A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:35:23 · Pablo Srugo, Hermann Frank
[00:35:23] S0: I like that. What would that look like for for gigs? [00:35:26] S1: So we were lucky in the beginning. We had Stripe. Like Stripe was our projection. It's like we're building Stripe for phone plans. Like that was the tagline, that was the story, and that resonated really well. And quite early on, we had quite a few people from Stripe come on board as team members, right, like they were early at Stripe. So... And they saw the same thing. Right? They're like, hey, this like reminds me a lot of like Stripe in its early days, and like they kind of understood what this this should be, and what this could be. The the the more we progressed, the more this became kind of a real story arc. And it's like only relatively recently where we said, we kind of understand the market more now, and there is more depth that we can that we can go into, where like that started kind of... We can now start telling our own story and our own vision of the world. But for the longest period, we just used another highly successful company that we truly believe is a parallel to what we're building as an example, and that allow people that don't understand much about telecom to understand, okay, yeah, if they can make this work, the mechanics work a similar way, it's a similarly complex industry, then they will be able to build a massive company. So just use an existing example.
00:36:46 · Pablo Srugo
[00:36:46] S0: And then jumping to the second kind of tactical piece, which is around selling enterprise. Mean, you're selling some of the largest enterprises in the world. I mean, a lot of these fintechs are multibillion dollar companies. You had this idea of, like, enterprise sales is less about salesmanship and more about statesmanship. There's a lot of politics that come into play. I'm thinking if you could think about a given customer that you close, and you don't have to share who it is so that we can go in a lot of detail, And walk me through, you know, end to end, how did you go from that name in a list somewhere of a customer you wanna add, and you finally closing that customer x amount of months later.
00:37:18 · Hermann Frank
[00:37:18] S1: Yeah. So I put the team together a couple weeks ago, or like a couple months ago, and, like, I walked through like the anatomy of a deal that is that is typical for us. And I said it is more about statesmanship than it is about salesmanship, because if you wanna land an enterprise customer, multi billion or tens of billions of dollars in market cap, what you need to do is you need to convince several layers in that organization that it's a great idea to partner with you, many times including the founders or the c level. You need to get the operating team to like you. You need to get the developers to like you. And ideally, it's not you just like one person doing all that. Ideally, your team tackles different people from different layers of that company, and does their part. Right? Like the product engineering teams talk to product engineering teams, like our VP of sales talks to their VP of sales or their VP of product. I reach out to the founder, and like we we got it covered at different altitudes. And that gives us a pretty much three sixty degree view on the company, and is what has allowed us to win 90% of deals in the market that we're in, and I think we're probably one of the companies in the world now that works for like largest amount of high profile customers, at least where we're launching businesses together. It's not like someone's using our our dev tool and we can put a logo on on the website, but it is a real business partnership. We're launching a new product line. So that has been one of our kind of success recipes.
00:39:02 · Pablo Srugo
[00:39:02] S0: So let's get specific. Like, again, let's say that in in, you know, now you have more of a brand, so it's a little different. But, you know, a few years back when you were still not, let's say, known, and you had a name on there that, you know, of a bank that you wanted to close, how do you kinda split that up? How do you look at the org chart of that business and decides who to go after, who goes after who, cadence, etcetera. Like, you know, just... Again, imagine you're thinking of someone, you're talking to a founder who's selling to enterprise, has a product, maybe has a few customers, but they've yet to really crack, like, a consistent repeatable enterprise motion.
00:39:36 · Hermann Frank
[00:39:36] S1: I'd say one of the other things that has worked really well for us is hire people who came up with the people working at your target customers. We hire a lot of ex stripes. The Stripe Mafia is everywhere. Right? Like they work in pretty much every company. One of the decision makers there. So if you have someone who can go to 30, 50% of your target list, and they are well known and respected and trusted, everybody's gonna take a call, everybody's gonna listen. And if you're in a competitive process, you might have an advantage on trust as well. This multi threading, multi altitude, in combination with having people who came up with the people that you wanna work with, is why we win as many deals as we do. And I mean, you need to have an amazing product, because people are not stupid. Right? Like, so I'm assuming that's that's what the listener will have. But like, if you have a great product, have the best product in the market, and do these things, worked really well for us.
00:40:40 · Pablo Srugo
[00:40:40] S0: So assuming you... Let's say you go in, you have an... You're an enterprise, you you split it up, you look at different groups that need to be part of it, like you said, c level, exec level, the owner, the champion, the devs, etcetera, and then you kinda split it up. How do you how do you go after them? Like, everybody's just hitting everybody up, trying to set up meetings, or trying to find what conference is gonna speak at and, like, run into them. Like, what are some of the the specific tactics that you use to just have many of these discussions happening, you know, either at once or over a series of months?