Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…, in order to make a list if my salespeople are doing outbound or if I'm doing target account selling or ABM, how do I make that list of who I'm going after, that kind of stuff. Then we have personas. Now, again, if I'm selling a consumer thing, maybe all I care about is personas, right? All I care about is who's this person who's the buyer. B2B, everything's a little bit more complicated than that. So in a typical B2B purchase process, particularly if it's what we would call enterprise software, Even if it's not very expensive enterprise software, typically we have between five and seven people are involved in what we call making the decision for what gets bought. So if I come back to my example earlier where the VP sales decides they need a CRM and they pick on poor John and then John's got to go figure it out. John, that persona, let's say he's the sales ops manager. We would make a sales ops manager persona that would capture that person, but there's other people involved in this deal. So he, as part of figuring out which CRM to buy, when he got in the later stages of the deal, he probably consults some of the sales reps because they're going to be the end users of this thing. And so he doesn't want to pick something that they're all going to hate. He's probably got an IT department and IT probably gets a say about, you know, well, does it meet our security and compliance stuff? And we're going to have to take care of it. Does it integrate with what we need to integrate with? Can it suck in data or push out data to our data warehouse or whatever? So that person has a say. There might be a purchasing department. There might be legal involved. There might be hit security at all. There might be chief security officers. Somebody gets their nose in there, gets involved in that. So, Five to seven people involved in this deal. Ah, and so here's where I think we go off the rails in marketing. So what I see marketing teams doing is they'll do personas for all those people. So they'll have this sheet and the sheet will say, Eric, the IT person. doesn't like talking on the phone, really likes video games. And they'll have this stereotype of Eric, the IT person. And then they'll say, Janet, the sales rep, really outgoing, loves talking to people on the phone, doesn't know what a video game is. That sort of thing. So for positioning work, I'm going to say something that is contentious, but I don't think it is at all. Think about how the deal gets done. Here's how this actually happens. Vice president says to John, go figure it out. John then does all this research and figures out how to get a short list, right? And then John might actually go all the way through to having calls with salespeople and all this sort of stuff with all the vendors. And then John's really getting down to, okay, I'm gonna pick this thing over this thing and then starts bringing in the other people, right? So by far the most important persona that matters is that one. we call this the champion in the account because this person their job is to get consensus and champion the deal across everybody including their boss who's the rtant persona that matters is that one. we call this the champion in the account because this person their job is to get consensus and champion the deal across everybody including their boss who's the actual economic buyer the person that writes the check and so if our positioning doesn't resonate for that champion We're dead in the water. We don't even get on a short list. We don't even get to care about all the other personas. And we don't nail it with John. Because John's a gatekeeper, right? So my positioning needs to crush it with John. And at some point, way down the road... I need to arm John to be able to sell IT, to be able to sell purchasing, to be able to make sure everybody is cool on the user side and to be able to sell their boss, who's the economic buyer. And so I think there's really only one persona that really, really matters in this, which is the champion in the account. And we should be very thoughtful and we should really have our arms around that persona because And then later in the deal cycle, we need to figure out how to arm that persona to go sell to all the other constituents in the deal. But if we don't nail that champion persona, we got nothing. So I think it is an utter waste of time for marketing to build these stupid little one-pager persona things for these 17 million personas and treat them like they're the same as the champion when the champion matters times 1,000. And what all we really need to do is figure out how to arm the champion because the champion is going to do this heavy lifting of selling IT. We're likely not even going to get all that involved. That's my rant. That was amazing. I've never heard it described so directly and clearly. And so I think that's actually a good way to just kind of wrap things up. I feel like I've sucked up enough of your time. Where can folks find your book, contact you if they want to work with you, anything like that?…

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