Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:30:05 · Jen Abel
[00:30:05] S1: Yes. Okay. So usually right now, the stages that most people have is intro, demo, proposal, contracting, close won or close loss. There's five stages. They're very basic. People usually go from an intro call straight to a demo, okay? The demo is your carrot in the process. Everyone wants to see this amazing thing you just spoke about, okay? So your job is to make sure that when you do that demo, the formal demo, you have the right people on the call. Because if you don't, one, you lost your leverage to organize that group and rally them, but more importantly, you never want it to feel like one person's baby, right? If you're selling to that director or that VP, you need to make sure that that executive feels like it's part of their baby and they're helping craft it and they have their fingerprints on it. And vice versa, you want the C-suite. They want the actual users to feel like that they were bought in on this too. Okay, so you want to make this to be ... And this is the tricky part. There's going to be someone that's going to champion it and get the deal done, but you got to make it feel like a group effort. Okay, so the person that you had the intro call with, that's who you built the rapport with. That's your champion at this point, whether it's the C-suite executive or one step removed. I say champion. Most champions are one step removed, but let's just say the C-suite executive has delegated this now to the champion to navigate. Okay, for that demo call, now before you do the demo, get on another call with them, "Hey, I had so much fun on our first call. I think that there is a great opportunity to get to support you guys." This call should be 15 minutes by the way, okay? "I'd love to do a demo, but before we do the demo, I want to make sure we have the right people in the room and I'm demoing the right things. Can you help me understand from the conversation we had earlier, and as I'm walking you through, now I'm walking you through the product, what do you think would resonate with the team?" Now you're collecting more intel, okay? Now it starts to feel like, "Oh, great." Now they get to put their fingerprints on this.
00:32:10 · Jen Abel
So it's like, "Okay, when we demo to this group," at this point I want this question to be asked, "can you ask this question in the meeting because I want them to understand the values?" And they'll be like, "I'm actually going to ask this question because it's going to resonate more." So now you're building this demo alongside this internal executive and none of your competitors are doing this. No other startup you're competing with is taking these extra steps. You now have the alpha of the intel they're giving you from these conversations. And now they feel part of this journey, okay? Now they trust you. So it's like, okay, so now you're spending 15 minutes trying to figure out, "Okay ..." or 30, right? Sometimes they won't give you that much more time, but ask for 30, probably do 15 and say, "Here are the five different things we can go into. From our first conversation, it sounds like these two things matter, but let me show you all five." And then they might say, "Okay, I want you to do those two that we spoke about, but I also want you to show this because this is also part of our mandate and this will make it feel holistic." Okay, so now you just mapped out the storyline with an internal partner on their end and now you have the names of the right people. Now you're going ... To close that call, "Great. Is there a time we can look at everyone's calendar and put this on the calendar?" Make the meeting an hour. The demo should be an hour, okay? Now you can ask, "Before this meeting, do we want to do a pre-demo to maybe someone else on your team that would be excited by this before you race to the group demo or should we just do the group demo?" They know their organization better than anyone else and how pressing this need is. Now if they're less mature in knowing if they want something like this, they probably want to bring in someone else before a big group. If they're like, "No, no, no, this is something we want to really move into," they probably are ready to go into a group. So you just need to figure out where they are on that maturity arc of their decision. Okay, so now you have ... Do we want to assume they checked off pre-demo or do we want to do group demo?
00:34:19 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jen Abel
[00:34:19] S0: How often does that pre-demo happen? [00:34:21] S1: I try and push for it because again it's just more intel. [00:34:24] S0: Yeah. So let's say, let's assume there's a pre-demo. [00:34:26] S1: Okay, so now you have a new colleague on the phone and you could say, "Hey, for five minutes, I'm just going to catch you up on the things that I just learned from so-and-so. What can you add to that? What do you think?" Do you see how you're just collecting more and more intel along the way? So now you're building the business case for them. Now they feel like they're buying, not being sold to. So now you have two or three people at this point already excited for the big group demo. The worst thing you can do in the sales process when you move into demo is just go into one straight demo with no prep, or worse, a enterprise organization might reach out to you because they're going through a due diligence process to say, "Hey, we'd love to see what you guys have built. Will you present this to four or five people?" Don't do it. You're either a checkbox and you want to remove yourself from being a checkbox, or two, you're about to demo your product with no competitive intel. You just lost the deal at that point. [00:35:32] S0: Oh, man. [00:35:32] S1: The enterprise deals are won on, "This feels so close to who we are. It feels like it was built specifically for me." That's the whole game.