S6E32 - Guillaume Jacquet - The Formula for Predictable Growth

Foreign.

What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the surf and sales podcast. I'm Scott Lease, one of your two co hosts for today's show, along with my good friend and partner, Richard Harris. How's it going, my friend?

It's good. I just realized we haven't like, really Talked in like 2 weeks, 3 weeks, or seen each other, which is, you know, it, it, you know, absence makes the heart grow fire. I miss you. I miss you.

It's strange, but you were traveling somewhere and then I've been in California for the last week.

Yeah.

So we've been all over the place. Yeah, we have. We haven't figured out a mobile podcast recording strategy yet.

I'm sure we could. I'm sure we could. So maybe one day. One day. One day. One day. For sure.

One day. Well, we thank everybody for joining in and checking out surf and sales. If you haven't looked before, check it out@surfandsales.com. our next event is, is in like four weeks, Richard.

I know, I was thinking about it yesterday.

Four weeks, one month from now.

Yeah, yeah, I gotta start working out.

Yeah, yeah, that'll work. That'll work. I'm sure you'll get in great surf shape in the next couple of weeks.

I just need to be able to stretch. I just gotta be able to stretch.

Yeah, yeah. Well, pregame, we'll pregame. We've been sold out for a while and we appreciate everybody's support, including our guest today. His name is Guillaume Jaquet. He is the co founder and CEO of Vasco, who is one of the sponsors of the surf and sales podcast as well as the Serpent sales summit. So we welcome. I'm going to call him G the rest of the day. Guillaume Jacque to the podcast. Welcome to the show, G. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. Very happy to be here.

All right, well, go ahead, Richard.

I was just going to say, you know, rather than us sort of, you know, reading and talking about Vasco, let's, let's, let's hear it straight from you. Like, what pain does Vasco solve? Give everybody a chance to understand what you're on promo.

What he's saying is do your own promo.

So the kind of one liner of Vasco is that we are a revenue operation platform that leverages AI, you know, to help startup and scale up, grow more predictably. I think the biggest pain that you can have when you're a startup or your scale up is that you're trying to build that predictable revenue engine that every VC Fund asks you to and it's quite hard to do. And you need a lot of data foundations. You need to build your forecast in a certain way. You need to, you know, assemble the team, specialized people and you realize that actually it's, it's a very complex stuff and in most of it time lives in spreadsheets in your CRMs in different places. So what we do with Vasco is we help you implement kind of the, the flywheel of rev ops. So you'll have the kind of planning hub where you can reverse engineer the targets that your board gave you in order to understand, you know, that, that 3x goal that you have at the end of the year. How many MQLs do you need to have actually to, to hit it based on your conversion rates, how many pipelines, how many people, what are the targets they need to have? Then we have the, what we call the review hub where as you, you have your, your actuals coming in, we're going to give you the, the most important revenue leakage that you have in your revenue engine. And very often I see, I'm curious to, to hear your thoughts about this people focusing on pipeline to close one. But a lot of the revenue actually comes sometimes from getting better icp, better conversion rates from MQL to SQL, better, you know, customers that go live in a faster rate. So, so Vasco is going to give you that unified view around your bow tie, your revenue engine, so that you, you leakage. And finally we have an execution hub where you have real time, you know, actuals versus forecast, ICP tracking activities, monitoring and everything around that. And at the center of this, then we have the data piece where we assemble, you know, your various data sources, so your billing engine, your CRM and so on and so on. And we put it together around the customer journey so that you can, you know, have that data foundation that helps you measure things and put everything into one place.

I think that, I mean, this is all great. My question is.

At what stage.

Can.

We start to AI this data, right? Like, do you need 10 customers? Do you need 20 customers? Like, you know, the biggest thing is like how do we get to our first 10 logos, right? Or how do we get to our first 100 grand ARR. And then a million arrows and all those things and all the things you're talking about are great. Like yes, we all want that. You still have to have a certain level of data there. So maybe, maybe the better question is.

Not even about when to use a tool like yours, but really.

When can you Try to define product market validation and product market fit.

It's funny because product market fit is probably the term that is the most used. I'm seeing it in overused room. Yeah.

And you know, sometimes people to tell you that it's 1 million AR, it's 2 million AR, 3 million AR, but it's not very, very well defined. Actually, I feel it's more like product market fit is when you're starting to get a pull rather than a push. And that means that you found your ideal customer profile. I think it often starts with this like finding who's your best customer. And so to your question, when do you need to start using a tool like this? Well, you could say that you need to be a bigger organization in order to build those found. But the reality is if you're funder led and you're still selling yourself like you go, you go, you go. And you have sometimes like an over emphasis on the last deal that you closed or on the last cell that you're pushing on the last thing. And the more you can build those data, the more you can see pattern extracting from the deals that are entering your pipelines, the ones that are closing, the ones that are onboarding fast. So I would argue that once you have a product and you have around 500k of sales, like trying to reverse engineer the customers that you've signed that go the fastest to your onboarding and that see the fastest value, the ones that don't churn, the ones that wants more and more of your software is a great way for you not to over index on the last deal that you've closed. So I think you can start very early to kind of build a slower version. But then, you know, when you're a bigger organization and it becomes a game of making sure you specialize everything on various ICPs. But in the very beginning, it's really, it's really about finding that first first one. And, and data is a big component of it. There's not just data, but I feel it's, it's a big one.

Yeah, I love what you said, Scott. I'm curious how often, because you work with a lot more founders early stage. How often do you see founders over indexing on the most recent deal or two they've closed thinking that they've now cracked the code?

That happens every day? Yeah, every day. I mean, sometimes it can have, it can change twice in a span of two days.

Right.

You know, he closes the deal today and the founder is like, we need to go that direction. And Then Richard closes a deal elsewhere that he was working on, and then the founder's like, oh, wait, we should go that direction. And they're just constantly spinning around all over the place.

So what do you do? So what's the advice you give? Like, the reason I sort of led you into this conversation, Scott, what do you, what do you, what advice do you give? And then, gee, I would love to know what advice you give to those founders to make sure they don't over index. Short of having a, A, a software like Avasco. Right. Like, let's say they don't have it. Right. What do you tell them to do?

Well, if they don't have any software, I mean, the first thing I tell them is one data point means nothing in and of itself, nothing. You know, my, my. One of my funny sayings is the broken clock is right twice a day. So just because you close the deal over here doesn't mean anything. You know, you've got to have some sort of repeatability. Right? Like, I know in, in Guillaume's past, you maybe don't know this Richard, but he sold software to golf courses. Okay. I have a little bit of experience in this type of vertical. So, you know, probably selling to golf courses in the Midwest in the winter, probably not like a hot spot. I'm not going to call North Dakota in January necessarily. Even though I close one deal, that doesn't mean that it's hot all of a sudden there. For me to like close all the golf courses out there. Right. So, you know, I try to tell them, you need to see a pattern. I don't know, it depends on the size of the deals and number of logos and whatnot. But you're looking for a pattern. You're looking for a cluster of sorts. Like, okay, you know, my sales team just closed seven deals this week at golf courses in Florida. Florida is potentially a hot spot here. First of all, there's more courses than anywhere. The weather is pretty good year round. There may be more open to this type of thing. Right. So you're looking for those type of clusters. That's what, that's what I tell them. Go ahead.

I think the words that you said, that is the most important, I think, Scott, is predictability. You can sell, sell, sell, but it's, it's always better when you find one ICP that is narrow enough on which you can have some kind of replicability on the way you sell. So you spoke about Florida. That's one data point. It's great. But let's, let's Keep with the golf analogy. And by the way, like I built Vasco out of, you know, the things I've learned with my first company being acquired by a bigger organization. I wish that product existed at the time because it would have made me know better on my job being a founder, trying to, to get the product market fit and scale beyond. We still made it but it, you know, it took us more time than we'd like to. But let's go again with golf. You know, there are actually four different type of golf courses. You have public golf courses, you have semi private golf courses, you have private golf courses and you have management companies that operate many golf courses. Like this is four different products actually that have four different needs on which your product will not sell using the split the same pain points or the same kind of feature set and you're not going to lead with the same demo. If you sign one of those four each week, then your product roadmap becomes a mess because you've attracted on your pipeline then deals that are, you know, not the best fit but you still needed to make demands, therefore you still pushed it. Your promised roadmap features and therefore then your, your, your development team starts to become kind of a custom agency for those funnels first customers. Well when you find actually one type of customers that is somewhat big enough so that you can say, you know, we're going to be narrowly focused on those ones public and semi private golf courses in those kind of regions, they're going to have a set of features that are going to be very, very common and you're going to see that actually it's the same sales pitch and it's the same product and you can start codifying that engine until you tap the market and you move to the next one. But if you don't track that data, you realize that actually you start and you other index on the last two deals that you've closed or you don't see those patterns or you don't realize it. And even if you don't close sometimes, you know, you're still iterating like just looking at pipeline generation, like how many people actually feel the pain so much that they took the time to take a demo from you is an indicator of as a founder, what is the ICP you should be going after. So I'm a firm believer of actually kind of having that a little bit of tracking system so that yes of course you don't over engineer everything but you, you, you, you have actually a direction or a north star that you can follow and on which you can hold your team accountable. And if I can flip the script, I know you've been coaching so many founders and you've been a fractional CROs and so on and so on. So, you know, what are the kind of, you know, first advice around ICP positioning and so on that you actually ask your founders or try to, to get your founders to, to understand when you're trying to help them actually find that road to product market fit and beyond.

Great question. You want to go first, Richard or me?

Sure. No, I'll go for it. I think the first thing that I do is.

I make sure that they understand how to talk about the pains they solve and not what they do. Nobody cares what they do. So describe to me and very specifically I, I, I get them to tell me stories about the person that they think they're trying to target. Okay, if G is the person you're trying to target, what about G? And I don't mean, you know, he's, you know, 45 years old and he probably has 2.4 kids and blah. Like I don't mean that. I mean what is G's day to day pain that he is trying to solve specifically? And get them to tell stories around use cases, very specific use cases. That' first thing. Because if you don't know what pains you solve, if you're only talking about what you do, you're too in love with your product, right? You're too in love with your baby. So I, for me, I work with founders and tell them, well, what pains do you solve? Okay, who has those pains? Right? Then we start to slowly build out there.

And then even from there, preventing them from trying to go up market to enterprise. For a lot of reasons I focus on that piece. But for me it's really keying in on making sure they understand the pains they solve, not what they do. Because I think they get lost in that part.

And when you have founders that tell you, well, we solve for 15 different pains, how do you get them?

Same. Same thing is like, yeah, you can't support it. Those are actually the easiest people to sell, to be honest with you. Because you give them some rational thought and they're like, oh yeah. And I was like, look, you could sell to 15 people, but you can't even support 15 people from a messaging and branding perspective. You don't have the bandwidth to even do it. Right. So I always try to get them to narrow it down to two, maybe three verticals. Right? And I keep reminding them, particularly at the founder early stage that we're talking about. Everything's a hypothesis right now. I also tell them to, to stay.

As close to SMB, as mid market as they can because they do need to get that growth in that track, track record. Going to get the data, right. A 12 to 18 month sales cycle for enterprise at a startup, not going to work. You're not ready, you're not even close to being ready.

But not only that, you're likely to fume because you've raised, unless you've raised a bunch of money, you can't survive for, for years without any traction. And you know, 18 month sales cycle kind of deals, you can't rush those. No. So all the, all you're sort of doing is, is adding pipeline potential for 6 months, 9 months, 12 months. It's like at some point you got no cash coming in, nobody's going to want to reinvest in you. You have no real traction. So yeah, I'm always kind of optimizing for who can we get a hold of the easiest? That's literally the first question that I ask. Who can I get a hold of first? That could be referrals by the way. That could be like, hey, G knows Richard and I want to talk to Richard. So we're just going to use a go to network strategy.

Right.

It could be smaller deals because those ones pick up the phone more.

Right.

Or they respond to email better because there's less red tape or whatnot, they're less busy, whatever. It could be a geographic thing because in the golf course case, like, okay, well Florida is hotter for golf than, you know, North Dakota probably is. Right. So who can we talk to the fastest and who has the least amount of kind of likely red tape, meaning what sales cycle in, in theory, what sales cycle could be the fastest? Right. I don't care about deal size or anything like that. I'm just looking for who can I talk to fast that has not that much red tape and can make decisions quickly. Because I want to get data points to Richard's argument about, I want to get data points about who do we connect with, what resonates with our messaging, what obstacles are we going to run into? How do we overcome those things? What pipeline can I put on the board and then hopefully what numbers and what logos and what revenue I can put on the board because those things build momentum and belief and traction, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I want to do that over and over and over and until I feel like, oh, we've perfected Closing small private golf courses in Florida, Texas, Southern California. Until I perfected that. I don't even want us trying to go after public ones or big, huge conglomerate ones. I don't know the right name, but you know what I'm saying. I don't want us to focus on thing two or thing three until we are have built a repeatable sales motion for thing one that I know works.

Right, because it's another go to market motion. I think another go to market motion, you go after it when you're around at least 5 million, more like 10 million. Because this is where your time or your small part of the time that you address, you're starting to tap out of it. But until you've tapped out of that initial niche that you're dominating, there's no reason for you to start opening up so many other things. Like you mentioned, very precise icp. Then you know, you go after them. Let's say it's inbound, you have an amazing content machine and then you have SDRs that are transforming them into qualified demos and then they transform like the traditional sales assisted way. Well before you start opening it up to another segment of customers, which means a very different product. Well, open up an outbound machine, try to maybe have a few sales rep on the field that are there, try to leverage partnerships and you go through different channels, progression until at one point you feel that, you know, the return economics are not good enough versus opening up a new geography, a new segment of customers or new something else. But, but yeah, I've seen too many times, you know, trying especially earlier stage founders while going there for the first time, trying to sell to everyone they can because they believe that, you know, this is the fastest way for them to scale. But actually narrowing down the icp, working those inches, getting the first channel right, then the second one, then the unit economics and you know what happens by the way, is that you start to show that revenue engine that flows and you can go to your investors and say, well, give me $10 million. We're going to be going up market okay with a bit and the rest we're going to invest in just applying that formula to go from 1 to 10 or 10 to 15 million. And I think this is, you know, a more structured way to, to approach growth that I wish I actually knew for my first business because right now I'm telling you like other things, but those are hard learned experience for.

So what did you do? Like let's dig in there, right? Like, like let's, let's share some Painful stories because I think people like to hear it. It's always a little fun. Like what's like two things aside from sort of like tell us two quick funny stories.

He probably got this, he probably got this advice from somebody when he was running the golf company. Ignored the advice, thought he could do it on his own the way he was doing it. Didn't quite work that way. And now he's like, okay, whoever that person was was probably right. I get it now.

I think, I think, I think it's even worse than this.

I'm, I'm a finance person by training, so I train in, in corporate finance. I started my career in venture capital and you know, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur because that's something I, I really love. But what I understood about being an entrepreneur is of course like, you know, you're here, pitch deck, you write a business plan, you come in there, you ask Dev to build a product and then off you go, it's going to work out. So we are good enough on the fundraising side of things because, you know, this is where we came from. But hard learned truth is actually building a great product is super hard. And the second one is in order to sell, it's not just about hiring salespeople and telling them to sell. You actually as a funder, needs to get on your car, your zoom or whatsoever and get your first customer yourself. You need to figure out the formula before you start hiring. Like you have some unicorn salespeople that just arrive in their mix of PM and amazing sales and they can help you through that. Most of the time it's the, the fund that I have to go through.

So how many sales do you think? How many sales does a founder need to make before they can start to scale their sales, do you think?

It's an amazing question. And by the way, doubling down on what you say, I think going enterprise first is often a very big fallacy. That big logo, you think it's going to make you happen because you have that big logo, but actually you're the custom development agency for that big logo because the feeling they're going to have the software they wanted but not pay for it. So it's more useful to go on the easier logo first. The ones that you know won't have six months of procurement to go through. But. But yeah. How many salespeople, how many sales do you need to make? It depends on your acv, I'd say.

But let's go back to your example. How many sales should you have made.

Before you Brought in a salesperson minimum 500k.

I think 500k. And what was just out of here in that world, in, in that world you were in. What was your average contract value?

It was, it was 6.5K. And then we managed a way to, to grow it up, but at the time, 6.

So close to 100. So almost 75 clients before you is, is the. For you at that stage was what you would have done. Scott, what do you think? How many, how many deals does a founder need to close before they should start to think about really hiring salespeople?

Well, I would say 75 is extremely high.

Yeah.

So not that there's anything wrong with that, but I would say, wow, that's, that's a lot, a lot. Especially for a founder who does not have sales experience or background or sales chops. I think it's super admirable though, and I think it makes the business much stronger if somebody is able to do that for a lot of different reasons. I would have aimed much smaller than that. I would probably say 10 to 20 depending on the deals, depending on the deal size. Like he said, 500K. So I started, I, I immediately started thinking about 25 to 50K average deal size. That's like, you know, 10 to 20 deals or something.

That's what I was thinking too, in that range.

So it's super interesting.

It's really just, it's really enough for me. The important part is.

I want a founder who is going to be empathetic to the plight of a salesperson. And the only way for that to happen is for the founder to actually experience what it's like trying to sell this product. All right? So they should have a better understanding and grasp of the sales cycle length. The objections you run into the icp, what works on a demo, what works on a prospect call versus doesn't work. What are the things people are asking for in the product that we don't do right now that we need to do? I could go on and on and on and on. Right. But I want them to know how freaking hard it is. Because I don't want a founder to just show up and be like, okay, Scott, you got a 90 billion dollar quota. It's easy. I closed 75 deals like she did. It doesn't work like that. Right. So. And then I think that they also can help prepare and teach a little bit in the onboarding of first new hires, founding new hires or whatever. It's brutally hard for founding AES to come in and there's nobody There they can learn to learn from who's been selling the product, like, at all. Right. Also, that founder, if they know what they're doing, has done some sort of documenting of their experience as G did these first 75 sales. Hopefully he was writing things down, like, here's my sales pitch, here's how I demo, here's the objections I run into. Here's the icp. Hopefully all that stuff wasn't just locked in his head and he was writing it down. Because when a founding AE or 2 or 3 comes in, if they don't have that stuff and it's all locked away in the founder's head, it is a nightmare trying to extract it, because the only way to extract it is to have a conversation with you. But I can't have conversations with you because you're also talking to engineering, product marketing, cs. You're not on demand for me all the time. So it's got to be written down and documented somewhere. So extremely valuable. But yeah, and for me, 10 to 20 would be enough asterisk to this. By the way, the last place that I was an operator at the founder never closed a single deal.

Okay.

They, hi. They hired a couple founding AES who also were unable to close deals. And I got hired. I got hired as the. What pill is my job title? SVP of sales. And I came in.

But you were a consultant first. You.

I was consulting. I was consulting.

That's a great story. And I tell that one day, and I kept.

And I kept thinking to myself, how the hell are these people not closing deals? Because this is like the best product in an antiquated industry, ripe for disruption. There's no good competitors. How are they not closing? And I thought I should just take this job full time because I think I could blow this thing up. So I got there, and to what we were talking about earlier, they were trying to tell Everybody about the 100 different pain points that were out there, and they were trying to show everybody 100 different features. And I'm like, you're just overwhelming the hell out of people with information. We have to simplify the hell out of this thing. And so that's what we did. And then off we go. So there are exceptions. But what I think worked a little bit was this particular founder at least tried. They had been trying and they had built pipeline and they had almost. They had a lot of like, almost deals that just weren't getting over. So they at least had given it a go. But I think Ideally for me, 10 to 20, assuming you've got like a 20 to 50k kind of range. I think what G did is phenomenal, but also like maybe a little bit more than is necessary.

Fortunately, that founder was super empathetic to sales. Right Scott?

For about six months. For two years. For two years. I'll give them two years.

But honestly, in B2B right now, in B2C it feels that if you have the best product, your chances of winning are higher because you have that inner virality in the word of mouth that your users.

In B2C you're saying. In B2C you're say B2C.

Yeah, okay.

In B2B. In B2B for me, distribution is as important as getting the product to work for customers and to the best product doesn't always win. And I feel especially in the world now, you know, and AI is contributing to this is that there's so much noise that trying to find a way to get the ears of a prospect and be crisp enough in order for them to trust you to buy your product, use it and choose you from a zillion of possible app that requires a total ton of, you know, dedication, full time attention, work and so on and so on. And people often treat sales too much as I'm going to hire salespeople and they're going to figure it out and I think you need to build a distribution engine manufacturing sales in certain fashion and you know, the 10 to 20. I think it's a good point. Maybe 500 cases is too much. In my personal advisory they give to, to some of the founders. You know, we did it with my first company, we raised 3 on the financing. We sold the company to a company called Lightspeed. We had a great ride with Lightspeed as well. So afterwards I became an advisor or a board member of a few, few companies. But what I tell them first is, you know, at one point you start having off customers that you should specialize people around the customer journey. And if you look at it in a very simple way, you would have pipeline generation, pipeline closing and then onboarding, retention and expansion like that would be the three phases. And often I recommend the founders that their first hire is making sure that onboarding and retention is taken care of. Customer success starts splashing this and the second one before hiring someone in sales is to hire someone in pipeline generation because there's nothing better for me than having predictable pipeline because that means that you don't have to corrupt everything in order to make your months or your quarter because you feel you have sufficient predictability on the Number of prospects that actually can, can, can become customers and the last hire then would be, would be a salesperson. It happens within the same run of financing to be clear.

Right.

But your attention as a founder, I think, you know, especially with the fact that now buyers, they're so much educated before they define your product like yeah, yeah, like often it's the founder who can find the little magical stuff that actually is going to transform the thing. But predictable pipeline I feel is so key and often a second thought, yeah.

That is the thing that everybody complains about the most right now anyways is where can I find pipeline? Everybody in every industry, every size company. That's the thing that I hear the most by far we're getting towards the end of the show. I want to ask you one fun question before we turn it over to you and let us, let you ask us a question. I read, I read recently some founder was saying that one of the sort of most over indexed and overhyped things is finding the perfect name for your company and having to spend God knows how much money on the domain. So my question is where does the name Vasco come from and how much did you have to pay for the domain? If you're comfortable sharing.

I have a guess, I have a guess of what it means, where it comes from. I'm wondering if Richard knows but go ahead, tell us where does, where did the name come from and did you have to pay a bunch of money for the domain?

Yeah, so.

Great question. So second company, first one we had a name that we liked but for the second one we want a name that we feel resonated and the problem is that all the good and cool names, you realize the.com is already taken by everyone. So we tried and to find other assembling of word and try to be very engineering about the name that we found and they would all be those names like they wouldn't represent who we are and just wanted for the second company to have a name that you know, I like to sense that means something. So the name Vasco comes from Vasco de Gama, which is a Portuguese explorer who helped discover new lands. And the idea, it's also by the.

Way a football team in Brazil. Vasco da.

Absolutely. And I think you're a Liverpool fan, so.

I am, yeah.

Yeah.

So I'm psg. I'm guilty as charged. But.

But the idea behind Vasco is the notion of Vasco is kind of the tool that helps the founders, which are the explorers of modern time, to find the promised land. And they have this cool idea, they have this drive, this will and swan and we give them the tools so that, you know, they avoid the trial and errors and the mistakes that you would do if you go there and you try to find, find this new land and you don't have the right ship with the right equipment and the right crew. So that, that was the image behind, behind this.

I love that. I love that.

And therefore, and therefore we don't have the dot com. So it's Vasco app and we almost paid nothing for it, but we expected.

It from the get go.

Perfect.

There you go.

Perfect. Well done. Well done. You avoided what this one person said was a big booby trap for, for founders. Cool. Well, we wrapped every show by saying, how can we be helpful to you? Do you have any questions for us? So we turn it over to you for a minute.

I mean, for me there's something, you know, you both are advising a lot of companies. Some of them had amazing success and here we talked about a lot about, you know, engineering the growth and finding, you know, the model with the metrics and the foundations and so on. But there's something that is absolutely critical as well is to find the piece positioning and the messaging. And I'm just curious in the world that is changing right now where there's so much noise with AI like how do you approach new mandates with a company that you're trying to help? They have a great product, they're growing and you're trying to advise them to, you know, find the positioning that really touch and messaging that touch, you know, through that noise, like what is your new playbook? And that's in that new age.

Interesting question. I have two main pieces of feedback and if you go back and re watch this episode, they directly could be listened to by you if you're open to this feedback.

Yes.

The first one is everybody's pitch, especially their elevator pitch is way too long.

Yes.

It takes them too long to get to the point. So if we went back to the very beginning when we said, hey, do your own promo and you listen to it, I bet you, you listen to it now and you're like, damn it, that was too long. It was longer than I wanted it to be. And my theory and hypothesis for this is people don't have the attention span. Frankly, it's literally that it comes down to that simple thing. People don't have the attention span to listen to a one to two minute pitch about what somebody does. So you have to be as short as humanly possible. In the beginning. The second thing is you have to get rid of all of these buzzwords and jargon. They only sound smart and cool to other people who think they sound smart and cool. They actually tell me pretty much all about what companies actually do. So when you go back and listen to it and it's like AI this, generate that, it's all buzzword stuff. So if you try to have that conversation to somebody not from this industry about what you guys do, they look at you like your cross eyed, they have no idea what you're talking about. So I'm constantly telling people, shorten your pitch and get rid of all the jargon and buzzwords that you've included in it and pretend like you're just talking to a common person who is not from this industry. Explain what you do in this particular way. And that's the guiding sort of light and principle that I start with when I work on messaging for companies. And that goes beyond elevator pitch into cold call pitch, how we demo, content, copywriting, marketing, copywriting, email prospecting, all of these things. Simplify, simplify, simplify, shorten, shorten, shorten, get rid of buzzwords, get rid of jargon. That's the number one principle and guiding light that I'm telling people. So I'll let Richard answer now.

Yeah, I mean I'll, I'll say the same thing. And, and you know, this is the example I give is, you know, nobody cares what we do. They only care what pains we solve in relation to what they're experiencing.

So for example, people walking around saying, so Richard, you know, what do you do? I don't say, well I'm a sales trainer and I work with Zoom and Salesforce and blah blah blah to increase pipeline and close revenue and conversion rate. I don't say that. I simply say that I teach reps how to earn the right to ask questions, which questions to ask and when to ask them. And there's not a CEO, VP of sales, CRO, CFO who doesn't know exactly what that means. So we have to paint pictures of pain as our elevator pitch. Not what we do, but the pain that they solve. People buy pictures, they don't buy words. That's why we hate buzzwords, because you don't buy a buzzword. Nobody's buying me because I'm going to make their pipeline in their sales team more efficient and effective. They're buying what I do because I'm going to teach their reps how to earn the right to ask those questions and ask the tough ones.

Every person I know knows what that means in the business world we're in. So, so that, so I just sort of double down on what Scott's saying in terms of that simplification piece.

Do you agree with this feedback?

I think that's great advice and that is great feedback. And I can tell you 100. I feel it. So now I'm going to flip the script back on you. How would you have pitched it? I think it's a live session also for people who listen to this to see, you know, before and after.

How would, how would I have pitched it? Well, you got to pay Scott a lot of money to get that from the sponsorship only gets you so much. Right. So.

For me, it's, it's, you know, whenever I talk about removing pictures of.

Pain.

I try to think about who you're selling to. Right. That revenue leader, that CEO. And those pictures are often things like, you know, the frustration you feel on Sunday night before setting your meeting up on Monday. Right. There's. Everybody in the revenue world knows exactly what that is. Right. Or, you know, there are definitely some cliche things in there, but you have to find the right one that fits love, like, you know, stop looking for the needle in the haystack around your revenue growth or whatever or something. That's where I would start the conversation. And then you and I would dive in much deeper to go, well, let's repaint that picture more and more and more. That's how I would do it.

That, that part that Richard said, I think is really, is really key, actually. It's because you don't need to explain everything. In fact, you don't want to explain everything. You just want to explain just enough that somebody asks a follow up question.

Yes.

For more information. So you're just sort of breadcrumbing information about who you all are. So if I'm sitting down in an airplane, this is how I think about it. If I sit down on the airplane and somebody's like, what do you do? I am not going into a long spiel about who I am and what I do. I, I just be like, oh, I run a consulting business. And if they don't say anything else after that, they don't really care. If they're like, oh, what type of consulting? I'm like, well, I do sales and go to market consulting. Oh, and for who and for what types of company? Every time they ask me something, I tell them a little bit more. So that's how I would kind of breadcrumb Vasco, you actually have Lots of good, like one liners on your website from a marketing copy perspective. So you could just start with one of those, which, by the way, is important. What if marketing and sales messaging is not aligned? That's a problem. So whatever's on the website as a one liner, elevator pitch type of thing, if I can't use it as a salesperson, then marketing and sales is not aligned. So if somebody said to me, what do you guys do at Vasco? I would say, well, you have early product market fit data, right? They would say, yeah, I'd say, okay, well, we help you turn that data into predictable revenue growth. We built a platform that kind of does all this stuff for you. That's all I would say. And then they'd be like, okay, so does that like. And if they have a follow up question right on the airplane, then I would tell them a little bit more. And I don't know enough about your business to, to like dive into all these different things. But I'm not telling them everything that you do at all. I'm just picking like one thing that I think they could relate to the most. Well, any business person who says to me on the airplane, hey, Scott, what do you, what do you do? Like, oh, I work at this company called Vasco. I'm a CRO over there. Oh, what do you guys do? Well, you probably have some type of product market fit data at your company, right? Okay, well, we can help you turn all that data into predictable revenue growth that I think people can sort of get an idea and understand. It's not too, too buzzwordy. I probably could make it less buzzwordy if I really sat and thought about it. Right. And then hopefully it leads to another question like, well, do you do this? Or what does that mean? Or are you like so and so or whatever a competitor of yours is? And then I can share more details because somebody's showing interest and intent and it's less about that push and it's more about the pull, to your point.

Cool. But that's a life case study for all the listeners then.

Yeah.

So there's probably like 200 people going, this guy's full of. I would do it the exact opposite way. This is terrible advice.

I was just gonna say I'm impressed that Scott will actually talk to somebody on the plane. Like, that's usually.

You know what, what I didn't mention is this breadcrumb strategy is also a way for me to not engage in conversation unless somebody really, really cares. Yeah.

But that's part of qualifying.

There's nothing wrong with.

That's right. That's right.

Gee, how can people get a hold of you as we slowly wrap this up?

Oh, you can just go on our website Vasco app and then, you know, you can discover what we do and you can connect. Either sign up or just, you know, ask for a demo and someone will reach out and offer you a tour of the platform.

Great. Well, thank you so much for having us. Thank you again for being a sponsor to the podcast and to the event. We hope to see you at the, at the next event that we'll be announcing shortly for 2026, but really appreciate all the support you've given us. So thank you very much.

Very happy to be here.

All right, thanks. We will see you next time on the surf and sales podcast, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us. And surf's up. I'll see you in Portugal soon, Scott.

Yes, four weeks.