A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:39:29 · Nick Fleisher, Pablo Srugo
[00:39:29] S0: Totally. I think the alternative would be like, you can also say, hey, we have 10 clients, 10 potential prospects that I can try to get a meeting with over a one or two day span in, call it wherever, the middle of nowhere in Florida, right? Even if those are all 20K accounts, like that's still worth my travel, right? Because cumulatively, like if I spend enough time with them, like it's worth it. And so you do kind of have to do some like backup napkin math. I think early on though, like you just want users, right? You want usage. I don't care if it's a 10K deal. I don't care if it's a million dollar deal. [00:40:00] S1: It's a good segue actually for the second kind of deep dive because we're talking about kind of how to sell effectively into enterprise small or large, right? Million being large and 50K being small. But you're doing this dinner cycle, like you're doing two to three dinners a week. So this is very much like a playbook that you're running. I mean, a lot of people do events, but it's here, there. They'll go to conferences and maybe do an event after the conference. Like that's pretty common. But to be running two or three of these a week is not something I hear every day. Tell me more about why you're doing it and how you're doing that and kind of what the outcome is.
00:40:32 · Nick Fleisher
[00:40:32] S0: Yeah. We discovered early on, and this was honestly through this early tactic of trying to build community and brand before we had the perfectly scalable product. Like we said early on, like we want to be a place that like lawyers feel safe and comfortable like procuring from because it's a very small community. What happened as AI has become more easier to use and it's everywhere in sales tech is like outbound is just not as effective. And like people are flooded, right? You get crazy LinkedIn's emails. Like even I get calls from our competitors, AEs and SDRs because I signed up to trial their tools, which is just, it's hilarious. And so what we realized is like the best high ROI channels for us are things that are inherently not salesy and things that are low, low ratio of salesperson or person at Sandstone to clients. So like if we can do a 10 person dinner with two Sandstone people there, it's very effective. The reason is like we're talking about things that are not necessarily Sandstone. Like sure there's topics that might hit on Sandstone, but generally we're just talking about like what's going on in legal, how their jobs are like general topics and we're building relationship. And the second is like, we're not the only ones at the table. Like we usually mix in a customer or two customers, two or three high priority prospects, and then like four or five other people just from our network. That makes the conversation a lot more natural and it feels like a community. And ultimately it is right. Like we're trying to build a community of people that are either buyers or in our market. If you do a 10 person dinner like that and you have seven prospects there, it is very hard to imagine that they don't all do a first demo with you. Like if you're talking about just getting that demo, it's almost a hundred percent convert to demo rate. After that, like you have a much higher like buy-in with whoever was at the dinner, whether it's the head of legal ops or the general counsel, because they understand like you, your story, and they like kind of trust the business versus being just like yet another software vendor. And frankly, it's the same for me when I'm buying like sales tech or developer tools. Like I feel a lot more empowered to like stick with the tool. If like, I feel like I have a relationship with the founder, they slack me.
00:42:39 · Nick Fleisher, Pablo Srugo
Sometimes we go for coffee. [00:42:41] S1: It's a tension. Like it's the difference in cold and warm. I mean, it's an, it's a massive, massive difference. And the reason aside, like if you become warm versus cold, like it changes everything. [00:42:51] S0: So we've even found that it also just changes how we build because we, we get a lot more real insights from, from customers and what's going on in the market. Like we hear their stories of what they're doing. Like we've brought engineers to these dinners and I didn't bring this up. Like our first engineers were also selling, like we just, you'd have them go do sales calls just to see, you know, what they learn. I've had some of these dinners. We did one where like I was so scared. It was like a standing dinner or event, still pretty small. And I remember like being so nervous for 30 minutes of the event, I see like a GC at a big company is like cornered in the room with two of our most junior engineers. And I'm like, what the hell could they be talking about? Like, I might need to go over there and check it out. The engineers like ran out of the event. They're like, we've got something new we need to build. Like this is going to be game changer and we're going to email him a demo of it tomorrow. And I'm like, you can only do that through in person, right? That just would never happen on Zoom. It would only happen if we set up events like that. And those are the kinds of things that like that customer will be a customer for life if we deliver that thing for them.
00:42:51 · Nick Fleisher, Pablo Srugo
[00:42:51] S0: So we've even found that it also just changes how we build because we, we get a lot more real insights from, from customers and what's going on in the market. Like we hear their stories of what they're doing. Like we've brought engineers to these dinners and I didn't bring this up. Like our first engineers were also selling, like we just, you'd have them go do sales calls just to see, you know, what they learn. I've had some of these dinners. We did one where like I was so scared. It was like a standing dinner or event, still pretty small. And I remember like being so nervous for 30 minutes of the event, I see like a GC at a big company is like cornered in the room with two of our most junior engineers. And I'm like, what the hell could they be talking about? Like, I might need to go over there and check it out. The engineers like ran out of the event. They're like, we've got something new we need to build. Like this is going to be game changer and we're going to email him a demo of it tomorrow. And I'm like, you can only do that through in person, right? That just would never happen on Zoom. It would only happen if we set up events like that. And those are the kinds of things that like that customer will be a customer for life if we deliver that thing for them. [00:43:47] S1: And so tell me a little bit more about the like, let's say I'm like, okay, you know what? This I'm sold. I want to do this. How do you do it? What's the process for not just running one event, but also then many events?
00:43:56 · Nick Fleisher
[00:43:56] S0: The first one is like, you have to have the right people on your team who know the network loosely well, right? Like our team is maybe 35 people. Now we have 10 lawyers and we have a lot of people who come from the community, like they're ex-legal ops or they, you know, they've been in and around. They know like a baseline of contacts that you can start doing a dinner with. If you're a founder and you've never been in the space before and you just want to start doing a dinner, I would say you have to revert to LinkedIn and like going cold direct outreach. And we've done, I've done a lot of that myself. Like even on this call, I will have agents that have been running and doing outreach to a subset of GCs that like, I don't know yet. You would be surprised at the hit rate on those if you said, hey, I don't want to sell you my product, but I do want to like take your brain on what's going on in the market and run things by you and like just have a nice night. And by the way, there's going to be GCs, whatever your persona is from XYZ types of companies there. You'll get a pretty good response rate on that. And so some of it can be cold outreach. Some of it's just hiring the right people to build the right network. Once you do one or two, you can start to recycle and bring people back into events, right? You ask them to bring a friend, like almost all of these events we ask, hey, bring someone from your legal team or, you know, a friend from another legal team that you think we should need. And that's been super successful for us. So that's kind of how you think about like building the audience and the network of it. One other kind of hack that we found in terms of location is like either partnering with venues where like we build some sort of a long term relationship and deal just because dinners actually can be very expensive over time, especially if you're early stage. The other one is like there's actually like lawyers and GCs that own restaurants and bars and are like super keen to partner on community events. And like that's been a huge lever for us because they don't want to charge you because it's their community as well.
00:45:37 · Pablo Srugo, Nick Fleisher
[00:45:37] S1: And how do you translate from that to a demo like without being, you know, kind of like cringe where it's like, okay, cool. Now check my product out. You know what I mean? [00:45:43] S0: Honestly, most of the time, like after a natural conversation, these people will say, I would love to see Sandstone and I would love to do a demo. A lot of times it's not even us prompting it. That said, like I will still do a one-on-one message to everyone who came to one of these dinners and say, hey, thanks for coming. If you and your team have time, like I would love to spend 15 minutes walking you through Sandstone. It's very rare that they say no. They usually loop in the head of legal ops or the right person and like we do a demo. [00:46:09] S1: And do you have a full-time person now dedicated to this? Just doing these events because at two or three weeks, it's a decent amount.