Your ideal customer comes knocking
Your ideal customer comes knocking
What to do when they're a potential accelerant to your business
If you’re lucky, the moment you’ve been waiting for finally happens: literally the best company that could ever possibly be a customer of your company offers to take a discovery call with you. Everything should be exciting, but insecurity settles in; is my product good enough? Actually, probably yes.
Why you’re worried
Your average deal size is way smaller than you expect this one to be
It could be a lot of development work done for nothing
Things that should work aren’t working so great with customers
You don’t know what to do to service a company like this (yet)
Recently lost a deal to competitor
Shifting “enterprise” or feature needs from another client
etc.
The mindset shift required is to ask yourself: would working with this company be an accelerant? In the spirit of “Selling Roadmap,” this customer may actually catalyze your company in a way that wasn’t possible before. Their feedback and quality input can help drive the right roadmap items, and being able to reference them as a customer may pay the effort 10-fold if you’re looking for a lighthouse company to show why your company is the best solution.
What to do if this company is an accelerant?
First understanding in detail what the customer is looking for in a solution is important – three key areas to know:
What are their most urgent needs in a solution? This will help you prioritize what “success criteria” matters most and how much of your current product meets their requirements and how much you may need to build in the coming months.
What other solutions are they evaluating (this includes building themselves) and what do you offer that is truly differentiated? Do they know this yet? Are your differentiators included as part of the evaluation? Why? Why not?
Who needs to be involved to make a final decision? The reason why this is a “first things first” kind of question is that if you’re working with a junior person, it’s going to take time to get their boss on board. If you’re working with the buyer early in the cycle, great. However, you need to shift your line of questioning towards “what will the team and users expect in a solution to make sure this doesn’t become shelfware after you purchase?”
It’s actually okay to do a lot of work, but in the spirit of the enterprise sales mindset, everything must be a give-get. In the emerging AI and new-company-building world we are all living in, there is just a lot more “hands-on” work required to close deals. To make sure your effort is worth it, always be in the give-get mindset:
A give-get requires that there is always a reciprocal effort between you and the prospect. You can always do the work, but they should always give something in return that gets you closer to closing the deal (future posts on Success Criteria + Action Planning to come). For example, a prospect may need help with configuration. They should be able to do this themselves, but what could take them days can take you 1-2 hours. “Hey, I’m actually happy to do this in the spirit of our partnership we’re aiming to develop. Since we’ve accomplished X and Y for you and it allowed you to do Z, can we find time with [Buyer] to review our progress and discuss how internal conversations are aligning around the cost ranges we’ve provided? We can also use that call for me to walk you through all the work I’m about to do for you. What’s the best way to schedule this?” Give-get.
Map out technical requirements on what you have and don’t have today. Discuss this internally, then show the prospect in a document, slides, etc. what you can do within the scope of the evaluation, and what would require engineering time post-purchase (yes, this is okay to do).
Prioritize things based on what you can sell today and get the technical win fast
Set the right expectations on how long it will take based on the number of stakeholders
Meet the executives early and often – as the Founder, the CEO is your peer (remember you are now an Executive). People don’t want to be told “give me your boss,” so what you want to start thinking about is how to use the give-get approach for someone to feel comfortable looping in leadership as you add value to the partnership.
How to know if it’s not an accelerant?
Scope is way too large on a list of features well outside of what you can offer today. Although this may be the case, it’s important to ask about ways to reduce scope and grow into these requirements. It can help you close a small land and expand over time.
Consistent scope and timeline creep – you must build boundaries and requirements with prospects early and often in the sales cycle. The above on prioritizing urgent needs can help.
You didn’t have boundaries and now you need to reset expectations – this can actually be a positive if you’re transparent and don’t overpromise. People typically know what they are getting from an early-stage startup, they believe in your vision. True champions and advocates will understand, but operate like an executive, not an AE.
You’re doing a ton of work and the deal is getting further away from closing. If you haven’t been give-getting, now is the time to (thoughtfully) recap all of the work you’ve done to date, the value you’ve provided, and walk the prospect through your intended course of action to work together. Else, you should revisit this at another time.
You’re unable to get executive (or management) alignment after multiple give-gets and adding lots of value to the prospect – this requires the thoughtful conversation of showing what you’ve done to date before moving on. You’ve probably heard of the concept of “multi-threading,” but you want to do this with the alignment of the team you’re working with, not going around them. Else, you have lost your one true advocate.
A very real but worst case scenario, you burn out your team
As you start to land conversations with your ideal prospects, we’re always happy to help. Don’t hesitate to reach out.
Excellent reads of the week
This is the most comprehensive and thoughtful layout on how to navigate the buying process. One very important takeaway I love and we encourage Founders and their Founding AEs to focus on:
Budget owners need to carefully think about the questions I listed earlier and provide a thoughtful analysis on why the company needs to purchase a tool.
Sales Folks: Your job is to help equip your champions to do that. Spend extra time with those who are less experienced, new to a company, or may not have the trust of their CFO. Because they are the ones who need to earn trust to get the purchase approved. CFOs don’t want to talk to the salespeople. They want to hear a thoughtful analysis straight from the internal buyer.
Clay’s Path to Product-Market Fit
2b. This podcast interview from ~5 months ago was also the best description I’ve heard of the time and effort required to find true fit. Felt timely in response to the recent fundraising announcement and reminder that it takes a ton of time to hit scale :). Congratulations again to our client and most recent investment, Clay.