Lenny Rachitsky: commitment

Transcript context

…Super helpful. What if we pick a company either that you worked with or that just out there and think through what they would do for each of these steps to make this super real? Sure. I'm going to do Help Scout because I like these guys. And I was just talking to the CEO not too long ago. So Help Scout's a good example in that they're a startup, sort of, I would call them a growth stage startup. They're not super big, but they're not teeny weeny either. And they're in what would appear to be a terrible marketplace. which is they sell software for customer success. So their competitor is like Zendesk. You know, there's lots of, there's like actually a million companies in this space, but the gorilla in the market is Zendesk. And so if I put the stake in the ground and say, well, what do I got to replace? Well, their customers, a lot of small, medium businesses, a lot of direct to consumer e-commerce businesses. And so they obviously have to beat Zendesk and the other folks that are out there, but sometimes they're replacing like just email or even like a kind of rudimentary sort of shared inbox. That's who they got to be. And so when you look through what Help Scout has, it's differentiating. They've got a whole bunch of features that are really around delivering really amazing service to the customer. So they do a shared inbox. They were the first ones to do like a proper... services oriented shared inbox to make sure that nobody gets missed and the right people get signed to the right thing and you don't get conflicts. But they do a lot of other things like their whole philosophy about how they treat a customer in the service process is really different from Zendesk. So get assigned a ticket number, you get assigned a person and things like that. And so they do all sort of neat integrated things like they'll do a chat bot thing, but it only appears when there's an actual person to chat with you. Like they don't try to pretend they're a machine, things like that. So they want to guarantee really high level of service. So when you map that to value, the value is one, I'm delivering this extra amazing service for customers, right? I'm not trying to push customers to a low cost channel. I'm treating them like a person. So their value is really around delivering amazing customer services, service that's going to like deepen your relationship with the customer. That's the value. And then you say, well, who cares a lot about that? Well, not everybody, right? So there are businesses out there, like I would say, I would argue maybe your phone company doesn't really care. They have a giant call center and all they care about is reducing the cost in their call center and driving you to low cost channels. Like they don't actually see customer service as a way to build a relationship with you versus a lot of direct to consumer brands or e-commerce brands, right? This is almost the only way that they can interact with their customer. So they actually see customer service as a way to really drive growth through customer loyalty. And so those are the kind of companies that are really good fit for Help Scout. act with their customer. So they actually see customer service as a way to really drive growth through customer loyalty. And so those are the kind of companies that are really good fit for Help Scout. So I go through that process, that's my positioning. Then the next thing you gotta do is like, okay, like now that I understand all that, How do I weave a story around that? So how do I tell the story about that if a customer comes to me? And so what we want to do with our positioning is turn it into a sales narrative that clicks with the kind of customers we know we can sell to. So the way Help Scout delivers the story, if you come in, you're a qualified prospect, it starts with this idea that customer success is a growth driver. Like modern e-commerce companies see customer success as a way to deepen customer relationships, increase repeat buying, show it as a growth driver. And they have a bunch of great stats that prove that this is true. And then they go, look, look at all your other alternatives. All your other alternatives treat your people like a number. They give them a number. They try to drive them to low-cost channels. They try to do these things. They are not treating this like a growth driver. They're treating it like a cost center. And so being able to tell that story that takes your differentiated value and puts it into context is kind of the way all this stuff comes together and the rubber meets the road. I don't know if that's a good example.…

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