Sales Management Podcast
72. Product-Market Fit Mastery and Sales-Driven Innovation with Praveen Ghanta
We talk about how sales teams can benefit from and help drive product evolution in small and larger companies. This episode is especially useful for aspiring senior execs who want to break out of their sales bubble into overall company leadership.
We talk about how sales teams can benefit from and help drive product evolution in small and larger companies. This episode is especially useful for aspiring senior execs who want to break out of their sales bubble into overall company leadership.
Welcome to the Sales Management Podcast, your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. I'm your host, coach CRM co-founder, corey Gray. No long intros, no long ads, let's go All right. Different topic today Very fun where we're continuing a theme we've touched on a couple of times previously, but from a different angle. Where we're continuing a theme we've touched on a couple of times previously, but from a different angle, where we're going to talk about sales teams and product teams working together. You've heard me say the best sales enablement is building a better product, and I've got Praveen Gante here to tell us about his experience, having exited a SaaS company over the course of the last 10 years and now he's at it again as a new founder. Praveen, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks for having me, Corey, happy to share the long march that it was with the last company, and how we're trying to sprint faster this time, and everything in between.
Speaker 1:I love it. So the theme today is how sales teams can be instrumental in finding product market fit. We're going to look at this through the lens of an early stage company to begin with. We're going to look at it through the lens of a later stage company later on. And Praveen, just for context for everybody, I don't always do intros of who somebody is, but I think for you it's very important for the conversation today. Tell us about what you're working on and how that gives you insight into the topic that we've got today. Tell us about what you're working on and how that gives you insight into the topic that we've got today.
Speaker 2:For sure. Well, so I've been at, you know, in the I guess entrepreneurial game for I don't know 25 years now, give or take, but the two experiences that I think inform you know what we're talking about today. My last company, the SaaS company that you mentioned, was a company called Hidden Levers. We built software for financial advisors and it was risk management software specifically, and we had an interesting experience in getting the product market fit. It took us about 18 months there at the beginning and I'm happy to share more on that later, but that experience really showed me how sales can be key in that process of figuring out who your customer is.
Speaker 2:And then, for context, my role I was CEO of that company, ceo of my current company, but I'm also a technical co-founder. So I've done enough work on sales to respect what salespeople do and how hard it is. So I've gotten 100 leads at a trade show. This is back in the day I was giving away iPods, when iPods were like a hot thing that worked really well as a raffle, got all these business cards and then I'm like, oh God, I have to actually call these people and try to get meetings with them and try to go through a sales cycle.
Speaker 2:So it gave me respect for the sales process and collecting the no's, I guess, as you say, the nose, I guess, as you say, um. But more recently, currently building a company called fraction, where our thesis is that the best talent already has a job, so why not hire them fractionally? And where this company comes from is we actually built the last company, uh, in no small part using fractional talent and had a lot of success with that, helped us drive profitability, helped us get access to senior folks that had a lot of skills that we otherwise couldn't afford. And so, coming out of the exit, once I sold that business, then I thought, well, why don't we take this model and help other companies scale using a similar approach? So that's what we're doing today. I've been working on Fraction for a bit under two years and, you know, been growing with this as well, but again, sales has absolutely been part of the process of hey, even with a service business, there is a notion of product, market fit and who is your ideal client, and figuring all of that out.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love it. Okay, so let's talk about early days. You've got some salespeople, so it's not founder sales. You've got some customers. You've got some rough idea of what your target market is. You've got a decent idea of what personas you're going to sell to. From your standpoint as a technical founder. What do you want the salespeople doing and how can they do it in a way that builds credibility with you, instead of just being oh, that's the whiny salesperson telling me the product's not good enough?
Speaker 2:Right yeah, person telling me the product's not good enough. Right yeah, cause you. Well, I mean, it's interesting and this I think it spans from founder led sales in. You know at the very earliest stages, before you have any clue what your market is, all the way through. You know early sales folks.
Speaker 2:I know in my experiences with uh, sas companies, we were for sure after my co-founder was no longer the only salesperson I think the first person that we hired was actually a salesperson and we were poor enough that he was still tending bar at nights our first sales guy, maybe to pay his bills. We were definitely being scrappy, and you know so it was one of those things and he was. You know a lot of it was commission based, and you know so, it was one of those things and he was, you know a lot of it was commission based. And so well, naturally in that environment salespersons got to eat, so they're trying to get closes and get closes quick in that kind of setup. So what were we trying to determine? We were trying to, as much as anything, determine okay, well, where are the right pockets of leads? So we identify the financial advisors were our target client base. Well, what you know what are the efficient marketing channels? How can we, you know, and when you're early stage you don't even have a much of a marketing budget, so a lot of it's sort of gorilla tactics how can we get folks attention? How can we get folks to take meetings? And how can we be efficient with things like trade shows where you know that there's some baseline exposure? You get there, but how do you turn that into real business help in that process?
Speaker 2:Well, first and foremost, it was getting in front of customers, obviously doing the pitch. It was also just because you have to wear a lot of hats in an ultra early stage company. It was a certain amount of customer success as well, and the reason that that was valuable was the sales folks. This was Steve, steve Zushin, actually. That was the first sales guy at Hidden Levers and he was wearing multiple hats, but that gave him insights into, okay, what works well about this product. Where are the weak spots? Yeah, he got very comfortable doing and we did all of our demos live, so we didn't do canned stuff Feels really risky, feels kind of scary, um, but honestly that's great because it it sort of built up that muscle of being able to talk past, you know.
Speaker 2:So you get a live question from a customer like well, can you make it? You know, do this or can you? You know, I want to see this example having sales actually very comfortable with being a real life user of that product and being able to speak to okay, this is actually how I would do this and this is actually how we're going to have success in that particular case that you're bringing up, or speaking to. Okay, tell me more about that need that you have, and maybe that's not something that we are able to do today, but having that depth of understanding of the product to say, okay, what's that requirement? Let me take that back to the team. Let's see if that makes sense. So remember, in that early stage, at least in my experience, we didn't have product management yet. So sales is sort of bringing in. You know, corey, you mentioned how to not be a whiny salesperson. We didn't necessarily regard that as whining. That was feature discovery to a certain extent.
Speaker 1:They're bringing it to the table. They're bringing it to the table. You guys can analyze it and determine if it goes on the backlog and where it goes in the backlog in terms of priority. Love that A couple of things I want to double click on here. So one is sales people acting as customer success, and the second one is the depth of the product understanding.
Speaker 1:When it comes to customers, one thing I always say is that prospects lie and customers tell the truth.
Speaker 1:Prospects are incentivized to lie and they're not doing it egregiously. It's not because they're trying to be bad people or anything like that, but they're not showing up and telling you here's all my problems, here's all my financial situation, here's specifically how you're going to win a deal with me. They're not going to tell you all of those things because it's in their self-interest to withhold some of the information, at least until later stage in the sales process. Customers, on the other hand, have decided that you're the person that they're going to work with and when it comes to hitting a roadblock or anything that happens in that relationship, they're going to be forthright and forthcoming with you because you're working together as a team. So how do you get the salesperson in that world where they're talking to customers, they're acting as that customer success point. They're learning all of these things, which is enriching their perspective and then helping give feedback to the business without being a distraction to their core job, which is bringing in new revenue.
Speaker 2:Right. So this is interesting. It certainly worked for us, and I think it works at a certain scale, and then you scale past it. But in the early days, the way that we sort of made that a natural fit for a role was that you know again, we're paying out lots in commissions because and I think our just to be transparent, concrete about it it was a 20% commission is what we paid at that time, and it was 20% ongoing on the entire book of business.
Speaker 2:And so, for you know, that first sales guy was our lead sales guy. He was building a book, but that meant that he was getting paid every month on the clients that were part of his book, and so his goal was to grow that book as large as possible. And it also meant that, by definition, if one of his customers was unhappy, that he might lose them, so he might lose revenue. So he was directly incentivized to grow and keep his book happy, which, by the way, I think one of the reasons that we adopted that model is that it's analogous it's exactly analogous to how wealth management works and since that was the audience we were serving, it just felt like a you know, go ahead and map that model onto our business.
Speaker 1:Well, you were bootstrapped too right, correct? So there's people that work at venture-backed companies that are listening to this thinking too right, correct? So there's people that work at venture-backed companies that are listening to this thinking this guy's crazy. You can't do that. We can do it if you don't have to give up massive amounts of your profit and upside to a financial institution.
Speaker 1:So in this case, what Praveen was able to do is say how do I incentivize this person to stay as close to customers as possible? Figure out how to keep them sticky, keep them engaged, identify cross-sell up-sell opportunities. Keep them engaged, identify cross-sell upsell opportunities, form them for referrals and things like that, and financially motivate them to do that. And since he was bootstrapped meaning that he financed the company as opposed to bringing in outside high expense capital he was able to do that. I just want to double click on that, just so everybody, I'm going to stop saying the word double. I never say that. Why am I saying that today? Y'all have never heard me say that today. I don't know why I'm saying it, but let's move past it.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, no, I think that's a good point, because in a typical venture-backed model you wouldn't necessarily do that Because we were bootstrapped that essentially, hey, we're able to get somebody started with maybe a lower base salary, but they were able to build their book of business up and therefore build their own total comp up to a good place. And then we kind of got to this natural transition point where you know that first sales guy Steve, he had gotten his book of business up to a good place and now he was actually earning a solid you know comp number for what he had achieved at that point. But by that point now the company has grown a bit and we transitioned. So we actually did transition away from that model, and that was around the same time. Now we have some cashflow coming in where we can have someone formally come in and do customer success.
Speaker 2:And actually, again, you're always wearing hats in early stage startups, right? So the first product management person was also customer success, because, honestly, those two things have a lot of symbiosis as well. Right, you need to know what the customer's problems are and prioritize them. That's half of product management.
Speaker 1:I love this.
Speaker 2:Okay, so this is founder advice out there and advice for any go-getters First hires in each role make them also customer success yeah, well, actually not just that, but customer success is sort of um it and I'm not saying anything that anybody doesn't realize here but oftentimes it's kind of like not the highest job on the totem pole at most companies, right at many startups and even larger companies, uh, and so, rather than hire directly into that role for the longest time until we got much further along, you know, once we were probably more like 25 folks we always hired into other roles.
Speaker 2:Mainly it was as we were building our product team out and all of those folks had to rotate through customer success. So they spent a couple of days a week, you know, actually answering live chats on the website or taking calls and doing all of that, because how else do you learn the product really well? It was like this trial by fire. But, yeah, you gotta know this product well enough to answer to the customers and answer their questions. That's gonna ensure that you A understand what are the strengths and weaknesses of the product. B you know how to lead them through, how to solve some of those things. So, yeah, so we found that that was how we handled that until pretty late in the game. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay. So now this goes to the second thing that we'd put in the parking lot, which is the depth of understanding of the product. I've heard people say wrongly, I believe that oh, you don't need to be a product expert, you just need to know enough to ask some good questions, and I think that's. That's fine, if you're doing cold calls, probably, but if you're running a full sales cycle with somebody, how the heck can you do really good discovery? How can you manage resistance? How can you be a credible representative of an organization If you don't understand the ins and outs of the product, especially given that the people that I'm talking about, if you ask them what mitochondria is, they know. If you ask them what photosynthesis is, they know. They remember all these things from a thousand page biology book that they read 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago. But they won't take the time to figure out what all the buttons do on the screen of the thing that makes them money.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, no, it's wild Actually. And what you're saying now, Corey, it really it resonates for me because this is something I'm going through now with the new business with Fraction. So you know, I mentioned Fractional Talent. Well, the majority of the Fractional Talent that we work with is in the engineering and sort of product side of different organizations. So most of our clients are, you know, we're helping them on that side of the house and so we've sort of structured so that the sales team we've got a couple of folks in that role and they are handling sort of intro calls but sort of the follow-up. Right now I'm still involved with that as someone coming from a technical background who can fill in that depth. But we have been investing in that training and that kind of growth and knowledge because I do think at the end of the day, you need to have that.
Speaker 2:Or there's another model which is used in the big enterprise right and way back when I was an Oracle sales engineer so I got to see like how enterprise sales guys worked and you know the model that they used at those places, those big enterprise sales shops, and there was a period of time, like around when I was there, where Oracle was the largest enterprise software company in the world, and what did they do? Well, they had their, you know, account executives, you know very much focused on relationship building and all of that side. They didn't ask them to have a depth of product experience, and there I think maybe there was some logic to it. Because Oracle has so many products, how could you possibly know them all? So, rather, sales engineering was a legitimate function and that was sort of like what was built up, and so I think that's another way you can solve it that's at a greater scale.
Speaker 1:They're representing a portfolio. Yeah, yeah, they're representing a portfolio.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they're representing a portfolio, and so I think that I think that makes sense. I think, if your company has one product or a couple of products, yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, yeah, the question is could you, over the course of a month, could you reasonably learn everything that you do? And if the answer is yes, then do it. If the answer is no, then spend the time understanding. Okay, so the Oracle analogy is what are all our different products, who are all the different support staff resources I have access to, and what specifically would I need to see to bring them in? There's probably as much depth just in that conversation as there is in the product for a company.
Speaker 2:No, I think that I think that that's absolutely right. If you're talking about a particular SaaS product or something along those lines, then yes, if you can't walk through the Typically honestly with most companies, even once they've gotten to three, four, five million in scale, maybe even a little beyond that, oftentimes there's still like really one killer use case. And if you can't do that killer use case, ask the salesperson while you're asleep. You know you've just got to be able to bam, bam, bam, be able to do that and generate the output you know that should be. You know completely, you know so easy. And then, beyond that, you know you get into. Then you, you know you finally get to that point where there's two or three products and maybe some of those you're not as well versed in, but you've got like a grasp again of the whole suite until you grow beyond that point when you're a portfolio, as you said.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly. Well, and the in your sleep thing the way that I have that come to life with the folks that we coach and train is called a whiteboard demo, where I say, all right, draw the demo on the whiteboard as you do the demo. So you've got to do it visually in your mind. Let's start with the dashboard product. So you draw, you draw the dashboard, you draw the things and you verbally talk through how you would, you would demo it, you ask questions at the point. If you do that, then you know it.
Speaker 2:If you can't, do a whiteboard demo. Yeah, I love that, cause. That means that implies that you've seen it so many times that you actually remember what the screens look like. Yeah, exactly, and you can click on them. Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but then the corollary to that is don't do verbal demos, because people get in this trap where they know the thing inside and out and they start trying to describe it and the person on the receiving end of that conversation is lost.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, and we would always say, yeah, show, don't tell you know, which I think is critical, and it's critical on multiple levels, because, you're right, it's easy to get into that trap On the trade show floor. That was another place where we saw, you know, that could happen if you're not careful, right, because you're just sort of talking to folks. Could happen if you're not careful, right, because you're just sort of talking to folks, one way that we you know this was sort of something that we did at trade shows. Now it's become more commonplace, but it still actually works pretty well.
Speaker 2:Basically, bring the largest touch screen you can, and, and that way you can have something like, you know, like we would bring a 27-inch touch screen and put it front and center, like at the front corner, and then we would put whatever the coolest screen was that we could and and we would, you know, kind of pull up multiple tabs so we could quickly flip to whatever, but have some really cool screen, you know. And so then, yeah, we just do impromptu demos. I mean, that certainly works well, like carry an iPad around and do the same thing, right, but whatever it is, yes, be prepared to actually show and not not just talk at somebody.
Speaker 1:Love it. Okay. So we've got all of this as a foundation. The salesperson knows the customer inside and out. They know the product inside and out. It seems to me at this point, when they come across an opportunity for product improvement, a feature request, an enhancement, something that they change, they've got so much more credibility with the product team and the executive team because those folks look at this person and say, okay, well, they actually understand what we do and we know that they know this stuff inside and out and it's not just some half-hearted requests that they're making because they want something different for sure, then we we would try to take it one step further, uh, and ask, so you kind of you can put the ball back in the court of the salesperson.
Speaker 2:Now this is sort like let's call this bonus points. I don't expect everyone to do this, but certainly we did get some engagement where sales folks would actually think about it. You know, get a certain request and you know, as the salesperson, you're interacting with so many prospects, you know, and so you can see patterns emerge. You can see why, in the past week, I've been asked two or three times for this same, pretty much the same feature would solve these, and so we would have the sales folks give them an opportunity. You know, on a you know once or twice a month cycle. Hey, show us a quick, you know, wireframe mock-up of something that you cooked up and, you know, do it in whatever tool you're comfortable in. So, hey, if you love PowerPoint, you just throw some boxes on the screen, or or, honestly, take a screenshot of the existing app as it exists and throw some boxes and throw the stuff on there that you want to see so that way you know you're expressing it as as the solution.
Speaker 2:That doesn't mean that's the final thing that's going to get built, but it's a much better way again showing, not telling, proposing that into product management, as opposed to just giving them a bit of verbal feedback that gets lost immediately.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's just they've thought through it and I agree that patterns and trends are critical and I think one of the opportunities is I see this all the time is a salesperson will find an opportunity for a product enhancement, but they'll only hear it once, but everyone else on their team will hear it once, and all of a sudden, something that's a little more chronic.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, and you definitely need to. And this is where it interfaces into product management and having on that side of the house, having a good system for sort of accumulating all those requests and then scoring them. And If it's coming from prospects, you know, then you can sort of score it by. You know what you think the size of the deal is. Certainly, if it's coming from customers, then you know, and we, you know, you kind of have this voting system where, okay, let's just say one vote per customer but then multiply that by, you know, you could.
Speaker 2:the simplistic way is to multiply that literally by the number of dollars per month, per year, whatever, or you bucket them and we would sort of multiply by a factor, so that that's how many votes you get, and then we sort of see from a demand perspective. This is where these features are ranking, based on how many times it's been asked for and what size customers are asking for that. And then there's so that's like let's call that the numerator in this sort of equation or this fraction. Well, really, that's like let's call that the numerator in this sort of equation or this fraction. Well, really, it's an ROI equation. Right, that's the return.
Speaker 2:If you do build that feature, then maybe you close these customers or you keep these other customers happy, so that's the positive. Then there's the denominator, that's the investment, and the tech team has to provide that because, generally speaking, sales and sometimes not even management really knows exactly how much effort's required to build that new feature. So you got to bring those two pieces together and I think everything, particularly, I think, because we were bootstrapped. But it doesn't matter if you're bootstrapped or if you're venture-backed. Roi should always be part of your way of analyzing a business.
Speaker 2:And so you bring those two together and what you might find is that there's a seemingly high return, meaning like lots of customers are asking for a particular feature, but maybe the investment required is like a whole I don't know a whole manual of development or something, and so it may still not make sense versus a much smaller ask which is like oh yeah, that'll be done next sprint. You know that kind of quick hit, and so figuring out that total return on investment requires both pieces, and so that's where that communication needs to happen. You figure out what the cadence is. You know teams work differently. We used to do this sort of the big picture cadence, like in sort of this product town hall, where we'd bring all of the stakeholders together. But yeah, you got to get both sides of that, because you don't know, from the return side alone or the investment side alone, which ones make sense.
Speaker 1:I love that and I agree. My question is when calculating the return side, it could be risky just going based on things that we've heard from people. You know this has come up eight times. Whatever it is, is there an immediate step there where you say there might be something there? We don't know how big it is? Is there an immediate step there where you say there might be something there, we don't know how big it is? Let's go to a design phase and then do some kind of user testing or broader feedback outreach around something that's at the design phase without building it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, and that's a great question and definitely, as now we're talking more about businesses that are sort of in the middle of their scaling, to the extent that you've got, say, a ux resource or somebody who can do like a nice wireframe, so actually get in figma and do something that looks somewhat real or looks actually looks real.
Speaker 2:It looks real for the purpose of that blast email, right, that sort of thing.
Speaker 2:Um, definitely that is a great way to go out, reach out to the market and essentially you're kind of soft announcing a feature to see who cares and you can get those responses and actually even get on demos with those folks and show them hey, here's a quick clickable mock of this thing that we're working on and get concrete feedback on that. So, yeah, no, I think that as you get the company to the scale where you've got that capacity, or if you have that capability, absolutely and as I think we all know, it's it's more of an art than a science to sort of know which of the features you know from a, from a founder perspective or from an exec perspective, which ones are worth testing. Sometimes there's a little bit of a question there as to how closely it overlaps with you know the core kind of focus of the product probably is relevant as well, like if it's way off in left field and it's probably going to be tougher to justify exactly well, I'll tell you another thing.
Speaker 1:One of the easiest ways to get meetings with prospects is say, hey, hey, we've got something new, would you mind taking a look at it? Yes, people love doing that. Now, then you've got to flip them into a sales conversation at some point, which is easy if they see it solving a pain point for them, and if they don't, I mean, that's another. Another fun way to just talk about user testing is you show them something for 10 minutes and if they don't say, hey, when's this going to be live? Or hey, can I get this when it comes out? That tells you a lot right there, just by the absence of those types of questions.
Speaker 2:Right, no, and that's a great point because, as you were saying, kind of, you know, prospects lie right, yeah, and people naturally tell you what you want to hear, and so money talks. That's what we all know. And so that question, to your point, that question that when can I buy this, basically is really the one that you're looking for. That's the money question.
Speaker 1:All right, let's transition. So we talked about the early stage. We leaked a little here into the mid stage, Later stage companies. How can sales teams help and I think here we're talking about additional product releases, product enhancements, maybe post M&A, post mergers and acquisitions how can sales teams help expand and establish new types of product market fit?
Speaker 2:Right, and this is where you actually get back to the beginning in some ways, except that you have now you've got a brand, so you've got some reputation, so it may be easier to get some conversations going. That's helpful. But when you're moving into new product space and maybe it's white space, well I there may be a little bit of a playbook because you, you know, you can see what they're doing and you can leverage based on that. But if you're moving into white space like, hey, this is a new feature we have, we think is exciting, there becomes this question of, well, who's it for? Is it for the same? You know ICP, so the same client profile, and if so, then of course you know in terms of who you workshop that with, who you kind of test that with. You've got an obvious case. If it's not, what we found was that that process of figuring out well, who is the customer feels very much like starting over again. And there I think sales, the sales team, can be super helpful, because it is what I would call. So this is kind of getting computer science geeky, but it's called a breath first search. So what does that mean? So whenever you're searching, sort of like all of these different avenues that you could like to figure out where the clients are. Instead of going super deep, you need to touch a bunch of different potential audiences because, as quickly as possible, you're trying to eliminate all the groups for whom it's not a fit.
Speaker 2:So I'll give you the example of going back to the early stage of that SaaS company, when we were first getting out the door. But with a new product launch, it's similar, even if you're later stage. So here we had this portfolio stress testing software, so the risk management software I mentioned that we eventually ended up selling it to financial advisors. But when I first built that first version and I brought my co-founder in, who was going to help on the sales side, we didn't actually know who the audience was. So first we pitched it because we had a kind of a Wall Street background. So we pitched it to some of the Wall Street firms we'd worked at or knew, and then they laughed at us because they're giant companies, like who are these two yahoos? So that didn't work. So then we pitched it to like all of the online brokerage firms E-Trade and Fidelity and Schwab and all of those and they thought it was kind of amusing looking, but they were like, yeah, it'll be a two-year process before we buy anything like this. And we pitched it to small brokerage firms and they still barely wanted to give us any money at all. So we're like, okay, that's not going to work. And we pitched it to retail traders and we're like, oh God, they're going to pay us $20 a month. We're never going to build a business here. And so it was literally just eliminating all of these and literally we went through I think like seven or eight audiences.
Speaker 2:And finally, how did we stumble upon the audience for whom it made sense? Well, we went to a trade show and, honestly, made sense. Well, we went to a trade show and, honestly, oftentimes that is a good way for sales folks to get in front of a bunch of different potential stakeholders quickly. So we went to a show where it was a financial. You know, it's got a FinTech innovation show called Finnovate and we pitched and it was the wealth management folks that actually cared what we had.
Speaker 2:So finally, oh, okay, look, there might be something here. Let's go back to the lab. Let's actually we gathered that feedback. So that's like sales gathering the feedback, the product feedback. Bring that back into the lab. Actually work on those features and then we finally were able to launch a product that somebody would buy. And I think that that process whether you're at close to $0 of revenue or you're at 30 million in revenue and launching a new product, the new product still has zero in revenue. So that feels very similar to the early stage, where it's you know again that process of searching through as many different audiences quickly. That's how you're helping the rest of the team.
Speaker 1:Okay, I love this. I'm gonna dig into this a little bit. How do you create the startup stage discipline at the later stage, given the extra resources and specific things I'm thinking about? Later stage, you're going to have a product manager who reports to a VP of product, who reports to a CEO. Early stage, you're going to have the founders. Later stage, you're going to have a bunch of money to make things look nicer. Early stage, you're going to move faster. Later stage, you're going to have more politics. More people are going to want input on how things are or what things aren't all that type of stuff and that can really dilute your ability to move fast and to make good decisions as opposed to making consensus decisions. How do you deal with that?
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, that's a tough one man. The uh. I think the key and and I and I'll say honestly, an experience that I had, you know, more recently that dovetails with that is in the MNA event. You kind of get into that right, because you get bought by a much larger organization and now all of a sudden it's almost the inverse. It's like how do you keep the innovation, keep the innovative spirit that you had? So that's sort of similar. I think there's an extent to try to-.
Speaker 1:Threats do not work. Threats, what's that Threats?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like, how do you keep from absorbing sort of that pace?
Speaker 2:It's a challenge.
Speaker 2:We tried to ring fence the team and sort of keep sort of some of the independent spirit going and I think that there was some success there but say, you're launching a new product, you know, and you're within this, within the mothership, so to speak, and you'll see, like some of the big, like, for instance, even the big consulting firms, like Deloitte, for example, which is out of their couple hundred thousand people, they all have an innovation lab and, to your point, part of the trouble is is that there's not that much risk in failing.
Speaker 2:And so how do you break out of that? And actually, really, because you've got to take some risk, I think that from an executive perspective, at that later stage, you probably need to create that team and have it, give it a little bit of independence and give it, you know, maybe give it that shoestring budget so that it can behave a little bit like a startup, a startup within a larger organization, cause I think otherwise it can be very hard to simulate that feeling of well being a startup and you will get that right back into oh, we've got to get eight different stakeholders to buy in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so okay. So let me ask you this You're a sales leader, sales manager, vp of sales somewhere, somewhere, somewhere on one of those ends of the spectrum, and you see some innovation happening, where you see mergers taking place. How do you position yourself as the sales leader to get involved in that, to make sure that you're getting some experience both it's fun, but it's also a great resume builder? How do you position yourself with the executives to be a part of that, instead of being told oh go, wait in the corner, do what you're doing, We'll bring you in when we're ready.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know what I think is exciting perhaps for the executive team to see. And so here's what not to do, though maybe it's the easy thing to do. It's the common thing to do is so now there's these new toys available, but Rather than sell them, it becomes quite common for larger organizations, once they've acquired something and it's coming in, to be like oh, we'll throw that on top of the cake for free, just to get this deal closed. That is actually the reason sometimes large-scale M&A deals happen. But then what happens is it becomes a just like, becomes a free giveaway, and it sort of gets assigned that value and there's a danger in that. And it's easy for that VP of sales, that sales manager, to think that way, because they don't have to worry about like, well, what should this cost? Or like, how should we market this separately? No, let's just bundle it in. We'll just bundle it in, and so everybody gets onto that sort of bandwagon oh, just bundle it in.
Speaker 2:The tougher path is to figure out okay, how do we utilize this product in a way that expands our market reach? Perhaps? How do we actually flip the script? And, instead of us just bundling it into our same old customers, how can we go into the market? Because usually, like with any acquisition, maybe there's a certain amount of overlap in the customer basis, but there's always a portion which is not, and quite often there may be a big portion which is not. So how do I, as that VP of sales, how do I work with that new team to actually sell into their audience with? Oh, by the way, now we've got this much more complete offering that we can bring to your customers, rather than just taking you and slopping you on top of whatever we already have. So now I'm expanding the footprint of sales, hopefully raising revenue that way, but I'm also I'm not devaluing that product that was already out there in the market.
Speaker 1:Yeah, love that, okay. So if someone's doing that as a sales leader, I can see how they'd really be looked upon favorably by the executive team.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, hopefully they're growing revenue, which is what they're. You know, that's what they're being counted on. No-transcript. If we could just raise our pipeline close rate by 1% with this new thing, we'd make our numbers. That's the easy way to think and it requires a little bit more willingness to step out. But hey, that gives you that experience of stepping out into that new market and positioning with, uh, with this new product.
Speaker 1:Would you want to see as a, as a senior leader? Would you want to see sales commission accelerators placed on new products like that? So for every traditional SKU you get 10%, but if you sell one of these new ones it's 20%, at least for a limited time offer to get the sales team motivated to do it, because it's new and people don't like new.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, no, I mean, I think that I think that there should be opportunities, you know, for those incentives to be in place. You know the the funny thing about you know incentive structures, of course you know the funny thing about you know incentive structures, of course you know, from an executive perspective it's like, oh man, we don't want this to become like alphabet soup, like complex. But then again, these days of course there's lots, lots of sales comp software and things that can make it easier. But yeah, no, I think. So. I think that particularly at the moment that the deal happens and typically you have the press and you've got like a lot of momentum, you know in, you know if it's a decent sized deal. You've got the press releases and maybe you've got some stories in the industry press, so you've got some tailwinds, and so aligning that, I think, is a great idea, at least for a quarter, maybe two, having some accelerators in there so that you're incentivizing sales folks to go out on that limb a little bit and actually give that a try.
Speaker 1:Love it. Last thing I'm going to ask if you're hiring a sales leader, how do you want them talking about how they work with product?
Speaker 2:That's a great one.
Speaker 2:So so I'm hiring a sales leader and well, I'd love to see that you know in their past or in the way that they intend to work, that they actually want to have a relationship there, because sometimes you'll, you won't hear that right, it'll be the, it'll be like, oh yeah, you know.
Speaker 2:I just I don't think that anybody would say would answer that question by saying that I just sell what they give me. But you want to see that they're thinking about how to have a constructive relationship with product. Again, going back to, you know, providing feedback, but hopefully having that be. You know, as we talked about before, there are lots of ways to make that a productive back and forth relationship where they're actually bringing ideas to the table and where that ROI actually gets discussed. And so, seeing that they've done some of those things or tried to do some of those things, or at least have thought about how they would, because some organizations maybe weren't open to their ideas, and so you can't necessarily blame a person who hasn't had that opportunity, but what they would do in their ideal world, seeing that they're thinking about this and that they think about their ownership of product as being part of the company. I think is important Love it.
Speaker 1:Well, this was a great conversation, anything else that we missed. That you want to add as a closing thought. And then I want to make sure that you get a chance to tell a little bit more about what you're doing and how people can reach out to you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I think I think we covered. We covered a ton there, corey, and I think the piece that is probably fodder for a whole other conversation, but it's. There's that whole relationship with sales and marketing and that side of the equation, which is which is, of course, super important too, from the early stage, right on. Yeah, so any anything you want, plug specific things that people should be looking out for, to loop you in on and we've focused on US-based, so 100% US-based, senior engineering and product talent primarily, and so that's whether that's software engineers, product managers, project managers, ui, ux, and then in recent days, we've gotten more into fractional CTOs and technology architects. So all of those skill sets. You know a lot of what we actually see is that we're working with firms that are in that scaling phase. So there may be 3 million, 4 million, 6 million ARR. So they've got a product, got a couple of products maybe in market, and they're trying to figure out how to grow efficiently but also grow profitably, because, of course, it's easy to blow money in a hurry on an expensive product team. And so what we realized was a very and so we realized this again with our own business super cost-effective to be able to get half of a senior engineer's time.
Speaker 2:The magic, the secret sauce that we found was that a lot of folks are working at big companies 10 years into that role senior engineers. The folks who that we found was that a lot of folks are working at big companies 10 years into that role Senior engineers. The folks who don't really they're not on that management promotion path, kind of getting bored. At that point they can do their J job, you know, kind of like one eye closed and so they've got spare capacity. So those are the folks that we are bringing to the table.
Speaker 2:The other group is actually bootstrap founders, so bootstrap technical founders who still need to pay the bills. So that's really the two sources of our talent, and what we're finding is relative to the market, that in order to have this flexibility to work fractionally maybe beyond whatever they're doing, that they're oftentimes taking a 30% discount in terms of what they would normally get paid, and so just a super cost-effective model to help build out a team without having to go like way offshore or do any of those things, being able to work with folks who are domestic and have sometimes already been there before, because with the founders that's been a great experience for us Folks who've actually built and sold companies and they're willing to do this fractionally for the folks listening. I think that's been some of our best success stories.
Speaker 1:Love it. Well, that sounds like a great way to beef up the team. Anybody listening, reach out to Praveen if those sound like interesting topics. Thank you so much for joining us today, and I'm Corey Brave, co-founder of Coach CRM. We'll see you next time on the Sales Management Podcast.