Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedJen Abel: belief
9 Nov 2025 Lenny's Podcast "Sell the alpha, not the feature": The enterprise sales playbook for $1M to $10M ARR | Jen Abel
“Oh yeah, I think that a lot of companies, sorry, a lot of folks that serve the enterprise, they have a butt in a seat in their office.”
— Jen Abel
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Jen Abel
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 9 Nov 2025
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…Today's episode is brought to you by Coda. I personally use Coda every single day to manage my podcast and also to manage my community. It's where I put the questions that I plan to ask every guest that's coming on the podcast. It's where I put my community resources, it's how I manage my workflows. Here's how Coda can help you. Imagine starting a project at work and your vision is clear, you know exactly who's doing what and where to find the data that you need to do your part. In fact, you don't have to waste time searching for anything because everything your team needs from project trackers and OKRs, the documents and spreadsheets lives in one tab all in Coda. With Coda's collaborative all in one workspace, you get the flexibility of docs, the structure of spreadsheets, the power of applications, and the intelligence of AI, all in one easy to organize tab. Like I mentioned earlier, I use Coda every single day. And more than 50,000 teams trust Coda to keep them more aligned and focused. If you're a startup team looking to increase alignment and agility, Coda can help you move from planning to execution in record time. To try it for yourself, go to coda.io/lenny today and get six months free of the team plan for startups, that's C-O-D-A.io/lenny to get started for free and get six months of the team plan. Coda.io/lenny. There's a lot of talk these days about this idea forward deployed something volunteer was really famous for, just essentially an engineer sitting in your office solving problems with you basically as an employee. And then through that, they learn what software to build. Is that something you're seeing too? Oh yeah, I think that a lot of companies, sorry, a lot of folks that serve the enterprise, they have a butt in a seat in their office. You look at these large consultancies like McKinsey, they're not in their headquarters, they're in their client's office all the time. And the other interesting thing and proof of this is how many people go to a Deloitte or Accenture and expect them to be a channel partner? This is exactly what this is all about, which is they sell this service, they come in and then they introduce, "Hey, look at what this startup is doing over here. You might want to give them a shot. The problem with channel partnerships and why I don't believe in them is there are a hundred of you on this list and you're expecting them to sell it on your behalf." Biggest no-no, they're not vision casters, they're not visionaries, they're consultants, but it goes all towards go. I remember startups saying, "Oh, I'm going to go win over Accenture and then have them disseminate me into their clients." And I'm like, as if that's a workable strategy. Okay. You know what might be helpful is, let me try to summarize some of the best pieces of advice you've shared so far. And this is specifically for folks trying to go from about a million ARR to about 10 million ARR. And then I want to ask you just what's most different about these two stages, but let me share this first. So advice one is go for tier one logos earlier than you think you should because they're early adopters, they can move fast, they can pull you in the right direction.…
Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.