Inside The Pipeline: B2B Sales and GTM
00:21:59 · Oscar Lanzendorf, Tris Tusa
[00:21:59] S1: Understand the company very well. Understand your reason for applying very well. Be able to quickfire, you have to like, at ElevenLabs, we're gonna test your RAM, not your memory, your RAM, what is accessible right now. Yeah. And do more than the average person, you know, come in with no ego. Like, if I'm telling you, listen, I think I'm the best in go to market. May I show you a presentation? You didn't ask me for a presentation, but I brought one with me. And I also brought a case study. And I also have a slide showing you why I'm better than all the competitors showcasing you rather than telling you, giving you an example of my portfolio. It's really like going the extra mile and going into detail for that so that you actually show me, listen, I can close you as a customer versus other people that are just like coming in there and being like, yeah, but I worked for Google back then, like, was not enough. And that is the thing. Like, we don't hire these kind of profiles, because we wanna hire people that are really serious and that show us their execution. Yeah. And that's also, like, the different way of thinking about approaching go to market and having different strategies to get to the decision makers quickly. [00:22:59] S0: So you've got the job. You're now working in go to market. ElevenLabs seems like this incredible company that works at such a fast pace. Obviously, we know at Proxy, there are a lot of different ways that you can sell something. How are you selling ElevenLabs at the moment? What are the tips and tricks,
00:23:16 · Oscar Lanzendorf
[00:23:16] S1: and and what are your So at the beginning, you obviously ramp up. Right? Like, if you join a company like ElevenLabs, you're you're just quiet, and you just, like, first listen and try to understand and digest what is going on as soon as possible. And the second tier, when you feel like you've got the grip of it, that's when you start to become creative. For me personally, I realized, and this is a thing that everyone can do for themselves is if you're playing with probably and potentially the best players with, like, in the world, you have to be very good at understanding what am I exceptionally well. Mhmm. I realized I'm exceptionally well at presenting. I can pitch. I can talk. I'm good with people. I'm good at events and organizing and ownership. I'm gonna excel in this. Other people are really good. I'm also good at messaging. Like, I can share some stories of how I approach c levels or, like, important people. Nice. But these are the things that you double down on, and then you make this your own strategy. So this is the major thing that you do. You just, like, find the things you're really good in. And for me, it's those ones. It's very interpersonal because I also believe that a lot of the tasks that people are gonna do, especially in sales, behind a computer are gonna get automated. So what are you gonna do when you have your leads being found automatically? Reach out down automatically. Like, proxy. Exactly. What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do then? You have to think above that. And you have to build a relationship, and you have to go back to these older tactics that are more interpersonal. And this is what I'm betting into it. And we actually... It's funny because Arnel and and I were at the same conference, and we're hearing a couple of the major, like, influencers on LinkedIn from Spain talk about the importance of a personal brand. And it was like, yeah. That's the next frontier. Like, that's what I have to do. And, yeah, I recommend everyone to do that.
00:24:55 · S2, Tris Tusa
[00:24:55] S2: And our our bet is human in loop sales. We would do that before the podcast. Yeah. Apply AI to everything but selling. Yeah. Yeah. [00:25:03] S0: Tell us about tell us about your messaging. You you hinted at it just then. I wanna hear some of these tactics.
00:25:09 · Oscar Lanzendorf
[00:25:09] S1: Yeah. It kind of came down. So I I read this one McKinsey book once, and I was taught about this, like, top down communication, which I think is amazing because I have very little patience, and I like when people come to the point quickly. And then I remember that just being in BC, seeing exceptional founders communicate and seeing the not so exceptional founders communicate. Yeah. Exceptional ones write you a black and white email that is very short with an update and very much, you know, they... There was a funny quote said once, we're not poets. So I love that. We're executing. And it's like, keep it extremely short. I always approach messaging like content. If you look at content, the first three seconds get the most watch time. Right? If a video is a hundred seconds long, you got 3% watch time. That's not a good metric. If your video is, let's say, ten seconds long, you got 30% watch time. That's a much better metric. Yeah. So you have to hack that. So the thing is if I know a human can read maximum a 150 words in a minute, how much time are they gonna give me? Ten seconds? Try to do it in 15 words, you know, more or less. And so I like to keep it extremely short. I like to just get to the point and also have a little bit of... I mean, and that is very specific to me. I get along with this. Maybe someone else doesn't. Just have a very specific ask, you know, and have it have it be a little pushy because most of the email leaders are like, hi. Hello. How are you? You know, I'm writing you today because... Get out of here. Like, this is... The thing you wanna evoke with people is you have two signals that you can provoke. Number one is the BS radar, which is that's the sales email, that's the sales call done, that's already understood, or a question mark. Who is this person that is calling me? Who's this person writing me? Should I give it more time? This is the hook essentially in social media. Right? You have to apply the same principles, and it works quite well.
00:26:52 · S2, Oscar Lanzendorf
[00:26:52] S2: So you're actually doing any cold calling? [00:26:55] S1: I am. Yeah. [00:26:56] S2: How do you find that? [00:26:59] S1: I mean, look, to be honest, it's great. You just have to be alone because you can't do it when there's a lot of people around. It's also not a thing that I like to do in front of people. You know, like, you see that and... Because it's it's gonna be different from time to time. You have to adjust it. But, yeah, you do that mostly. [00:27:15] S2: Yeah. I honestly think that, if I were to give any very unsolicited advice to anyone that wants to get in sales, just start cold calling because there is no quicker way to learn how sell anything [00:27:27] S1: Yeah. [00:27:28] S2: Calling. And turn up to conferences, which I think I wanna talk about a little bit more. How, because I think you're absolutely right. You know, go back to the older techniques of of selling as, AI and and and and technology is doing a lot of the sort of quote, unquote, grunt work of finding the right persona, finding the right lead, making sure that you're set up in the right room or the right call with them. How do you run your conferences, And what what do you think is gonna change about how people do conferences as AI becomes sort of, I suppose, your assistant that is running the the boring stuff in the background?
00:28:05 · Oscar Lanzendorf
[00:28:05] S1: So I think conferences haven't really changed too much. Unfortunately, I feel they're still stuck in like 2000, 2005 era. I mean, definitely their apps and their systems, it's it's really not. It sucks. It's really sexy. And you have to rely like actually without using other like scraping tools, it doesn't it doesn't work really well. Yeah. How are they gonna change? I think the idea of, like, a booth is... I'm not the biggest fan because I genuinely like to do things differently. I think maybe, I don't know, a lounge could be interesting, like a drinking lounge or something like that. Something that... I always think of one thing at a conference, you wanna capture attention, and you wanna be relevant at the same time. Right? So you have to also get rid of all the people that come to the conferences to get free swag. I think the biggest value driver right now at conferences is if you have pitch slots. So if there's like a topic related stage and you get to pitch, that really does make the difference because I feel no tech company has it easy at describing what they're actually doing. It's like every SaaS company, go on to the website. I had it as a VC because you were scanning many SaaS companies. And I literally built a GPT to explain to me what this URL does in like, this is the Airbnb for x y z. Yeah. Right? So I think pitching a conference is really good. If they share the leads before, this is great. If they have a bad app, it does not make the experience good. I think if you have a booth, you have to have people on the ground to speak with all the different people Yeah. And you have to have a process. You have to book in the meetings right there. You have to, you know, qualify the leads quite quickly. Mhmm. And you have to know with whom you're spending time. It's very easy to suddenly talk for 40 with a person Yeah. That is not going to buy, and you just have to be careful because at the end of the month, someone's gonna come to you and is gonna say, what is the ROI?