One of my favorite things to do in that role is do these roundtables for people in all different functions in our portfolio companies on various topics. Sometimes we do those with external experts, but today, super lucky to have Dave Palmer, general partner here at 1011, talk about a topic that I think is critical to so many of our companies. 1011 is a stage agnostic investment firm.

So we invest from very small to very large, and this inflection point we see so often in the portfolio is transitioning from founder- led sales to scalable sales, and it’s not easy to do. Luckily, we have Dave here, who needs no introduction, but one of his more famous roles at Darktrace, where he did exactly that. When Dave joined, I was so excited to access all the knowledge he had from growing Darktrace, and this is one of the topics I think that he felt most strongly about. So yeah, thrilled to have you guys all here.

Just to let you know, this is all 1011 family on the call. So we want people to feel really comfortable to ask questions. We’re all a growing organization, so no one should think that there’s a silly question or a dumb question. That’s what we’re here to do, figure it all out. Building a company is not easy, so we just want to share the lessons we’re all learning together. We are going to record it, but it’ll stay in the family. There are just some people who have RSVP’d but aren’t on the call, so please don’t feel intimidated by that.

We’ll keep it all safe and password controlled, and feel free to ask questions during, in the chat, or just jump out, and I’m sure Dave will be excited to field that and have a little discussion around it. So Dave, you want to take it away?

Great. Hi, everyone. Awesome to see you all. I feel somewhat of a fraud when there are a bunch of repeat founders on here and some rock stars that have been and done it at scale as well talking about these issues. So let’s definitely have a chat, right? This is not a human blog post, as I was joking to Megan and Mary a minute ago, like, let’s try and have more fun than that. Otherwise, it will be painful.

So I’m definitely sharing my perspective here as not a professional head of sales, but as a technical founder that had to learn a lot about selling and managing transitions and work out what was really going on under the hood for the business, as opposed to sort of classic sales methodologies, or what have you. And we can talk about some of that stuff as well, if you if you like, but in general, I think, from a founder’s perspective, that maybe this is can be quite simple.

And we don’t have to be bewildered by some of the complexity and and jargon that is in the sales world and the go to market world over and over. So yeah, my journey was from from naught to 500 million. So I can’t express in AR can’t express many views beyond that. But probably for most of us on the call getting to 500 million hour again, we’ll, we’ll do for the outcome of this webinar. And we’ll start off Mary with the next slide, please. So I’m talking about probably what’s going on with a lot of people doing founder led sales at the moment.

So founder sales is completely different to having a professional sales force. And I think the number one reason why is founder led sales typically are led by experts, you know, you you know, this space, that’s where you’re building products in there and services and, and companies, but also you’ve probably lived with the pain and have some realistic empathy for what the customer is going through.

So generally, founder led sales feels like sitting on the same side of the table as a as the champion in the customer and winning them over with your understanding and nuance of the pain that they’re going through your vision for a future where that pain doesn’t exist, and trying to build together on getting through that. So no surprises, right? I’m sure you’re all of you experiencing that all the time.

I think one of the things that the venture world kind of falsely creates, though, is the idea that there’s a perfect customer profile or ICP, that you should just ruthlessly go after and spend all your time in that, in that region. And I, I actually completely disagree. I think it’s easy to think through some people that might have a pain point and easy to think through some people that are likely to be accessible to you, who might have that willingness to work with a startup.

But especially in cyber more than most places, I think people are pretty protective about letting you know that they have a major issue in their world that you could potentially solve.

And so, I think the kissing of lots of frogs is a phrase that we have in the UK that I suddenly realized may not translate. Or chasing wrong customers and seeing what the unexpected opportunities is, is really powerful. My personal experience was, I thought, you know, my first customer at DT might be 12 people with some Windows laptops, and it was the biggest power station in Europe. And they were an amazing champion because the complexity was off the scale. Half of this thing was built in the 50s and 60s, and half of it was cutting edge.

We had not planned in any way for working in that environment. But the customer really, really wanted that pain point solved. They were in heaps of trouble, and they were absolutely persevered in all the usual lumps and bumps like, hey, have you got your last three years of audited accounts? Well, no, we haven’t. We’re six weeks old or whatever. I think one of the ways of punching through when you’re meeting customers is asking if there are two or three other people that they might connect you with that might have pain points.

It’s a nice, easy way of getting some value out of customers that are saying no to you, because often customers that are saying no feel a bit guilty about that. Potential customers that say no often feel a bit guilty about that. So I’m very happy to feel like they’ve given you something back by introducing you to two or three of their peers that they might feel are helpful. And then the third point on this slide, again, rocket science, is that your stories undergo major change as you go through the early months and years.

I think one of the things that we can do as founders that maybe is terrifying to the team around us is we can make it up as we go. We’re passionate about this space. We’re experts on it. We might change the story in every single meeting that we go in. That is really nerve- wracking for early go- to- market hires if you do that.

And I’m not saying you should never do that, but I just want to express that they’ll rarely tell you that you pitching on the fly a completely different story this time to the one that you told in the last three meetings can make them feel like they really don’t understand what’s working with the customers or why that you took a certain path. So controlled experimentation in that regard is sometimes quite helpful.

If you’re going into a meeting with someone, giving them a heads up that, hey, I’m not going to explain how whatever the complex AI works or the blockchain or whatever, I’m just going to take it as a foregone conclusion that they understand this and let’s just drive straight into whatever, a demo or an example and try and get a proof of value from that. Giving people the heads up of the way in on that, I think very, very, very powerful. And it makes it easier to have some discipline about measuring what works in experimentation and what doesn’t work.

Often we experiment without measuring and capturing feedback. And if you’re not doing it, there’s no way that early go- to- market hires are going to do it. They just simply won’t give you the feedback on and telemetry on what is and isn’t working. Anyway, so probably all of you are piling through that at the moment. How do you make this better? Next slide, please, Mary. I, because I have a simple mind, I really think that in simple type ways, and there are two things for me that I think get lost when we’re passionate about products and what we’ve built.

And the first one of those is.

Sorry, Mary, thanks.

It’s been really, really clear eyed about what caught the customer’s interest. And, you know, we especially as VCs get to see a lot of product demos and we hear a lot of pitches and some of you might recognize this. But one of the things we see an awful lot of is AWS build scripts where a demo for the first three minutes just showing AWS consoles and what have you. And I can promise you that absolutely nobody in the world ever wants to see you deploying your tool in a pitch meeting. Not VCs, not customers, not whatever.

You really want to get towards the bit that makes the customer say, wow. Now, for some of you and I’ve spotted a few of the Silent Push folks jumping on, the wow moment is probably in the pitch. With Silent Push, you can get across in two or three sentences why what they’ve built is special and why the customer should go and buy this or trial this and get this running. And that’s amazing. But most of us don’t end up in that position. It could be the demo that’s the wow moment.

It could be the first time the customer gets the hands on into the tool in their own environment. That’s the wow moment.

Whatever it is, doesn’t matter, but spend as little time as possible doing all the other stuff right, like if you are going lots of here’s how we install the thing, here’s an NDA that you need to sign before we can tell you about what’s really great, or I’m gonna force you through a training course before you’re allowed to see what’s cool about it. It’s just absolute death of momentum in moving forward for the customers.

You can have a real terrible conversion rate and if you’re tracking conversion rates in every step of your process, this is normally a good indicator. If, say, customers are falling out at the demo or the pitch, that’s where to spend the time saying: are we doing the right things here, etc. Etc. Enough on that for the moment. Go on, Meg.

I mean that’s really interesting, like listening for the magic moment or watching for the magic moment where there are times at dark trace where you had a conversation with other people who were on those pitches about when the customer really started to light up or how did you open yourself to observing that?

I think you could just ask the customer. I like genuinely think usually not in the meeting- live as you, as you’re having it, but even if you had a failed customer interaction, shooting them a really polite short email afterwards and say, hey, by the way, which bit of this was interesting to you, and not just purely for our feedback on getting better or what we, what we do. I think the other powerful technique here is asking a customer how they would explain what you do to one of their peers. Is is incredibly rich.

And then you know cheekily you can say, hey, would you mind doing that to three of your peers? While we’re talking about it, I’d really appreciate that. Hearing how customers explain what you do to someone else gives you a real sense of what did they hear and learn, especially if they heard and learned something that is wrong, and you will get this a lot. Of course. You know people stick you into a bucket or shortcut their understanding of your product or service. It’s a powerful way of finding out without, without cost and expense.

There are, of course, consultancies that you can pay to go and chase all failed leads and all that sort of thing. I you know I’m not sure that’s a good idea to in hundreds of millions of a hour thanks. So I think we we’ve sort of touched on this, trying to be clear- eyed about the magic moment and if you’re, if you’re pre customer, just finding people around you to talk to investors, angels, advisors, friends, and getting them to play back helpful as well.

Go on, Mary, let’s skip through a couple of slides and get on to the the one with the next slide, please. So let’s talk about what happens when we’re actually hiring go- to- market people and moving away from it just being pure founder. Let’s sell. So if you don’t know what your magic moment is and you start hiring salespeople, it’s not the end of the world. Like you know, the process might be a bit clunky, you might get some churn of leads and salespeople, but it’s not. It’s not a killer.

I think one of the things that is a killer- if you haven’t got your head around it- is having a structured approach to objection handling. So if you can say: here’s all the amazing reasons why my, my product is awesome and you don’t have good pre- packed, pre- briefed reasons for handling each of the customers of objections, then it’s massively frustrating for early go- to- market hires. So I picked our trace as an example. It’s the one I know best.

Back in 2013, people would say: I don’t believe in machine learning, I don’t think it’s real, I don’t think it could ever do something thoughtful, and one of the ways that we erroneously tried to handle that is say: hey, why don’t you? Every single customer can have a meeting with Dave- me personally- and he will give a one- hour lecture on why this machine learning is amazing and that you should really trust. Trust it, and it was a massive error on our part, I get. Did it win people over? Probably only if they’re halfway to a PhD in machine learning.

Otherwise it just sounds like absolute gobbledygook. It’s stand it up. The sales process, no end. It’s pretty good for my air miles, but but litter a little else. What we found was finding analogies to how the AI worked into, into things that the the customer did understand, like Google search or Google Maps or automated hedge funds, etc.

Was much more powerful and could be delivered by anyone in 20 seconds of. Why should I trust machine learning? Well, how did you get here? Did you use me? Google Maps, like? That’s a really good example of where machine learning invisibly is helping us out in our day- to- day lives, and this widget that I make is going to do the same for you. Security team. There are, of course, standard objections that all of you will have. I’ve got no budget right now, blah, blah, blah- and I’m sure you’ve got some canned ways of handling that.

But a lot of other objections come down to stuff that you could iterate away in advance, whether it’s legal stuff, whether it’s HIPAA, whether it’s PII, whether it’s this is too hard to install or I don’t have the resources or I don’t understand what the outputs are. Having pre canned responses to all of that sort of stuff is enormously helpful to your early go- to- market employees and the consistency is good.

Sticking with the idea of consistency, I think giving early go- to- market hires very defined flexibility, but not arbitrary flexibility- on the deals they can make and when they need, say, CEO sign off or CFO sign off to change the deal, is very helpful, because negotiating a totally arbitrary contract on a customer by customer basis is again the death of speed and consistency and you can really end up with some random stuff being hammered into your engineering folks to go and deliver his features or some you know terrifying contracts financially that you just didn’t want in in the first place.

So setting out in advance: hey, I’m non- negotiable about annual in advance payments. It’s got to be that. I’ll take monthly if someone’s really short of cash, but only with the CFO’s approval. And if you want to, if a customer asks for some integrations and what- have- you, then we’ll agree to up to three integrations, but only delivered after signature of the contract. We won’t deliver them in advance as a, as a precursor to getting started with a with a customer and getting a PO, that type of stuff.

Like they’re not specifics- right, don’t adopt those specifics. But having some of those ground rules in place of what a person can and can’t offer under what situations is often missed and we focused on things like discounting levels and referral fees and all that sort of thing. But the underlying flexibility of the offering from you as a company is a good thing to try and nail down. I think the other thing that you can use here is you start to have less and less founder and maybe technical expert engagement is using that to build momentum.

Hey, I’d really love, from a meeting with the CTO, to understand your road map before we move forwards. You know the replay to that would be: hey, why don’t we get this thing installed into your environment and then the CTO can come along talk about the findings and talk you through the roadmap at the same time- and obviously the CTO is pretty busy. They’ve got an awful lot of customers to serve, but I’m gonna be 30 minutes with them and this spend 30 minutes talking about the commercial proposal and and getting this to sign off.

That holding back of experts, rather than having the CTO in every single meeting or the CEO in every single meeting, is absolutely a tool that you can trade momentum for and I’d heartily recommend it as a way of making your early go- to- market people feel like they’ve got some leverage in moving a process along while dealing with early customers. I’m really conscious that I’ve monologued for quite a few minutes. There is anything that people want to talk about. If not, we would power.

I have a question. This is Todd early on. How is your relationship with- with marketing or your CMO and being a business partner? I’ve had both sides of the coin where I’ve had some not so good working relationships which made it even harder, and then my most recent one has been a joy. So what’s been your experience and how important is that in the early stages, the I wouldn’t.

I’ll offer a reflection and I wonder if this was true of your experiences. Marketing professionals that have been in startups before kind of enjoy the chaos and the and the evolution of the message and the evolution of the brand and the positioning and and come with you on that journey.

Marketing professionals who may be amazing marketing professionals but haven’t operated in a small- scale, chaotic environment before, can get really frustrated by: hey, I’ve already done the brand and it’s orange and you know the fact that we’re moving away from quirky into corporate IBM style blue in our positioning and messaging. It’s not cool. Like, I’ve already done all the website. What are you clowns up to in in trying to change our persona? Whatever I think there is, there can be some tensions there.

I think whether it’s marketing or sales, the other thing that sometimes you can see is, hey, I’ve worked in this vertical before or subcategory before. And there’s a way of doing this, right? Like we always take the client to play golf, that’s how you close this deal, or we always go through the following six stages. And I’m coming in telling you, I’m a salesperson or a marketing person, and this is our process, versus going, hey, who really are our customers? What motivates them to a decision? What really is this product?

That inflexibility in those dimensions can also create a lot of friction between the founders and early GTM. And I’m sure you’ve all seen it, right? Like someone that’s absolutely crushed it at mega scale, wants to join a startup, but isn’t necessarily aware of why their previous organization did certain techniques and steps, and just imports it wholesale, because that’s how you do marketing and sales. But I’d be interested in your reflection on that. Does that sound true, or you experience something else?

No, it does. My experience has been, you have to get over being adversarial. In the beginning, it was, I’m bringing you the leads, how come you’re not converting them, right? Instead of understanding, yeah, you might be getting me the leads, but to your point, maybe you’re not going after the right customer profile, or the right demographic, or targeting the right persona, right? So it’s really important to have that relationship with your demand gen person to make sure that you’re both on the same page.

So if the leads are coming in, and there’s an issue with sales training, because we’re not getting past the second stage of the sales cycle, then that’s addressed, instead of throwing bombs over the fence to each other, to make them look at the other person’s problem and not your own. So it’s been really important to develop that relationship early, so that way you can cut through the noise and try to figure out what the real problem is.

Because like you said, that’s the most critical point in an early stage startup, is to get over those inflection points.

I’ll offer this as a tool that I’ve found powerful in a few different places, which is having heads of all the major units in your company, in the same room looking at customer dropouts through the process. So I’m sure most of you are tracking this, knowing if someone bounced on the first pitch, or the first meeting, or install time, or a demo, or blah, blah, blah, all the way through to a purchase order, is an exceptionally useful thing to do.

And you don’t have to make it super complicated, like a simple spreadsheet, even a whiteboard when you’re on your first 10 or 20 customers. Getting people around the table, and everyone having a shared responsibility, including the CTO, including legal, including finance, and saying, right, everyone, here’s where the dropouts are happening. They’re happening in whatever, stage three and stage six of our process. Do we know why? Have we genuinely got anything other than hypotheses of why we’re bouncing off?

And so to your point there, Todd, if you’re getting some leads, and they’re coming into the process with an erroneous understanding of what your product or service does, no surprise it dies, right? And there’s a shared responsibility in the company to go, hey, could we build what the customer thinks they were buying in the first place? Or did we get the initial setup of the lead wrong? Or did we just not pitch it correctly, or the demo sucked, or what have you? That is a collaborative activity for me.

And I’ve often found that engineering can lean back in that meeting and feel like, this is a problem for you folks, you need to go sell it, I’ve made this widget. But the reality is, removing friction and increasing conversion is absolutely something that the engineering team should be leaning in on.

If you’re getting stuck in legals over and over again, actually, is this something you can do in the product to make sure that it is more privacy friendly, that it’s not storing sensitive data, that it has a load of stuff baked in Ts and Cs, and you don’t need it in an NDA in the first place, or whatever the blockages are? Absolutely, you can make some major wins there. And the other place where engineering can make some major wins is onboarding.

No engineer wants to work on onboarding the product, super boring, it’s not cool and sexy, it’s not in the UI. Can you go and do something fundamentally different that de- skills and accelerates the onboarding process for customers, even if it’s a boring project for four months? Engineering should really be a participant in that conversation to say, end to end in this sales process, what can we do to make it repeatedly frictionless to grind forwards on this stuff?

The reason why I suggest we do it in one meeting is when we do it in three meetings, it’s always the person in the room’s fault who isn’t there, but it’s always the person who isn’t in the room whose fault it is the you can’t be the CEO and go and have this one one conversation at a time, because genuinely that’s where office politics starts coming in.

Oh hey, Anisha, you made a really good point about kind of tracking, conversion rates and just sales stages. I’m curious from your experience at drug trace and then also maybe some of the other founders in the call, like if they are finding slow down at that POC stage where they- you know you’re- you’re sort of letting the customer or the prospect try out the environment or the, the product themselves, and also if you’re finding that you’re able to skip that stage a lot, the well.

I’ll go first. Other people chime in. I’m a huge believer in momentum in all types of deals, whether it’s fundraising or customer engagements etc. We have a catchphrase in 1011 that all deals have their moment and if you feel like you’ve been plugging away something for nine months and your it’s ticking through some stages really quickly, you know chances are that it will never happen because all the energy has gone out the room and everyone’s found something else exciting to go and chase after.

But one of the things that I love doing is saying, well, how can we have maximum momentum here? Like, do we, can we set up with a customer to say, look, here’s what it means to get this solution up and running in your environment and I’m ready to go whenever you are. If you give me two days notice, we will turn up, have an impact and what we would do on day one is get this working and then we would come back on day three and show you the outcomes that that solution is giving you already, and on day five we’ll walk you through the commercial proposal.

Day seven will come back and have a wrap- up with you of the total impact this is had, will give you a report that you can take to your, your decision makers that shows the value that you specifically got in this. But I tell you what: let’s not plug it in on in two days time and then wait four months before we come and see some value. And then, if you’re not sure when the next procurement meeting is, you know, let’s not do it. Where there’s a three month just drag out window because they’ll lose the excitement and the energy of you being there.

And what have you and I and I- actually I’ve got this in it in this latest slide. I genuinely believe coming in armed with a solid proposal with real numbers, in around the time that you first demonstrate value for the customer is a really powerful way of unlocking progress.

There’s a norm in cyber that I think is incorrect, that you maybe turn up two or three times showing value, doing some training, and then we suddenly reveal to: da here’s some pricing right at the end of the process and and people haven’t been warmed up to it and and it just massively elongates dell cycles. And, on a related point, if there’s surprise pricing in there, that it only covers the initial onboarding but it’s a blank check for what it would take for the customer to adopt at scale or how their business might change in the next three years.

Again, that creates uncertainty and slowdown for the customer, where you could have just really put it all out on the table very early on and start working alongside the customer and go. Well, you’re seeing, the value is the commercials. Let’s start getting this stuff over over the line together.

Yeah, super helpful. I love the idea kind of previewing. Okay, here’s the plan right up, right at the get- go, I think- sorry, I just think we get that question a lot.

You know, and it’s in some of the pre questions- how to create the sense of urgency and I think that that’s a really helpful mental model. You know, how will you have those deliverables at the end of the POC that we? You know they keep that moment, that urgency up, that, keep that momentum going.

One of my sort of more comical ways of thinking about this is that us folks with small organizations can’t keep up with bigger organizations. Ability to create meetings, like the folks were often selling to, especially if it’s federal and all of the layers in between selling to a federal customer- have a almost unlimited ability to create meetings and having pre meetings about what the next meeting will be and all of that type of stuff.

If you can cut through it by really politely saying: we love you guys, you know we’re crushing it with so many customers at the moment. Let me give you some materials for framing this stuff up here is the plan for how we would do this together and you call me any time and we’ll be there in 48 hours to execute against this plan.

But with the, you know, utmost of respect, we probably aren’t going to come to 400 meetings in in advance, like we can give you one or two sales engineer meetings to do some, whatever it is- data center planning, security sign offs, blah, blah blah. But we really aren’t going to come on that the 700 meeting journey with you.

Yeah, that’s great. You know, federal as well as I do, Anusha,

That’s where I’m on.

I think you kind of remember what the next slide is. Let’s find it out.

Right.

Okay. Let’s talk about this sort of briefly, because we’ve covered some of it. How do you maintain some sense of empathy when you’re going from people that have lived with the pain in the founding team and early employees to maybe they’re a 22- year- old salesperson in their first sales job, right? They haven’t been a CISO before or run big tech risks in their career. Obviously, hearing from the founder, as often as possible, is very powerful. No surprises there.

One of the tricks I think that really cuts through, though, is replaying stuff that other customer meetings have created and language that other customers have created about how you might help them into their narratives is really good. Without them lecturing the client on, hey, you really need to care about this security issue, and here’s me as a 22- year- old telling a 60- year- old CISO why they need to do what I say, you know, that doesn’t work.

But if you’re like, hey, I was with Rolls- Royce last week, and one of the things that really stuck with me was when they said they were worried about A, B, and C, and they really saw us fitting into D, E, and F in their business. Like, it’s just such a simple tweak of language, but it really lets junior employees feel like they’ve got things in their arsenal that aren’t rolling into a CISO and going, hey, did you hear cyberattacks are bad? Like, they really suck, and penalties are huge these days. Like, we’ve all seen those pictures, right?

They don’t work. They definitely don’t work when you think you’re getting told what your job is by someone that hasn’t done it. I think the other thing we can do with pure go- to- market people that maybe don’t have natural empathy is let them be a concierge of the process that your business is selling or product or service or whatever, rather than sitting opposite the table trying to jam it through a customer. So it can very much be, hey, these are all the things that our company can do.

Let me know if you would like to do a POV, and I’ll get that set up for you. And would you like a commercial proposal? I can trigger that for you, and I’m hoping to get access to the CEO’s diary and bring them in to see you. When would be the right time for that? Again, it’s subtle changes of language, but it’s really moving someone onto a concierge type, let’s get through this process together and get you what you need, rather than saying, again, hey, let me jam you with my clever sales methodology, etc.

We’ve already talked about Magic Moment and all that sort of thing. I would like to bring up one more time, and I think this is hardest for the founders that are most proud of the product, how extraneous a lot of the things that we might want to show are. So many engagements and pitches focus on being a training course for a customer before they can move forward, or let me show you every single button in this product. Would you like to see some raw logs on a black and white screen with some arbitrary strings in it?

Jamming that stuff into your go- to- market team and forcing them to do that as part of their classic pitch is just death for everybody, right? There’s a high risk that they make an accident and say something not credible. Yeah, Phil, show up and throw up. I mean, for sure. We met a really cool founder the other day, and they had an 11- minute demo, of which 10. 5 minutes was buttonology on some stuff that no one cared about. We as founders can get really proud of every button, right? This is one of, I think, the hardest mindsets to go through.

If you can have a 15- minute pitch meeting, where you turn up and you say, this is what our company is about, here’s how I can concierge you through a process. You won’t really experience how powerful it is until you’ve tried it for yourself. So let’s get you into that situation as fast as possible. But hey, I was with Unilever last week, and they’re using this in the blah, blah, blah and changing from them. Happy to do demos and stuff, but for real, you should just try this, because that’s where you’re going to see the real power of it.

And that’s 15 minutes well spent, right? The client’s glad you didn’t spend an hour and a half showing them AWS scripts and all of that type of stuff. I think it’s one of the most important transitions that we can make as we go from expert selling into early GTM. But I’ve probably laboured that point too much. What’s next, Mary?

Yeah, I don’t think you can labor it up point too much, David, thank you, that’s very useful.

Well, you guys are the masters at it and I could feel like a fraud with, with you and and Phil here, pretty, pretty solid process that you guys have created.

You.

Why don’t you share for a moment how? Because you guys have done a bit more PLG, right, Ken? So you’ve got a community and we’ve got a simple message.

We’ve made plenty of mistakes, so it’s nearly better to share your mistakes, I think the things that have gone well, you know. So you know it’s pretty recent that we just hired sales and marketing in the first place. Right, it’s not that long ago. First mistake I think we made is we just hired a bunch of people at once and then, relative to the size of the company, you’ve had too many people who didn’t know anything, kind of echoing the unknown sentiments to each other, right, so so you know we had to.

We had to kind of roll back and improve our sales enablement on our sales and able material so that we could really focus on what matters. Right, and I think you know we had. We had quite a large kind of campaign around this recently, right, to to kind of make sure everybody had the simple messaging and knew that the product wasn’t the product. If you get me, you know your product is the concept and the outcome more than the actual product or the UI, right, and you know the. You know what button is where on a UI. It doesn’t matter a shit.

So that’s, I think that’s that’s the main thing we’re just trying to hammer home to everybody. Right, to focus on the concept and the outcome. Concept and the outcome- because that’s that’s what really makes the difference to the buying organization. Right, this is a new thing, changes everything for you. The outcome is massive. So I think that’s that’s kind of an important point for us. an important point for us.

But you know we’re kind of reiterating just what you’re saying, right, and another thing that i’ll touch on just while we’re on this slide and thank you for sharing that: uh, one of the things that I think you guys have done great is, uh, you don’t put barriers in place for anyone in the world trying out what, what you do, and you’ve got competitors.

I know you’ve got competitors on the platform and the and the product, and you’ve got, uh, you’ve just made it really really easy for people to access the community version just by, you know, downloading it and essentially, not being um the criminals with some slim checks. One of the things that I think is largely disappeared from the industry but was more common a few years ago, so you you may encounter it from some of your advisors- is, um deliberately creating friction to try and jazz up more interest in a in a customer.

So, hey, can you prove to me you’ve got budget for this, otherwise i’m not wasting my time coming to a meeting with you or letting you try it. I genuinely I think that’s insane. Um it I I can’t think of any um situation where it would be a good idea to make a someone who’s already got a painful life harder to engage with you and adopt what you’re doing, especially on rolling into procurement and saying I need to. I need to find some way of demonstrating to these clowns that i’ve actually got some money that I might spend on it.

Like, yeah, that is not a good idea, wouldn’t do that. Um, you don’t have to go all in like ken and phil have on making it available to everyone on the planet. But I think, unless you’re desperately supply constrained, making it hard for people to interact with you is is. It’s really not the right approach, but some of that advice still kicks around. Let’s click on to the next slide. Please, mary, I really wanted to talk about proposals for a moment, um.

This may not be the case if you’re in marketplaces or doing high volumes of small deals with your customers, but if you’re asking for a million bucks from a customer or some significant amount of money, and the thing that underpins that is a flimsy proposal with a bunch of numbers in it that doesn’t communicate the value to people you haven’t met before, it’s just got a downloaded low resolution logo from the customer’s website on it, but otherwise it’s completely impersonal.

I just don’t think that that is a sensible way of thinking about what proposals are for. One of the rules of thumb that I have often had with companies I’ve worked with is: why would you spend a crazy large amount of energy and money on your website, which may not be the thing that leads to a purchase, just gets people jazzed up about your brand.

But then you roll in and ask for three million bucks from a customer and the CFO is sat there with something that doesn’t explain in simple language what you do, doesn’t get them excited about the engagement that they’re going to make and doesn’t take them on a journey- terrible catchphrase, but often the proposal is the only representation you have in the room when the deal really gets signed and, of course, we will meet buyers who say: I’m definitely the buyer I can sign off on this- and we all know that they can’t sign off on that right.

They’re going to some procurement board and there’ll be 50 other people that find out about this transaction before you get a signature. Having something really awesome that stands up about who you are, the impact that you’re going to have and is not aimed at getting the customer over the initial buy on day one, but is aimed at here’s what the next three years look like together and this is how we’re going to live together and evolve together and, of course, what it’s going to cost you. I think it’s super important. It’s massively neglected.

It’s often delegated to the most junior person in the entire company to write these things and they’re often terrible and I’d really encourage you to go after this stuff. We’ve talked about when to time these things. I like to time them early. I think it just gets people into a mindset that they’re not just hanging out with you for a free cocktail and to play with some fun tech, but they’re on a journey to buy something.

I like surprise pricing where you get hooked in on day one and you get screwed on six months down the line when you find out that the prices are much bigger than you’d anticipated. I’m not really a fan of that right, like everyone knows that. That’s what Splunk is famous for. Is that what you want your brand to be famous for? I really love this company and then they screwed me. It’s not what you want your customer champions to say as they go around the bazaars.

Here’s my most arbitrary slide in the deck of how to think about what the different numbers are, where you start scaling different roles. I think Mary crystallized this thinking for me that it is different if you’ve sold before. If you’ve sold before, you can absolutely juggle a bunch of early, go to market folks and understand where they’re at in a process, give them some coaching, kind of understand what’s happening under the hood.

If you haven’t done that before and you’re a technical founder like I was, you really need a sales team leader early on to do a lot of that heavy lifting. But I think maybe the next hire doesn’t always- or the third or fourth hire doesn’t necessarily always need to be the next salesperson if it can be someone that’s starting to give you insight into what’s happening in the sales process, that can glue together marketing with sales and lead gen and BD and truly understand what’s going on and maybe take some of the heat out of those relationships.

That’s pretty good. That lets you elevate back out from: look, we’re fixing a process here, we’re optimizing a business process. It’s not, hey, marketing you suck, or sales you suck at this, or the sales engineers aren’t installing things on time, and it being office politics. So a sales ops type person, even if they’re fractional right, where they just come in a couple of days a week and help you out, I think can really help you focus on managing the overall thing rather than just being a scrappy startup trying to fight every deal through.

These numbers are arbitrary right the device authority folks on here. You have an incredibly complex sales process, incredibly complex clients. These numbers may not be reflective for you folks, but they’re probably maximum. You probably can’t be coaching 10. Go to market folks underneath you and retain your sanity and try and run a business and a product strategy and all that sort of thing. Anyway, I checked that out there. It was one of the pre- submitted questions that came in, so if whoever submitted that wants to talk about it, let’s do it.

I do think that’s interesting, you know, we always get these questions at 1011, you know, like, what’s the playbook? Who do I hire? When? And think like, looking introspectively, like, what am I good at? What have I done? And what am I not good at, is a good lens to put on it, for sure.

And the if the folks in the room that haven’t done this with us, you know, 1011 is always very happy within our ability to do so to help you find good sales team leaders or VP sales or CMOs or whatever it is. We’re generally running a couple of searches with companies at any given moment. Sometimes they’re serendipitously useful for several companies at once.

So we’ve just done a CFO search in New York for with Sempris and now Blackbird are thinking about bringing a CFO on, you know, we’ve got a pre- cooked list ready to go of some great CFOs and some terrible ones, you know, a lot of the value is going, hey, that person sucks or whatever. We’re always happy to help on that stuff. So if you’re hiring someone outside of your comfort zone, come and chat to us. We’d always be delighted to try and help you along.

You kind of touched on this earlier, training up the early hires, there’s a load of stuff that’s obvious, right? Like we’re going to get them to rehearse their pitches, we’re going to test that they’re not saying crazy things before we unleash them on the world. Sometimes that’s a one and done and I wouldn’t recommend that or a six monthly type process, I wouldn’t recommend that.

You know, there’s no reason why early hires can’t be practicing objection handling with each other as a group and someone from the expert team on a weekly basis, just get better and better at objection handling, get better and better at narrowing in on what has worked with the last three customers in the last seven days. And if anyone’s ever spent any time with BDRs or SDRs, this is their superpower, right? The first superpower is no, doesn’t mean no.

The second superpower is they rehearse like crazy, everything they talk about, and they practice, practice, practice every single week. It’s really, really powerful in getting you good fast to do that sort of thing. And you, the founders or senior hires don’t need to be in every single one of those, but making sure it happens and that there is an expert in the room helping it along, really powerful. You pick up a lot of things that maybe aren’t said in other forums that customers may be objecting about that aren’t on your radar.

So I couldn’t recommend it enough, but you specifically have to work to avoid what Ken was talking about, which I believe in the US is called telephone game. It’s called something else in the UK. But if you hire someone that doesn’t quite know what they’re doing and get them to whisper some words into the next person and they go and responsible for hiring the next person and whispering some words in those ears, in the new person’s ears, then your message and your pitch and your style and consistency just absolutely go down the toilet.

And it probably happens to every single startup at some point where you don’t realize that you’ve been scaling, scaling, scaling, and now just crazy stuff is happening in an onboarding. I predict what happened to everyone on the call. I think it actually can happen several times that, you know, you get to 50 people, you get to 150 people, you get to 1000 people and go to market. It will break repeatedly, but the fix is always the same, right? Okay, let’s boil back down to what we were talking about at the start. What’s the magic moment?

How do we take the friction out? What is our core consistent story?

Hey, what have you heard over here?

Holy moly, don’t ever say that again. Like literally erase that from your memory. Let’s go back to basics. So I think that will keep coming up. And the other point I’d make on this slide is it can be really demoralizing for early go to market employees when the sales aren’t just magically turning up, if the sales aren’t magically turning up in the early days. So having some measures that everyone understands or performance metrics around activity as well as outcome is a good thing.

One it will let you know that if maybe you’re not, if someone’s not selling is because the reason they only do one meeting a week and they’re just not doing anything, then that’s helpful to know, right? You can start managing that person out or try and turn around their performance. If someone’s absolutely having meetings like crazy and it’s active and getting PVs and just specifically for them, they have a conversion issue, then you can get in there and try and diagnose it and turn it around.

But it’s nice for early go to market folks to feel like they can hit some targets even if the revenue doesn’t fall out at the end of it. And I’m also a fan of attaching some comp to that. Doesn’t have to be permanent parts of the comp plan. You can have a temporary bonus or prize or whatever it is and say, hey, whoever can get the most demo meetings booked in the next seven days.

whatever. He’s going out for dinner, he’s going to the Dodgers game or whatever he’s trying to think of an American sports team that he’s heard of. Broncos, that’s Denver right? You know that stuff can make people feel like they’re crushing it and getting some recognition from their peers even if maybe the product’s not quite there yet and so it’s not resulting in sales or there’s something problem downstream in the business that you’re working away at and keeping morale up and try and minimize churn of people you want to keep in an alligator market.

This is easy stuff right? Getting a book taken for 500 bucks or whatever it is. It doesn’t cost you much. It’s a technique that you can use again and again as you scale. Maybe you’ve got a new product and everyone’s a bit wary of it but you can have a competition or a prize or some spiff for everyone that gets a certain number of whatever it is, trials or sales or meetings booked, whatever. A tool you can use again and again and I’d really recommend it. I think that’s the last slide isn’t it Mary?

Yeah, Dave on that reaccreditation point, I feel like we’ve been noticing really rapid product cycles and so I thought that, sorry Mary is on the slide, the really long one. One more back. This reaccreditation like just the competitive environment is changing so rapidly. I feel like we’ve seen companies maybe not realize that what their sellers are facing in the field is changing pretty rapidly.

Right. So I thought that was an interesting point. And the product too right? I’m on mailing lists for most of the folks on the calls businesses like constantly getting updates and saying hey we’ve got this cool new thing. Is that fully woven into the narrative for you go- to- market folks or did you start accumulating a bunch of add- ons that don’t necessarily feel like they fit into the story or they don’t have a flow yet for navigating that?

You’ll work that out if you’re trying to reaccredit someone on the up- to- date story on a periodic basis again good diagnosis tool. Maybe just while we’re back on this slide I’ll hit on one more thing is really easy to over index on planning for a one- hour zoom.

An awful lot of sales opportunities are you know whatever standing at the coffee machine at a conference where you’ve got 35 seconds to tell your whole story or you’re a cocktail party or whatever you know we often don’t accredit our go- to- market and outward- facing folks on what’s the answer to what do you do? Hey Megan what do you do? Like you know like oh let me book a zoom with you for an hour I’ll tell you what we do. Wrong answer like hey what do we do?

We’re the most complete threat intelligence source of the entire internet and it’s updated in real time. It’s called silent push and you can buy it for 10k a month. Would you like to try it? Like whatever. I mean you know that’s a terrible one.

Phil will be rolling in his grave but having that ready to go is something we rarely actually get the folks to do and it’s quite a fun exercise to ask people if you haven’t trained on it what they would say in that exercise because you it’s terrifying you hear some absolute crazy stuff that you don’t want them to say but yeah well worth practicing. How does the story change when you’re on stage? Maybe it’s way less salesy when you’re on stage. Maybe you’re talking about a lot of customer case studies.

Maybe you linger longer on the pain points and outcomes. It will be different to the to the zoom meeting for sure. So how do they get that right and obviously accessing other parts of the business and marketing experts and having the perfect you know on stage slide deck which is different to the what do you do in a short meeting versus a traditional hour meeting etc is effort well worth it.

Yeah I think that’s a great point and sort of a hidden advantage if you can get to perfect those different opportunities. We’re right at the top of the hour so I just wanted to thank everyone for joining us.