Jessica Fain: belief

Transcript context

…My podcast guest and I love talking about craft and taste and agency and product market fit. You know what we don't love talking about? SOC 2. That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta helps companies of all sizes get compliant fast and stay that way with industry leading AI, automation, and continuous monitoring. Whether you're a startup tackling your first SOC 2 or ISO 2701 or an enterprise managing vendor risk, Vanta's trust management platform makes it quicker, easier, and more scalable. Vanta also helps you complete security questionnaires up to five times faster so that you could win bigger deals sooner. The result, according to a recent IDC study, Vanta customers slashed over $500,000 a year and are three times more productive. Establishing trust isn't optional. Vanta makes it automatic. Get $1,000 off at vanta.com/ lenny. We've talked about aligning your incentives and goals with their goals, going in with open mind, setting context at the beginning of the meeting, understanding how they like to be presented to. What else can we learn to become better at influencing execs? And let me just do a quick tangent. As people are listening to this, they may again be like, "Oh my God, all this BS I have to do. I just want to do awesome work. Why am I spending all this time learning all this meta work? I've had to convince someone of a freaking thing. I just want to build awesome products, drive growth for the business and the product, and this sucks." I think it's, again, important to remind people this is just the way things go. You need to influence people in power to agree with your approach. That's just the way it is. You can't just be like, "Nah, no one understands me. It sucks. It's not my fault." It's literally your job. I think the way that product management has worked for a long time is you basically get funding for your ideas in the... You basically get funding for your ideas in the form of engineering, design, cross-functional resourcing. That is, you should consider that VC money that's been invested in you, and your CFO, your CPO, your CEO is expecting a return. And so what is the way that you are showing that you are building great products that honors that investment in you? And sure, you can go into a startup and be the sole decision maker, and that is a very, very valid way to work. But if you work with other people, having them excited, interested, passionate, bought in to what you're doing, will make everything easier. It is also the job, right? You also have to. But I think the thing I want people to take away is that it's really the way to build well. When people are motivated, when they feel purpose, when they feel like this is really something that I believe in, they work harder, they support you more, they talk about you in rooms that you're not in. And so it's just actually the way you deliver great results. I think that's such an important framing. Okay. What other tactics, what other techniques work in helping leaders get influenced?…

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