Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Once you get into that mindset, I think then you look at the situation a lot different. I think we've seen the statistics on this that says the buyer is 80% of the way through their buying journey by the time they talk to your sales rep. Yeah, maybe, but they might be 80% of the way to saying, "Nope, I'm not buying nothing." And in fact that's true 60% of the time. And so how do we combat that? The way we combat that is not just talking about ourselves, it's actually about trying to be helpful to that person in this very stressful situation that is trying to figure out how do I make a really good decision. So what we should be doing is giving them a way to think about the whole market and say, in the case of Help Scout, "Look, there's shared inbox and then there's help desk software and then there's us. And I don't care who the vendor is, I'm going to put them in one of those buckets." And so you can just think of it that way. So you don't need to know every single feature, every single thing. I'm giving you a bigger picture of the whole market and helping you feel good. Well, if you choose this or you choose that, now you know why. I think what's interesting about this is a lot of startups fail because they can't convince anyone to switch from the status quo. And I think people always think of that as the current product is good enough and that's why they're losing, but I think this adds an additional wrinkle of it's also the person buying it is just like, "I don't want to add the stress to even decide and make the choice and put my butt on the line to switch." And I never thought of it that way. I think that hurdle is a lot more than you think. So we obviously have to compete with status quo, we can't ignore status quo, because sometimes status quo just is good enough and so we can't ignore that. We still lose deals to status quo, but we lose an awful lot of deals to just plain customer indecision, customers being more afraid of screwing up than missing out.…

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