Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…ly good, but it's probably pretty expensive." Or, "Yeah, that's okay, but it probably doesn't meet our needs for security or whatever." And so we handle that at the end in this special objection step. And then we end the pitch with what I call the ask, which is whatever we want the customer to do next. So it could be just asking for the sale or it could be, "Hey, we want to do a proof of concept. Who do we need to talk to about that?" Or, "Hey, we're going to do a project. Who needs to be involved in defining the project?" Whatever the next step is in your sales process. That's how we end is with dask. Cool. I wanted to actually talk about objections. 'Cause I imagine going through this, companies often don't agree with what you're saying, and I wonder how you handle that. So you're going in this, do you agree? And yeah, the silent objection is really interesting. I don't even think about that, where they're just like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, we agree. " But they don't really agree. How would you suggest people handle them being like, "No, I don't actually see the world that way." Or the silent objection, which I guess is something you save for the end. Typically when we're starting with insight, our insight into the market, if we're doing this well, the insight is generally not all that controversial. So you could think of it this way. So it's kind of the reason you built what you built. So most founders, when you talk to them, they didn't just come up with the idea out of nowhere. They woke up in the morning and said, "You know what sucks about email, this thing sucks about email. And so I'm going to build this different kind of email that solves that problem." Or in the case of Help Scout, it's like, do you know what sucks about customer service? It just wasn't built for these kinds of businesses. And so if you've got a point of view on the world and you're talking to a customer that just fundamentally doesn't agree with that... In the case of a Help Scout, they come in and they say, "No, actually it's a cost center for us. We're just trying to get the cost down." They should disqualify that deal because they can't serve that customer better than Zendesk does. Zendesk is going to win that deal. But if you've done this properly, your insight should resonate for the target account that you're trying to go after. Now, that doesn't mean there aren't going to be other objections, and usually there's all kinds of other objections. But the objections are more on a level of, if I can get you hooked at the beginning in this setup, then we go to the value, which is just proving I can do what we already agreed we wanted to get done. Then the objections tend to be more like operational stuff. "Yeah, this sounds good, but I don't know if we can forward it." Or "This sounds good, but boy, we're going to have to migrate off the old thing or whatever." So mentally they're kind of sold already, but they're worried about, "Well, what's IT going to say? And can I actually get budget about this?" And in B2B, we've got this network of people that we've got to go get agreement from to move forward on this thing. And so often there's objections around that. The beginning of the sales pitch thing... One more thing on that is that part of what we're doing in that setup is what salespeople would call discovery. And so that setup part should not be me talking at you. It should be a conversation between me and the client saying, "Do you agree with this? Is this what you're seeing? Did you start with a shared inbox? What are you doing right now? Did you ever consider using help desk software? Why yes, why no? Do you have any constraints on what you're looking at? What have you tried before? What are you looking at trying right now?" This is part of the discovery that we do in a first substantive sales call that your sales reps would know how to do this. Typically, one of the things we don't have in the pitch decks that I see in SaaS companies is there's no good place to do this discovery. So it kind of happens outside of the structure of the pitch. In this pitch structure, there's a definite spot for discovery.…

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