Jeanne DeWitt Grosser says your go-to-market strategy is a product. Stripe replaced discovery calls with collaborative whiteboarding sessions where customers sketched their payment architecture, creating a useful artifact and building trust when features alone don't differentiate.
Chapters
We buy a lot of things because of how we feel about them. The experience that you have of being sold to will increasingly actually differentiate a company and drive buying decisions. If products are only different at the margin. And so then you really want to create a customer buying journey that feels like very unique experiences. A lot of companies, the first call after you're qualified is discovery, which is basically, let me ask you a lot of questions to try uncover pain, figure out where buying power lies, et cetera. That is kind of boring sometimes for a customer. You're basically being quizzed. And so what we started to do at Stripe was that first session was a whiteboarding session. We would actually get together and have you draw your architecture for payments and all the other things that were under the hood to enable you to take money and drive customer outcomes. And through that, we would learn a ton about what was in your stack, what we were going to have to compete with. But the customer also learned a lot themselves because in many cases, they'd never drawn their architecture diagram. So they left that meeting with an asset and a sense of, wow. This is a really collaborative person who's, like, deeply interested in helping me develop a mental model for how to think about this.
