A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:48:33 · Rahul Shivkumar, Pablo Srugo
[00:48:33] S1: Some people may not like this, but we actually try our best to do a ton of discovery before we even show a demo. And we found that to be extremely valuable. This used to annoy me a lot when I was on the other side, when I would demo products. When I'd hop on, they'd ask me 50 questions and I'd be like, I just want to see the product. What are you doing? And that's how we were running when Varun and I were selling and we had no sellers. First call, demo, show everything, right? But as we've become more multi-product, as we've started catering to more specialties that have their own unique edge cases and things like that, the approach of going in and just showing things actually backfires very quickly. Our ICP comes in and they're like, look, these five things matter a lot to me. But if your demo script is showing 18 things and you only touch the five at maybe the end of like the demo session, you've wasted their attention on the 13 things that don't matter and it ends up backfiring a lot. So we actually changed our process to do discovery, then demo after. Like never show the product until a few questions are answered. And then kind of what we saw there was like when we did show the demo, it was far more effective. Right? Like, oh, I get it. Okay, you've actually tailored a demo to me. Yeah. [00:49:42] S0: What's your demo to close rate? [00:49:43] S1: Our demo to close rate, I think, I'd have to go check our, from last quarter, it was at something like 40%.
00:49:43 · Rahul Shivkumar, Pablo Srugo
[00:49:43] S1: Our demo to close rate, I think, I'd have to go check our, from last quarter, it was at something like 40%. [00:49:49] S0: Nice. Yeah. Anything about 30%, I think, is your winning. And if you get to that 50% mark, I mean, it depends though on the ACVs. It does depend on the ACVs. When you're doing 100K, actually, you know, even 20% is actually not bad at all. [00:50:01] S1: I think when we started, we were at like 18 or something like that. Like when we were doing it the other way where it was like, hey, we'll just show a demo and then we'll do it. Like it was like 18%. [00:50:10] S0: But you ascribe that, a lot of that improvement to just doing discovery first and then demoing the right features. [00:50:15] S1: Correct. I think if you're a complicated product, I actually think this might be true of a lot of like AI native companies. I think if you're doing a forward deployed motion where like some of these workflows are reasonably unique for like a sub vertical or something like that, definitely do discovery before showing something generic. Yeah. [00:50:32] S0: Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. And then tell me about, okay, you close like the onboarding and deployment part for them to truly get the full ROI. Like what does that look like?
00:50:32 · Pablo Srugo, Rahul Shivkumar
[00:50:32] S0: Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. And then tell me about, okay, you close like the onboarding and deployment part for them to truly get the full ROI. Like what does that look like? [00:50:40] S1: Yeah. We have a forward deployed motion. So we actually, our team is split into BDRs, sourcing, AEs, kind of running the full lifecycle, closing the deals. We then have a deployments team specifically focused on deploying these agents and making sure the workflows are effective before handing over to our post sales team, which is what customer success, they leave renewals, expansions, and things like that. But I think what we've had to do is have a very, very, very specific deployment team. Every single customer actually touches now. Like we don't do anything where you go from sales straight to post sales. You have to go through a deployment period where you have someone that's really understanding your workflows. Even if you have like these templatized agents that work right off the shelf, we still try to find edge cases and stuff like that where we can customize for you. [00:51:27] S0: What's the number one thing you found, or it doesn't have to be the number one thing, but something you've found that works a lot when it comes to a deal that you feel should close, but it's just dragging, you know, and you just kind of, you got to get it over the line.
00:51:39 · Rahul Shivkumar
[00:51:39] S1: Yeah, this happens to every company, you know, like, and I think like while we've done things to move it, it is still a frustrating thing, right? Like it's just like the nature of selling where priorities sometimes change. I think one thing we do is we track very deeply how many touch points a sales rep has with their champion, right? I think that's a very good indicator of how quickly a deal closes. So if a deal, as an example, is $200,000 and you assume it's going to take four months to close, 16 weeks, you have to have at least 16 touch points, right? You can even hop on a call for like five minutes and like just talk about, I don't know, your fantasy football team. But like when you build that level of depth, I think you earn the right to ask your customer, do you think this deal can close by a certain date? Because that's what you're going for, right? You're trying to close something within a quarter, you're trying to close something within a certain time period. I think you have to earn the right to ask your champion, hey, can this be done by this date, right? The way you get there, I think, is a couple of ways. One, building this level of like depth and trust with them where they're like, hey, we'll just get done, right? Like we've agreed on this, we'll just get done. The second thing we do is we actually use maybe like a weakness, which is like how long it takes to deploy as like a strength, right? Like, hey, you guys have this like perceived live date of when you want to go live with the shirt to get this ROI within a certain amount of time. Let's work backwards from that, right? Like if you have to go live January 1st and it takes us eight weeks to deploy, you need to sign by the end of October that we have November and December to actually deploy. Any day after that is going to move that like live date out, right? Like constantly kind of bringing that up actually helps a lot to you where the customer realizes like, hey, the urgency is actually on my side. Like I have to do this if I want to see value from this within a certain amount of time. So it's kind of like a combination of both these things really helps.
00:53:27 · Pablo Srugo
[00:53:27] S0: I like both of them because I also think one of the things that's often missed when you're selling B2B is oftentimes like you're not selling to, you're certainly not selling to the owner. Like it's not, you're not thinking dollars. Like when you sell to a consumer, you're literally transferring money from somebody who's, it's my money and now it's going to you, right? Most of the times when you're selling B2B, you're selling to someone, it's not their money. And so they're not fully like adversarial in that sense where it's like they're taking money out of their pocket and give it to you. They're probably going to make the same salary anyways. They're going to have whatever money they have to spend on their own things. They're taking money from their business, right? And maybe they have a budget and these sort of things. So it's not like they just don't care, but it makes a big difference because oftentimes you can kind of flip it where it's both of you kind of against, if you want to think it that way, the enterprise and the system, right? And it's like, listen, you've already bought into Assured. You know, this is going to deliver ROI. You want to like look good and also like have an easier job or whatever it is that you want to get out of this product. Let's like work together to get you there, which kind of fills into all, you know, obviously that means building trust and also means saying, look, if you really want to get about October, if you don't, it's fine. We could do November, but if you really want to do about October, that's best for you. And then, so then, you know, they're really truly a champion in that way. And I think that's often kind of lost. I think people get it over time, but especially at the beginning, first time founder, especially like you forget that that's really what's going on.
00:54:43 · Rahul Shivkumar, Pablo Srugo
[00:54:43] S1: Totally. And even add in your first call, like that, that discovery call that you're doing, you should really understand they're not just like what they're looking for, but also their buying process. Does it have to go through legal? Does it have to go through compliance? Right? Like, do you need us to show like our security certificates or things like that? Like if you leave your first call not understanding that you actually have done a bad job. Wow. [00:55:04] S0: Perfect. Well, listen, let's stop it there. I'll ask the last question. Any piece of advice that you kind of feel like you give first time founders or even just early stage repeat founders a lot, like anybody that's kind of in that early stage finding product market fit, what's something that you'd want to kind of leave them with?