Why Choosing Your First Customers Matters More Than You Think | Pigment Co-Founder Eléonore Crespo

From the first day, you have to believe in yourself. Everyone will make you doubt. When I created Pigma, the idea came from what I saw. We are replacing Excel. We managed to win incredible deals with the best companies in the world. It's always about raising the bar higher and higher. Everything I do, I do at more than 100%. Hi everyone, I'm Eleonore Crespo, co-founder and co-CEO of Pigment, and I'm here to explain why for everyone in the audience— I believe all of you are from SaaS companies pretty much— why you should actually pay more attention into your customers than into your revenue. So that might sound strange, but You know, when you look at the SaaS playbook in general, we always talk about ARR, right? ARR is probably the first metric that we look at, you know, when we look at a Series A, at a Series B, and many milestones obviously that are more geared toward your financial rather than your customers. However, I'm going to share our own experience with Pigment and my past experience as an investor. I used to work for Index Ventures, which is a very large VC fund in Europe and in the US. And one thing that always got up our attention at Index was when companies very early stage would come and talk about some iconic brands they managed to sign very early on. And that would always trigger our attention because we would think, well, you know, they probably have a very trustworthy product here because, you know, they managed to sign very interesting names out there and they are probably thinking carefully about their go-to-market. So what I want to explain today is first of all, obviously, why you should actually pay attention into picking your customer, why you should also be very, very much focused into the customer you sign, but also obviously how, because this is very difficult when you want to actually spend time picking and cherry-picking your customers and turning them into advocates. So I will spend time showing you first of all what we did at Pigment in the first 6 months after our public launch. These are the type of companies we actually signed, so you probably know some of them. Some are actually iconic SaaS brands, so you probably know the Figmas, the DBTs of this world. Some are very famous brands for CFOs, Carta, Brex. Some are iconic brands for sales teams. I can talk about Gong, for instance. And you could think that this happened by luck, but actually our product is a must-have for finance and sales teams. To be very clear on what we do, we actually replace Excel for fast-growing companies. So it means that basically when Excel, when you outgrow Excel or spreadsheets in general, You start knocking at the door and looking for a solution to become your database and to basically have finance team, sales team, and HR team collaborate on one tool. And what we wanted, as you know, we created this core product was to make sure, obviously, we could create trust and credibility with all of our customer base. And so what was important here is that first of all, we wanted to build confidence because what we sell first with Pigment is confidence, confidence in your numbers and confidence confidence in the decisions that you take. And our core persona are actually CFOs, CROs, VPHRs. And when they look to buy a tool, what they look for really is a tool that they can trust and that they can partner with for many years. And so we actually spend a ton of time and effort with my team to try to sign the biggest logos in the fast-growing ecosystem, fast-growing company ecosystem, to make sure we could unlock the next wave of customers. So in order to do that, I will explain obviously the methodology we used later on, but I have to say it was literally like climbing the Everest without oxygen. It was a very, very hard process, but I will explain obviously why it pays off and why I think it's very important, especially in this world where, as you know, we have a very big economic crisis ahead and the IT budgets are going to be very much constrained and so the distrust and credibility you can create with your customer is gonna be even more critical. So I will explain the why. So first of all, you need to know that in general, people and organization are risk-averse when it comes to buying SaaS. So I've put a sentence here, no one got fired for buying IBM. That could be no one got fired for buying SAP or Salesforce. And you could put any leader name next to it, meaning that literally it could be anyone saying that. It could be Jason M. Lemkin, it could be Elon Musk, doesn't matter. Everyone thinks the same here. The companies, the market leaders, you know, the CFOs, the CROs, they will never get fired if they decide to go for SAP versus another ERP, right? And when you come and you are a new player in the SaaS ecosystem, no matter who you sell to, whether it's to small companies, mid-market, or enterprise, you are nobody. You have no brand. No one knows about you, right? And so in a way, how can a company, no matter what the size is of that company, will trust you and decide to put a significant budget into buying your tool. For us, you know, we have an average contract value of pretty much $70K, and, you know, people need to understand why they should put such a budget in a tool. And the problem is that, obviously, especially in this time, you know, companies need to understand if you will scale, if you will have enough funding to actually be sustainable in the next 2-3 years. And we all know that, obviously, the VC and the tech ecosystem right now is getting harder there. And obviously, there are also questions around your product, the quality of your product, the security of your product, and obviously how strong your product is. And because these people are risk-averse, you need to actually embrace that and make it— and turning it as an advantage for you. And this is what I mean by this slide. What these organizations are going to look for are the next generation of market leaders. And here, what I would advise everyone to do The first advice would be to actually use confirmation bias as a good thing and turn it into a good thing for you. And what I mean there is that when you sign, for instance, for us, as I mentioned, you know, the Carta, the Brex of this world, that are the best brands for CFO. When we sign Gong, that is a very, very solid brand for sales teams, I can tell you that the next sales team that will actually look at Pigment, or the next finance team that will look at Pigment and know that some of the market visionaries that are worth, you know, 1, 2, 3, 10 billion plus, that they have made the choice to actually go with our solution, that's a fantastic confirmation bias. And even if you are no one in your ecosystem, that will certainly help. Obviously, you need to go further than that. And when I say that you need to go further than that, it's not only about signing these logos, but it's about turning them into advocates because that's not enough, right, to say, yeah, we are trustworthy, we've signed Brex. No, it's when someone will talk to the CFO of Figma, he needs to understand that the Figma team absolutely loves your product. And it's the same for any category. You can sell to SMB and you have this iconic SMB brands that everyone will know about, whether they are B2C brand or brands known for your own niche, right? If you sell SaaS for HR, there are some HR brands, SMBs that are very well known that you can sell into. If these teams speak for you and say, this is the tools that changed my life, I can tell you that you win even 10x more of trustworthiness in the ecosystem. And obviously when you manage to convince these visionaries, that will unlock the next wave of customer. And this wave will be massive because you will have unlocked obviously some superpower with these fantastic brands. So now I want to give you 6 tips to succeed and to make sure you can actually deliver on signing and be very, very much focused on signing iconic brands and then obviously turning them into advocates. So the first tip I want to give is about the wish list you should make. So here, what is going to be key for you is is to first of all draw a picture of your ideal customer profile. And you shouldn't do that 3, 4 years down the line. You should do that even before starting your company. You should do that when you are actually designing the first layers of your product. And with my co-founder Romain, before starting Pigment, we actually spent 9 months speaking to the ecosystem, defining our ideal customer profile, understanding What would be the persona that would have the biggest pain at a certain point in time and yet would be willing to buy fast the tool? And we designed the first steps of Pigment with this in mind. And we kept asking ourselves, are we tackling the right ideal customer profile? And so when I made my list and my letter to Santa, my letter was like, oh please, I would like to sign Snowflake, I would like to sign Datadog, I would like to sign those big names, right? That would be my dream. So you put your dream there and you're like, well, actually, is it realistic? You know, you're going to do a public launch and probably you need to sign big names, as I mentioned before, in the first 6 months to gain traction, right? Does it take 6 months to sell to Snowflake? Probably not. You know, sales cycles are long with large public companies, and Snowflake now is a large public company, same with Datalog. So when you do that list, what I would strongly encourage you to do is what would be an ideal sales cycle for you and understand obviously from there what it means for your market. Like, is actually, you know, the biggest name on your list actually probably too big for you for now? But this is probably the next wave for next year or the year after. And what's more realistic? And so for us, what we decided to do is to say, okay, look, we still want to sign very big next-generation market leaders that experience still a massive pain, you know, companies that are post-Series B, post-Series C, that are struggling with spreadsheets. But yet are very capable of buying a tool in 1 or 2 months. And this was our ideal customer profile, and this is what we went after. And we focused all of our time and energy on that to make sure we could sign the DBTs, the Ledgers, the ManoMano, the Deliveroo, the Figma of this world. The second tip is around leveraging your network. I think it's something that people do not do enough. What I mean by that is that you are surrounded by people that are willing to help and that have an interest to help you. Why do they have an interest to help you? You VCs, you angels, the VCs want you to be successful. They want you to be successful, and guess what? They have a fantastic portfolio usually. So even before choosing the partners that you want with you around the table, my number one advice would be to think What VC, what advisor, what angel, what operator has the network that I need to actually unlock some customers? So to give you an example, if you are selling to small customers, small businesses, perhaps you want a VC that has a portfolio of 400 companies. If you are mid-market, probably you want a VC that is not only doing seed but also Series A and has a portfolio that can help. Perhaps you also want to bring in your network operators that also have a network and that can help you. One of them is here, Julien, for instance, Julien Codorniou from Facebook that helped us, you know, with his network of companies to unlock obviously the first logos. So I would strongly encourage you to actually look around and find some people that can help you. So that's not enough because it looks very much handcrafted if you just look at that, right? You need to be systematic and to treat that as a proper outbound channel. So it should be a proper lead gen channel on its own to actually say, I have a channel to sign iconic brands that are going to unlock my next wave of customers. So the playbook we did at Pigment is simple. We started to create some mini CRMs with all of our VC, all of our advisor, tracking all the P0, P1, P2 priorities of the companies we wanted to sign and making it a win-win, meaning that basically we would we all follow and have like proper processes to follow the different ops, making sure, you know, we bring them on board when we are close to actually converting a lead into a demo, converting a demo into, you know, the next step, and then the closing, etc., etc. But you have to treat it and put people to treat this as a proper marketing channel. The other important part is not only to involve your network, but the network you win, you want to bring in the next wave of your company, and the network you want to bring in your next wave of your company are probably the next VCs that are going to come on board. And that has worked really well for us, and again, it's a win-win situation. What I love to do, you know, when someone is interested in Pigment is to actually tell them that, you know, if they start making a couple of intros to their portfolio companies, not only their portfolio companies will benefit a lot from probably, you know, looking at Pigment and installing Pigment as a tool to help them you know, take faster decisions around their business, especially in this world when, you know, you have to deal with your financials the most perfect way. But also, obviously, because they will see if this customer buys a tool and if they are happy with the tool. And this is the best due deal they can do, right? Like, if they manage to get one or two of their portfolio companies interested in buying and they see that this company love it, it's a total win-win. Third tip, Brings the right people. Here I'm talking about employees and your early employees. And what you need at the beginning of the adventure is to bring people that are experts in the field. I will come back to the beginning of the presentation when I told you how much trust and credibility matter when you have no brand, you know. For us, it's very clear we are not in the magic quadrant of Gartner yet. We are too young. We are not in the next wave of Forrester. This is what we are looking for because we are selling mid-market market enterprise. What do you do? People have to trust your team because they are not buying a product at that stage, they are buying an experience, and they are buying the team, and they are buying what you offer them. So you need to bring experts that they can trust, but these experts not only need to be experts in their field, they need to be flexible, and they need to understand that at this stage of the company, you have no playbook. Meaning you have no sales enablement, you have nothing, they will have to sell on their own. So it means they will have to be a mix of BDR, a mix of sales, understanding the product really well, understanding, have a lot of empathy obviously for the customer, but also understanding how to create a perfect communication channel with the product team. This is what will be game changer as your first employees. Finally, something we did with Pigment was to hire very senior talents day one, and I can tell you that this is a very big accelerator as well of growth for two reasons. First of all, senior people, they have their own network, so they are going to bring also, you know, the next wave of customers. They know the methodology, and at the very beginning, I can tell you, you have no time to train anyone. You know, if someone reports to the CEO, you are not there to coach them. They need to be autonomous day one, and they need to know what to do. But also, And also obviously they bring this trust, this credibility, and they will bring not only the next wave of customer but the next wave of employees and A+ players with them. So these are the things, and it's a very complex recipe, but that I think are instrumental to the first, the first layers of your success. Next tip is tip for the CEO itself. So the CEO here, the CEO needs to be very much involved involved in this process. So here I can tell you that I spend at least a third of my time with customers. So it sounds like a lot, right? But at this stage, it's just absolutely critical that the CEO creates and liaise relationships with their first customers. Why is that? It's very simple. The CEO, you know, can commit himself to things that your sales team will never be able to commit to. So I can tell you right now, we are about to sign one of the largest fintech in Europe. And this company, they are talking directly to me. They have a direct channel. They text me every day, and they know that I commit myself to things that we will deliver, whether it's, you know, customer experience, SLAs, the way we will deal with them when they are signed, etc. These are things that obviously they will trust your sales team, but when it comes from the CEO, it's obviously 10x more powerful because they know that you cannot commit to something you will not do. So I would say even if you sell to small companies, building relationship with your first customers is going to be fantastic because you are going to hear their pains and you are going to understand really what can make them the greatest advocates of your tool. That goes with this fifth advice around involving your customers in your product decisions. Here, the idea is simple. Your first customers, as I mentioned before, if they trusted you early on, it's probably because they are visionaries. You would probably never buy a tool that early stage if you don't have an idea that, yes, it's probably going to change the way you work. And so you should carefully listen to them. And the way I like to, to, to tell my employees about how we should think about our first customers, we should treat them them as co-founders of the company. We should treat them as co-founders, meaning that really literally exactly like your first employees, your first customers are co-founders of your product. However, one mistake that many companies do is to obviously listen to all of the first customers, especially when they are iconic brands, and take, you know, all the feature requests that they get and panic over it and think that, you know, they have to deliver on all of these requests. Because these requests are so important because these are iconic brands and you want to serve them well. So a tip actually to avoid this is to set a vision around where you want to bring your product and bring your customer on board with that vision with some very, very clear feature concept around principles that you want to adopt or not and explaining them basically what's the next wave of your customers. So for us, it's simple. We are always going upmarket. So idea for us is to sign as the next wave of the Fortune 500. And hence, you know, the fast-growing companies is our first market, and it's a market we'll always serve well. But we also have to build for the future. And that's very interesting for them, by the way, because obviously they are young companies that want to grow and become the next Fortune 500. So we are building these enterprise features. And once they understand these product principles, they can really participate into the roadmap. So something we do at Pigment, for example, is we organize this customer advisory board. We have one actually next week in Paris where we bring all of our first important customers together in one room and we make them look at the roadmap of the next 3 months. We let them interact with that roadmap, give us feedback, understand what's important for them, what's not so critical, what's key for the next 3 months, what's key maybe in 2 years from now for them, et cetera. And then we debate together. We also created an online community where people can basically come and discuss, again, features together, upvote features that will be important for them. And I can tell you that this has worked so well. I can give you concrete examples, but we built a connector to G Suite thanks to the team at Deliveroo. We are building a sort of spreadsheet mode within Pigment thanks to some feedback that we got, and we accelerated that. That roadmap thanks to feedback we got from Brex and Figma. So we really listen. And not only we need to listen, but we need to thank them. And they need to understand that these features have been delivered thanks to them. Maybe I will name the feature after them at some point. We'll see. But that's later. And finally, what I've put here is kind of counterintuitive. But it's also about making sure that, as I mentioned, when you have an ideal customer persona, on an ideal customer profile, you shouldn't derive from there. And it means that if some people knock at the door and want to buy your product but yet are too small or too big for you, I would strongly advise you to build trust with them by recommending competitive alternatives. And it might sound counterintuitive, but I can tell you that they will thank you in 2 years when they understand maybe that, you know, it's now time to switch to a tool like Pigment because maybe it was not the tool for the size they were in at. And this is something we now do constantly to make sure that we don't lose the focus on the size of the company we are going after. Another thing to keep in mind is that not only the companies are growing, but also the people that you have involved and your customers are growing. Figma, for instance, Pravir, head of FP&A who bought the tool in December, got promoted yesterday as the CFO of Figma. He, you know, he's going to be a big voice in the valley, right? And so if you manage to actually create a special relationship with these first customers, that will obviously change the trajectory of Pigment. And I can tell you that we are very proud of the community we have created, and our customers are willing to help us above and beyond, you know, spending time with not only other customers but VCs, writing G2 reviews, helping us with analyst relationships, etc., because we give them a very strong voice that they don't always get. And this works really well, especially when we are in a market where usually, you know, other players have not spent so much time and attention on that category of buyers. Finally, you should differentiate through your product and your touch. So here you need to find what makes you so special as a company, what makes you so different as a brand, and how can you actually create long-term partnerships with iconic brands. So obviously there is this trust relationships we talked about, but it's not only about that. It's about how can we build the future together and how can we both become obviously the next generation of leader in tomorrow's world. And if you manage to do that by sharing obviously not only your product as I mentioned, but sharing a full experience package, you know, sharing your values, sharing what makes you different, you know, in the way you will serve customers. Because this is very true, you know, for large SaaS companies today. They are not buying a product, they are buying the end-to-end experience. They are buying the SLAs, they are buying the team that actually can help them in a day-to-day basis, support them when they have an issue with the tool. And if you manage to differentiate by showing them that you can treat them differently, that you are always here for them, And when you pitch them your vision, you know, treat them like VCs, like future partners, like co-founders, that will completely change the relationship because they need to understand that it's not a customer relationship. What you are trying to create goes way beyond, and you want them to be on your side for the next 10 years, not, you know, just as a small, quick deal that you're making right now. Finally, you need to be honest about what you cannot and can deliver. That goes back to what I was saying before around the fact that, you know, when you have your roadmap, when you have, you know, the customer experience design, etc., you need to tell them clearly that these are the things that, yes, we will do next year, this we won't. You should not overpromise on anything because, again, you need to create this very, very trustworthy relationship. So finally, I'm just going to recap what I've tried to explain today. So my top takeaways are very simple. The first one is to create that top logo list, this wish list, this letter to Santa that you will write. It's exactly the same letter, by the way, you should write when you pick your co-founder and when you choose your first employees. You should always have a wish list. This is a dream. My dream is to have Romain Nicoli as a co-founder. Yes, I've done it. Romain Nicoli is my co-founder. But that's really what you should do is you should write this list and be very clear about the logos you would like to sign. And so once you've done this list, obviously then you need to trim it, you need to understand what's feasible, what's realistic, etc. You have to design your roadmap again to be very much focused not only from a roadmap perspective but from a go-to-market perspective on that wish list. Deliver, obviously, around the must-have features that are helpful for that market, basically, and then leverage all the halo effects you can use for the big brands that you can manage to sign and make sure obviously that you turn them into advocates because this advocacy is the cheapest marketing channel. It's even a channel where your marketers are paying for your tool and it's the cheapest marketing channel that can unlock the next waves of the hundreds, the thousand customers you are going to sign. And not only the customers, but also your equity story. And finally, please work with your network. Use all available resources and be very systematic about what you do, using, as I said, like, you know, putting in place proper process to make sure you don't do it on the side and you are capable to scale that go-to-market strategy. And I think this is the hardest because it's not an outbound channel that is something that has a proper playbook. Book. So you need to create yours depending on your channel and obviously your, your, the type of categories that you want to tackle. Thank you very much, and I hope that was helpful. Thank you.