Show full transcript 0:55 What are some signs that your salesperson is not doing a great job? 0:59 The most successful salespeople are not trained salespeople. 1:01 Fastest way to commoditize yourself is to go into some sales script. 1:04 Budget, authority, need, timing. 1:06 Like that should be in the back of your brain. 1:08 You never actually ask those questions. 1:10 What percentage do you think are just doing it wrong? 1:13 90 percent. 1:14 Wow. 1:14 Like it's literally so fun. 1:16 People read these sales books, go to these sales trainings. 1:19 They try and take someone else's game and run with it and never works that way. 1:22 Most people think the sales process is five steps and we're already in step 10 and we're not even 1:28 done. The worst thing you can do in the sales process is... Today my guest is Jen Abel. This is 1:36 her third time on the podcast. For those that don't know Jen, she's co-founder of Jellyfish, 1:41 GM of Enterprise Sales at State Affairs, and most importantly is the person that I've 1:45 learned the most from about the art and science of enterprise sales. In our first 1:49 First conversation, we went deep on founder-led sales. 1:52 In our second conversation, we focused on the $1 million, $10 million enterprise sales 1:56 playbook. 1:57 And in this conversation, we do something I've never seen anyone do on another podcast. 2:02 We go step by step through the full enterprise sales cycle. 2:05 Most people think this is a five-step process. 2:08 It turns out it's closer to 15 steps. 2:10 Most people ignore a bunch of these steps that you'll hear about. 2:13 We go through everything that you need to know at each step to significantly increase 2:16 the odds that you close your deals. 2:18 The episode is incredibly tactical and specific. 2:22 You will learn a ton I did for sure. 2:24 Like I say in the episode, I always get so energized and just excited to sell something 2:29 after talking to Jen, you will feel the same way after this conversation. 2:33 I'm so thankful to Jen for sharing so much alpha with us. 2:36 Before we get into it, don't forget to check out LenysProductPass.com for a free 2:40 year of the hottest and most beautifully crafted AI products in the world, available 2:44 exclusively to Lenys newsletter subscribers. 2:47 with that and bring you Jen Abel. 2:53 Jen, thank you so much for being here. 2:55 Welcome back to the podcast of Very Rare, 2:58 third visit to the podcast, How Does It Feel? 3:01 Round three, super excited to be here, Lenny. 3:04 I'm even more excited. 3:05 So we're gonna do something really unique 3:07 with this conversation. 3:08 I've never done anything like this before. 3:10 We're gonna basically go through 3:13 the enterprise sales life cycle, step by step. 3:17 You'll talk about this, 3:18 But many people think it's like five steps. 3:20 You talk about how there's actually something like 15 steps. 3:22 A lot of people ignore a lot of these steps. 3:24 And the idea is I want to create a very concrete 3:29 and tactical playbook for how to do enterprise sales. 3:33 OK. 3:33 We've had conversations. 3:35 All let's that's the goal. 3:37 Just just suck them all out, make everybody amazing at sales. 3:41 It'll be great. 3:43 And you know, this touches on just like why 3:45 I think the podcast is really helpful to people in just the valley vibe, even though 3:50 you don't live in the valley, just like there's so much win-win-win in helping people learn 3:55 these things. 3:55 You know, it may feel like, why is she giving away all these things? 3:58 But maybe actually, let me ask you that, just like why do you share these things? 4:02 Well, it's so interesting because there's so much art to this that even if you gave 4:06 someone a 15-step playbook, there's so much of a feeling that you have to go off 4:12 of. 4:12 of like sales is one on one, right? 4:15 You're dealing with a variable, 4:17 which is another individual. 4:19 And if you ran the same flow every single time, 4:23 it's gonna probably not hit one out of every four times 4:26 because everyone's different. 4:26 Like some people like to joke, 4:28 some people like the small talk opener, 4:30 others wanna jump right into it. 4:32 Some are technical, some are not technical. 4:35 You know, so everybody's so different 4:36 that even if I gave, 4:37 even as we go through all these 15 steps, 4:39 while it's 80% of it, the other 20% is obviously the art of like how you make someone feel, 4:45 do they feel heard? Did you make it fun? Did you tell a good story? I mean, that's also a huge 4:50 part of this. Too much to cover today, so we'll stick to the road map of like how to close 4:56 these deals. But I think the interesting thing about enterprise sales is even if you're selling 5:02 If you sell a $100,000 solution, it is the same exact process to sell a $1,000,000 solution. 5:14 It's an interesting process because the enterprise organizations are more sensitive to the process 5:22 you take them through from a sales motion than they almost are with demoing the product. 5:28 Amazing. 5:28 Amazing. 5:29 And I'll just give a plug for if people want to continue learning, your Twitter feed is 5:33 just the best. 5:34 Yeah. 5:35 You share all this stuff constantly. 5:36 Yeah. 5:36 And I think you talk about, there's like rational reasons to share this stuff. 5:39 But I think there's, it feels like there's just like, I just need to get this stuff out. 5:42 People need to. 5:42 It's like a diary and it also helps me like keep it in my mind too. 5:46 Right. 5:46 It's like my own education. 5:47 Yeah. 5:48 I know exactly what you mean. 5:49 That's why I started writing. 5:50 I started, I was just like, I just want to remember this stuff myself. 5:52 I'm just going to share it and crystallize it. 5:54 Okay. 5:55 So before we get into the steps. 5:57 Let's set this up. What are some things people should know? What's kind of like the case study? What we're going to be using? 6:03 Yeah, let's use a company like SpaceX, right. Recently, you know, has seen a massive news 6:09 pressings. It, you know, everyone's probably targeting them, right. So it's going to be a hard logo to go in and 6:16 win. They are a technical organization. But I think what we do is target a non technical team. So we're 6:26 going to like really get into like the nuance of this. So let's do SpaceX. Why don't we pick 6:31 legal? Let's have some fun with legal. The interesting thing about legal, it's the largest 6:36 budget line item in the enterprise kind of budget, right? Sometimes three to four times 6:47 other budgets. And it's forever. There's always more money for legal. 6:54 That's why there's some illegal AIS startups, I get it now. 6:57 100%. 6:57 Amazing. 6:59 And I'll just add, the reason I love to have you on this podcast is I've left both of our 7:04 previous conversations so just fired up about selling, I have nothing to sell, but I'm 7:10 always feeling like, I want to sell something now, I feel like I'm learning all these things 7:14 that feel so fun. 7:15 You're a master, you're actually a master at this. 7:18 Sales is marketing, marketing is sales to some extent, right? 7:22 And you do that better than a lot of people. 7:25 I feel like you're using some sales technique on me 7:27 to make me feel good about myself. 7:28 Okay, anything else before we get into step one 7:31 of the sales enterprise? 7:32 No, I think it's just good. 7:34 Sales cycle. 7:34 Space tax and targeting the legal function. 7:37 And then like a hundred K, let's say deal. 7:40 Yeah. 7:40 And to your point, it's the same process, 7:42 whether it's a hundred K, a million. 7:45 And I will add a plug for a previous episode, 7:47 you talk about why you want to be at least 100k something as a deal to be a real enterprise 7:54 company that will survive because the ROI and just the whole economics of that stuff but we won't get 8:01 into that. This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor WorkOS. 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In order for an enterprise deal to move forward, you need to have this extremely compressed 10:37 storyline that lands immediately to the objective that they want to solve for at the organization. 10:44 It has to go beyond just an AI mandate. I think every company today has an AI mandate 10:48 and I know everyone is an AI tool, but what exactly are you solving for them as a problem 10:55 that's one, that's level one, but most importantly the alpha. What does this executive uncover and 11:01 unlock by bringing in a net new tool? Because bringing in a net new tool, okay, is risky. 11:08 No one wants it. So if we're targeting the chief legal officer in the n minus one, 11:15 you get two to three sentences max. Okay, that might be through an email LinkedIn, 11:20 in. That might be through a phone call. That might be through an event or that might 11:26 be through some marketing capability. Most C-level executives don't respond to marketing. 11:32 They might see your brand. They're not going to respond to a marketing campaign. It will 11:36 respond one-on-one. And the best individual to one-on-one to a corporate executive is 11:43 the founder, even if you're a Series B, Series A. The founder should be ecstatic to want 11:51 to get in front of the chief legal officer at SpaceX. 11:55 I think any founder that is building something really meaningful knows the important role 12:01 of that. 12:03 Second is you can get your AE or enterprise sales lead to target the N-1 and you do 12:11 what you call this. 12:12 I call it the pincher model, because you're going after two different people and trying 12:16 to get them together. 12:17 It's actually called the pincer model, which is start at the very, very top, find that 12:21 kind of floor, and work in between them. 12:27 So these are the two layers you want to be targeting in landing that meeting, because 12:33 if you go any further than that, you risk they're not going to be able to communicate 12:39 your storyline. 12:39 It's a game of telephone, and now you're learning from someone that is not near the 12:44 budget or the executive discussions, which is super risky, because now you're learning 12:50 about user value, not executive value, and a $100,000 deal needs a executive sponsor 12:58 to sign off on it, to allocate the budget, and this is why you need to start at these 13:04 two layers only. 13:05 Wow. 13:06 Wow. There's going to be a fractals of questions and things to dig into with each of these steps. 13:10 This was amazing. I love just how specific and tactical you are with all of these things. 13:15 I'm going to try to summarize a couple of these tips, and then I have a follow-up question. 13:19 Okay, so tip one is go after either the exec. So in this case, it'd be general counsel, 13:24 head of legal sort of person, or n minus one. Yeah. Love the way of describing it. 13:28 Maybe a VP. You want to pitch them two or three sentences in like a text or 13:32 email or at a conference, and the keys to focus on the alpha, like the way what your 13:39 product will unlock for them, love that. 13:43 And it sounds like they're still like, here's the problem we sell for you, but here's like 13:46 really the alpha we unlock. 13:48 Correct. 13:48 Because for an executive to bring something in and be the sponsor and like share this 13:53 and disseminate this down their command, they need to stand behind something beyond, 13:59 Hey, we're going to make, we're going to alleviate, you know, the time it takes to do X activity. 14:06 That's not big enough. 14:08 They want like, they're like a founder or two of their own business unit. 14:11 Like you've got to sell the vision. 14:13 And what are these people going to, how are they going to get to the next stage, whether 14:17 with their influence, get more budget, get more people, however they want to define 14:22 that. 14:23 Yeah. 14:24 So it sounds like you don't want to, like they want to win and to win you need 14:28 something unfair. 14:29 They are unfair advantage. 14:30 That's exactly right. 14:31 With your pitch in. 14:32 That's exactly right. 14:33 Okay. 14:34 And then this pincer move, I love this. 14:35 So the idea here is for the exact, say, chief legal officer, general counsel, founder needs 14:40 to reach out. 14:41 And then this AE reaches out to the N minus one contact and you do this, you go from 14:46 both directions. 14:47 And I imagine the goal is one of them at least responds. 14:50 That's correct. 14:50 And then because you're only one step removed, they'll usually loop in that 14:55 next person. 14:55 And or you can say the founder could say hey, I'm gonna loop in my so-and-so colleague who on your team 15:01 should we also include or the 15:03 An enterprise executive could say hey, I'm gonna bring in my founder 15:07 Could we see if your boss might want to be a part of this too? 15:10 it's that parody of 15:13 of 15:15 Kind of rule yeah 15:17 And they might be like wait, I've heard of that. I think I heard that name before exactly got this other email 15:22 Exactly, and I remember okay two questions 15:24 How do you find this N minus one person? 15:27 And it just tricks as they're just sitting on LinkedIn 15:29 kind of figuring it out. 15:30 And then two is any channel recommendations these days? 15:33 Like what's the best way to try to contact these people? 15:35 So I'll use, you can ask, you can spar with open AI 15:38 and Anthropic to like let them do the quick scan of like, 15:41 hey, I'm looking to target the chief legal officer 15:43 of SpaceX and their deputy, 15:46 who are possible people I should be targeting 15:49 and then go off that and do your own gut check 15:51 and search from there. 15:52 But usually they'll give you the the the proper names now. Here's the interesting thing about this 15:57 Everyone is probably also targeting those people 16:01 Okay, and this is why you need to be and we talked about this in other episodes 16:05 It needs to feel so different and it needs to be about alpha 16:08 And if you don't have executive value meaning you cannot get an executive 16:14 Excited by your value proposition, then you probably shouldn't be moving up into the enterprise doing a top-down strategy 16:19 Okay. 16:20 Got it. 16:21 Okay. 16:22 And then in terms of trying to reach out to them. 16:24 Any tips? 16:25 Is it like the tools there to do the figure out their number or whatever? 16:28 They're also unique. 16:29 Cold calling works. 16:32 Again, it depends on the role. 16:33 You're not going to cold call a highly technical person, but a non-technical person. 16:36 It works. 16:38 Email, LinkedIn, Twitter. 16:40 Are there tools to find these emails and things? 16:42 Is there something you recommend? 16:43 Yeah, you can get like, there's a ton of tools that do enrichment. 16:48 I also, like, I'll try like LinkedIn first and say, hey, I shot you a note on LinkedIn. 16:54 I just want to make sure you got it. 16:55 Like, most people don't check that on a daily basis. 16:58 But yeah, I mean, you have like, when lists and all sorts of these enrichment tools that 17:03 can give you the email. 17:04 But I think the number one thing is assume they're getting hit with hundreds of emails. 17:11 How are you going to message your storyline to stand out? 17:14 And that's that's not easy to do and that's really why I think having going back to our first episode 17:20 Why founder let sales is so important to figure that piece out 17:23 So that was my next question is what are some examples of two to three sentences? 17:28 If you have some in your head 17:29 Maybe even from your current job that may you think are good examples of this two to three cents pitch 17:33 Yeah 17:34 I think it comes down to like what is the differentiator to what you're offering not even like what do you do 10x better because to them 17:42 It still sounds like a commodity. 17:44 How are you rethinking the business model? 17:46 How can you help them rethink the way that they're structuring their team? 17:50 We're in this flood-the-zone moment of everyone trying to break into the enterprise. 17:56 And the number one thing that breaks into the enterprise is like, oh, the way I'm modeling 18:00 my business unit, here's how I should be thinking about it in the age of AI. 18:04 And it needs to be different. 18:05 It can't just be like, oh, yeah, we'll help you reduce the number of resources 18:09 here. 18:09 like, no, no, no, like, how are they going to show needle-moving impact to their COO, 18:18 CEO, you know, if they were to bring it to the board meeting, like, what would they say about 18:22 the product? This product will allow me to do what? That's like the litmus test. 18:26 Is this a pitch that you iterate on over time? Yes. 18:28 Because it's probably, you know, you're probably getting some percentage of people 18:31 responding. Yeah. 18:32 So, okay, so the advice is like, keep trying to refine this. 18:34 That's exactly right. 18:35 Awesome. Okay. Anything else on the first reach out before we get to the next step? 18:40 No, I think that's okay. 18:41 Okay, let's do it. I started shaking your head before you said it. 18:43 Okay, super confused. Okay, step two. Step two is basically running the intro call. 18:48 Yes, okay. This is the most important call out of all of them, okay? 18:55 Because you are setting the tone with how they think about you, how they respect you in your role in your craft, 19:03 and the information they will tell you on the first call, 19:07 they will clam up moving forward 19:09 because it starts to feel like a sales process. 19:12 So all of the information edge you can gain 19:17 as a seller is on this first call, okay? 19:20 So keep it, and this is what I like to do. 19:23 Super informal. 19:25 Don't show them anything. 19:26 Don't show them a demo. 19:27 Don't show them slides. 19:29 Don't like focus on them. 19:31 and have a one-on-one dialogue for 30 minutes, okay? 19:35 Now again, if they're bringing in a C-suite executive, 19:37 you better have your founder join that call as well. 19:39 I don't know any founder that wouldn't wanna be in the room 19:41 with a Fortune 100 C-suite executive. 19:44 So make sure you bring in your founder 19:46 if you have that person. 19:47 But let's say you had the N minus one, 19:49 you had like the VP out, okay? 19:52 Like super brief, hey, and this is how it typically open, 19:55 hey, I'm gonna keep this super informal. 19:58 I don't even know if we need a full 30 minutes. 20:00 Put them on the back for like, 20:01 Oh, this person's not trying to take out my time. 20:03 All I would like to do is swap intros, and if it makes sense, we can always get on another 20:07 call and go much, much deeper, but I just want to better understand who you are, and 20:12 I'd love to share what we are doing and why I specifically reached out to you. 20:15 So I say, would you like to go first? 20:17 Always let them go first. 20:19 Give yourself the edge, because if the more information you are receiving before 20:23 you speak, the more you can frame it and tighten it to what they specifically 20:27 care about. 20:28 And they also aren't like sitting there now, listening to a pitch or like, 20:31 Exactly. Now they're talking. Now they're conversing. Now it's like, okay, now it's fun. 20:34 Now this person's not pitching me. I'm in a conversation in a dialogue. Okay. 20:38 So now you're talking to them and they usually do a very brief open. They're like, Hey, 20:43 we didn't get a chance to look up the chief legal officers at SpaceX. Obviously, 20:48 this is just a case. But like whoever that person's name is, 20:51 you know, I oversee the legal team and blah, blah, blah. Okay. Okay. Great. 20:54 They usually don't give you much. So they say, Okay, interesting. Like, 20:57 Like, how are you thinking about, like, do you guys have an AI mandate going on at the 21:03 organization? 21:04 Like, how are you thinking about the existing way you guys are doing work? 21:08 Like, what are you looking for going into 2027? 21:10 Like, is anything need to change? 21:12 Like ask, does anything need to change? 21:14 Because again, what they're going to usually default to is what conversations have happened 21:21 above them and have been transcended down. 21:24 So, the change is usually dictated from the top, which is great. 21:28 So like what needs to change going into 2027 that you did in 2026 or maybe not at all. 21:33 And that's when they start to open up and again, you don't want to be too pointed of 21:38 like anchoring them towards your product because again, the more they speak, you can start 21:43 to like pull on the strings that matter. 21:45 So they could say something along the lines of, you know, I'm making this up at 21:49 this point. 21:50 But we are really looking to figure out 21:52 how to bring more of this work in-house 21:56 and rely less, rely far less on external law firms, right? 22:01 Because now we have more tools and capabilities. 22:03 Be like, okay, like, is there a measurement to that right now? 22:06 Like, how are you guys, like, what does that look like internally 22:09 in terms of if you've done that successfully in 2027? 22:14 And then they'll say, you're trying to understand, like, 22:16 how mature is this thought, right? 22:18 Okay, so now they're going in, and they say they can't really answer that fully, okay. 22:24 Why is that important now? 22:25 Why not wait another year? 22:28 I mean, you guys have so much going on. 22:29 You just had this massive IPO, what's causing the team to want to reshape this or rework 22:36 the way that they're managing internally? 22:39 And that's usually the moment of where they start to really guide you in terms 22:45 of how they want to structure their team. 22:47 So, now you're getting all of this information about where they want to go, right? 22:52 Now when you talk about what you do, now you're the vehicle to get them there, right? 22:59 And so, I try and spend maybe 10 minutes, the back 10 minutes, explaining what we do 23:04 and just keep asking them questions, be like, oh, that's so interesting, like what an exciting 23:08 role to be in? 23:09 Be like, okay, full disclosure, right? 23:11 And by the way, I take a step back to that. 23:13 Do not bring a recorder to this call. 23:17 Do not record the call. 23:19 They will not be open. 23:20 They will not be vulnerable. 23:21 They might assume it's being recorded 23:23 because I think everyone kind of operates 23:24 under that assumption right now, 23:25 but for the benefit of yourself, 23:28 do not have a recorder present. 23:32 Okay, you should be off the record 23:33 between the two of us talking right now 23:36 of what you just shared, like what really matters. 23:40 Like what like or like what do you want to own or like what's the chronological like keep 23:47 digging digging deep because the more you dig the deeper you go the more information they 23:51 give. 23:52 Okay. 23:52 Now you can't sit there and just pepper them with questions. 23:55 This is that that art piece of like how open is this person. 23:58 Some people are poker faces. 24:00 Some people are not. 24:00 You will be able to go much deeper with some and not deeper than other you just 24:03 have to improv. 24:05 But after you now have that intel and you can now understand, okay, here's the frame 24:11 I'm going to take, now you can give them the pitch, okay? 24:15 I will confirm every single conversation I have, the storyline that I tell looks slightly 24:20 different. 24:21 I do not have a scripted pitch or frame for any call because it feels artificial. 24:28 They feel it. 24:29 It feels like you're putting them into a square box. 24:32 The best thing you can do is listen actively and then feel confident enough to craft the 24:40 picture on what they just shared for you. 24:42 That last part seems really hard to adjust and make up like here's what you're focusing 24:47 on and here's our product that's going to solve that problem for you. 24:50 So that's kind of where that art and skill comes in. 24:53 That's right. 24:53 In enterprise sales, it's so, so hard to hire for because the more someone is trained 25:00 in sales, the less natural it feels. I know this is counterintuitive, and we spoke about 25:07 this on another call. The most successful salespeople are not trained salespeople. 25:11 That's why founders are so good at this. They don't give themselves enough credit. 25:16 What are they not good at probably following this process? What are they great at? 25:20 Pulling out information, pulling on strings, getting people excited by a vision. No one 25:25 can do that better than they can. What percentage of the time are you just like, 25:28 Okay, this isn't actually gonna help you that much. So just we'll share we're up to okay. You're nodding that happens one 25:35 I would say two to three out of every four calls. There's someone real 25:40 One one real. Yeah, there's some real one out of every four calls 25:44 I'm like listen based off of the maturity of where you guys are and where we are 25:48 It's too much of a gap like I'd love to revisit this in a year 25:51 like once you guys have a chance to like solve for X Y or Z the 25:56 That's such a great question about the qualification. 25:59 Most people are not going to be qualified, not because necessarily you're talking to 26:02 the wrong person, because if you're an enterprise executive or enterprise account executive, 26:09 your job is to know who to talk to. 26:12 And your job is also to quickly disqualify someone and it's probably one in every four 26:19 calls, simply because of maturity. 26:22 Cool. 26:22 So you don't have to have this like intense pressure to nail it on every call and here's 26:26 the bitch. 26:28 Okay. 26:28 Awesome. 26:29 What I also want to comment on is if this idea of like getting to share a bunch, it may 26:33 feel tricky like you're tricking them to sharing all this, but really they have problems 26:37 they want to solve and you're there to help them solve a problem. 26:41 And so why would they not want to just like, okay, here's what we need help with. 26:45 Here's the problem. 26:45 Here's our priority. 26:46 Their job is to buy solutions to these problems, right? 26:49 That's why they have budgets, right? 26:53 So that's why the fastest way to commoditize yourself is to go into some sales script, 26:59 like budget, authority, need, timing, like that should be in the back of your brain. 27:03 You never actually ask those questions. 27:05 Cool. 27:05 Okay. 27:06 So the core kind of lesson here is focus on learning and extracting their priorities. 27:11 And the reason why I felt as you push them to get more real and really pressure test, 27:18 how big of a deal are these? 27:19 Why is this important? 27:21 Because you want them to ask you those questions because that's when you know you're building 27:24 a relationship. 27:25 I had a client last week say to me, what's the biggest learning your team has had this 27:31 year? 27:31 Every product needs to get better, every product has a bug, every product isn't able 27:36 to do X or Y as well as they said. 27:40 And they're and I'm like that's a really good I'm like that's so funny 27:43 We just had a conversation about that. I she was like thank you for sharing. That's what they just want to know 27:47 You're vulnerable 27:48 Because then it doesn't feel like it feels less like sales. I imagine 27:53 Priorities for a lot of companies these days is saving token costs. I know classically 27:58 You don't want to focus on lowering costs as a sales pitch. This is the cheaper option 28:02 Yeah, that's on if that just comes up a bunch. We just like legal. We just need to save costs. Yeah 28:08 so in 28:09 pricing, their job is to, there's usually going to be two motions. 28:15 I need the lowest cost way to do X because it's low on the totem pole and I really don't 28:20 care. 28:20 If it's 60% of the way there, no one's getting fired over it, I'd rather just say budget. 28:25 Or you're solving a problem that you can charge 250,500K land because it is a high 28:37 high risk, if you're dealing with illegal, there's high risk to it, right? 28:41 Missing information, being delayed on something, not having people understand the importance 28:48 of some new regulation or law, not being buttoned up. 28:57 So I think if every organization looks differently, like marketing needs to produce, marketing 29:04 in sales, it's very clear that numbers drive them. For legal, it's probably they need to 29:11 stomp out risk. Awesome. So yeah, basically this comes back to the idea of alpha and upside. 29:17 The more you can be in that bucket, the more you can charge. That's exactly right. 29:20 Easier everything gets. Okay. Anything else before we get to step three? 29:24 No, I think for step one, that is the most important meeting and I feel like people just 29:30 spend so much time talking about themselves and miss all the competitive advantage to 29:34 win the deal. Yeah, your point about how as a buyer it's so like low pressure at 29:39 that point you're just exploring and so I could see why people come into it like 29:43 cool let's learn let's see if this versus you're in the funnel like oh should I 29:46 get actually make a decision I'm gonna have to let them down if I don't want 29:49 this. Yeah, that's like dating. Yeah, like your openness to share more and start to 29:55 claim up a little bit more but we'll talk about how to make sure that 29:57 doesn't happen too. Amazing. Okay, great. Great for a 30:01 Okay, so step three is writing a follow-up intro call. 30:05 Yes. 30:05 Okay. 30:06 So usually right now, the stages that most people have is intro, demo, proposal, contracting, 30:16 you know, close one or close loss. 30:17 There's five stages. 30:19 They're very basic. 30:20 People usually go from an intro call straight to a demo. 30:23 Okay? 30:24 The demo is your carrot in the process. 30:27 Everyone wants to see this amazing thing you just spoke about. 30:30 So your job is to make sure that when you do that demo, the formal demo, you have the 30:35 right people on the call because if you don't, you lost your leverage to organize that group 30:43 and rally them, but more importantly, you never want it to feel like one person's baby. 30:48 If you're selling to that director or that VP, you need to make sure that that executive 30:52 feels like it's part of their baby and they're helping crafted and they have their 30:55 fingerprints on it. 30:56 And vice versa, like you want the C-suite, 30:59 if they want the actual users to feel like 31:02 that they were bought in on this too. 31:04 Okay, so you wanna make this to be, 31:07 and this is the tricky part. 31:08 You want it to, there's gonna be someone 31:10 that's gonna champion it and get the deal done, 31:14 but you gotta make it feel like a group effort. 31:16 Okay, so the person that you had the intro call with, 31:19 that's who you built the rapport with. 31:21 That's your champion at this point, 31:24 whether it's the C-suite executive 31:25 or one step removed. 31:27 I say champion, most champions are one step removed, 31:30 but let's just say the C-suite executive 31:32 has delegated this now to the champion to navigate. 31:35 Okay. 31:36 For that demo call, now before you do the demo, 31:39 get on another call with them. 31:40 Hey, I had so much fun on our first call. 31:43 I think that there is a great opportunity 31:45 to get to, you know, support you guys. 31:48 This call should be 15 minutes, by the way. 31:50 Okay. 31:51 I'd love to do a demo, but before we do the demo, 31:54 I want to make sure we have the right people in the room, and I'm demoing the right things. 31:58 Can you help me understand from the conversation we had earlier, 32:03 and as I'm walking you through, now I'm walking you through the product, 32:05 what do you think would resonate with the team? Now you're collecting more intel. 32:10 Okay, now it starts to feel like, oh great, now they get to put their fingerprints on this. 32:15 So it's like, okay, when we demo to this group, at this point I want this question to be 32:20 ask, can you ask this question in the meeting? 32:22 Because I want them to understand the values. 32:24 And they'll be like, I'm actually 32:26 going to ask this question because it's going to resonate more. 32:28 So now you're building this demo alongside this internal 32:32 executive, and none of your competitors are doing this. 32:38 No other startup you're competing with 32:40 is taking these extra steps. 32:42 You now have the alpha of the intel 32:45 they're giving you from these conversations. 32:46 us. And now they feel a part of this journey. Okay. Now they trust you. So it's like, okay, 32:53 so now you're spending 15 minutes trying to figure out, okay, or 30, right? Sometimes 32:57 they won't give you that much more time, but ask for 30 is probably do 15 and say, here 33:02 are the five different things we can, we can go into from our first conversation. 33:05 It sounds like these two things matter, but let me show you all five. And then they 33:10 might say, okay, I want you to do those two that we spoke about, but I also want 33:13 you to show this because this is also part of our mandate and this will make it 33:16 feel holistic, okay? 33:18 So now you just mapped out the storyline 33:20 with an internal partner on their end, 33:23 and now you have the names of the right people. 33:25 Now you're gonna, to close that call? 33:28 Great, is there a time we can look at everyone's calendar 33:30 and put this on the calendar? 33:32 Make the meeting an hour. 33:33 The demo should be an hour, okay? 33:37 Now you can ask before this meeting, 33:40 do we wanna do a pre-demo 33:42 to maybe someone else on your team 33:44 that would be excited by this before you race to the group demo, or should we just do the 33:50 group demo? 33:50 Like they know their organization better than anyone else and like how pressing this need 33:54 is. 33:54 Now, if they're less mature in knowing if they want something like this, they probably want 33:59 to bring in someone else before the big group. 34:01 If they're like, no, no, no, this is something we want to, you know, really move into, 34:06 they probably are ready to go into a group. 34:08 So you just need to figure out where they are on that maturity arc of their decision. 34:11 Okay. 34:11 Yeah. So now you have, do we want to go into pre-demo, do we want to assume they checked 34:16 off pre-demo or do we want to do group demo? 34:18 How often does that pre-demo happen? 34:20 If you're, I mean, I try and push for it because again, it's just more intel. 34:24 Yeah. So let's say, let's assume there's a pre-demo. 34:26 Okay. So now you have a new colleague on the phone and you could say, hey, I'm going 34:31 to, for five minutes, I was going to catch you up on the things that I just learned 34:35 from so-and-so. What can you add to that? What do you think? Do you see how you're 34:41 collecting more and more intel along the way. So now you're building the business case for them. 34:46 Now they feel like they're buying, not being sold to. Okay, so now you have two or three people 34:52 at this point already excited for the big group demo. The worst thing you can do in the sales 34:59 process when you move into demo is just go into one straight demo with no prep. Or worse, 35:05 a enterprise organization might reach out to you because they're going through 35:09 a due diligence process to say, hey, we'd love to see what you guys had built. 35:13 Will you present this to four or five people? 35:15 Don't do it. 35:16 You're either a checkbox and you don't want, you want to remove yourself from being 35:20 a checkbox or two, you're about to demo your product with no competitive intel. 35:28 Like you just lost the deal at that point. 35:32 Enterprise deals are one on this feels so close to who we are. 35:37 It feels like it was built specifically for me. 35:39 That's the whole game. 35:41 Amazing. 35:42 I love how just how much alpha, not only you're sharing with us, it feels like the theme of 35:48 this is alpha, just like the alpha we're getting from this conversation. 35:51 It also feels like a lot of this process is you getting alpha from the team. 35:56 I don't know if alpha is the right word, but let's just say it. 35:57 No, it is. 35:58 It's information edge. 35:58 Yeah. 35:59 It's the information edge that whoever I'm up against is not getting. 36:02 And you have to assume in the enterprise, you're always up against something. 36:06 You're up against not doing anything at all, or you're up against a competitor 36:09 who does some, or an incumbent, right, most likely the incumbent, but it's so crazy to 36:15 me how many people just like spew out a pitch with like no, you also have to make it informal 36:22 and fun like you need to, you know, people also buy from people they like, right? 36:29 I love how so far at least it feels very doable, not that difficult, feels like I could do 36:35 this, and it doesn't feel like it takes that much time 36:39 to do any of these steps so far. 36:40 It's like a call, learn some stuff, think about it. 36:44 Is there any like time buckets that aren't obvious 36:48 of like where you spend like a bunch of time 36:49 on your own thinking about something? 36:51 Yeah, so I will, I spend so much time thinking about 36:55 what, reading between the lines of what they were saying. 36:58 And that's when I will follow up, 37:00 Like those kind of pre-run calls before a big demo, 37:06 like I'm asked, I'm clarifying all those questions. 37:08 Like, hey, I know you said this, 37:10 like did I interpret that correctly? 37:12 Like is that the priority? 37:14 Like, and then again, they'll go deeper. 37:16 Like the more you infer the questions you ask, 37:20 it's almost like you just have to keep prompting. 37:22 It's like prompting humans at this point, right? 37:25 Like go deeper and deeper and deeper 37:27 and the answers you're gonna get 37:29 are just going to get so much more refined, the whole game is to slow down to go fast. 37:36 All of this should be within a 90-day sales cycle based off of their maturity. 37:41 Some people listening this may sound like a lot of work. 37:44 I imagine that this is what separates companies and products that win deals versus not. 37:51 You could have a better product, you could have a better price, a lot of things, but 37:55 but just not executing in this way through the sales process is probably shooting yourself 37:59 in the foot. 38:00 Or you're stuck at, you just sold the enterprise on a $15,000 solution, which goes, how do you 38:06 expand that? 38:07 The whole game is expansion. 38:08 If you're not going from 100K or 250K to 350 or 500 the following year, it's not 38:16 an enterprise motion. 38:17 Okay. 38:17 So just to kind of quickly summarize, we're at step one, landing the meeting, then 38:22 Then running the intro call, then there's this follow-up intro call, which you pointed 38:26 out is often ignored and a big opportunity to improve the demo. 38:31 I love the way to describe the demo, it's kind of this carrot that you're holding that 38:33 you can use a little bit to kind of extract more. 38:36 And then there's step four is prepping the pitch and framing the demo. 38:41 Is there more to share there? 38:42 No, I think we're at the point where it's like, okay, now you're running a big 38:46 demo. 38:46 Okay, cool. 38:47 So now you have all of the people involved in the demo. 38:52 You might have somebody that's involved from their AI team that's 38:55 going to support some rollout. 38:58 You might have somebody like you want all of the people involved in 39:01 this decision at that table for the demo. 39:05 That's how important it is to not rush it. 39:07 Okay. 39:08 So now you're running the demo. 39:09 Now you're, before that demo on that, on one of those calls, who are all 39:13 these people, what do they care about and what should I avoid? 39:19 The person that you've now built this relationship with can give you all of the intel. 39:25 At this point, they want this to go forward. 39:27 Now this is like a great star for them of like, I found this amazing tool. 39:32 It's going to solve our problems. 39:34 And now I get to put my name on it alongside one or two other people. 39:39 So for that demo, just make sure you know exactly who's involved, 39:43 what these people care about, and what does this success demo look like for them. 39:46 I just ask them, be like, hey, people do demos all the time, like what looks good, 30 minutes 39:52 of a discussion, maybe 10 minutes of showing, 10 minutes of discussion, 40 minutes of in 39:56 the product. 39:57 Like what do you tell me like what the organization likes? 40:01 And on that demo, there's going to be people that were not a part of any of these calls. 40:07 Okay? 40:07 Your job is to take a step back and restart with here's who we are. 40:12 Here's why we are doing what we are doing and it's fully in their frame. 40:16 You now have all the context to put this in their frame. 40:18 So now for these net new people, they're like, 40:20 holy shit, this was built for us. 40:22 Sorry for my French. 40:24 Now they're like leaning and being like, okay, all right, somebody, 40:28 this is very aligned with what we need. 40:30 Because they have no idea you've talked to all these people. 40:32 No idea you talked to all these people. 40:33 Learn what their challenges are in Paris. 40:35 You're like, they're leaning and being like, this feels different. 40:38 Now, this is also the whole part of like, it's being different. 40:41 Not only is your product different, not only is your pitch different, 40:44 I mean, the way you're going through the sales process is different. 40:48 So it's like, wow, these guys are good. 40:49 Okay. 40:50 All right. 40:51 These, so now you can see, you know, let them talk, let these net new people talk. 40:55 Be like, Hey, I know you, I know we haven't had a chance to speak like, 40:58 what do you want to get out of the demo today? 40:59 I want to make sure I focus for you. 41:01 Now you're leaning a little bit more into these net new people. 41:03 So they feel the love. 41:04 Okay. 41:05 And then when you demo the product, 80% of the value comes from 20% of 41:10 the product. And you have learned on these previous calls, what that 20% is. Do not demo 41:20 everything unless there is some reason to. Because now all of a sudden this tight frame, 41:26 this tight narrative you've just crafted and spent all this time with just gets thrown 41:30 out the door because it's like, oh, well, I wouldn't use that. I wouldn't use that. 41:34 Well, everything she just shared, that's really only over here. And you could just 41:38 blow the whole thing out. 41:39 And the amount of times enterprises are like, 41:42 hey, I don't know if we want to spend this much money 41:46 for half the tool that we wouldn't use half the tool. 41:49 Now all of a sudden, you just unraveled 41:50 all the work you've just done. 41:53 Enterprise sales is super, super, super tight 41:56 project management and super, super tight narratives 41:59 and framing, owning that frame. 42:02 Owning that frame to exactly who these people are. 42:06 And that's why this role is so hard, okay, because it's a lot of improv and it's a lot 42:11 of leaning in and it's a lot of reading in between the lines, but like it's stuff that 42:19 is doable. 42:21 I mean, it's just psychology. 42:22 This episode is brought to you by Mercury, radically different banking loved by over 42:27 300,000 entrepreneurs and now with command. 42:31 I've been a customer of Mercury's for over six years. 42:33 I have never once thought about leaving. 42:35 Merk theory is basically what happens when banking is built by product people, not by 42:40 bankers. 42:41 They make it so easy, dare I say fun? 42:44 To send invoices, move money around, set up virtual cards for folks on my team. 42:49 Does your bank have an API, a terminal native CLI, or an AI-ready MCP server? 42:55 I don't think so. 42:56 And just recently they launched Command, a conversational interface built directly 43:01 into Mercury, which acts as your financial operator. 43:04 I've been using command to transfer money around to figure out what categories I've 43:08 been spending the most money in, analyze my cash flows, and just today I used it to find 43:13 out how much I've made from a specific sponsor over the past year. 43:16 I just ask, how much have I made from X over the past year? 43:20 10 seconds later, I have an answer. 43:21 It is so freaking cool. 43:23 Visit mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes. 43:27 Mercury is a fintech company not an FDIC insured bank. 43:30 Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column NA members FDIC. 43:35 How to deal with someone that's just kind of taking things off track or just talking 43:39 too long. 43:40 I imagine that's just like a skill and an art, but just any tips there. 43:43 The good news is, is that most senior people, like the people that you're doing your 43:49 outreach to, it's very hard to get to that title if you're like verbose and long-winded 43:55 and like take things off track. 43:57 So that's the good thing about being going after executives is those people are like really dialed in 44:03 Like no one takes a meeting off track at an executive level 44:06 Now of course, there's sometimes where there's people that meander you could say I love this conversation 44:11 Can we park it because I actually want to spend another call just dedicated to that? 44:17 And if that if that if that needs to happen, then of course you can run with that awesome 44:21 So there's kind of two people that might be leading this might be the founder 44:24 if you're still doing federal-led sales, could be the AE, VP of sales. 44:29 VP of sales. 44:30 Yep. 44:30 Okay. 44:31 Say you're not the founder and you're the VP of sales or an AE leading this. 44:37 As a founder, what are some signs that your salesperson is not doing a great job up 44:43 to this point? 44:44 What are just like smells of like, hmm, I should really take this person? 44:47 I would say like, what is the timeline from intro called the demo? 44:51 Now, how many conversations have happened between those two buckets of when people advanced 45:01 stages in the sales pipeline? 45:03 Can the salesperson articulate exactly what they are going to be demoing, why they're 45:08 going to be demoing it, and how they're going to open it? 45:11 The demo looks different every single time. 45:15 Every single time. 45:17 I don't think I've ever run a demo and it looks the same. 45:19 This is like when everyone comes back to like, okay, what's the scaled playbook? 45:24 What's the scaled approach with this? 45:26 When you're selling $100,000 minimum, right? 45:30 Again, it's the same effort as selling a million dollars. 45:32 So it could be selling a million dollar deal. 45:35 It is, it's hard. 45:37 You're cracking some of the largest logos that every single startup goes after. 45:43 You've got to be different. 45:45 You've got to take a different approach. 45:46 It is not cram the pitch down their throat and hope that they want to buy something. 45:52 It feels like a job AI will not replace any type of student from here. 45:56 No. 45:56 Yeah. 45:56 I do not. 45:57 I'm not worried about AI replaced because there's so much about it. 46:01 That's just human. 46:02 Right? 46:03 Like, do you vibe with this person? 46:05 I mean, I've definitely taken intro calls with a person probably did not appreciate 46:10 with how I ran it. 46:11 And that's okay. 46:11 It was just, that happens. 46:14 It's such a point I've never heard before this idea of when you're demoing, demo kind 46:20 of as narrow a slice of the product as you can that addresses their priorities and needs 46:25 because to your point, they may feel like, why do we need all this stuff? 46:28 We just want this one problem and that's shooting yourself in the foot. 46:31 Or let them guide you like, can it also do this? 46:34 You'd be like, oh, it's so funny. 46:35 You say that we just released this and now all of a sudden it feels like it's 46:38 again built for them. 46:39 They want to feel like it was built for them and that it's different. 46:44 And they get alpha. 46:45 And get alpha. 46:45 Okay. 46:47 So, step six, you call the post-demo discussion. 46:50 Yes. 46:51 Also, something you say everyone ignores. 46:53 Yes. 46:53 Talk about that. 46:54 Okay. 46:55 So, as soon as the demo closes, you are texting the woman or the gentleman or whomever 47:01 that has helped guide you to this point. 47:03 How do you think that went? 47:05 Can we grab, can I call you in like five minutes? 47:07 I just want like a fresh debrief. 47:10 They will give you a raw reaction, I know you haven't spoken to anyone. 47:13 What do you think? 47:14 How do you think that went? 47:15 Do you think we need to go deeper with anyone? 47:18 Before anyone solidifies kind of everything that's said, like, where do you think we 47:24 lost somebody? 47:25 Where do you think we did well? 47:27 Is there someone we need to spend more time with? 47:32 There's always someone in the organization that's going to kill a deal. 47:35 There's always somebody. 47:38 You need to protect that as much as possible and make sure everyone is aligned and excited 47:44 by what this is. 47:46 And again, the more intel you collect on these people. 47:49 Because again, if for some reason someone goes quiet for two weeks or three weeks, 47:54 you can now prompt with, hey, I know you guys are still in the process of thinking 48:00 through if this makes sense. 48:02 Do you think it's worthy if I found 15 or 20 minutes with said individual? 48:06 to just like hear their thoughts and and maybe we can and maybe we can approach 48:13 this a little bit more closely with how they would want to see it. 48:16 So just always looking for ways this might explode a network and and this 48:20 person that you're working with would you call them what was the term used for 48:24 them? Champion. The champion. Yeah. The champion can also be an executive, right? 48:29 Yeah. And they may and they're like excited at this point in theory very 48:34 excited for this to work out. Like they're on your side. They're not trying to. 48:38 And I define champion is who's the individual that really wants this to come to life. That's like 48:42 was there from day one? Not necessarily like the person that's like the C-suite executive could 48:49 be the one shepherding this well, but they need to make sure that the people below them are 48:52 brought in. Okay. Anything else around the demo or the post demo discussion before we move 48:57 on to the next? No, I think we're good. Okay. So the next step you call identifying 49:04 The best thing you can do, assuming that you've built an incredible solution, right? 49:09 If you're now this far in, right, you usually have something that they allow them. 49:15 Now you can control the time on above. 49:18 Hey, I want you guys to go in for two to three days, these specific users, do not 49:24 put your C-level executive into the product, they're not the user. 49:26 Who are the users of this? 49:28 I want them to experience the magic 49:30 and the power of what this is. 49:33 Okay, you could charge them for a pilot 49:35 if it's an extended period of time, 49:37 but I'd rather forego the money 49:39 and do a two to three day pilot 49:41 so that at least I can control the sale cycle a bit more. 49:44 Okay, but again, if they ask for a month 49:46 and there's a good reason for it, do charge for that. 49:49 But I'd rather go in for two to three days 49:52 and let them see if they can get the value from it. 49:54 If they can, sometimes I understand 49:56 that there needs to be some level of configuration and extensive onboarding that needs to happen. 50:01 But is there a sandbox where they can assess the value, even if it's not on their own data? 50:07 So this isn't yet the pilot. This is just like prepping for the actual pilot. 50:10 Correct. So there's two different pilots you can run. A pilot that does not require 50:14 their data to be in the product to get the value or a pilot that you want to charge for 50:20 because they need to see some level of like integration on their end for the whole product 50:26 to actually work. Like I understand that those are two very technical things. Let's talk about 50:31 something that they can get in two to three days and it's pretty much of a light left. 50:37 Time box it to two or three days. Don't make it two weeks. I've done this enough times to say 50:42 people will go in usually for half a day and get what they need out of it. Shorten your 50:47 sale cycle by two weeks, by doing 48 or 72 hours. Now, if you need something a bit more 50:52 integrated and it's a far more technical solution, what I'd highly recommend is do it for a month 51:00 or two months, charge them for it, and then use that fee that you charge them for and credit 51:05 it back to them if they move forward. Okay? If they're willing to pay, that is a huge, 51:12 huge signal, especially if you're about to put in all this work. They have no problem 51:16 and paying for it is usually probably going to come out as services anyway because they're 51:21 not buying technology, they're buying the services to go through it. 51:24 And also, make it a credit on the back end. 51:28 Start the relationship off on a good foot. 51:32 I'm definitely feeling the feeling I feel when we chat is like, I just want to find 51:36 something to sell. 51:36 Yeah. 51:38 It's fun. 51:38 It's so fun. 51:39 Yeah. 51:40 Like it's literally so fun. 51:41 people, I think people read these sales books, go to these sales trainings, and they try 51:47 and take someone else's game and run with it and never works that way. 51:52 Like no one taught me this. 51:53 I was just like, okay, if I collect more intel than the competitive set, that will be my 51:58 special sauce. 51:59 And it's like more fun that way. 52:01 You're building a relationship more, chatting more often. 52:04 You're not trying to just like, it feels more real. 52:07 Yeah. 52:08 Okay. 52:09 A couple of questions here. 52:09 One is this idea of the two to three day pilot. 52:12 How do you convince them you only get two to three days because that feels tough? 52:16 So I would say here, this is what we typically do. 52:18 Who are the three or four people we want to put in and assess the, assess the value 52:22 from a user perspective? 52:24 Okay. 52:24 Make sure it's your person, right, assuming that it's not, or the person closest to 52:30 the seat. 52:30 Don't put your C-suite executive in it. 52:32 They're not going to, they're not going to go into the product. 52:33 And then two or three other people. 52:35 Okay. 52:36 And I want you to say, we're going to do two or three days. 52:39 I'm going to onboard you each differently. 52:40 We're going to do two or three different, like onboard sessions before those two or 52:44 three days, and I want you to go in and I want you to do these three specific tasks. 52:49 Be very, very thoughtful and explicit and descriptive with what you want them to do. 52:56 Okay, here's how we're going to measure success. 52:59 Define that with them. 53:01 Define that with the co-author that. 53:03 And that's no different than the thing that's a little bit longer where you 53:07 require that integration and build out, co-author it with them. 53:12 What does success look like? 53:13 What are the specific things they should be doing? 53:15 They should not just be logging in and meandering. 53:19 That puts the work back on them. 53:22 Your job in sales is to take all the work off their plate, 99% of it. 53:27 And help them discover the magic release. 53:29 Help them discover the magic and also continue to, you might have one 53:33 of those users that's like, oh, I didn't like it. 53:34 Great. In that three-stage process, you just, what didn't you like? What wasn't clear? What wasn't obvious? 53:41 Where did you get lost? The tighter it is, the less people get lost, the more 53:47 grounded it feels, and 53:49 the more consistent the experience is. You don't want people having different experiences. 53:53 Okay, so just to make it clear the steps involved here, because we've gone through, I think, three kind of around the same. 53:58 We've gone through so much. Yeah, we've gone through so much. So we're kind of on step nine. 54:02 So there's a step seven which is identifying the pilot move forward process a lot of people ignore 54:07 just like yep who that person is and what the steps are then there's prep for the pilot and then 54:11 there's run the pilot run the pilot exactly we kind of talk through all these things now 54:15 is there anything else along yeah for prep for the pilot the one thing I want to say is okay 54:18 before we put everyone in let's work backwards of if this is successful how do we get this deal 54:27 through okay ahead of time before doing that yes ahead of it um I should have clarified 54:33 have it. This is all before the people's pilot start. This is in the pre-pilot stage. Okay. 54:38 Assuming fingers crossed a successful pilot, which I feel confident is going to be, 54:44 one is, when do we want to get signatures on these papers? Let's work backwards from there. 54:49 Do we think we can get this closed by the end of next month? 54:53 Yes, I do. Great. Who needs to be involved in that? Like, do you have a procurement lead 54:58 that we should be educated in this process? And they might say, let's wait till after the 55:02 Probably totally, but like push them a little bit. 55:04 Again, you're project managing it. 55:06 Is there a security lead we should be working with 55:08 to run due diligence on the product? 55:11 Is there someone illegal 55:12 or is there a way for me to draft the paper 55:15 to make this make sense? 55:17 Now, the one thing I'm gonna take a step back on 55:19 is you would have already gone through pricing discussions 55:22 with them post demo, okay? 55:26 Try to hold out on talking about pricing 55:28 until post demo because you might, 55:31 they might assume, oh, this is three times what I'm spending 55:34 and not know why it's three times. 55:37 Right, because there's all these other people 55:38 that might not have been involved 55:39 in those initial discussions. 55:41 Talk through pricing, post-pilot, 55:42 once everyone's excited. 55:43 Post-pilot or post-demo? 55:45 Right, post-demo, I apologize. 55:46 Okay, cool. 55:46 So you basically just kind of tell them, 55:49 let's, we'll figure out pricing 55:50 once we understand what you're looking for. 55:52 This isn't a pre-pilot stage, 55:54 talk about pricing, okay? 55:56 Now, if they're this far along, 55:58 if they're really concerned about pricing, 56:00 they would have brought it up by now. So these are like the little cues like, okay, I think I 56:04 could probably push them a little bit here. Or go a little bit further. Two is if they ask and 56:12 they push, give them a ballpark. Well, it depends, but let's say it's somewhere between 150 and 250, 56:16 and there's a lot of dependence on that. So you can give them a ballpark, 56:21 but work with your champion and say, listen, here's what the price is. 56:27 I know you know why we price it this way, where... 56:31 Before you put this in front of anybody, how are you going to make the case, right? 56:39 Like, where are you going to cut? 56:41 How are you going to defend it? 56:43 How can I build out a slide to defend this for you and show you the ROI? 56:49 Let them... 56:49 They will tell you. 56:51 You don't have to go blind into it. 56:53 And then if they... 56:55 Okay. And if they push back and they're like, listen, I don't know if I can go to bat for 56:58 this, be like, I hear you. Let's work on this together. What do you feel comfortable going 57:04 to bat with? And can we do a step up for year two to get to the actual full value of what 57:09 we know we charge? 57:10 And do you include the slide or the price in the demo or is that like a post demo 57:14 conversation? 57:15 If they push you to do it, give a ballpark. But do pricing one-on-one with the individual 57:21 you've been working with? Because they might say, okay, I think we're all aligned. This is what's 57:28 usually going to happen. There's three answers. We're all aligned. I'm not too concerned about this. 57:33 I don't know if I feel comfortable going to bat with this number. 57:37 That's when you say, okay, I hear you. Let's take a step back. Let's figure out how to make 57:41 this work. Don't say you're going to discount. Don't throw out numbers. Be like, I need your 57:50 helped to tell me how to make this work. Now, this is the one part where you want to put it on them 57:55 because they might come back and say, is there any way we can cut 20k? And you're like, oh, 58:00 I would have gotten much lower than that, right? You don't want to negotiate with yourself. 58:04 But work with them. You've gotten to this point, you've shown so many people, everyone's 58:08 excited. This is when you know you can win them over through the co-authorship. 58:14 Yep. 58:15 And remember, you can always do the full value in year two and sign a two-year deal. 58:21 Awesome. 58:21 They expand. 58:23 Okay. 58:24 So in the pilot step, how many people do you give access to the pilot and any advice 58:29 there? 58:30 Three. 58:31 Three to four. 58:32 Okay. 58:32 So very small. 58:33 Very small. 58:34 Very tight. 58:34 Who are the power users? 58:35 Who are the people that are going to be on a daily level? 58:37 You don't want everyone in there. 58:39 You want it to feel like they're buying into it too, not like the same people 58:42 and the same. 58:43 But you do want that one individual that's been giving you all this intel to be part of 58:47 the pilot because you want them to get you prepped for everything. 58:52 So before we get to the next step, which is post-pilot discussion and session, I mentioned 58:57 many products, especially today, just take a lot of integration work and data ingestion 59:02 and all that stuff, this whole FDE emergence, thoughts there if your product is just 59:10 like, wow, it's going to take us a month to even get you onboarded. 59:12 And that's when we talked about those two different pilots, there's like, hey, we can 59:16 show you the value in two to three days, or it's the, hey, we have to show you the value 59:20 in 30 days for the 30 day value charge and credit it back to them, but know that your 59:27 sale cycle is going to probably be a month longer because of that. 59:30 But that's okay because you're probably charging more anyway. 59:33 Got it. 59:33 And just do the work to like integrate enough to make it magical. 59:36 Your price should be predicated on your sale cycle, right? 59:39 Like if you can get a deal done in 90 days for 100K, do that all the time. 59:43 If it takes nine months to get a deal done, you probably should be charging 250-300k. 59:48 What are your thoughts on four-deployed engineers as a part of this process, just as a role? 59:52 My opinion sway back and forth, like, is a four-deployed engineer there because the 59:56 product's super hard to navigate? 60:00 Or is it there because you're taking the work off their plate? 60:05 I think people use them—I'm all about it if it's taking the work off their 60:09 plate and accelerating and controlling the situation all day, every day. 60:13 But is it are you using a flower deployed engineer because your product is so gnarly and hard to hard to do like they can't do it on their own. 60:22 It's a bad sign. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like like the original idea for deployed engineer and the Palantir guys talk about this like the original idea was they work at a company inside of your company building custom software for you to solve your problems and then they figure out how to make that a broad product they can sell to other people. 60:41 Total. And I think that FDE is great for an expansion for a land on it. Okay. 60:48 If you're talking about like a Palantir where it's much more complex to like, 60:53 like I understand why they did that. Right. 60:55 But they're also charging multi-million dollar deals. That's right. Right. 60:58 So like the, the, the business model structure supports that. 61:01 If you're selling a hundred thousand dollar deal and you're pulling a four deploy, 61:04 like your economics are, it's going to get messy. 61:08 Just like you will not make money if you have a full time engineer salesperson sitting there working on this 61:13 Yeah, you know, I think I also know like there's a lot of folks in like account management 61:18 Who's job is to service and and up you know expand and upsell and they just take on the title left FD 61:23 So they just another salesperson. Yeah, just a nice. Yeah, it's a cool title 61:26 I think the counter people called FDs at most companies sparkling sales engineers. That's awesome. Yeah 61:34 Okay. Anything else on the pilot up to the pilot step before we get to the post pilot session? 61:40 Yeah, I think because now you've talked about like the timeline to if this is successful, 61:45 what does that look like? Again, you want to run this before you put everyone in it 61:49 because you might want to push out the pilot. If they're like, hey, listen, 61:51 this is probably going to be another quarter. We'll put the people in the pilot now because 61:55 now you've lost all the, you need the momentum to continue and you need the steps to happen. 61:59 And so use that, hey, if this is a successful pilot, how far out are we from like a commitment 62:04 from you guys? 62:05 Oh, I see commitment. 62:06 So there's like the commitment and also just, which is equivalent to rolling it out to the 62:10 company. 62:10 That's exactly right. 62:11 If they're not ready in a month to roll this out, if this is a huge success, then 62:14 weight undoing pilot. 62:16 Correct. 62:16 Yeah. 62:17 Awesome. 62:17 Because you're saying you may lose that momentum. 62:20 Yeah. 62:20 You've already exhausted all the stages. 62:24 You don't want to do that. 62:25 You want the stages to align with how they're thinking, 62:28 but you want a project management as tightly as you can. 62:31 And some of it's out of your control, but yeah. 62:33 And yeah, it's not like you can push them 62:35 to deploy it broadly. 62:37 That's like a thing that it's probably very hard to shift. 62:41 So yeah, so understanding that and working with that 62:44 seems really important. 62:45 Okay, so step 10. 62:46 And again, as you pointed out at the beginning, 62:48 most people think the sales process is five steps 62:52 and we're already in step 10. 62:53 Man, we're not even done. 62:55 And you made this point actually before we started recording 62:57 that you haven't touched on, 62:58 that I think is important to share this idea 63:00 of that these five steps kind of emerged 63:02 out of like a CRM pipeline kind of check thing. 63:04 Talk a bit about that. 63:05 Yeah, so everyone knows the traditional five steps, 63:08 intro, demo, proposal, contracting, 63:13 and then like close one or close loss, right? 63:16 Those are like the typical, 63:18 maybe there's like some variation of that. 63:21 Like that's not how you run the sales. 63:22 those are buckets to understand how to understand a weighted forecast, right? 63:29 Like a proposal or something mid funnel might be weighted at 50% of the deal 63:35 value for the, for the, for the pipeline. Something in contracting might be weighted 63:40 at 80% and something in intro might be weighted at 10%. That's what those stages 63:44 are for. That's not the stages you take a client through. Like those are 63:47 just the broad buckets. 63:50 And I think a lot of people use those buckets to say, okay, there's about five different 63:54 meetings that need to happen. 63:56 When it's like, no, there's like three meetings, maybe up to five meetings in each of those 64:00 buckets that are critical to get the deal done. 64:04 Now, we're still speaking at it at a very macro level, like, you know, obviously selling 64:08 a million dollar deal, you want to have more of those upfront meetings. 64:12 And you want to make sure you know who the executive sponsor is and all that. 64:15 You always want to know who the executive sponsor is, but like for 100k deal, you probably 64:18 can accelerate it a little faster, again, ensuring that they're qualified. 64:22 And they've worked with a lot of founders and salespeople over the years. 64:26 What percentage do you think are just doing it wrong in that way and treating it like 64:31 this five-step process? 64:33 90%. 64:34 Wow. 64:35 Yeah. 64:36 Because enterprise sales, it's mirroring their buying process. 64:42 process. It's trying to control their buying process. It's not plopping these people into 64:47 your sales process. 64:48 Amazing. 64:49 Yeah. 64:49 Okay. Let's keep you on. Step 10, post-pilot session. 64:53 Yes. You can send a survey. They might want to send a survey. Get the intel. Or one 65:01 on one to each of these users and say, hey, or let your champion... I mean, there's 65:05 a few ways you can do this. Or you can have your champion internally discussed 65:08 and say, Hey, how was that? Okay. You need to make sure that you are mirroring their experience, 65:15 right? From a technical perspective, like how much time did they spend in the product? 65:19 Did they run into any bugs? What were they using the most of? Because you need to be prepared of 65:25 like going into that call to say, Hey, I know we gave everyone those three things, 65:31 but most people only spent it on two. Why? And that may be okay, but like you don't 65:37 want them to be like oh well you know we wish it did this well yeah but no one spent time on that 65:41 we do do that but no one spent time on that so you just need to control also that you're capturing 65:47 what they did in those pilots and making sure that you're syncing up or you could go to your 65:54 champion and be like hey I know so-and-so logged in for like 15 minutes today they didn't get past 66:00 step one don't tell them what they're doing you shouldn't even be that but like they didn't 66:04 get past step one do you want it can you check in on them and making sure like they're having 66:08 a good experience. Like use your champion to like, again, they've invested so much time into you, 66:15 guide them with where they should be focused as well. Because at the end of the day, 66:20 getting a deal done at the enterprise, it is set up to have as much friction as possible, right? 66:27 There's a people that will kill the deal, then you got to deal with procurement, 66:30 then you got to deal with legal, then you got to deal with finding the executive sponsor, 66:33 right? Which usually comes in the very top of the funnel, but there's so much friction to 66:38 get a deal done, the project management and the individual on the inside, that's your 66:43 key. 66:44 So funny. 66:45 So many ways that could all fall apart. 66:47 Yeah. 66:49 What I was going to say is it feels like many people would naturally, like they don't want 66:54 to, they want to avoid confrontation. 66:55 They won't want to say this is not going to be, we don't want this. 66:59 They're going to probably be like, it's fine, it's good. 67:02 Oh yeah. 67:02 Everything's great. 67:02 Just like DCs. 67:04 That's right. 67:05 That's right. 67:05 And so it feels like a lot of this process is to like pull out. 67:10 Okay. Here's the concern. Here's the problem. 67:12 Are there any other signs of like, okay, they're actually not interested in like, this is not going well and I need to really. 67:18 This is why your internal champion is so important. When they go quiet on you, that's when you know. 67:23 That's why this individual, and listen, this individual is going to do you, if they've spent enough time with you, 67:28 they will call you and be like, listen, if I'm reading the tea leaves, we should sit on this for a minute. 67:33 Let's re-pick this back up. 67:35 That's why having someone on the inside is so, so, so critical. 67:39 And yeah, these are your approaches just to stop responding and just hope that the sales 67:44 person understands. 67:45 That's right. 67:45 A little not excited. 67:47 Oh man. 67:48 Okay. 67:49 What are like the benchmarks for like how often you get through each of these stages? 67:53 You mentioned like a few just like, yeah, from demo to the stage. 67:57 Usually once something is qualified, meaning you're speaking to the right person, they 68:02 They are excited by the alpha, they admit that there's change that needs to happen. 68:07 Notice I didn't say problem, but change. 68:09 People get so fixated on problems, which are important. 68:13 They are important, but everyone speaks to the same problem and it commoditizes you, 68:17 which is why I don't like to overly emphasize it. 68:20 The win rate for enterprise, a good healthy win rate is actually probably going to 68:25 surprise you. 68:25 It's not 50%, meaning of all sales qualified leads or opportunities, a healthy win rate 68:34 is usually around 30% to 35%. 68:37 From qualified lead to signed contract. 68:41 Meaning you speak to a hundred, you're closing anywhere between 30% to 35%, maybe slightly 68:48 less, maybe 25% to 30%, that seems high actually, yeah, 25%, somewhere between 25% to 35%. 68:54 Why? If your win rate is higher than that, your price is too low. 69:03 There's a lot of part of the market that's just not an immaturity perspective to take you on, 69:08 and that's healthy. Those are all the chasms. 69:12 And the implication here is it's better off keeping your price high than winning more often. 69:15 Yes, because the market talks too. The worst thing you can do is charge somebody's friend 50 69:21 and somebody else 500k. They talk. People, the market talks. You have to assume that. 69:27 Yeah, I'm in a lot of WhatsApp groups with founders and they do exactly that. 69:31 It's like, what kind of deal do you have for this product? 69:33 Yeah, that's exactly right. So assume the market talks, especially at the corporate executive 69:37 level, and someone might just not be ready yet. And that's okay. The amount of deals that come, 69:44 that boomerang a year later of the ones that have lost, that's probably another 25%. 69:48 So, it is totally normal and natural for deals to not advance, right? 70:00 But to a healthy win rate in the enterprise is typically, I would say between 25 and 35%. 70:06 Okay. 70:06 That is incredibly helpful to people, A. I know, how about key stages along the way, 70:12 just like percentage drop off up in? 70:13 So, it's usually like from qualified lead to like you're coming out of demo, it's probably 70:25 you lose half. 70:27 Out of demo. 70:28 Out of demo. 70:29 Post demo. 70:29 Post demo, not for us. 70:30 Yeah. 70:31 They get you to 30%. 70:32 So, from demo to, what was that step? 70:35 From demo to like, the more you move down, the less those numbers, the less wider 70:41 those numbers. 70:42 Okay. 70:42 Okay. 70:43 So, let's say if you speak to, and you're doing a really good job targeting the right 70:49 people, maybe 50% of those people move to a qualified lead, or 50% to 75% move to qualified 70:58 lead. 70:59 Of that, then another half move to demo, and then from there another quarter advance beyond 71:06 that. 71:07 Once you're in the bottom of funnel, you usually don't lose too much from there. 71:10 if you're doing a good deal of qualification. 71:13 So, say you're at the pilot stage, what percentage should you expect to drop off in our new? 71:17 80% succeed post-pilot. 71:20 Correct, yeah. 71:20 Okay, amazing. 71:21 I find that, yeah. 71:22 Okay, so if you're below that, something's wrong with your pilot. 71:25 Yeah, or you're not qualifying clearly. 71:27 I see. 71:28 You're almost doing too good a job convincing them this isn't the thing for them. 71:31 Correct, and the product's not there. 71:32 Correct. 71:33 So, yeah, that's where, and again, smart buyers always want to do a pilot, so 71:38 You just have a part of your process. 71:40 Okay. 71:41 There's four more steps to go before you're done, before the money is wired. 71:45 Okay. 71:46 So step 11, papering prep, setting timeline for procurement. 71:50 Yes. 71:51 So you have now spoken pre-pilot about the timeline of what you're reverse engineering. 71:58 Now you're going to document it in an email so that that champion that you're working 72:03 with can forward that to procurement to say, hey, here's what we agree to, here's 72:07 the pricing that's predicated on us, getting this signed by the state. 72:11 Here's the, give them something. 72:13 Here's the kicker they're going to give us if we get to the state. 72:18 There's always got to be a reason to create urgency. 72:21 And then what you want to do is say, here's our paper, send a Word document. 72:25 Do not send a PDF because they're going to always red line, always. 72:29 Send a Word document of your paper and ask the question, do you want to use our paper? 72:33 paper, here's a Word doc version, or do you want to lift from it? 72:37 And do you want to use your paper? 72:40 It might be a lot faster to use their paper. 72:42 That's why you give them the option. 72:43 And that's why the timing is in there. 72:45 Because they might say, well, in order for us to hit that time, we got to use our paper. 72:49 And it's not Google Docs. 72:50 It's Word. 72:51 Google, like Microsoft Office. 72:52 Microsoft Word. 72:53 Yeah. 72:54 We'll see if people can't access Google Docs, but yes. 72:56 And so this has post pilot, feels like it's gone well. 72:59 Well, you're saying the next step is here's like the contract, basically. 73:04 Get that to procurement that early. 73:07 And again, your internal champion is, you're working from N minus one from the executive 73:12 sponsor or is the executive sponsor themselves? 73:15 You wouldn't have made it. 73:16 They're not going to put their team into a pilot if it doesn't have legs. 73:21 And an implication here is procurement is a way that your deal might still die, even 73:26 if people internally love your product. 73:28 Correct. 73:30 So here's something interesting that a lot of people don't realize. 73:33 People will use procurement as the excuse to not want to give you the bad feedback. 73:40 Oh, I got to go to, oh, procurement, it's lost in procurement or blah, blah, blah, blah, 73:44 blah, blah, blah, right? 73:45 Very easy to blame procurement. 73:48 Usually procurement is like a 30-day process, doing the back and forth on the legal, 73:53 the papering. 73:55 Procurement's job is not to kill the deal. 73:57 it's just to make sure that it is aligned with how they need to buy. That's their job. 74:04 Procurement is the only person that can get you paid. Do not start any work till you go through 74:10 procurement. Business unit leaders can't just pay you. That needs to come from the finance team 74:18 who pulls from the budget. So be very careful like don't start any work until 74:24 until obviously the papers are signed. 74:26 Start work meaning implementing, rolling out, 74:28 people onboarding, got it, got it, got it. 74:29 Okay, amazing. 74:30 Okay, so that's step 11, 74:33 papering perhaps, setting timeline for procurement, 74:34 kind of getting on board with like, 74:36 what is it gonna take to sign by a state? 74:37 Here's a little gift you'll get 74:39 if you do it by a state, free month or whatever. 74:42 Okay, step 12, papering review. 74:45 Yes, the best thing you can do 74:48 is they're gonna send you back red lines. 74:51 No question. 74:51 If the red lines are extensive, go ahead and accept the things that are easy. 74:58 The red lines are extensive. 74:59 See if you can get legal on a call live and just talk through them. 75:03 That will accelerate your sales cycle. 75:05 First is a bunch of back and forth. 75:06 First is a bunch of back and forth. 75:09 Get them on a call. 75:10 Be like, hey, we're 80% of the way there. 75:13 I have a few questions based off of your red line. 75:16 Can we jump on a live call and just go through them? 75:20 focus on the things that are going to impact the business and pushing on those, let the 75:24 other stuff go if it's not super important. Obviously, have a lawyer look at it from your 75:30 side. You're dealing with a commercial legal team, have a lawyer look at their red lines. 75:36 I imagine most companies have a legal counsel. Yes, I would hope so, yes. 75:40 Okay, cool. So paper review. So that's reviewing basically. It's interesting call the paper. 75:45 Yeah. Is there like a more technical term for that? 75:47 like the contract. I say paper. That's like corpo language paper. 75:52 So interesting. Yeah. Paper and review. Okay, step 13, 75:55 papering procurement process. Yes. So this is where we kind of talked about this. We kind of 76:01 merged that conversation. This is when you are getting the procurement lead and that legal 76:06 lead on a live call to work through the questions or the things you cannot accept. 76:11 Now, remember, if they give you their paper, there's going to be a lot in there that you're 76:17 going to need to... 76:19 Red line. 76:19 Red line. 76:20 They're expecting that. 76:21 They're just giving you the kitchen sink, right? 76:24 If they ask for $10 million of liability insurance, as a smaller company, you can push 76:29 back and be like, listen, your exposure with what we're doing is not that high, 76:33 or maybe it might be and you need that. 76:35 But they're going to give you the kitchen sink. 76:37 Know that it's all negotiable, but paint the battles. 76:40 Pick your battles. 76:42 Don't be afraid, like, to deal with fall apart. 76:43 Yeah. 76:44 No, no. 76:44 See something in there initially. 76:45 At this point, the deal will not fall apart. 76:47 You just need to work closely with them to, like, make sure they understand where you're 76:50 coming from. 76:50 That's more what it is. 76:52 Okay. 76:52 And the final step, signature. 76:55 Ta-da. 76:55 Yep. 76:56 Anything special out there than signing? 76:58 No. 76:59 This is, like, the really exciting point, which is just figuring out who the signatory 77:04 is before it goes around for signature so that you, that you're, make sure your 77:09 Your internal client knows you know, because sometimes it's the CFO. 77:13 It's not the executive sponsor. 77:16 And you just want to make sure everyone knows who that individual is, because if there's 77:19 a delay, you just want to make sure they get paint. 77:21 Damn. 77:22 We did it, Jen. 77:23 We did it. 77:23 We got through all the steps. 77:25 We just signed a massive contract. 77:26 Congratulations. 77:27 Let's go. 77:28 Steak dinner, champagne. 77:29 I don't know what sales people do. 77:31 They close a deal. 77:32 Doing a bell. 77:33 There's bells often. 77:34 You know what we do? 77:35 Okay. 77:35 What's the next one? 77:39 Because you're all, you are in sales, you're only as good as your pipeline. 77:46 So fun, it must be the best feeling after all this. 77:49 It is, but then you're like, oh, now, like literally the feels is like five minutes and you're like back to work. 77:56 Yeah. And imagine part of this is also how do we expand this deal? 78:00 100%. 78:01 Is there anything there just real quick, just like how to start thinking about where this 78:05 goes once the deal is signed? 78:07 Yeah. 78:08 And this is where I think the expansion comes in. 78:12 You either know the products that they can expand into, like you've been through this 78:16 journey before and that's pretty straightforward. 78:18 But if you are early in the journey and you're closing your first 10 enterprise customers, 78:23 you need the founder involved. 78:25 once these people are in to understand like what part of the product is custom 78:31 to what these people need and do we want to build out you know do we want to 78:36 charge for services again here's the other thing to services and I know at 78:39 every company is an ARR recurring revenue focus that services is still the 78:45 largest line item in budgets and so you're saying it's okay to offer 78:49 for services as a part of it. 78:51 Yes, yeah. 78:52 Yeah. 78:53 Yeah. 78:54 This has come up a number of times, I think, with Jason, also Lemkin. 78:56 And you just like the increasing, like there's a rise in services being a part of software 79:03 companies. 79:04 It's what they know how to buy. 79:06 They're so used to it. 79:08 Consultants, lawyers, you name it. 79:14 There's always budget for services. 79:16 Yeah. 79:16 We talked about this last time, so we won't get too deep into it. 79:18 Something else I wanted to ask you at kind of at the end here, say you're a buyer and 79:22 you're, say you're talking to Jen and you're just like, not sure this is a fit, you don't 79:27 want to disappoint, you don't want to drag you along. 79:30 What are some things that people buying software products, working with a salesperson, how 79:35 should they communicate? 79:37 What should they be saying to kind of avoid disappointment? 79:40 Yeah, I would say as soon as humanly possible explain why the timing is not right. 79:45 It usually comes down to timing or why they're not mature enough to be able to be in a position 79:52 to, it's interesting. 79:55 You have to be, your organization and the team has to be structured in a way to bring 79:59 on the technology. 80:00 There's a maturity you have to go through. 80:02 Now, I know we talked about this before where sometimes it's easier to sell the 80:05 service first and then do the technology and counsel them towards the technology. 80:08 But if your sales maturity in the enterprise is further down the road, you want to start 80:17 with selling the technology versus the services. 80:20 And if you talk about how it's not the right timing or not mature, I imagine the sales 80:24 person will try to prod you and push you to see if maybe you're not so it's okay 80:27 to just tell them what you think it's not the right time. 80:29 Yeah, and you know what you can get. 80:31 I've had clients say to me, hey, I don't know if we're in a position to do this. 80:38 and I've straight up said to them, you are a liability not closing this gap. 80:45 And they're like, sometimes they just need to be like, 80:47 but again, you need to know if you're in a position to be able to say that. 80:50 But like, listen, I know you need this. 80:54 I know you need this, I'm not accepting no as an answer. 80:57 How do we figure this out together? 80:59 Because, again, use the intel they've given you towards that. 81:03 And like, interestingly, you're talking to a lot of their competitors 81:07 and you would think you have insight 81:08 and say, okay, here's whatever else is doing in this space. 81:10 Well, exactly. 81:11 Or like, hey, listen, on our first two calls, 81:14 you told me how important this is. 81:16 Did that change? 81:17 No, we're just like in a weird spot. 81:21 I'd be like, okay, listen, 81:23 here's what we're gonna do. 81:24 Let's start it a little bit smaller. 81:26 Let's get in. 81:28 I know you admitted that this is something 81:31 that you guys need. 81:32 I know that we are gonna crush it for you. 81:35 I do not. I don't want X to get in the way of that. And then there's obviously, 81:42 they're going to be the cases where it's like, it's just not the right time. 81:44 Like they might be going through an acquisition, right? And like bringing on net new vendors is just 81:49 like not a priority right now. You just have to respect that too. 81:54 I love how this whole process, a lot of listeners as podcasts or product managers, 81:59 product people, it just feels very product, the product manager in terms of the 82:03 the organization and the step by step and just like, 82:06 or just staying on top of all these little things. 82:08 Like it's interesting how you don't think sales 82:11 and product management are at all alike. 82:13 But they're so similar and it's just like you being human 82:16 like the way a PM tries to understand 82:18 what your pain points are. 82:19 We're here to solve them. 82:21 It's like, yeah, unexpected. 82:24 We did it, Jen. 82:25 We did it. 82:25 We went through it all. 82:27 Is there anything else? 82:28 Anything else we haven't touched on anything else 82:30 you wanna, I don't know, leave listeners with 82:31 before we wrap up. 82:32 Yeah. 82:33 We gave them a lot. 82:34 We did. 82:37 Which was the goal? 82:38 Just the right amount. 82:39 Yeah. 82:40 Yeah. 82:40 I'm excited for like, oh, I was going to say, I love that AI, I don't think it came out 82:44 one, maybe one time in this conversation, very rare these days in podcasts, which I love. 82:49 Well, it's interesting, like so many people will create like AI reports that they can 82:56 send to their clients or like AI imagery or like, I don't know. 83:01 You name your your flavor and it's like anyone can do that 83:06 It just feels salesy. What's your alpha? 83:11 Back to that exactly and I know you talking about this last time just like craft your own email and text 83:17 Don't use the boilerplate. Yeah 83:20 Nails are living and breathing. I swear to God that like people can read you saying the email out loud 83:27 Yeah 83:29 Okay, Jen 83:31 This is awesome. 83:32 This is amazing. 83:33 Everything I want it to be. 83:34 This is going to be, I'm excited for like the, not to talk about it, but just like AI 83:39 summary of this, especially that's just going to be like step one, two, three, four, five. 83:44 Final questions. 83:46 Anything you want to plug anywhere you want to point people to and how can listeners 83:49 be useful to you? 83:50 Let me know if anyone has questions and more than happy to go deeper into this. 83:54 I would say if anyone, here's a plug, if anyone is interested in enterprise sales, we are 84:02 actively hiring and I will teach you everything I know. 84:07 Wow. 84:07 And this is at State Affairs. 84:08 It's at State Affairs. 84:09 Holy shit. 84:11 What an opportunity. 84:12 Yeah. 84:12 So there's multiple roles, not just one. 84:14 Multiple roles, yeah. 84:15 Wow. 84:16 You'll be paid to learn from Jen directly. 84:18 I will teach you everything I know. 84:21 Whoa. 84:21 Okay. 84:22 Cool. 84:22 We'll link to the job descriptions in the description if you want to check that out. 84:26 Awesome. 84:27 Amazing. 84:28 Jen, thank you so much for being here. 84:29 Many. 84:29 This was awesome. 84:30 It's awesome. 84:32 Bye, everyone. 84:33 Thank you so much for listening. 84:35 If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or 84:39 your favorite podcast app. 84:41 Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps 84:45 other listeners find the podcast. 84:47 You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. 84:53 See you in the next episode.
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