A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:31:46 · Pablo Srugo, Alex Halliday
[00:31:46] S1: OK, so meaningful. Not massive, massive, but meaningful enough it's worth spending the time. [00:31:49] S0: Right, and so we really got very good at all of the automations of background processes and things to make our team fully prepared, right? To step into that call and not to firehose them with information. First to listen, really good discovery and then to start to talk to them about their priorities, but in the context of their priorities, have the data to have a meaningful conversation. And for some sales reps, that's quite different, right? Because they're used to saying, we sell email marketing software and it works like this. But actually, we need to earn the right to be part of their stack at this moment. Because competition is so high and we earn that right through the software. But also through the feeling that they have when they leave a call with us, and really giving them the feeling that they want to bet on us for a three to five year period as things change just immeasurably. So I really just have a lot of respect for how my co-founders run this and worked with the team to just create a culture of, experimentation and just making sure we learn with every call. [00:32:48] S1: For the higher end of that, the ones that are let's say $100k plus, right? Are you doing pilots? Are you doing some sort of trial period? Are you just signing them up annually? What works?
00:32:57 · Alex Halliday
[00:32:57] S0: You have to do pilots at the beginning. You have to be prepared to prove your value. We actually, last year, I think we had all but two pilots convert to annual. Which in the world of AI is actually insane and it's because it takes us four to five weeks to onboard a customer. Because we take them through a really rigorous process that we've actually built out of necessity. I'll give you one tiny sliver of that, is getting a customer to agree on their brand voice. So that they can actually use our systems and people think they know, but they don't know until you start showing them things. So calibrating with customers, that onboarding process, us holding their hand through that flow and making sure that they get to great as part of that POC is how we build a lot of trust in us. So we do POCs sometimes, less and less honestly, because there's a lot of proof points in the market. We typically start with two really strong focus areas that we want to work with them on. Because there's a million things we could do and then we have a roadmap of things we want to get to. And then one thing we've invested in from the beginning is education. So we offer to put all our customers through a training cohort where it's super fun. They become a content engineer at the end. A lot of people update their LinkedIn job titles. We throw conferences around that. So education-led sales and a consultative-led sales has been a big part of how we have gone and done this.
00:34:17 · Pablo Srugo, Alex Halliday
[00:34:17] S1: Here's a pointed question about the sales leader you mentioned. Out of these four things, what do you think is the most important for a sales leader. The ability to manage people, the ability to hire and recruit, the ability to implement a process, or the ability to sell themselves? [00:34:30] S0: I think it's hire and recruit followed by manage. It's an energy-led sport. The team has to want to win with you at the helm as a sales leader and I think Nick does that exceptionally. He's just the best in the world I've ever seen and it's incredible to watch. [00:34:45] S1: That's been, for what it's worth, my number one kind of observation for any leader across the organization is, are they able to hire and recruit? More than anything else, do the people that are going to be in that department want to work for that person? In some cases, it means maybe they also need to know how to build, or they also need to know how to sell, or they also need to know how to market, because that builds credibility. But that's a means to an end, where the end is, are you able to attract and retain the absolute best people? And if so, you're a leader. And if not, at best you're an IC. You know, everything else is secondary to that. Just because once you're scaling, I know there's all this AI stuff and for sure that's changing things, but you still need great people. You continue to need great people and great people want to work for great people. So if you've got that flywheel going across every department, everything just gets so much easier.
00:35:30 · Alex Halliday
[00:35:30] S0: I will say that selling to your audience is not like a static challenge. Your buyers are getting more sophisticated all the time. Especially if your category is just evolving and so there is a need to identify the gaps in the sales team, both from a training and skill set standpoint, and just evolve that as you grow. So I think the hiring point, being really good at hiring, but also identifying the problems you're trying to solve with each new tranche of talent. In our space, for example, a year ago, people had no idea how to evaluate a tool like ours, to be honest. And now, we get people showing up with really sophisticated RFPs and different evaluation questions. And they want to try the product, they want to do bake-offs. It is just the nature of the sale if you're successful, it will shift pretty dramatically as the market evolves.
00:36:15 · Pablo Srugo
[00:36:15] S1: Here’s another question on competition because like I compared to Claude Code, but that's kind of the beginner premium kind of thing. There's also a lot of players that do something very similar to what you do like, you know, GEO and whatever. How much does that matter? It's kind of a broad question, but it's the concern of every VC right now that these areas get competitive and the fallout of that is that. Therefore, you know, no one's going to win or the market is going to be split like fifteen ways and it's just going to be small. You're actually living that competition. You're in a place that you're certainly not the only one and yet obviously you're getting a lot of traction. How does that really play out in the day to day? How much does that really matter? Or is it just one of these worries that it's just not that important.
00:36:51 · Alex Halliday
[00:36:51] S0: It matters a lot and I think, to be honest, we are in more competitive processes than we were a year ago and that was part of my comment about kind of maturing our sales muscle to still thrive in that environment. I think VCs grew up in a world where there were like nice, neat Gartner squares for categories, and those squares would be relatively durable. I think AI is like a bowling ball going down the middle of all of that. Not because there aren't going to be categories. Categories are very real. I just think that most categories that are emerging now are like Pokémon that haven't found their final form yet. Because the way we work is shifting, and agents are kind of a thing, but not quite yet and the data story, and what really matters, and how ChatGPT is reading content. It's all just kind of evolving. I think what's really important as a founder is, use that competitive energy for excellence. It's like we've got to go, this is ours to win. But having a clear line of sight to what you think the category and more importantly, the buyer's life, a week in the life of the buyer is going to look like eighteen months, two years from now, and shoot for that. Otherwise you over rotate to this present day kind of feature fight. I think it's really unproductive. But to the extent that buyers of our customers have budget line items that say something on the left and a dollar figure on the right, and they allocate that. You know, you do have to fight it out. You do have to kind of be successful in the world of today in competitive processes while keeping a firm eye on what you want to bring into the world two years from now. Given how fast everything's changing and honestly, it's like the challenge of a lifetime. Building right now and being a founder as your listeners are probably experiencing too right now is unlike anything I've seen in twenty years and, you know, we will look back and think these are the good old days in many ways. Because it is the best time ever to be building a company. But it's also the most challenging as well. Because things like that that were set in stone, worked a specific way, just don't play out that way anymore, in my view.