Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…e making a great decision. I've got your back. You're going to look like a hero, not like a fool and that's really what The JOLT Effect is about. It's about how the very best salespeople execute that. It wasn't that we're wrong with Challenger, it's just the story was kind of incomplete. You got to break status quo bias. If you don't do that, you're never going to have an indecision problem, but even once you overcome the customer's indifference and their status quo bias, you got to second battle you've got to fight, which is you've got to instill the confidence and make them feel good about this. Frankly, leap of faith they're about to take and their fear, you got to deal with the fear that if something goes wrong, they're worried that they're going to be blamed for it. We're going to talk about this method you developed for how to actually do all the things you're talking about, but first, to make this even more real, what I'm thinking about is an example. Is a good example, maybe a CRM, like a better CRM product, say someone has Salesforce installed and now they're like, maybe there's probably something better out there we should probably evaluate. Then, I'm thinking from the perspective of a startup trying to build a better CRM. There's always this advice, you have to be 10 times better for anyone to pay any attention. I think that feeds into exactly what you're showing is it needs to be so much better that this fear is reduced. Can you just talk about maybe an example, whether it's that one or a different one to make this more concrete? We encountered a ton of examples. It's so interesting you mentioned startups and I think sometimes, I was actually with a big enterprise software company and I think when, and I presented this research to some of their sales leaders and one of the folks in the room said, "I'm really glad we are who we are, that we are the 800-pound gorilla, especially in a market like we're in right now," because as the old adage goes, it wasn't IBM, but the old adage is that nobody ever got fired for buying from IBM, right? This company is like the IBM of their space. They're the 800-pound gorilla. They've got the brand strength, the reputation, they're the safe choice. This team felt kind of comfortable or comforted, I should say by that fact, especially in a tight environment where it's a battle for deals and for mindshare and for wins out there in the market right now, especially in tech. What I said is you've got to remember though, that may be true, and I would argue, and I think you're right, that for a startup, yeah, you've got to be 10 times better to get that mind share. It may be even better than that to get somebody to take a leap of faith with you. There is inherent risk in going with the unproven player, but I cautioned these folks and I said, "Now, remember, what are the things that drive fear of failure and indecision?" It turns out there are three big ones. The first one is have I made the right choice? I know I want to work with this vendor, but did I configure the solution of the proposal the right way, the right contract length, the right implementation, the right used cases, the right integrations, all that professional services or DIY, all those big questions. The second thing that customers worry about in their second fear of failure is that they're going to learn something after the contract is signed that's going to make the decision look like not such a great decision. I'll give you a really specific example about this. I spoke to a tech company not too long ago, maybe a month ago, and they landed their biggest deal of their existence. It was an early stage company, seven-figure deal, game changer for this organization. Then, they beat out some big established competitors. This is a huge win. They went out. They celebrated. It was just totally amazing, their first big enterprise win and their first seven-figure deal and their first victory against some of these incumbents. Unfortunately, about two weeks after they won this deal, the new Gartner Magic Quadrant on their space came out and they were shown to be kind of, eh, right? They weren't the leader, but they were sort of middle of the pack. All of a sudden, the client who signed the agreement, the CTO just got crap rained from everybody saying, "Did you see the Gartner Magic Quadrant? It looks like the company we just plunked down seven figures with was kind of seen as so-so by the Gartner analyst?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.