Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:22:59 · Jen Abel
And so I try and spend maybe 10 minutes, the back 10 minutes explaining what we do and just keep asking them questions. Be like, "Oh, that's so interesting. What an exciting role to be in." Be like, okay, full disclosure ... And by the way, I take a step back to that. Do not bring a recorder to this call. Do not record the call. They will not be open. They will not be vulnerable. They might assume it's being recorded because I think everyone operates under that assumption right now, but for the benefit of yourself, do not have a recorder present. Just be, "Off the record between the two of us talking right now of what you just shared, what really matters or what do you want to own or what's the chronological ..." Keep digging, digging deep, because the more you dig, the deeper you go, the more information they give, okay? Now you can't sit there and just pepper them with questions. This is that art piece of, "How open is this person?" Some people are poker faces, some people are not. You will be able to go much deeper with some and not deeper than others. You just have to improv, okay? But after you now have that intel and you can now understand, "Okay, here's the frame I'm going to take," now you can give them the pitch, okay? I will confirm every single conversation I have, the storyline that I tell looks slightly different. I do not have a scripted pitch or frame for any call because it feels artificial. They feel it. It feels like you're putting them into a square box. The best thing you can do is listen actively and then feel confident enough to craft the pitch around what they just shared for you.
00:24:41 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jen Abel
[00:24:41] S0: That last part seems really hard to- [00:24:44] S1: Yeah, it's very hard. [00:24:44] S0: ... adjust and make up like, "Here's what you're focusing on and here's how a product is going to solve that problem for you." So that's where that art and skill comes in. [00:24:52] S1: That's right. In enterprise sales, it's so, so hard to hire for, because the more someone is trained in sales, the less natural it feels. I know this is counterintuitive and we spoke about this on another call. The most successful salespeople are not trained salespeople. That's why founders are so good at this. They don't give themselves enough credit. What are they not good at? Probably following this process. What are they great at? Pulling out information, pulling on strings, getting people excited by vision. No one can do that better than they can. [00:25:27] S0: What percentage of the time are you just like, "Okay, this isn't actually going to help you that much"? So just what [inaudible 00:25:32] ... Okay, you're nodding, that happens. [00:25:35] S1: I would say, two to three out of every four calls, there's something real. One- [00:25:39] S0: There's something real?
00:25:39 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jen Abel
[00:25:39] S0: There's something real? [00:25:42] S1: Yeah, there's something real. One out of every four calls, I'm like, "Listen, based off of the maturity of where you guys are and where we are, it's too much of a gap. I'd love to revisit this in a year once you guys have a chance to solve for X, Y or Z." That's such a great question about the qualification. Most people are not going to be qualified, not because necessarily you're talking to the wrong person, because if you're an enterprise executive or enterprise account executive, your job is to know who to talk to, okay? And your job is also to quickly disqualify someone. And it's probably one in every four calls simply because of maturity. [00:26:22] S0: Cool. So you don't have to have this intense pressure to nail it on every call and, "Here's the pitch." Okay, awesome. What I also want to comment on is this idea of getting them to share a bunch. It may feel tricky, like you're tricking them to sharing all this, but really they have problems they want to solve and you're there to help them solve a problem. And so why would they not want to just like, "Okay, here's what we need help with. Here's the problem. Here's our priority"? [00:26:48] S1: Their job is to buy solutions to these problems, right? That's why they have budgets, right? So that's why the fastest way to commoditize yourself is to go into some sales script like, "Budget authority need timing." That should be in the back of your brain. You never actually ask those questions.
00:26:48 · Jen Abel, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:26:48] S1: Their job is to buy solutions to these problems, right? That's why they have budgets, right? So that's why the fastest way to commoditize yourself is to go into some sales script like, "Budget authority need timing." That should be in the back of your brain. You never actually ask those questions. [00:27:05] S0: Cool. Okay. So the core lesson here is focus on learning and extracting their priorities. And what I felt is you pushed them to get more real and really pressure test. How big of a deal are these? Why is this important? [00:27:21] S1: Because you want them to ask you those questions because that's when you know you're building a relationship. I had a client last week say to me, "What's the biggest learning your team has had this year? Every product needs to get better. Every product has a bug. Every product isn't able to do X or Y as well as they said." And I'm like, "That's a really good ..." I'm like, "That's so funny. We just had a conversation about that." She was like, "Thank you for sharing." They just want to know you're vulnerable because then it just feels less like sales. [00:27:52] S0: I imagine priorities for a lot of companies these days is saving token costs. I know, classically, you don't want to focus on lowering costs as a sales pitch, "This is the cheaper option." Thoughts on if that just comes up a bunch like legal, "We just need to save costs."
00:27:52 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jen Abel
[00:27:52] S0: I imagine priorities for a lot of companies these days is saving token costs. I know, classically, you don't want to focus on lowering costs as a sales pitch, "This is the cheaper option." Thoughts on if that just comes up a bunch like legal, "We just need to save costs." [00:28:06] S1: Yeah. So in pricing, their job is to ... There's usually going to be two motions, "I need the lowest cost way to do X because it's low on the totem pole and I really don't care." If it's 60% of the way there, no one's getting fired over it, I'd rather just save budget. Or you're solving a problem that you can charge 250, 500k land because it is a high risk. If you're dealing with legal, there's high risk to it, right? Missing information, being delayed on something, not having people understand the importance of some new regulation or law, not being buttoned up. So I think every organization looks differently, right? Marketing and sales, it's very clear that numbers drive them. For legal, it's probably they need to stomp out risk. [00:29:12] S0: Awesome. So yeah, basically this comes back to the idea of alpha and upside. The more you can be in that bucket, the more you can charge. [00:29:19] S1: That's exactly right. [00:29:20] S0: Easier everything gets. Okay. Anything else before we get to step three? [00:29:24] S1: No, I think for step one, that is the most important meeting and I feel like people just spend so much time talking about themselves and miss all the competitive advantage to win the deal.
00:29:24 · Jen Abel, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:29:24] S1: No, I think for step one, that is the most important meeting and I feel like people just spend so much time talking about themselves and miss all the competitive advantage to win the deal. [00:29:35] S0: Yeah. Your point about how as a buyer, it's so low pressure at that point, you're just exploring and so I could see why people come into it like, "Cool, let's learn. Let's see," versus you're in the funnel like, "Oh, I got to actually make a decision. I'm going to have to let them down if I don't want this." It's like dating. [00:29:52] S1: Yeah. Their openness to share more, start to clam up a little bit more, but we'll talk about how to make sure that doesn't happen too. [00:29:58] S0: Amazing. Okay, great. Okay, great foreshadowing. Okay, so step three is writing a follow-up intro call.