A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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.
00:42:13 · Pablo Srugo, Isaiah Granet
[00:42:13] S2: That framing makes a lot of sense and I think people very often forget it, and they don't learn it until they really learn it. And they're all the way done, and then they get shut down, and they just don't understand why. And it's because you missed the one person that was going to be your anti-champion. You didn't get that person on board and it was over before it even started. These newsletters, is it a generic newsletter that you're just sending out and you're just adding to? Or are you creating customer by customer or a personalized newsletter that's relevant for them? [00:42:40] S0: It's customer by customer. So we're actually saying it's relevant for them. It's tailored to the people we're sending it to and generally speaking, it includes high level information on what we're doing together and the engagement. And the biggest thing is you will never win a significant enterprise deal by being sneaky. You will win deals by being really loud. You want everybody to know what's going on because that way you stop surprises and you figure out things early. The worst thing any founder will go through, and every founder selling to an enterprise has this, is I just spent six months selling to this org and at the last second on, signature day, they said they can't sign. Because we didn't ask X, Y, Z hard question or we didn't make sure that everybody knew.
00:42:40 · Isaiah Granet, Pablo Srugo
[00:42:40] S0: It's customer by customer. So we're actually saying it's relevant for them. It's tailored to the people we're sending it to and generally speaking, it includes high level information on what we're doing together and the engagement. And the biggest thing is you will never win a significant enterprise deal by being sneaky. You will win deals by being really loud. You want everybody to know what's going on because that way you stop surprises and you figure out things early. The worst thing any founder will go through, and every founder selling to an enterprise has this, is I just spent six months selling to this org and at the last second on, signature day, they said they can't sign. Because we didn't ask X, Y, Z hard question or we didn't make sure that everybody knew. [00:43:22] S2: What are the things you do to keep momentum? You know these deals are going to take a long time. There's only so much you can do to compress it. But when things are just kind of flatlining for too long, then they just tend to die. How do you keep things moving so there's always a next step?
00:43:41 · Isaiah Granet
[00:43:41] S0: My best advice is don't be shy to follow up a lot, and you're not going to annoy people. And even if you do, that's sort of your job. I strongly advise everybody that can to be on a texting relationship with their champion and with other people in the org. The reason being is if you can shoot a text, and you have to use this somewhat sparingly but if you can shoot a text, you can really get them back engaged and along. And don't be shy along the way to be following up, setting time, saying, hey, I put ten minutes on your calendar. I'm going to call you at that time on your cell phone just to hear how you're doing and part of this is what I say is the best enterprise sellers are not tricking people. They're not convincing them to buy something they don't need. They're not just pretending to be your friend. They actually get to know you. They understand what drives you, what motivates you, and how you work. And it's not to do something mischievous, and we have this sort of painting and color that we often use with enterprise sales. It's because knowing people helps you understand where is my place to push? Where is my place to step back? And then the best piece of advice I have with this is be patient also. For some of the deals that we've sold, there has been a month-long period where I hear nothing and that's just how enterprises sometimes work. And they take a really long time to get things done. And you can sell yourself out of a deal if you try to force their hand. So if you say, hey, it's been too long and we need an update, and if you don't give us an update, we're gonna walk. They will just walk away. It's not worth it at that point and so you have to be very careful that you're pushing in the right places but you understand how to be patient when things are moving, but slowly.