The Wisdom Wall

“if you, if you really genuinely think that you could build a hundred million dollar business, then you're probably going to want to go out to venture money because you're going to need to raise two or three times. Um, and debt probably won't help you do that over the longer term. I think if you, if you think, and…”

“And as product differentiation gets increasingly blurred, and competitive pricing kind of almost rules you out of the market, the one reason that you'll win more deals is your sales process.”

“If you demo early, before you've gone through really deep discovery, you're forcing yourself to get embroiled in feature selling, because you're just showing people features. That's what a demo is. The demo should come at the end.”

“The benefits from doing the right thing are very small in sales. The benefits from pulling out really quickly are massive.”

“It's taking your buyer through a process, and not just running the process that your buyer wants you to go through.”

“Look, the best person to sell Your platform is going to be your founder. It is. Doesn't matter if you're the chief sales officer, you're the VP of sales, whoever you are in this room, if you're not the founder, I can tell you the best person to sell your product is going to be the founder.”

“Segment your customers by growth, not by revenue. Understand how big these customers are. How big is the potential opportunity? Growth doesn't mean it's there right now, but if you've got a company with a billion revenues paying you 10,000 bucks a year, that's a growth customer. That is not a customer that should be in…”

“I wouldn't necessarily advocate you going into a salesperson as a founder, because you'll end up doing it all the time, and you'll get sucked in, and if you do it once, your sales team will be asking you to do it all the time, and that isn't scalable.”

“In terms of, um, quota, it, it depends on how much you pay them, and, and so, so typically, you know, if I'm paying an AE a hundred K, I want, I want 600 K in revenue back from that a year.”

“We, we never ask closed questions, so we're always asking open questions to try and open them up.”

“Finding the coach is difficult, but it's the most important role you can have, I believe, in any mid-market to enterprise sales motions.”

“Nobody cares how we're gonna help them save their customers. Nobody cares. What they care about is, can we? And what does it look like? What's the indicative value we can offer you As a customer of ours, that's what wins us our deals.”

“If you sell features, I guarantee you, you're going to be drawn into price. And you'll be in price negotiations all the time. People are going to haggle and try and get your price down.”

“So if you're selling by seat, contraction is the biggest killer for your business. Because you'll get, you'll bring a customer on, you might sell a hundred seats, and you've still got that customer in 12 months time, but you've probably churned 60% of your seats.”

“What, what we've, when we, we sold by seat initially, and then what we did is turn that off, and we just go and sell into the company now, and we sell directly into the, into the organization. It takes longer, but you'll get a much higher ARR, and you'll retain that customer much better than you would had you, um, you…”

“Very, very difficult for a customer to leave you if you're embedded into their workflows. They're not going to turn you off. If you're not, and they're using your platform on a web browser, for example, it's very, very easy for them to switch it off, move to a competitor, and you'll lose them.”

“So you're actually working to a main close date through very small little incremental close dates. And it's very, very unlikely that a deal slips.”

“I think you, you then get into lots of contractual disputes and I've had this before where, um, companies would then start to, to debate about, you know, who, how much revenue they've actually got from us or if they, if they acquire an organization and their revenue ramps because of the acquisition, does we, do we…”

“what we discovered very early on is that, um, churn, churn models aren't very scalable.”