Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:00:57 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jen Abel
[01:00:57] S0: That's right. [01:00:58] S1: ... right? So the business model structure supports that. If you're selling a $100,000 deal and you're pulling a forward-deployed ... Your economics, it's going to get messy. [01:01:08] S0: Just like you will not make money if you have a full-time engineer salesperson sitting here working on this. [01:01:13] S1: Totally. And I think I also know there's a lot of folks in account management whose job is to service and expand and upsell and they just take on the title of FDE, so they're just another salesperson. [01:01:26] S0: Yeah, just a nice ... Yeah, it's a cool title. I think the Palantir people called FDEs at most companies sparkling sales engineers. [01:01:32] S1: That's awesome. [01:01:33] S0: Yeah. Okay. Anything else on the up-to-the-pilot step before we get to the post-pilot session? [01:01:39] S1: Yeah, I think, because now you've talked about the timeline to, "If this is successful, what does that look like?" again, you want to run this before you put everyone in it because you might want to push out the pilot. If they're like, "Hey, listen, this is probably going to be another quarter." Well, put the people in the pilot now because now you've lost all the ... You need the momentum to continue and you need the steps to happen, so use that, "Hey, if this is a successful pilot, how far out are we from a commitment from you guys?" [01:02:05] S0: Oh, I see, commitment. So there's the commitment, which is equivalent to rolling it out to the company. [01:02:11] S1: That's exactly right.
01:02:11 · Jen Abel, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:02:11] S1: That's exactly right. [01:02:11] S0: If they're not ready in a month to roll this out, if this is a huge success, then wait on doing the pilot. [01:02:15] S1: Wait, correct. Yeah. [01:02:17] S0: Awesome. Because you're saying you may lose that momentum and they're like- [01:02:20] S1: Yeah, you've already exhausted all the stages. You don't want to do that. You want the stages to align with how they're thinking, but you want to project management as tightly as you can. [01:02:30] S0: I love that. [01:02:31] S1: And sometimes it's out of your control, but yeah. [01:02:33] S0: Yeah, and it's not like you can push them to deploy it broadly. That's a thing that is probably very hard to shift. So yeah, so understanding that and working with that seems really important. Okay, so step 10. And again, as you pointed out at the beginning, most people think the sales process is five steps and we're already in step 10. We're not even done. And you made this point actually before we started recording that you haven't touched on that I think is important to share this idea of that these five steps emerged out of a CRM pipeline check thing. Talk a bit about that.
01:03:05 · Jen Abel, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:03:05] S1: Yeah, so everyone knows the traditional five steps, intro, demo, proposal, contracting and then close won or close loss. Those are the typical ... Maybe there's some variation of that. That's not how you run the sales ... Those are buckets to understand how to understand a weighted forecast, right? A proposal or something mid-funnel might be weighted at 50% of the deal value for the pipeline. Something in contracting might be weighted at 80% and something in intro might be weighted at 10%. That's what those stages are for. That's not the stages you take a client through. Those are just the broad buckets. And I think a lot of people use those buckets to say, "Okay, there's about five different meetings that need to happen," when it's like, "No, there's three meetings, maybe up to five meetings in each of those buckets that are critical to get the deal done." Now, we're still speaking at it at a very macro level. Obviously selling a million dollar deal, you want to have more of those upfront meetings and you want to make sure you know who the executive sponsor is and all that. You always want to know who the executive sponsor is, but for a 100k deal, you probably can accelerate it a little faster, again, ensuring that they're qualified. [01:04:23] S0: I know you've worked with a lot of founders and salespeople over the years. What percentage do you think are just doing it wrong in that way and treating it like this five-step process? [01:04:33] S1: 90%. [01:04:34] S0: Wow.
01:04:34 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jen Abel
[01:04:34] S0: Wow. [01:04:35] S1: Yeah. Because enterprise sales, it's mirroring their buying process. It's trying to control their buying process. It's not plopping these people into your sales process. [01:04:48] S0: Amazing. Okay. Let's keep going. Step 10, post-pilot session.
01:04:53 · Jen Abel
[01:04:53] S1: Yes. You can send a survey, they might want to send a survey, get the intel or one on one to each of these users and say, "Hey," or let your champion ... I mean, there's a few ways you can do this or you can have your champion internally discuss and say, "Hey, how was that?" okay? You need to make sure that you are mirroring their experience, right? From a technical perspective, how much time did they spend in the product? Did they run into any bugs? What were they using the most of? Because you need to be prepared of going into that call to say, "Hey, I know we gave everyone those three things, but most people only spent it on two. Why?" And that might be okay. But you don't want them to be like, "Oh, well, we wish it did this." "Well, yeah, but no one spent time on that. We do do that, but no one spent time on that." So you just need to control also that you're capturing what they did in those pilots and making sure that you're syncing up or you could go to your champion and be like, "Hey, I know so-and-so logged in for 15 minutes today. They didn't get past step one." Don't tell them what they're doing, you shouldn't even be that, but like, "They didn't get past step one. Can you check in on them and making sure they're having a good experience?" Use your champion to ... Again, they've invested so much time into you. Guide them with where they should be focused as well. Because at the end of the day, getting a deal done at the enterprise, it is set up to have as much friction as possible, right? There's a people that will kill the deal, then you got to deal with procurement, then you got to deal with legal, then you got to deal with finding the executive sponsor, which usually comes in the very top of the funnel, but there's so much friction to get a deal done. The project management and the individual on the inside, that's your key.
01:06:44 · Lenny Rachitsky, Jen Abel
[01:06:44] S0: So funny. So many ways it could all fall apart. What I was going to say is it feels like many people would naturally ... They want to avoid confrontation. They won't want to say, "We don't want this." They're going to probably be like, "It's fine. It's good. It's good. Yeah, everything's great." [01:07:02] S1: Just like VCs. [01:07:04] S0: That's right. That's right. And so it feels like a lot of this process is to pull out, "Okay, here's the concern. Here's the problem." Are there any other signs of, okay, they're actually not interested and like, "This is not going well and I need to really ..."? [01:07:19] S1: This is why your internal champion is so important. When they go quiet on you, that's when you know. That's why this individual ... And listen, this individual is going to do you ... If they've spent enough time with you, they will call you and be like, "Listen, if I'm reading the tea leaves, we should sit on this for a minute. Let's repick this back up." That's why having someone on the inside is so, so, so critical. [01:07:39] S0: And yeah, the easier approach is just to stop responding and just hope that the salesperson understands very little, "Not excited." Oh, man. Okay. What are the benchmarks for how often do you get through each of these stages? You mentioned a few, just from demo to the stage.