A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:36:04 · Pablo Srugo
[00:36:04] S2: You know, the only kind of pushback I have, or not really pushback. It's just more I want to go deeper on, is at the earliest stages. When you only have, you're trying to build a multi-hundred million dollar a year business, and you have this idea of the thing that's going to get you there, and you have a certain amount of customers. And let's say you have a few million in ARR, and then something else happens on the side. I would argue, just like you did, if that thing is taking you away, and the only reason you're doing it is to inflate metrics or fundraise, don't do it. But how do you know that that's actually not maybe the thing? And it actually turns out you should have done it. Because actually you were more limited here and you're in a better position there, and you just ignored the market at the wrong time.
00:36:41 · Isaiah Granet
[00:36:41] S0: Great question. I wish I had a catch all answer for you. Because maybe it turns out that the Bland actually would have been the biggest agency white label or platform in the world and we would be five times the size we are if we stuck with it. You can't know that, but the reason we made this decision was ultimately we didn't believe that value would accrue for those people. Because when we talked to them about what they were doing, it was all unrealized value. Meaning they were hoping to use Bland to build their business and that meant that the value that they could achieve was very, very high theoretically, but in reality, there was no tangible way to understand that. And so what we did is we said, we're going to follow the pain. These business owners don't have pain, they have hope and I know that sounds weird, right? You want to be with hopeful people, yes, but where you build a great business is by figuring out where when you press, does it hurt.
00:37:29 · Pablo Srugo
[00:37:29] S2: I actually think it's on the mark, you got to go to first principles and first principles always is like solve this hair on fire problem, right? And that actually, I've seen this happen where you're solving, let's say, hair on fire problem. You know what often happens when it's tough is you're doing these $10k to $20k ACVs, probably not your case. But you're doing these $10k to $20k ACVs and it's solid, and it makes sense, and you're solving a real problem. And then you've got this enterprise that comes here and it's like, I'll give you $200k if you do this other thing. And you're like, $200k, that's twenty of my normal customers. But when you dig into it, the key question is it's not like never do that. It's just like, compare the pain, right? I like that phrase, but compare the pain of that $200k for them to the pain is $220k. If you feel like, yeah, this is a real pain for them, and if I solve it for them. I'll not only make $200k, but I'll open up this enterprise piece of a lot of other customers with big pain, do it. If you're like, I don't even really get why they want it, but it's $200k, you know, probably don't do it. Keep doing the thing you're doing.
00:38:23 · Isaiah Granet, Pablo Srugo
[00:38:23] S0: Yeah, I think follow the pain, follow where hair is on fire. Make sure that you're asking the hard questions about where does value accrue and I think you're actually a hundred percent right. Which is most people have the inverse problem. Which is an enterprise comes to them and waves a ton of money in their face to say, well, what if you go build all this and do our security reviews. And do the rest of it? Most people should say no to that. [00:38:43] S2: So we spoke quite a bit about griddle marketing. The other playbook that you're running is enterprise sales playbook. Let's go deep on that. I mean, you're doing different things. You're going deep on the org chart. You're sending newsletters to your customers, which I don't really understand. I'm curious to see how that works. So maybe tell me a little bit about that enterprise side of it and maybe how you did it early. But really, now that you've developed it, what is that playbook today that other founders could copy?
00:39:10 · Isaiah Granet, Pablo Srugo
[00:39:10] S0: It's a great question. Selling to the enterprise as a founder is really difficult because most people, especially that are listening to this podcast that are founders are going to be in go, go, go mode. All you want to do is constantly be moving, constantly be active, trying to make sure that you're following and saying, hey, how do I get to where I need to go next the fastest? And enterprise sales is just a marathon. It is a lot of time spent building relationships, following up, following through. And it's all about building momentum. And the thing I tell people is, first and foremost with an enterprise deal. Don't try and shoehorn it in if it doesn't make sense. So if you have a low level person at the enterprise with no buying power who just kind of likes your product. Don't believe that that's a real lead. Ask yourself in your gut, will they ever get a purchase done? And if the answer is probably not, don't spend your time there. So the first thing that we do for any enterprise deal is we map out the org and we say, who is this person we're talking to? Who do they report to? Who does that person report to? And what is the actual buying power and where does that live? [00:40:11] S2: How do you map that out? Is that just LinkedIn or whatever? Or are there any tools you're using to just get a full picture of the org chart? Or is it just conversation? As you talk to someone, you just ask them like, hey, who controls this budget? Who else do you work with? Who else is on your team, et cetera?
00:40:24 · Isaiah Granet
[00:40:24] S0: Most of the time, it's actually just asking them and they'll tell you. If they won't, then you can go on LinkedIn and just find it pretty easily. LinkedIn makes it really easy to reconstruct org charts and generally, you can do that by saying, what's this person's title? Let me go find a person that's above them in title. Let me go find all three of those people and figure out, you know, who are they connected to? Can I map this correctly? And the thing is, if the person you're talking to doesn't want to introduce you to the other person. It might just not be a deal and you probably should walk away. But once you have the org chart, it's your job to realize, hey, enterprise buying is a team sport. And so not one person is going to shoehorn this through. You'll have a champion. This is the person that really wants to buy you. But then everybody else has to be on board to some degree, and what you have to remember is that everything in an enterprise is political. And so when somebody is buying you, they're spending political capital to get that done. And it also means, that somebody else is going to try and use their political capital to stop it. And what you have to do is make the math such that you are cheap from a political perspective to buy by getting as many stakeholders, people that can buy the software, centered around you. One of the ways that we do that is actually internal newsletters. So with the enterprises we work with, after we have like a couple of meetings, we basically subscribe them and everybody in their org to a little Bland newsletter of updates and things that are going on. And that way they can hear like, hey, here's some updates on what we're working together on. Here's some updates on features we released X, Y, Z. And all that does is it creates, clarity and penetration through the org. Because your job is to make sure that as many people in the org have some degree of political capital committed to buying you, and that for anybody that doesn't want you bought, it's just too expensive for them to go have that fight. And if you do that successfully, you'll win an enterprise deal.