Assertion Not checkable as stated
Stone: Over half of software companies have weak or negative NDR
“More than half of companies out there have very weak to negative net dollar retention metrics.”
Insight
Stone: Early B2B Expansion Requires Build-and-Learn Over Short-Term Revenue
“Near term growth is not the goal. When I stepped into this role, we'd actually already promised very strong growth to the board on the revenue line. But it was very clear, very quickly, particularly in light of digging in and realizing some of those assumption…”
Insight
Stone: Separating strategies by sales channel creates silos and destroys synergy
“The one thing that I would, that I try to avoid personally and has worked out well is this idea that we have different strategies for different channels or different teams deal with specifically different deal types and sizes. I found that that actually inadve…”
Assertion Partly supported
Stone: Written miscommunication costs upwards of 6% of GDP
“Miscommunication just in a written form costs us upwards of six percent of our GDP.”
Insight
Stone: Consumer workplace usage does not equal B2B product-market fit
“The extensibility of our product market fit simply because it was being used in a work setting was not the same thing as becoming a B to B product and having the right product market fit that we wanted.”
Insight
Stone: Hiring for experience must require curiosity to avoid misplaced playbooks
“Bringing people in for pattern recognition has to be paired, and with their expertise, has to be paired with the right values, and those things have to be separately and collectively met in terms of a bar for hiring.
I would not, I would be very worried about …”
Insight
Stone: GTM teams must productize and remove manual work from day one
“Ensuring particularly the leaders in those areas of the organization that they share the same responsibility as any other leader in the organization on the product side to be driving productivity, to be productizing things, to be looking at places where manual…”
What-if
Stone: Grammarly should have documented why enterprise strategy could fail
“I think it's probably in retrospect probably would have been better if we'd even taken a stronger stance to write down the reasons why our current strategy to go into B to B and to go into enterprise would not work rather than allowing ourselves To be over opt…”
Disclosure
Stone: Grammarly had to unwind board-committed enterprise revenue goals
“Even when I started, we had revenue goals already committed to the board for the next year that Frankly, we had to unwind and that's not just on the revenue line.”
Disclosure
Stone: Grammarly paired enterprise hires with SMB reps on accounts
“We took a two-pronged approach to that. We hired some enterprise sales leaders and enterprise sales team members. We then put in rather than dividing the teams up, we allowed the teams to work together on accounts so that those with greater experience could al…”
Assertion Supported
Stone: Grammarly has over 30 million daily active users
“We have grown over that time quite substantially. Over thirty million daily users.”
Insight
Stone: B2B companies must track leading indicators due to long cycle times
“In B to B. Leading indicators and behaviors become very, very critical to learn from rather than waiting until you get to the end state because of how long the cycle times are and how that will deteriorate your learning.”
