enterprise sales

Don’t Tell Me About Your Product – Give Me 3 Outcomes

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My old boss, Mike Neeley used to tell me, ‘don’t just show up and throw up’. I now really understand what he meant.

Recently I was giving a product demo to serial entrepreneur, Brandon Lee. He stopped me midway through my pitch and said, ‘the product looks great, but give me 3 outcomes for what it will do for me’.

In other words, he was saying ‘hey, I don’t really care about your product. I only care about what it will do for me’.

I think it’s easy to get lazy and just pitch your product. It takes time and effort to do the homework to really understand what your potential customer cares about and what your product can do for them.

Thinking about this advice, here are my thoughts for my company, Cooleaf. To give context, we have a technology platform that companies use to manage all of their internal employee programs such as training, wellness, volunteering, social events, and recognizes employees for their level of participation and accomplishments.

Three outcomes for our clients:

  1. Cooleaf will make a large organization feel small – we help connect people inside the organization based on common interests and things people can get plugged into to meet others and build relationships resulting in a stronger company culture
  1. Cooleaf will enable company leaders to track the results of investments in their employees, – by leaders having real data, they are empowered to make more strategic and proactive decisions for their investments in programs for their people
  1. Cooleaf will power a rewards and recognition program for employees – organizations can recognize employee accomplishments and participation in the culture and success of the company

Before speaking with (not to) a client, I encourage you to first do your homework about their needs and understand your connection to them. Then be clear about what your product can do for them and ask the client to prioritize what is most important to them. This will allow you to focus your pitch to what they care about most.

Life in a Startup – Walking a Line Between Death and Greatness

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My co-founder, Prem Bhatia likes to say that the default state of a startup is failure and each startup is furiously working to avoid that state until it finds product-market-fit. He is absolutely right.

Last year was a good year for my company, Cooleaf. We grew our revenue by 477%. I preference that number by saying that it’s a lot easier to put up a big number like that when you’re starting small, but regardless, it’s strong growth. We implemented a new iteration of our product last March and were able to close several large enterprise deals. Our largest contract being $50K.

This all sounds great and it is. However, it still is not good enough. Despite having our best year ever with huge potential in the future, we are still working towards achieving product-market-fit and being financially secure. We have steady MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) and are growing but we also have grown our expenses, primarily investing in our technology.

Based on the feedback we get from customers and our own market discovery work, we believe there is a path to scale the business faster through our product. We are seeing more frequent and stronger signs of product-market-fit and therefore, we plan to continue investing in our technology to get us there.

One big challenge we face is that B2B enterprise sales cycles are long. Much longer than we expected. We’ve found that company leaders can absolutely love our product but since there is no line-item in their budget, we have to wait until the next budget cycle to get approved which may take a full year. This puts a strain on cash flow for a small company like us. Bottom line is that we have to find ways to shorten the sales cycle by providing more value through our product resulting in it being considered a ‘must-have’ for the the customer.

It is a strange feeling that can only be summed up as being part of the life of a startup when you have the sheer excitement of that feeling in your gut that you are on to something really big, all the while feeling a burning on the back of your neck from the pressure knowing that the clock is ticking and you have no choice but to fight like hell every day to survive.

Here is to kicking some ass and breaking glass in 2015!