. We're positioning our tools as: "You don't have to hire two more people. One person with our system does the job of 1.5 people with spreadsheets and manual processes." **Sarah:** And that's hitting differently with franchisees than it did before. **Michelle:** Tremendously. We actually had to hire someone on our team just to calculate labor ROI. We build custom models for prospects: "If you're paying $18 an hour, and your manager is spending 3 hours a week on scheduling and manual reconciliation, here's what that costs. Here's what you save with our tool." It's become our strongest value driver. **Sarah:** That's a really smart move. Do you find that different franchisees respond to different value props? Or is labor efficiency universal? **Michelle:** There's definitely a spectrum. The really mature franchisees—the ones running 20, 30, 50 locations—they're thinking strategically. They care about labor efficiency *and* growth optimization *and* unit economics. The smaller operators, the guy running one or two locations? He cares about: "Can I survive the next 12 months with higher wages and lower traffic?" Labor efficiency is his primary motivation. **Sarah:** That's a critical segmentation. So when you're forecasting CAC or thinking about pricing, you have to account for that buyer maturity. **Michelle:** Yeah, and it throws a wrench into our predictability. A highly franchised brand where corporate loves us but franchisees are struggling? We might have 40% of the base sign up, then struggle to expand because the corporate mandate isn't strong enough to overcome cost concerns. Versus a more mature franchisee base, and we'll get to 90% adoption relatively quickly. --- ## Corporate Mandates & Franchisee Influence (8:15 - 14:00) **Sarah:** Let's dig deeper into the corporate-franchisee dynamic. You mentioned corporate mandates. How hard are they actually? **Michelle:** *sighs* That's the million-dollar question. A corporate mandate on its surface sounds great—"Buy this, use this." In reality, though, franchisees have more leverage than you'd think, especially if they're profitable and well-networked. Here's the scenario: Corporate says, "We're implementing this sales execution platform for all units." Franchisee says, "I'm not paying for it." What happens? Well, if that franchisee is doing $2M+ in volume and is generally compliant, the franchisee rep and the CFO get involved. They might negotiate a subsidy, or a discount, or a phase-in period. I've seen franchisees literally say no, and the brand eats the cost because they don't want to lose that franchisee. **Sarah:** So the mandate is less binding than it sounds. **Michelle:** Much less. I'd say corporate mandates create a forcing function, but they don't guarantee adoption if the franchisee is determined to resist. What *does* work is when corporate subsidizes the tool, or when corporate packages it into a franchise fee increase, or when there's a real compliance requirement—like we need to know inventory at every location for food safety. That's different. **Sarah:** What about influence the other way? Do you see franchisees influencing corporate buying decisions? **Michelle:** Oh yeah, absolutely. This is actually fascinating. We'll close a deal with a franchise corporate, roll out our platform, and then individual franchisees start using it and generating incredible results. They'll go to the franchisee association and say, "This tool saved me $40K a year." Then the association feeds that back to corporate and to other franchisees. Suddenly, corporate's incentive to subsidize goes up, and other franchisees start asking their corporate why *they* haven't implemented our solution. We've had situations where franchisees literally drove corporate buying decisions because they saw results from other brands. That's word-of-mouth at scale, and it's powerful. **Sarah:** So the sales cycle gets longer but the expansion potential is higher. **Michelle:** Exactly. You're not closing one deal with corporate. You're closing corporate, then selling 50 franchisees, and then those 50 franchisees influence corporate to deepen the partnership. It's a longer cycle, but the LTV is multiples higher. **Sarah:** That's a critical insight. Does that change how you think about your go-to-market strategy? **Michelle:** It has to. We've had to build a dedicated franchisee sales and success motion. We hire people who understand restaurant operations, who can talk to owner-operators in their language, who can build ROI models, who can support them post-sale. It's not a once-and-done corporate deal. It's a continuous engagement engine. **Sarah:** Let's talk about what happens post-close, because I suspect retention is a major issue in this model. **Michelle:** *nods* Yeah, that's where things get real. --- ## Churn, CAC/LTV, and Retention Dynamics (14:00 - 22:30) **Sarah:** I read that SMB restaurant SaaS has some of the highest churn in the industry. What's your churn look like? **Michelle:** Monthly churn sits around 2.5-3%, which sounds okay until you annualize it—that's 28-35% annually. But there's a huge variance by segment. Franchisees that are part of a corporate mandate with subsidy? Sub-1% monthly churn. Independent franchisees or single-location operators? 4-5% monthly. **Sarah:** That's a massive spread. What drives the churn among the independent segment? **Michelle:** A few things. First, restaurant economics are brutal. A franchisee might hit a downturn, sales drop, margins compress, and the first thing they cut is software. They're not thinking, "We'll cut the tool that's saving us labor." They're thinking, "We're bleeding cash, cancel everything not essential." Survival mentality. Second, and this is painful to admit, we sometimes oversell the ROI. A franchisee signs up because we model 10 hours a week of labor savings. They implement it, and they get 6 hours a week because their team doesn't use it the way we envisioned, or their workflow is too different from the template. Honestly, the gap between expectation and reality is real. Third—and I think this is underestimated—there's a lot of vendor fatigue in the restaurant space. Franchisees are constantly being sold to by their corporate, by third-party vendors, by tech companies. They're tired. If the tool doesn't deliver in 60-90 days, they're skeptical about renewing. We have to earn renewal, not assume it. **Sarah:** So you're fighting against both economic pressure and skepticism. What's your retention playbook look like? **Michelle:** We've had to be very intentional. First, onboarding and time-to-value. We have a dedicated onboarding team for franchisees. Not an automated tour or a YouTube video—actual humans who work with the franchisee to set up the tool, run their real workflow, show them actual hours saved. We want them feeling wins in the first 30 days. Second, we've built a franchisee community. Quarterly webinars where successful franchisees share how they're using our tool, what they've saved, what they've learned. Seeing peer success is way more credible than us saying, "Trust us, it works." Third, we've had to drop churn metrics into our sales comp. Reps are not just incentivized to close—they're incentivized on 12-month net revenue retention. That's been game-changing because now reps are coaching franchisees on implementation, not just selling them and disappearing. **Sarah:** That's smart. Have you had to adjust your CAC/LTV model to account for the churn variance? **Michelle:** Massively. For the corporate-mandate, heavily-franchised segment, we can have LTV that justifies a 100-150% CAC/LTV ratio. For independent franchisees, we're targeting 4-5x LTV/CAC because the churn is so much higher. It means we have to be way more disciplined on how much we spend to acquire an independent franchisee. **Sarah:** How do you think about acquisition spend differently for those two segments? **Michelle:** For corporate, we'll invest heavily in sales—custom demos, executive meetings, ROI modeling, relationship building. That can take 3-6 months and cost $50K-100K in sales time. Justifiable because the customer is massive and sticky. For independent franchisees, we've shifted to more product-led and community-driven motions. We sponsor franchisee conferences, we have a presence in franchisee Facebook groups, we do webinars. Lower CAC, but it also means lower conversion rates. We're okay with that because our LTV can't support high CAC for that segment. **Sarah:** That's a really mature way to segment your go-to-market. I'm curious, though—how do you identify and activate the high-LTV franchisees vs. the churn-prone ones before you sign them? **Michelle:** *pauses* This is actually where we're not as good as I'd like to be. We look at some basics: Are they part of a corporate mandate? How long have they been operating? What's their financial health based on what we can see? But honestly, predicting who will stick and who will churn is still an art form for us. We've been experimenting with this with our data. We're looking at implementation speed—franchisees who get up and running in the first 14 days tend to stick. We're looking at usage patterns—if they're logging in regularly and using core features in week one, that's a signal. But we don't have a bulletproof model yet. **Sarah:** What if you could correlate franchisee metrics—like their net revenue growth, or their labor cost as a percentage of sales, or their employment stability—with likelihood to churn? **Michelle:** *sits forward* Okay, now you're talking about something we could actually use. Because right now, we're flying somewhat blind. We can see usage, we can see engagement, but we don't have real business context. Is a franchisee churning because our tool isn't working, or because their business is tanking? Those are very different problems that require different solutions. **Sarah:** Exactly. And if you could identify high-churn-risk customers early, you could intervene—maybe with different onboarding, maybe with more support, maybe with a different pricing approach. **Michelle:** Yeah, and even just knowing that upfront would change how we sell. If we knew this franchisee was high-risk, we might be more conservative with ROI promises, or we might suggest they start with a smaller footprint, prove it out, then expand. Right now, we're selling everyone with high confidence, then disappointed when they churn. **Sarah:** That's a critical insight. Let's talk about retention strategies more broadly. Beyond onboarding and community, what else are you doing? **Michelle:** We've added a customer success motion specifically for franchisees. Not support—actual success managers whose job is to ensure franchisees are getting ROI and expanding. For our highest-value franchisees, that's account management. For mid-market franchisees, it's lower-touch but still intentional—monthly check-ins, usage reviews, new feature education. We've also had to be very transparent about pricing and costs. Some franchisees churn because they feel like they're being nickeled-and-dimed by fees, or they're surprised by price increases. Now, we're upfront about annual increases, we grandfather long-term customers, and we offer volume discounts to franchisees running multiple units. **Sarah:** That's interesting—volume discounts. Are you seeing larger franchisees expand faster? **Michelle:** Oh, absolutely. A franchisee running 10 units who sees value in one location will expand to three, five, all ten if the unit economics make sense. We've actually shifted our pricing model to have a per-location component and an enterprise component. If a franchisee goes from 1 unit to 10 units, the cost per unit drops from $500 to $300, but we might add a $2K annual enterprise fee. Everyone feels like they're winning. **Sarah:** That's a smart expansion approach. What percentage of your revenue comes from expansion within existing franchisees vs. new franchisee acquisition? **Michelle:** We're probably 55% expansion, 45% new acquisition right now. Ideally, we'd be flipping that to 70-30 over the next two years, which is why the churn problem is so critical. Every franchisee we lose is a double hit—we lose their base revenue, and we lose future expansion opportunity. A franchisee we keep and grow with could generate 3-5x what they started at. --- ## Delivery Platform Integration & Strategic Partnerships (22:30 - 28:00) **Sarah:** Let's shift to delivery integration. You mentioned it's non-negotiable. Walk me through why and how that fits into your sales narrative. **Michelle:** Okay, so delivery now represents 30-40% of revenue for most restaurant brands. For some high-volume urban concepts, it's 50%. And the delivery platforms—DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub—they run the logistics, but restaurants have to manage the orders, the inventory, the labor allocation. If your tool doesn't integrate with those platforms, you're asking franchisees to manually move orders or data between systems. That defeats the entire purpose of automation. So integration is literally table stakes. **Sarah:** And what does integration look like from a technical standpoint? **Michelle:** We have native integrations with the top three platforms. Orders flow directly into our system, inventory decrements automatically, labor scheduling can account for expected delivery volume. It's seamless from the franchisee's perspective. **Sarah:** Do you have to maintain those integrations as the platforms change? **Michelle:** *laughs* Constantly. Uber Eats changed their API last year, and we had to rebuild our integration in a week or risk losing customers. It's an ongoing engineering cost that doesn't go on the PNL as "product development"—it's just cost of doing business. **Sarah:** Have the platforms ever become friction points in your sales cycle? **Michelle:** Yes, actually. We had a situation where Grubhub was pushing their own management software, and they were actively discouraging restaurants from using third-party integrations. We had to navigate that relationship because if Grubhub decided to cut off our access to their API, we'd lose a significant chunk of functionality. **Sarah:** How did you manage that? **Michelle:** Partnership and transparency. We reached out to Grubhub's restaurant relations team, showed them how our integration actually improved restaurant performance and, by extension, their delivery economics. We found common ground—they want restaurants profitable because profitable restaurants list more and use more delivery. So we positioned ourselves as aligned with their success, not as a competitor. **Sarah:** That's a smart approach. Do you see platform relationships as potential white-glove selling opportunities or potential roadblocks? **Michelle:** Both. When we're integrated and the platforms know about us, it's an opportunity. A Grubhub account rep might recommend our tool to a franchisee because they know it improves order management and reduces mistakes. That's free sales for us. But platform changes are always a risk. If DoorDash launched a free, built-in management tool that replicated our core functionality, we'd have a real problem. So we're very aware that we need to be indispensable and integrated at multiple levels, not just relying on API access. **Sarah:** Are you exploring deeper partnerships with the platforms? Like co-marketing, or revenue sharing? **Michelle:** We've had conversations. Right now, it's mostly transactional—they tolerate us, we integrate with them, everyone's happy. But yeah, the opportunity for deeper partnership is there. A Grubhub-co-branded solution or a built-in offering could be interesting if the economics work. **Sarah:** That sounds like a strategic priority worth tracking. Let's talk about retention again because platform changes probably affect churn. **Michelle:** Absolutely. When a platform makes a major change, we often see a spike in support requests, and sometimes in churn if we're slow to update. A franchisee who was relying on Uber integration suddenly has broken workflows, and they lose confidence in our tool. We've learned to communicate proactively when platforms change. We send emails saying, "Here's what changed, here's what you need to do, here's what we've updated on our end." Transparency reduces panic and churn. **Sarah:** Smart. How much of your roadmap is driven by platform needs vs. customer requests vs. your own vision? **Michelle:** *laughs* Honestly, probably 50% platform and integration needs, 30% customer requests, 20% vision. Which is frustrating from a product perspective, but that's the reality of being infrastructure for a fragmented market. --- ## Targeting, Messaging, and Strategic Recommendations (28:00 - 32:00) **Sarah:** So zooming out, if you're a sales leader managing this go-to-market, what are your top three priorities for the next 12 months? **Michelle:** One: reduce churn through better segmentation, onboarding, and success motion. Every point of churn we eliminate flows directly to the bottom line. Two: optimize for the high-LTV franchisee segment. We're spending a lot of time on one-and-two location operators, but the real money is in franchisees running 10-50 locations. We need to be hunting bigger fish. Three: formalize our delivery platform partnerships. Right now, we're reactive. We should be strategic. If we could get co-selling relationships or revenue sharing with the platforms, that changes the entire equation. **Sarah:** Those are smart priorities. I'm hearing that you're essentially managing three businesses: corporate, high-LTV franchisees, and SMB franchisees. Are you organized that way? **Michelle:** We're moving in that direction, yeah. We have a corporate sales team, a franchisee sales team, and a customer success organization. But we're still pretty integrated on the product and marketing side, which sometimes misses the mark because the three segments need very different messaging. **Sarah:** What would better segmented messaging look like? **Michelle:** For corporate, we talk about standardization, compliance, multi-unit visibility. For high-LTV franchisees, we talk about operational excellence and labor optimization. For SMB, we talk about simplicity and quick ROI. Right now, our website and most of our content is generic. We should have specific landing pages, case studies, and messaging for each segment. **Sarah:** That's a really tactical improvement. One last question: If you could give advice to a SaaS vendor selling to your industry, what would it be? **Michelle:** Understand the actual economics of the customer. Restaurant margins are thin. Understand the labor market and how it's reshaping priorities. Build for integration, not as an add-on but as a core feature. Be transparent about ROI and timeline. And most importantly, understand that we're not buying software—we're buying hours, labor, margin, and survival. If your tool doesn't deliver that, it doesn't matter how good the software is. **Sarah:** Michelle, this has been incredibly insightful. Thank you for being so open about the business. **Michelle:** Happy to. This stuff matters, and it's nice to talk to someone who actually understands the complexity. --- ## Key Takeaways & Strategic Insights ### Sales Motion Complexity - **Dual selling required**: Corporate procurement (30% of revenue) + franchisee direct sales (70% of revenue) - **Corporate mandates create forcing function but aren't binding** without franchisee financial alignment - **Franchisee-to-corporate influence is significant**: peer results drive corporate investment and other franchisee adoption - **Sales cycles are longer but LTV is multiples higher** when both layers are engaged ### Pricing & ROI Sensitivity - **Thin restaurant margins (5-12% net)** require immediate, measurable ROI - **Labor efficiency is the dominant value driver**, especially post-labor market shock - **Custom ROI modeling is non-negotiable** for franchisee sales—must quantify labor hour savings at franchisee's wage rate - **Pricing must account for franchisee size**: single-location operators can't justify $500/month without clear 60-day ROI ### Churn & Retention Fundamentals - **Monthly churn: 2.5-3% overall, but 4-5% among independent franchisees and 0.8-1.2% for corporate-mandated** - **Annualized churn of 28-35% is unsustainable** and driven by: business downturns, oversold ROI, vendor fatigue, poor implementation - **Retention strategy requires dedicated franchisee success motion**: onboarding with humans, community building, peer validation - **Sales comp tied to 12-month NRR** changes behavior—reps now coach for implementation, not just close - **CAC/LTV ratios vary dramatically**: 100-150% ratio acceptable for corporate, 4-5x required for independent franchisees due to higher churn ### Segmentation & Targeting - **Three distinct customer segments require different go-to-market**: - Corporate (30% revenue, sub-1% churn, high CAC tolerance): Executive sales, ROI modeling, multi-location visibility - High-LTV Franchisees (50-55% revenue, 1-2% churn, growth expansion): Account management, peer validation, volume pricing - SMB/Independent Franchisees (15-20% revenue, 4-5% churn, quick CAC): Product-led motion, community, freemium or trial - **Franchisee maturity is a predictor of LTV**: 20+ location operators have different buying criteria than single-location operators ### Churn Prediction & Prevention - **Implementation speed (14-day onboarding) is a leading indicator** of retention - **Early usage patterns correlate with churn risk** but need business context (is low usage due to tool or business decline?) - **Opportunity to layer franchisee business metrics** into churn modeling: net revenue growth, labor cost %, employment stability, location count trend - **Transparent pricing and communication** directly reduce churn—surprise fees and surprise price increases drive defection ### Delivery Platform Integration - **Delivery now 30-50% of restaurant revenue**, making platform integration table stakes - **API maintenance is ongoing cost**, not one-time—platforms change regularly and break functionality - **Platform relationships are both opportunity and risk**: - Opportunity: platform reps can recommend your tool, co-selling, revenue share - Risk: platforms could build competitive functionality or restrict API access - **Strategic partnerships with DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub** are underexploited and could be major distribution channel ### Operational Excellence Priorities 1. **Reduce churn through segmented retention motion** (targeting 2% or lower monthly across all segments) 2. **Hunt for high-LTV franchisees** (10-50 location operators) rather than spending equally on SMB 3. **Formalize platform partnerships** as strategic channel and reduce reactive integration costs 4. **Build segment-specific messaging and content** instead of generic positioning 5. **Implement churn prediction model** using implementation speed, usage, and franchisee business metrics ### Competitive Positioning - **Labor efficiency is the dominant value prop**, not growth or scale - **Trust and peer validation matter more than feature lists** for franchisee segment - **Implementation and success motion are differentiators**, not product features - **Deliver in 60-90 days or risk churn**—speed to ROI is critical - **Integration breadth** (delivery platforms, POS, labor management) is table stakes --- ## Interview Quality Notes **Strengths of Conversation:** - Michelle was candid about churn rates, segmentation challenges, and ROI overselling - Provided specific percentages and metrics (2.5-3% churn, 28-35% annualized, 55% expansion vs. 45% new) - Connected business context (thin margins, labor market) to product needs (integration, efficiency messaging) - Articulated clear priorities and admitted areas of weakness (churn prediction, platform relationships) - Practical examples (Grubhub API changes, franchisee associations) grounded abstract concepts **Follow-up Opportunities:** - Deep dive into churn prediction modeling with actual data - Detailed case studies of high-LTV franchisee expansion (1 unit → 10 units) - Platform partnership strategy and revenue opportunity - Competitive landscape and positioning against niche restaurant-focused competitors - Organizational structure and incentive alignment for three-segment go-to-market