Lenny Rachitsky: preference

Transcript context

…I'm not a software engineer, but I like to use technical metaphors with technical audiences because I think it's helpful, so it's like when it runs on your local, now it's time to see if it reproduces over here, so if it reliably runs on your local and it doesn't air out, so then what would the definition of not erroring out look like? So, generally speaking, it is to contingent on your sales motion, but it's going to be that you can reliably, at a pretty okay win rate, so maybe 15% or 20% or 25%, turn first meetings into eventual customers and do that in a reliable fashion. It's not like, "I engaged 10 arms-length parties and I got two customers closed." It's like, "Hey, that's great. That's a good start. 5X that, 10X that." Take 50 at-bats, take 100 at-bats, and now that you know that you reliably, for every cohort of ten first meetings, what's known in sales land as opportunities, for every cohort of 10 that you engage, are you closing 1, are you closing 1.5, are you closing 2, or are you closing 2.5, if you're in there? But if you're at like, "For every 30 I interact with, I close one," well, it seems like that's probably pretty inefficient, unless you're selling $500,000 deals or something like that. So, it's at the point where it feels like it's statistically significant, it feels like it's repeatable, because what you're going to then do is now it feels like it's a safe bet to try to abstract that out to somebody else. Because the only way we're going to get to success is we're not going to have Lenny go and sell from morning, noon to night. What we're going to do is we're going to take the information out of Lenny's brain and we're going to put it into slides and we're going to put it into scripts and we're going to put it into email templates and all that sort of stuff, and then we're going to shove that into the brain of two more reps and see if now we can get it to run in the cloud, in the sales cloud here. And then to start out, it may fail, the same way you're like, "Cool, it runs on my local. Uh-oh, it breaks over here. Why?" And then that's the next stage is now you're figuring out how to get those other folks to sell as successfully as you have, and that becomes the next job. Actually, this is the presentation I gave at Brianne's SaaS School, if you Google it's just called Founder-led Selling, it's available online. Essentially, there's a bunch of stages in the B2B maturity journey and you have to go through them in order to get to the next one, if you jump stages, you're hosed. So, in this case, if you know that you can reliably sell this yourself, that's great. Then, the next thing to do is get at least a couple people reliably selling, as well as you, not 10, because you're never going to get 2 successful if you're trying to onboard 10 concurrently. And then if you get those 2 successful, now you've earned the right to go to 4, 8, et cetera. I love this heuristic that you shared that you want to get to about 15 to 25% of contacts closing to a customer. I see you shaking your thumb. I think that's really useful. So, it's a bit less than a third and doing 50 to 100 attempts is roughly where you want to be? Yeah. Importantly, what you don't want to do is, and I think probably a lot of the product managers who like to listen to Lenny's Podcast here might appreciate this, is you want to bring on cohorts of users and then see what's going on, then learn, and then bring on new co cohorts of users. So, going and doing 100 at-bats and then being like, "Did it work or did it not?" Versus, "Hey, let's have 10 for prospect and try to get 10 first meetings," have all those interactions, see how your conversations land, see how the discovery questions are evoking the right response or not the right response, see how your slides land, see how your demo lands, all that sort of stuff. If it's working well and you're getting to the next stage, "This is great, I would love to introduce you to my boss," that's a good sign. If it's like, "I'm just not getting it." Cool, back to the drawing board, versus doing 100 all at once and being like, "Now, did it work?" We want to break it up and then constantly just be iterating, iterating, iterating. Again, I think your audience might appreciate this, the way to think of a sales motion, so sales motion is a fancy-pants way of describing just all the things that you do in order to take a prospect and bring them through the sales process and then eventually close them. One helpful way to think about it is kind of like software and what you want to be doing is constantly updating it. Oh, that was a really interesting question that the prospect asked right there, I didn't have a good answer for it and moreover, I didn't have a slide for it. You know what I should do? I should make a slide that handles that objection so I can show it to them visually and also, it'll help give me guardrails and a talk track and that'll be nice. So, I'm going to do that and then I'm going to update the source code. Now, my sales motion has been updated. And then the next loop through, ideally the next time that person says, "Oh, I don't know, Lenny, it doesn't really sound like X, Y, Z," you're like, "Oh, a lot of people say that, but here, if you look over here, you can see this." "Oh yeah, that's a really good point." "Wonderful. So, as the next step, let's go ahead and talk to your boss." So, now your sales motion has been updated and the collateral's been updated and now, we're being more effective sellers. You're just going to do that dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of time before you have a repeatable sales motion.…

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