A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:35:44 · Sean McCarthy
[00:35:44] S0: No, we're talking like the Fortune 500, Fortune 1000 now and so there was one thing maybe that's helpful is there was a really large switch from in the end of 2025. As well when we kind of made this enterprise grade solution, which was that we were selling primarily to supply chain companies and now we are selling to companies that operate a complex supply chain. So you can think some of the biggest grocers in the U.S., some of the biggest automobile manufacturers, Arma, and what those customers, they might sign kind of all over, but they all operate a hyper complex supply chain, right? So if you take Sprouts or Whole Foods, they're a grocery chain, but they have a very complex supply chain and so that is really who we are selling to now and have found a lot of market pull. And I think we're also not vying to go sell to the same brokerages and some of the other folks that our competitors are, and that's been beneficial for us. So what we'll first do is obviously see if we know anybody. Hands down for us, our ICP has been the senior vice president of operations. I would say ninety percent of the time, so we'll go find that person on LinkedIn. We have sent champagne, we have sent donuts and bagels to warehouses. We will look and see, do we have anybody in common? I'll have as many employees as I can to see, and here's who we're looking to target. Do you know anybody? You know, if we have the cousin's friend's brother's uncle, we'll reach out and say, hey, would you mind saying some words and maybe getting a meeting set up? And so we try to back channel first as much as we possibly can. And when we are approaching these enterprises, we also learned the efficiency playbook and what that means is, going to these customers as an AI company and saying, hey, we're going to make you more efficient. What are your problems? Works almost never because they have so many problems and they usually don't know where to begin. What we've changed to and where we've had a lot of pull is in the grocery example that I gave you, Going with that exact use case to say, we know that you have trucks showing up that have temperature breaches on them, this is exactly what we built, this is what you can expect in the first ninety days, and here's the average that our current customers are saving by doing this.
00:37:47 · Sean McCarthy
So it's a very pointed, tailored use case to something that actually matters to them and we're seeing that work eight out of ten times. I would probably say, where they will say, okay, this sounds interesting enough, where I want you to have a conversation with the director of operations. And they'll kind of kick us down after that. They'll kick us down to the director of ops, or maybe even the manager of ops, and we'll work really closely with those teams. Doing a lot of cross-threading during that time, showing that we can understand their use cases, building and conceptualizing what it would actually look like for them, giving them custom demos of exactly what they would be getting to get the buy-in and making sure that they have a really clear line of sight. And that we're getting as use cases and all that critical information. And then that's where that presentation comes in. Because most of the time, they're going to give a presentation to that same VP, and that VP is probably going to then give it to the board or the ELT or AI committee if they have one. And so that's where that comes in. We're putting all of that data in there, everything that we've grabbed from the use case information to the ROI analysis and building this deck for them. Sending it to them, so that hopefully it's just one less barrier that we have from an entry point.
00:39:00 · Pablo Srugo
[00:39:00] S2: So that's great as the high level framework. So let's kind of maybe dive into each step there. So the first one is, you know, you identify the SVP ops. Okay, that's easy. Then you go and you figure out if you have, you know, mutual connections. You start pinging. Do you kind of just set up? Okay, we've got these fifteen potential wins. These are the best, this is the best one, the best three, the best five. Let's do those first and see what happens. And within that, how meticulous are you about the messaging? Is it just, hey, you know, we're trying to speak to this person. I started connected, can you reach out or do you have like a much more crafted, very tailor made message you wanted to send? How do you think about all that?
00:39:34 · Sean McCarthy, Pablo Srugo
[00:39:34] S0: Yeah, so we will go off of the strength of the relationship in the beginning. So who has that closest connection? So again, if we pull five people in and we've established who our target is in the funnel meetings. Then maybe somebody knows this person, or again, somebody who's actually close. They used to work together, we'll always take that as like, a warm way in and we're crafting the message that we want that person to send. A lot of people make mistakes as they just say, hey, can you make an intro to Bill? I want to talk to him about what we do. It really doesn't set who you're asking the favor to do. It makes them do more work and it doesn't really feel like maybe it's a good fit. Because they have no clue what you want to talk to them about and so, we'll actually say, we built this, we believe he has this problem, and this is what we've built to solve it, as an example. Or we'll just put a copy paste message of, can you just say this? And just copy paste this to the stakeholder. And so we're trying to make sure that they don't have to come up with this context, because they also might pitch us in a way that we don't want to be pitched. So we'll give them all of the context. We are also cross-threading a lot of the times between LinkedIn and email. Assuming that we don't have the warm intro or we get the warm intro but it doesn't go anywhere. We will cross threads, we will send them an email and a LinkedIn message and they'll be different. [00:40:53] S2: Is it usually you or is it an enterprise AE that's doing it?
00:40:53 · Pablo Srugo, Sean McCarthy
[00:40:53] S2: Is it usually you or is it an enterprise AE that's doing it? [00:40:56] S0: We were founder-led for a very long time, so it was just me. With the enterprise AEs now, they will run them and if they're getting blocked, I will, of course, offer to reach direct to the stakeholder. But right now, it's the AEs primarily and so, they will send the email, and they'll send the LinkedIn, and they're hyper-personalized. So, none of the AI sequencing, I think we're past that, doesn't really work very much anymore in my opinion. So, again, coming back to the basics of that and picking up the phone. We've had a crazy amount of success on the phone lately as well. And so, kind of just getting back to the basics of what it used to be for enterprise sales. [00:41:34] S2: And what about in person? Anything in person you're doing?
00:41:34 · Pablo Srugo, Sean McCarthy
[00:41:34] S2: And what about in person? Anything in person you're doing? [00:41:37] S0: We're doing a lot in person. You know, surprisingly, the conferences have been really, really successful for us. We were just at Manifest in February and actually closed two deals for Manifest already, and so that was great. And I think it's a good way to get in front of either folks that are in our industry or maybe even net new. And then for our actual customers, yes, we're flying. I think this month I'm in six or seven different cities meeting with prospective customers. I think one of the big things that we're also trying to do is these onsite activations with our customers. So if they're just becoming a customer, when we need to get all that context information that we talked about, getting that in person, and even if the contract's not signed. We'll fly out and meet with them and it just helps to conceptualize like what this would actually be like. Because we're workshopping it together, we're answering their questions live. They're bringing people into the room that are potentially going to be the blockers down the line, kind of the gatekeepers. And we're able just to work everything out in person. And this is before a contract is even signed. And so it's an investment on our side to do it, but it's paid off multiple times. And so I think that that's also been a huge unlock, because a lot of this sell is educating the customer on AI as well. And so you have to pair that with making them feel comfortable with what it's actually going to do in their environment.