Inside The Pipeline: B2B Sales and GTM
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?
00:29:50 · S2, Oscar Lanzendorf, Tris Tusa
[00:29:50] S2: Yeah. [00:29:50] S1: Oh, but I spoke to so many people. You didn't speak to the right people. [00:29:53] S0: So... In terms of, like, brand awareness, I I went to quite a few of the the conferences in the web three space a few years ago. And, I think you you had the same thing where, like, it was kind of the lame companies had the booths. And then what it was, it was the cool... I mean, I know the web three companies haven't done that well since, but the cool companies back then were doing, like, the anti events. So they're in the location where the conference is happening because they understand that there's loads of relevant people there. Yeah. But then they've got the cool, like, the the one at the nightclub or the, you know, the DJ back after. And then you can sort of... And I feel maybe ElevenLabs is more in that sort of space. [00:30:30] S1: Yeah. Yeah. We do... So that is right. We also... Our... I would say our booths, we can we can definitely improve our booths. And that wasn't meant to be... No. No. No. No. No. I didn't take it that way. But we have we have an amazing person right now that has joined the team that is actually doing all of this and it's already been improving. But I think this is also a little bit of the vibe that we wanted to portray because we're not this kind of, like, booth that you come and you get a lot of stickers and all of that. It's more of a booth, like, you come when you're a professional and you're, like, you you come when you're, like, from the community. You [00:30:59] S0: know? Yeah.
00:30:59 · Tris Tusa, Oscar Lanzendorf, S2
[00:30:59] S0: know? Yeah. [00:31:00] S1: Yeah. But I do agree the events afterwards is the way to go in my opinion or also doing things like running campaigns at these events Yeah. To get those leads. I think that is the ultimate way of getting all these people that join the, you know, these kind of, like, different events to really, like, get the most value out of that. [00:31:16] S2: 100%. And one of the great things about working at ElevenLabs must be that you've got this extraordinary sort of brand and awareness about what ElevenLabs are doing and and and about you guys as a company in general. How much of the growth at the moment, which is genuinely extraordinary how fast you guys are growing, is inbound and how much are you guys hunting? [00:31:39] S1: So exact percentages, I would say most of it. I'm I'm not gonna say exact percent. Most of it is inbound because we're just very gifted with a lot of the attention that we've gotten. And it would also be foolish not to, like, focus on inbound first in a time where there's literally, a queue of people that want to spend with you. Yeah. Having said this, though, like, everything on the enterprise side has been pretty much balanced out in the sense of that we're very aggressive when it comes to outbound because companies don't know that they need this. And people that come at these larger enterprise companies are not always so incentivized to have the newest innovation come into place. Some countries are better than others, but there's a bigger number of companies that are not so incentivizing their employees with this.
00:31:39 · Oscar Lanzendorf, S2
[00:31:39] S1: So exact percentages, I would say most of it. I'm I'm not gonna say exact percent. Most of it is inbound because we're just very gifted with a lot of the attention that we've gotten. And it would also be foolish not to, like, focus on inbound first in a time where there's literally, a queue of people that want to spend with you. Yeah. Having said this, though, like, everything on the enterprise side has been pretty much balanced out in the sense of that we're very aggressive when it comes to outbound because companies don't know that they need this. And people that come at these larger enterprise companies are not always so incentivized to have the newest innovation come into place. Some countries are better than others, but there's a bigger number of companies that are not so incentivizing their employees with this. [00:32:24] S2: Is that bureaucracy