A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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.
00:45:14 · Pablo Srugo
[00:45:14] S2: The other thing you told me about enterprises is you never give without getting. Where does that, I get the idea but I'm curious, does that come from a particular experience? How do you implement that?
00:45:23 · Isaiah Granet
[00:45:23] S0: Yeah, it's come from a litany of experiences and part of this is, giving and getting. What I always say is you never give anything without getting and the reason that we say this is any time that an enterprise has an ask or they want something. You should always be getting something in return and this get that I'm talking about doesn't have to be money. It doesn't have to be some sort of transactional step. What I mean by what you always get when you give is, if you don't get something, then the give isn't worth anything and what you're forcing the enterprise to do is to peg value to what they're asking for. And I'll give you a really simple example. Hey, can you take out, can you raise the liability cap on this contract from $10 million to $12 million? For almost any startup, it doesn't really matter that much to have that. A get I might ask for is, sure, but then I need to know that you'll sign before X date, right? And that's a really simple, easy one. Or, hey, can you guys add this feature to the product? Great, but if we do that then I want to have three follow-up meetings on the calendar to know when we're going to meet and review the feature, and make sure it meets your needs. And when you ask for something in return, it levels the playing field. It doesn't make them feel like they're asking too much from you. And it also shows you what the value of what they're asking for is. And a piece of advice with this I always give is, when you're sending out contracts and you're dealing with these enterprises. You are always welcome to ask for something in return and you shouldn't be shy to do that. Just don't always make it monetary and don't make it so transactional they have to get approval. It can be as simple as, hey, if I get this done, can you introduce me to this person? Just make sure you're always asking for something.
00:46:59 · Pablo Srugo
[00:46:59] S2: And then maybe just to end this, just two kind of crazy things you've done going back to the marketing side. One is you spent a few hundred thousand dollars only on a Super Bowl ad. Tell me more about that.
00:47:10 · Isaiah Granet
[00:47:10] S0: Yes, so I wanted to do this since I was a kid. I was a really weird kid, but for those of you that don't know, Super Bowl ads. The ones that you see, there's a combination. There's the national ads. These are the ones that are like $8 million, $10 million, $11 million just for the spot, let alone the filming. These are really expensive and everybody in the country sees them. Then there's local ads. These are the ads where you're like, hey, come on down to Ray's car dealership in San Jose. And you're like, how on earth did this get into the Super Bowl? Every network is obligated to give some airtime to local businesses and then the national ads that are big ones are the ones that we all talk about. And what we thought was, hey, what if we could go viral and get a lot of attention by picking a couple of locations to air a local ad? A local ad doesn't mean it has to be made in that area, and it also doesn't mean it can't be high quality. So we shot and filmed a 4K ready-for-TV ad. We aired it in, I think, Arizona, Las Vegas, and San Francisco. And we had a bunch of influencers ready to go. We got listed in, hey, here's the top 10 best Super Bowl ads this year. We had a bunch of viral posts about it and we had people in that area actually seeing the ad, and engaging with it. And so we basically were able to say, hey, look, we did a Super Bowl ad. And people were like, wow, that was such a great ad. And locals would have never seen it. And they sort of just assumed they missed it one commercial break or something. And we were able to get a huge amount of free press, and then even more press when we told people what we had done.
00:48:34 · Pablo Srugo, Isaiah Granet
[00:48:34] S2: I love it, I mean it's a classic like Sun Tzu. When you're big act small, when you're small act big. So this is the startup version of that, you know, the billboards and the Super Bowl ads. How can we appear to be much bigger than we are and still get the ROI by leveraging, you know, like in your case, the influencer stuff and the viral stuff so that what could have been just a local thing seen by a few thousand people actually become the huge viral campaign. [00:48:58] S0: Absolutely. [00:48:59] S2: And then the last thing I want to touch on quickly is, tell me about getting Soulja Boy to run an ad with you.