Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:03:01 · Jen Abel, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:03:01] S1: Round three, super excited to be here, Lenny. [00:03:04] S0: I'm even more excited. So we're going to do something really unique with this conversation. I've never done anything like this before. We're going to basically go through the enterprise sales lifecycle step by step. You'll talk about this, but many people think it's like five steps. You talk about how there's actually something like 15 steps. A lot of people ignore a lot of these steps. And the idea is I want to create a very concrete and tactical playbook for how to do enterprise sales. We've had conversations- [00:03:34] S1: Give away my secrets. [00:03:36] S0: That's the goal. Just suck them all out. Make everybody amazing at sales. It will be great. [00:03:36] S1: Awesome. [00:03:44] S0: And this touches on just why I think the podcast is really helpful to people and just the Valley vibe, even though you don't live in the Valley. Just there's so much win, win, win in helping people learn these things. It may feel like, "Why is she giving away all these things?" But maybe actually, let me ask you that. Just why do you share these things?
00:04:02 · Jen Abel
[00:04:02] S1: Well, it's so interesting because there's so much art to this that, even if you gave someone a 15-step playbook, there's so much of a feeling that you have to go off of. Sales is one on one, right? You're dealing with a variable, which is another individual. And if you ran the same flow every single time, it's going to probably not hit one out of every four times because everyone's different. Some people like to joke, some people like the small talk opener. Others want to jump right into it. Some are technical. Some are not technical. So everybody's so different that, even if I gave, even as we go through all these 15 steps while it's 80% of it, the other 20% is obviously the art of how you make someone feel, "Do they feel heard? Did you make it fun? Did you tell a good story?" That's also a huge part of this. Too much to cover today, so we'll stick to the roadmap of how to close these deals. But I think the interesting thing about enterprise sales is, even if you sell a $100,000 solution, it is the same exact process to sell a million-dollar solution. So that's why it's an interesting process because the enterprise organizations are more sensitive to the process you take them through from a sales motion than they almost are with demoing the product.
00:05:28 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jen Abel
[00:05:28] S0: Amazing. And I'll just give a plug for, if people want to continue learning, your Twitter feed is just the best. You share all this stuff constantly. And I think you talk about there's rational reasons to share this stuff, but I think it feels like there's just like, "I just need to get this stuff out. People need to-" [00:05:44] S1: It's like a diary and it also helps me keep it in my mind too. [00:05:46] S0: Right. [00:05:46] S1: It's like my own education. Yeah. [00:05:48] S0: I know exactly what you mean. That's why I started writing. I was just like, "I just want to remember this stuff myself. I'm just going to share it and crystallize it." Okay, so before we get into the steps, let's set this up. What are some things people should know? What's the case study, what we're going to be using here? [00:06:03] S1: Yeah. Let's use a company like SpaceX, right? Recently has seen massive news pressings. Everyone's probably targeting them, right? So it's going to be a hard logo to go in and win. They are a technical organization, but I think what we do is target a nontechnical team. So we're going to really get into the nuance of this. So let's do SpaceX. Why don't we pick legal? Let's have some fun with legal. Interesting thing about legal, it's the largest budget line item in the enterprise budget, right? Sometimes three to four times other budgets. And it's forever. There's always more money for legal. [00:06:55] S0: That's why there's so many legal AI startups. I get it now. [00:06:56] S1: 100%.
00:06:56 · Jen Abel, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:06:56] S1: 100%. [00:06:58] S0: Amazing. And I'll just add, the reason I love to have you on this podcast is I've left both of our previous conversations so just fired up about selling. I have nothing to sell, but I'm always feeling like, "I want to sell something now. I feel like I've learned all these things. It feels so fun doing sales after talking to you." [00:07:19] S1: You're a master. You're actually a master at this. Sales is marketing. Marketing is sales to some extent, right? [00:07:22] S0: All right. [00:07:22] S1: And you do that better than a lot of people. [00:07:25] S0: I feel like you're using some sales technique on me to make me feel good about myself. Okay, anything else before we get into step one of the sales enterprise- [00:07:32] S1: No. I think this is good. [00:07:33] S0: ... sales cycle?
00:07:35 · Jen Abel
[00:07:35] S1: SpaceX and targeting the legal function. It's a great question. So I think let's start with how do I even get the first meeting, how do I even engage with these people. There's so much nuance as you target, as we're using the case study of SpaceX today. You have the top of the rung, which is the general counsel, the head of legal, the chief legal officer. They all have slightly different titles, but they all carry the same weight, which is like, "Who's the lead of the team?" And then underneath that, you have a bunch of people that carry a VP title, carry a director title, maybe just say lawyer on their LinkedIn. So you have to do the work to figure out, "What is my entry point?" and there's only two entry points, starting at the very, very tippy top, meaning going direct to the decisionmaker, the chief legal officer, or finding the individual that would be maybe one step removed, okay? Other people would argue with this. I personally would not be targeting anybody else. It is the executive themselves or an N minus one, okay? So let's talk about why. In order for an enterprise deal to move forward, you need to have this extremely compressed storyline that lands immediately to the objective that they want to solve for at the organization. It has to go beyond just an AI mandate. I think every company today has an AI mandate and I know everyone is an AI tool, but what exactly are you solving for them as a problem? That's one, that's level one, but most importantly, the alpha, "What does this executive uncover and unlock by bringing in a net-new tool?" Because bringing in a net-new tool is risky. No one wants it. So if we're targeting the chief legal officer and the N minus one, you get two to three sentences max, okay? That might be through an email LinkedIn, that might be through a phone call, that might be through an event or that might be through some marketing capability. Most C-level executives don't respond to marketing. They might see your brand, they're not going to respond to a marketing campaign, okay? They will respond one on one. And the best individual to one on one to a corporate executive is the founder. Even if you're a series B, series C, right? The founder should be ecstatic to want to get in front of the chief legal officer at SpaceX.
00:11:25 · Jen Abel
I think any founder that is building something really meaningful knows the important role of that. Second is you can get your AE or enterprise sales lead to target the N minus one and you do what you call this ... I call it the pincher model because you're going after two different people and trying to get them together. It's actually called the pincer model, which is start at the very, very top, find that floor and work in between that, okay? So these are the two layers you want to be targeting in landing that meeting, because if you go any further than that, you risk, they're not going to be able to communicate your storyline. It's a game of telephone, right? And now, you're learning from someone that is not near the budget or the executive discussions, which is super risky because now you're learning about user value, not executive value. And a $100,000 deal needs a executive sponsor to sign off on it, to allocate the budget and this is why you need to start at these two layers only.