A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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.
00:42:54 · Pablo Srugo, Sean McCarthy
[00:42:54] S2: What would you say is your kind of like reach out the first meeting ratio conversion rate if you had to guess? [00:43:00] S0: Let’s specifically talk about the large enterprise. I think it's obviously a higher barrier to entry. Of every ten reach outs, I would say we maybe get four that either eventually respond or respond in a fairly quick manner that would probably turn into one meeting if we're lucky and it may be on a bigger scale. And I think if you had to push that out, it probably is something like, again, thirty or forty percent of the time we're getting somewhere on messaging, half of those turn into a meeting, and then call it ten to twenty percent of those actually turn into an opportunity. [00:43:34] S2: And if the person doesn't respond, what do you do? Do you just go to a different account, come back later? Do you stick them in some sort of nurture campaign? Or do you go down in the org and you're like, okay, well, you know what, let's find the director levels. Let's find the managers and go after them.
00:43:47 · Sean McCarthy
[00:43:47] S0: We'll go down knowing that we're going to get kicked down to probably that director level or manager level anyways. We will also cross thread there. So we'll go down, contact them and see if we can get some movement there. We won't go to the individual contributor level, we actually have a whole slew of lessons learned on that. So manager kind of being the lowest that we will try to do and then, you know, from there, that's where we do some of the gifting suites where we'll send, maybe champagne or donuts to the warehouse and say like, hey, we just sent you as, you know, something we'd love to talk about ABCD. So that's a possibility. We will also send case studies proactively that are hyper tailored to that customer persona. So it'll just be redacted case study of one of our customers and talk about what they're experiencing, hoping to play off maybe some of the FOMO tactic there. I would say there's no hard set rule that we have to put an opportunity as lost. But if we've reached out seven, eight times, we've tried every angle, and that's seven, eight times, like seven, eight phones, seven, eight emails, seven, eight LinkedIn, and tried back channeling and nothing's working. Then we'll kind of move along there. We are seeing that it does take multiple touches. I mean, again, multiple emails, multiple phone calls, multiple LinkedIn messages before. I can't say the exact name, but I'll tell you that one of the largest beverage manufacturers in the world, it took me eight LinkedIn messages and I think four emails to get the response, to get the opportunity and, you know, I was persistent. I was afraid I was gonna get blocked, but I didn't get blocked, so.
00:45:18 · Pablo Srugo
[00:45:18] S2: There is an element of persistence that is undervalued in the sense that if you're on the receiving end of it, like these people. I mean, they get in pitch things all the time. So actually, probably first impulse on anything, even if it sounds kind of valuable is to absolutely ignore it. If you're reaching out so much, you're either just completely annoying, or maybe you really believe that you can help this person. But you're basically filtering yourself from everybody else just by the sheer persistence and at some point they're like, oh my God, okay, let me read this message. And maybe they're like, you know what? Actually, this is kind of interesting and that's like message number six or seven. Dude, I've been saying this to you, you know, for a long time, but this is what it takes.
00:45:54 · Sean McCarthy, Pablo Srugo
[00:45:54] S0: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I mean, the old SaaS days, I think it was something like it takes seven touches to create an opportunity and in today's world, it's so easy to enroll somebody into an AI sequence and just hammer them on emails. And I'm sure you see it. I know I get hundreds of emails a day and I think, again, kind of going back to the basics is where this goes. And it's hyper personalized messaging. It is not just on one platform. You're sending them emails, you're doing phone calls, and you're doing LinkedIn. You're trying to get creative with maybe, it doesn't have to be a gift, it could be a number of things, finding the commonality. If we do have somebody that works there, even if they are an individual contributor. Maybe trying to get them to bring us up in passing, or say like, hey, we've even done that where we'll send a case study to an individual contributor, just to send up the stack. If we have somebody that we know really well. But yeah, I think that the persistence pays off, and you have to today, especially in the AI era. Where sending out outbound is easier than ever. [00:46:49] S2: And then if you get a first meeting, how do you structure that meeting? Fifty minutes, thirty minutes, an hour? Is it a demo or are you just qualifying? How's it go?
00:46:58 · Sean McCarthy
[00:46:58] S0: So traditionally it's thirty minutes. We kind of go against the grain, I guess, as it relates to running a playbook and doing just discovery, and making sure that you're deeply embedded on that first call. What we find often is that we have to demo on that first call, and really just so that it conceptualizes what we do in, AI and the impact to the customer. Otherwise, they don't quite understand what it is. You can talk a little bit about it, but they need to see it. So we will demo, we'll get a little bit of information. We have a demo that we have a number of demos actually depending on what they tell us is relevant and we'll demo that. And then from there, we'll collect information. Almost always, they're going to bring in more team and so if they do that, we'll try to get more information from them as it relates to what they liked. What was relevant in that demo to you guys and what was not relevant. What are some of those things? And we can make sure and customize that demo a little bit next time for the broader audience. Sometimes they're so excited, they'll offer, we'll offer to sign an NDA. So that they can give us some of that information right off the bat so that the next meeting we have is hyper focused on their use case. But that's traditionally, it's usually thirty minutes, forty five minutes, we do the demo, and then our ask is always to make sure that we have the relevant stakeholders in. That are either going to help us shape the use cases or utilize the product or are going to have that signing authority.