Context is the unlock
The better the context, the faster your team can align to your vision
No surprise but the Founder-led building and selling process is my absolute favorite thing to experience. It’s incredibly exciting to watch the vision and effort come to life. As a company scales and hits real PMF it becomes increasingly harder for Founders to translate their vision and paired learnings into a language other can follow, repeat, and scale within their own teams rather than feeling like they need to "own" or "start from scratch" on a vision that has already been ordained through years of hard work and customer conversations. As CEO, you’ve now signed up for the manufacturing, distilling, packaging, and dissemination of shared context.
As companies grow, you hear CEOs make the joke of repeating themselves thousands of times. This is painfully true and it means you need to be smart about standardizing your internal and external communication to bucket the value, outcomes, and challenges happening so you can close customers consistently and newcomers have historical context that allows for faster onboarding. Most will claim they need a “Playbook” but what is most important is the context of your vision, what you’ve learned so far from selling to customers, and the types of problems you help your customers solve. The playbook and communication framework can follow from there.
A few weeks ago, I referenced the Enterprise-Wide Sales Activities from Mark Leslie, where I mentioned Engineering, Product, and Design (EPD), Marketing, and Sales must remain in lock-step. As you start to transition from Founder-led to making your first IC and leadership hires, it’s important as the Founder to start grounding the company on a shared understanding of the following:
What main problems do we solve today? (Likely 1-2 core things, your vision may have more)
Of the main problems you solve, how would I categorize the workflow / use cases customers can achieve in each? (The product features nicely categorized for your website)
From there, what are the outcomes customers can expect to achieve if they successfully do this? (Formally known as “Customer Value Drivers”)
What customer examples do we have? (What makes you unique and different. Why did they buy from us in comparison to your competitors?)
Does everyone have a shared understanding of how and why we are different from competitors? (It should be more than a feature and more a moat on a really smart decision you made)
Based on the above, what will customers be able to do in the near-future if we continue to build an amazing product? (Your podcast pitch)
Based on that, if we’re right about our hypothesis, what will the market look like in 3+ years as we continue to build towards a larger and more exciting part of the workflow? (Your Bloomberg Technology pitch)
Without the above, most will ask for “ICP” changes, a “golden customer journey,” have disjointed messaging, and a frustrated EPD team unclear on which customers to prioritize and what are the specific problems the customer is running into. There’s a lot of deeper nuance to this, but if the above isn’t clearly documented, communicated, and discussed on a weekly basis, it becomes harder to get a large, high-performing team to hit your next Series B+ milestones.