Webinar | Early Stage GTM: How to Convert Your First Customers - March 12, 2020

All right, welcome, everybody. My name is Sam. I'm the VP of programs here at Launch, one of Western Canada's leading tech hubs. And you're not here to listen to me today, but we're joined by Whitney Sales of accelaprise. She's the managing partner there. Welcome, Whitney.

Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

So we're here today to talk about the sales method. I can't get over how great of a name that is. But first of all, why don't you just introduce yourself a little bit what you do at acceleraprise. What does acceleraprise do?

Yeah. So I'll start with acceleraprise and then we'll go into a little bit around my background. So Accelprise is a B2B SaaS accelerator and seed fund. We have offices in San Francisco, New York and Toronto. So we just launched our Canadian presence over in Toronto. Most of the West Coast, Western Canada does end up coming to San Francisco, but we have three locations now. We invest in about 60 companies a year across those three locations. And we are B2B SaaS focused, which will actually be the structure of the presentation that I'll give today. We have invested in 150 companies at this point. We started out in San Francisco. I run our San Francisco hub. And the sales method is actually a methodology I developed about over about 14 years now of selling. It started out when I was working at a B2B SaaS, a real estate startup called LoopNet. I was early employee there pre IPO, launched two separate products for them, and then have worked with several startups since, several of which have been acquired. I had four companies on the Inc 5000. I started as a salesperson, then started building out teams, and then prior to Acceleraprice, I launched a B2B SaaS consultancy. It's actually where I met Mike, my business partner out in New York, who was the founder of acceleraprise. I worked with one of our startups there out of our third program, and we got to a million in ARR in eight months. And when I was running the consultancy, Mike realized there was something to this. And so since then I joined as a partner for on the second fund. I've been with the company or the fund now for about three years. We're launching our seed fund now, and we've rolled up the methodology I developed under Accel Apprise from a programming perspective. So this is a lot of what we go over. This is just one piece of a Much, much bigger model. But what we'll go over today is how to qualify a SaaS company, or excuse me, a customer as an early stage SaaS company and some of the hacks that we've put together and strategies we've put together to make it a lot easier to sell. This methodology has actually been used for hundreds of companies at this point. So not only in the portfolio but in the consultancy I ran and then just a lot of companies that I advise. I can rattle off a bunch of successes but accel apprise itself. We invest in companies that are pre seed to seed stage startups. We look for product technical founding teams, someone ideally who has domain experience or with a founding team that has domain experience in the industry that they're targeting with product in market and some indicators of initial traction. So it could be revenue traction, it could be a strong active user base, it could be a co developed product with a larger enterprise customer and ideally companies who are looking to sell into North America. So not just Canada but also looking to launch in the US which is why this is such a good fit today.

That's awesome. Yeah. So let's. I'm not going to interrupt you too further just some housekeeping items. If you guys do have questions or gals do you have questions? We do have a Q and a function inside the zoom so just type them in there and then as much as I can I'll try and keep an eye on it and but worst case scenario we do have a Q and a timeframe at the end. So yeah, let's get right into it. I'm excited.

Awesome. And I'll try and pause in between each slide as well so that you guys can, you can ask questions about each section but I'll try and hit on a lot of the not just what to do but the why to do it as an early stage company because I think it'll be really helpful because I think that that helps people understand the framework on how to be thinking about sales as an early stage company for sure. So give you guys a little bit about me again, my name is Whitney Sales. As cheesy as it is born and raised, it's one of the questions I actually get early in my presentations because last name is sales and it's actually fun fact. It was the first buying signal I got from buyers. I learned really early on in sales if someone asked if my last name was sales or commented on my last name being sales, there's about a 90% chance that customer was going to buy the product just because it shows a buying mentality really early on. It also would happen at later stages of conversation. So those are things to be looking out for. The types of questions customers ask can teach you a lot about their mentality in buying, which we'll about talk. Talk a little bit about the point of this presentation. So what we're going to go through is a qualifying conversation. So if you think through your sales funnel and there's the initial engagement piece, which is how your customer engages with you on how you're getting the lead in the first place. And there is a champion call. This is ideally the structure of your qualifying champion call to identify if this company is a good fit for you. You can actually use this as well for your stakeholder meetings. So those are typically your first two conversations. Your champion is usually the who's going to help you teach or teach you how to navigate a sales conversation. A stakeholder meeting is typically when you have multiple buyers in the room who you're trying to align around the KPIs that they're going to be judging success of a particular product as well as align around the buying process for that particular product. With sales is two things. It's problem solving and project management. And the point of a champion conversation. A qualifying conversation is going to be to build trust with your customer as an early stage company who hasn't proven product market fit yet or hasn't identified kind of what their ICP looks like in a lot of cases. Ideal customer profile. Sorry, I'm going to use abbreviations to stop me if you guys don't understand something or if you have questions about an acronym I'm using. The point of this conversation is to identify good fit as well as build trust with that customer that you can do what you say you can do and you can help them. You can help align them around buying the product. So that's the goal of this conversation and what we're going to be going through today. This is generally how I structure a qualifying call. I like to break it up into four key pieces. When I think about it, the first portion of the call is going to be to align around context. And you guys will get a copy of this deck afterwards. I'm happy to share it. I share it around all the time. I also encourage you to connect with me on LinkedIn if you have any questions. I'm just going to say that we'll go through some of my contact information afterwards too. But I like to structure this conversation around the first part of the conversation around setting up context for the conversation and what we're going to be talking about so that I can actually control the flow of the conversation and the questions that happen throughout the conversation we having with the customer or prospect. Then I like to tee up why so why would they be talking to me in the first place? And why they should be listening to me as a thought leader within the industry. Three is going to be what so what we can actually do for that individual company, it's going to build credibility, identify what we're going to be aligning the goals of the company are and kind of teeing up what potentially those goals should be and then helping them understand what the value will be in your product, what type of value your product will be adding to the company and their operational efficiency and then finally how they're going to buy. So what does that buying process look like for the organization? So you can map that and really understand it. I like to organize it this way specifically just because I found it to be the easiest way to train early. People who are learning how to sell the how piece could be peppered in throughout the throughout the qualifying conversation. So I'm just going to say that right now that if you are a more experienced salesperson or someone who has done sales before, I put how afterwards because founders, when they're selling for the first time a lot of the time aren't really comfortable asking the person about their buying process until they've identified the problem. But in reality once you're more comfortable selling, you can actually move that portion up in the call or the meeting. So when I start a conversation I like to start with a laugh. As I mentioned, my last name is one of the things I used very early on when I started selling. But there's a lot of ways you can do this. You can do it through making fun of yourself, talking about something that's happening. Coronavirus is a great one right now because there's so much stuff. I like the nickname Rona. Our wonderful little friend who's torturing everyone in the early stage business. Something I found about their company or market that might be ironic or funny. Something about the mutual connection that connected you if you were intro through someone or if they downloaded a report of some sort. A fun fact about that. Anything that you can do. I also talk very quickly. So if you're knowing that about myself I used to talk about the fact I was wired on coffee because my CEO, my first company I worked with and and I used to make coffee together every morning. It was one of the fun things and we called it sludge because it was really thick and it got everyone really wired in the morning. So it doesn't matter what you use, but what does matter is you get the person to laugh. The reason being when someone's laughing, they actually drop their guard. It also increases neural activity by 32%. So literally, by making your customer laugh, you're making them smarter. Ideally that's a good thing, but you're also getting them to open up and be more receptive to you. The other thing is positive emotion elicits trust and it also makes it more likely that they're going to jump on a conversation with you because they think about you positively and sets the brand up in a positive light. So it's just really important to actually start the conversation off in a positive trajectory with a laugh, whatever that may be.

Canadians like the weather.

That makes sense. I used to use that when I was in San Diego a lot because I used to sell for a legal firm when I was in college. And so yeah, I understand that completely.

There you go.

The next area I like to go into introductions. The context piece is actually so the laugh, introduction and agenda are areas I see a lot of people skipping in a conversation. It's really important to do an introduction. Specifically you're going to look at how you're connected. So for example, if they downloaded a white paper, a white paper, you might want to understand what piqued their interest about that white paper or if they filled out a form in some way. If you're introduced to them through someone, how they know that person, could you give you some context around the level of trust they have with that person or why they took the call in the first place. The next area I like to go into is what each person. So name title and responsibilities, including my own. The reason I like to make sure I get title and responsibilities is in the startup ecosystem these days if you are a startup selling into other startups or even in corporate innovation, for example, if you start with innovation or bd, those responsibilities really range. The title is very abstract and ambiguous on what the actual responsibilities are within the organization. So someone could be ahead of title and head of titles are bullshit these days because a lot of the times they might be just head of one. So it's really important to understand what that responsibility is. If they're ahead of, you know, a department, that there's only one person and they might not have decision making power within that organization and you may need someone more senior to actually get the decision through. It's Also going to help you as you start to map your ideal customer profile. Your ICP help you understand how to develop your leads and how to actually focus and identify who's a good fit for you really early on. So it's really important context to have in the conversation. And then third, I like to confirm how much time I have. I may have scheduled an hour of time and they may actually only have 30 minutes. And if someone ends up giving you more time, it's super helpful to know that if they're telling you they're going to give you a half an hour and they give you a full hour because that means that they're really interested. So there's good information signaling you can get from setting up the context around the introduction. The other thing I have down here is I have little tips down at the bottom but I like to take notes on each person's name, title and responsibilities. Especially if I have multiple people in the room. The reason being how people ask questions is actually a really good indicator of how people make decisions across the organization. So example, if I have a senior person who's driving a lot of that conversation, what that's going to indicate to me is that it's a top down decision making org or department. If I have more junior people driving the conversation, what that's going to indicate to me is I'm going to have to build consensus across the org. Or if I may have one person driving all the conversation, it might tell me that that one person is responsible for a lot of this and I need to make sure they are fully bought in on it. So it's a really helpful information. The other thing that's really helpful for is if you had noticed that someone, if you're in person and you notice someone is checking out in the it's going to tell you like you can use that person's name when you cover a piece of information that's going to be relevant to them. Like hey John, I noticed that, you know, this is an area that I think will be really applicable to you. You take care of this right? And it'll get them re engaged. So it's a really good way to kind of manage and control that conversation and attention as well as get information about how the organization works. The next area I go into in context is the agenda. So this I use pull a little bit from the Sandler method in this which you guys can, I highly recommend reading up on. It's a great method. There's a lot of different strategies that are actually peppered throughout this presentation, I kind of pull different pieces that I like. But the way I structure the conversation, I have a script down here at the bottom which I'm actually going to read because it has all these pieces in it. But the way I open it with the agenda and the reason I set an agenda is it helps me control the conversation and structure how I want to have the conversation, as opposed to if I have a senior person in the room who might jump in or try and control the conversation over me. This allows me to actually set the context for me controlling it. And sales. A lot of sales is about control. It's control of information and control of the conversation and control of how things are relayed. So this allows me to have a little bit more of that. That's why I do an agenda. But just going through this quickly, so I want to go over a quick agenda for the meeting today. My goals for the call, get a good understanding of how you guys currently do X and then discuss how we can potentially help you with that if there's a fit. From there we can go over next steps. Sound like a plan? Great. Is there anything in particular you'd like to cover? One thing I want to do is ask that you make this a discussion versus a pitch. But I love to hear the sound of my own voice. Your questions are much more enjoyable for me. So if you have any questions, please feel free to interrupt me just to touch on a couple things and how I structure this, the goals of the call. The reason I structure it this way is I'm getting alignment, an agreement around the fact I'm going to start with questions as opposed to start by telling them about the product. Even though I am going to tell them about the product and my founding story. The reason I want to do this is a lot of the times people get defensive when you ask them a bunch of questions. And in this case you're getting them to sign up for you asking those questions before you give them answers. The second piece in here is around questions. Different cultures ask questions in different ways. Some people don't want to interrupt if they have a question. And depending ADD is a real thing these days. And if you're on a presentation like this, there's a good chance people are checking out if they have a question or they're trying to remember the question that they have if they're not able to ask it. And so if you don't give them permission to interrupt or you don't tell them how to ask the question, they won't be Paying attention to anything else you say afterwards. So it's a really good way to make sure your customers stay engaged. And then the final thing is ask them if they have any items they want to discuss so you can make sure they. The items they want to discuss will give you context around where they're particularly interested and why they're talking to you in the first place. And then it'll also give you some buying signals that they've done some research ahead of time. I'm going to pause there. Are there any questions right now?

I. Yeah, I don't see any questions out right now. Feel free. If you guys have them, please type them in. So. So, like a lot of this, I think from what I'm hearing is building the foundation of trust. Is that right?

Yeah. So this is right now it's setting up the context for me. Having control of the conversation is the initial piece and then we'll go into setting up. The founding story is really around and qualifying questions and use case are around establishing trust. So I'll jump into that a little bit.

Cool.

So founding stories. So I actually have a worksheet around this that I'll share with you guys as well. But the founding story, before I jump into it, I like to ask what they know. But my founding story is how I'm going to set up the thought leadership on how I discovered the problem that I'm solving. What trends are going on in the industry that led to me discovering this. Ideally, you have first hand experience with this that actually led you to the conclusion that you need to design a product, what you researched and why current solutions don't work, and then what you develop to actually solve that problem. So this is actually your first pitch, but you pitch it in relation to your founding story. And even if you're a salesperson who's giving this founding story, it's really helpful to do because what it does is it shows. It shows you that. Excuse me, establishes thought leadership, that you understand what's going on in the industry. It shows that you actually understand the problem that the customer has. Ideally, tease up some trends that will help you design the ROI story in your use case and then for this individual customer, and then establishes you again as a thought leader. So it's going to build that initial credibility and then that's going to weave throughout the entire conversation. So it's just a really, really good thing to tee up here. And again, I have three to five sentences. In reality it may be longer than that, but I just put three to five in there because some people spend 15 minutes on it and it's silly. I'm going to give you an example quickly. So the company I worked with as a consultant where I was talking about, we got to a million in ARR in eight months. It's a company called People Data Labs. The founder, Sean, was a college dropout, dropped out at 20 to start the company. Zero sales experience. Anyway, the way he discovered their people data. So they're an API that plugs into the back end of applicant tracking systems, CRMs, forms, et cetera and keeps the people data up to date. And they were specifically targeting the HR industry. So I'm just giving you guys context around this and I'll give you the story quickly. So Sean, when he was working with, you know, when he started People Data Labs, he was actually working on another application and he was looking to hire a designer. So he sat down with a recruiter and gave the requirements he was looking for for this designer. And the recruiter said she'd get back to him shortly. Seeing as Shawn was an inpatient person, shortly meant for him at the end of the day, for the recruiter meant the end of the week. And by that point Shawn had actually hired someone else. This recruiter was a friend of his. And so he sat down and sat down with her and looked at what the actual problem was and why it took her so long. And what he saw was 50 tabs across the top of her screen with a bunch of LinkedIn, an applicant tracking system. Some various online research this person had been doing about the various candidates. And what he found is that the systems of record that these people are using, these applicant tracking systems are 15 years old and didn't actually have even forms or excuse me, fields for the information that she needed. And 90% of the data that been created has been created in the last two years. And so what he decided to do is create this API called People Data that plugs into the back end of the system and keeps it up to date. So in there, in that story I talk about Shawn relating we were selling to the HR industry. So we talked about first hand knowledge of the HR industry. We talked about the problem of trying to find the research, we talked about the problem of the fact the current solutions that are, that people are using for this information are up to date, are, excuse me, out of date. They aren't designed for the information that exists. And it's because the information that exists came out in the last two years that the people are using on a day to day basis. So it's just kind of setting up context here around. Around the solute the problem that they actually solve. I'm not sure if that was helpful, but give you guys a little bit.

Of context there for sure. And I think one just further question, just to clarify the ask what they know part. One of the audience members is asking is it referring to what they know about yourself and what you're about to pitch or just about or what. What are you asking what they know about?

Oh, it's about what they know about your company. Because if someone's done research on your company, it's going to tell you a lot because it's going to tell you they're probably an educated buyer and doing their research. It also tells you they're probably highly interested because they've taken time ahead of time to research your company.

Gotcha.

Cool. So once I've given my founding story, this is where I like to go into my questions again. I say you get three. You may have more the big thing for your qualifying questions. There's two things you're looking to answer. You need to know are they a good customer for you and what customer case study are you going to give when you go through your use case. And we'll talk a little bit about that in a second. But these questions need to be open ended. So the way I typically like to structure them is talk me through how you guys currently approach X. Walk me through your process of how you currently do Y. They're not how many people do you have on your team? If it's how many. If you're looking for how many people do you have on your team or how do you think about hiring or how do you currently approach linguistics at your company? You want to get through like what's your current approach? What's your current thought process? How do you guys currently think about walk me through this process. Anything that you can't research online ahead of time that's going to give you the logic and a more broad answer around how they're currently solving the problem that you guys that your company solves. This is going to give you a lot more information than point like pointed questions such as how many or you know, one word answers like yes and no and then the two the questions should be oriented around again, how do you know if they're a good customer for you? So they're going to be pain point oriented the information as well. That's going to give you how much they're actually spending on this. Not necessarily. You're not going to ask how much they're spending on this. You're going to ask about the systems they have in place and how many people touch those systems. And it's going to help you understand the cost to the organization from a time perspective and money perspective. And then the other thing we're looking for in this is a qualifying event. So meaning what is going on in the organization that makes this a relevant pain point for them right now and are they trying to solve it right now? And that's going to help you ideally tie to an internal deadline to help drive the sales process forward and create urgent. And then the second piece around that is customer case study. So we'll go through this in the next slide but your customer key the customer case study. Instead of giving a demo, we're actually going to give a customer case study and talk through a customer's experience of the product versus how your product works. And we'll talk a little bit about that. And then when I, when they give me this information, I'm going to respond by educating the buyer as opposed to just firing a next question off the educating the buyer and the value based responses. I call them value based questions and value based responses. Your value based responses are educating the buyer around trends, things you've heard from other customers or thought leadership pieces to educate the buyer and educate them about the pain and the impact within the organization. The reason I give value based responses and I'm teeing up them via education is you're trying to frame the customer's mindset around the problem itself and actually educate them about what the broader reach of this problem is. Because they're probably thinking about it as oh it's going to help me in my day to day which is why they will buy the product, but that you also need to arm them on how they're going to sell it across the entire organization. If you're selling to multiple buyers within the organization. So you're trying to educate them on the broader context of this problem across the org so that they have piecemeal solutions that they can go and punchy one liners that they can go and educate other people to get them on the next call in a stakeholder meeting. One thing also to mention in this is every single time a new buyer or a new person within the organization is added to a conversation you need to go back and re qualify because each person has a different pain point that they're trying to solve. For most of you have probably worked for another company before, so you're going to be Aware of the fact when you get brought into a meeting to look at a product, most of the time you have zero context for that meeting. That's actually what happens across every single organization you're ever going to work with. And so you need to go back and re qualify and educate that buyer from the beginning so that you're getting everyone aligned around the KPIs and problems that you're solving and then align them around the specific problem that you're going to solve for their company. So it's just one thing to mention. The other thing I have down here is just a quick tip. It's casual competitor name dropping and your value based responses can be a really great way to pique curiosity. So for example, say for example I'm selling to Lululemon. I might mention that I spoke with Athletica the week before and they actually had a similar problem and they, they were talking, they talked to us about xyz. I'm not going to get specific information on what's happening at Athletica because I don't want to break trust with Lululemon when I talk to them. But it is in building credibility around the fact that we can get into larger companies and also that we can solve the problem that we say we can solve because the bigger brands in the industry are talking to us or their biggest competitors are talking to us. And it's a great way to also quantify, quantify the problem for the customer. Cool. Any questions?

I don't see any so far. Let's keep rolling.

Okay, so case study. So if you give demos in your conversations, I don't recommend it for enterprise sales or mid market sales. If there is a usually a group by a group of buyers who buys within your sales process. I gatekeep my demo to get all the decision makers in the room and I'll talk about how to do that when we go through Bant. But I like to gatekeep my demo and instead if I need to show screenshots, I'll give screenshots of the product. And when I talk about my product, I always talk about it in the eyes of another customer that's like them. The reason being one. Your biggest thing again as we talked about as a startup is establishing trust. A use case does that for you. And when you're talking about it in the shoes of another buyer, that's fact versus your opinion of how your product's going to benefit them. It's a fact about someone else's experience and how they benefited from the product. They can't argue with the benefits someone else got and how they use your product and the results they saw. So you always want to try and quantify it in some way. So I like to, again, I like to give a case study when I go through a demo. So I talk through someone else's experience in the product and how certain pieces of the product benefited that particular customer and that relevant use case which you've identified in your qualifying question. The other thing that's really helpful, just as a tip here is you can use, you can do your objection handling during your demo through the customer case study. So if you know a particular type of company typically has a certain type of objection, you can handle that objection in your story and kind of cut it off at the pass before it ever comes up. So if you know there's a particular type of question that always comes up with this type of buyer, you can use that and build that into your case study, which is also going to be your demo. And there's a little script down here as well. So from here, once I've given an overview of the product you're usually going to get, just so you know, you're usually going to get questions after your founding story and after your use case and after your ROI story, because these are the ways, this is where you're telling what the product will do and the value the customer will receive and the value other customers have received. So just so you know that those are usually good places to pause for questions when I'm going into my sales my sales questions. So I notice I have two types of questions. My qualifying questions are to understand if they're a good fit again, and the relevant case study I'm going to give to the buyer. My sales questions are going to be the questions I need answer to tee up my ROI for that particular customer to quantify the problem for that customer. So again, qualifying is about understanding the relevant use case and qualifying event. So are they a good customer for me and what's going to drive them to a decision? And then sales is going to be how do I quantify the value of our product for that customer? So just different questions because some people use sales questions in the qualifying and it's better to break them up after you've gone through your use case because the customer ideally will open up at that point. My sales questions again should be oriented around the ROI for this customer and a clear use case for this customer. And when I'm responding to the ROI questions, my sales questions, instead of with thought leadership, what I'm actually responding with is empathy. The reason being we've all heard one of our friends vent before. Ideally you've identified pain at this point for the customer and understand what the value is that you provide this customer. So we've all heard our friends vent before. When you empathize with someone's venting, they then vent more. And ideally what you want to do is amplify that pain for the customer because it makes it more real and more urgent for them. You also get more information around the specifics of the pain and how it plays out in the organization and how this particular pain point works for that customer on a day to day basis. So it's really good to turn up the volume on the pain through empathy. And then the other thing I want to mention here is your value based responses are not a pitch. They should specifically be related to the customer's pain point. And instead in that case it's like, yeah, that's actually something we hear a lot from our customers. One of our customers, they had this particular issue, they had five people involved in this process and it was taking them three weeks to actually do. I'm not at this point talking about what the product's going to do for them. That's what I'm going to give in the roi. Instead I'm just empathizing with them about the pain. I'll give the pitch when I give the roi. Once I've gotten all the information to quantify their pain and give them a strong ROI story. And then how I help them. So my use case in this case, again I do have a script for the use case and I have a script for the founding story. The use case is going to be very similar to the roi. So you can actually literally just say the same thing, but using it in relation to their company. But I'm giving a use case. It's how is this product specifically going to impact their business? I want to tie it back to the answers I received in my qualifying questions and my sales questions because that's going to show I'm listening to them and ideally it should quantify the problem for them. And again, this is a question. This is again going to be a punchy one liner. So it needs to be clear and concise that they can go and repeat back to someone else. And this again, this is going to be how they sell it across the organization. They should be able to visualize how the product is going to impact their day to day in the ROI story. The way I would structure this is yeah. So what I'm hearing from you, if it typically takes three people and you guys are using an Excel spreadsheet for this, you know, these are some of the secondary values you're going to receive from it. So it's going to make sure your Excel spreadsheets are more accurate. It's going to take down time of data collection. It's also going to streamline the processes around this. And I would expect that it's probably going to reduce the time that is currently taking you from 20 hours to probably about three, because you're still going to have to do the data collection. But that's what I expect. And then on top of that, the accuracy is going to increase significantly in XYZ ways. Does that make sense?

Yep.

Cool. Any questions? You guys are the most quiet group I have ever had. This happened to me last time I gave a presentation in Canada too. I know you guys have questions.

Polite.

Yes.

I think that's why we need this though, right?

Yeah. Yep. I am one of the most direct and slightly aggressive people you'll meet. So I'm one of those people who will like jump in and derail someone's presentation every chance I get because I want to drive it the way I want to drive it. So that's why I'm trying to give you guys these tools to not have one of me in the room. Okay. So mapping the buying process. So I use a tool called Bant. If you've ever done sales before, you're probably pretty familiar with this. There are a lot, there's a lot of information online about Bant. So BANT stands for budget, authority, needs and timeline. So budget. Some questions I like to ask here is how do you typically evaluate tools like this? Is this something you guys have resources allocated for? One thing to be aware of when you're looking at budget today is money is usually less of an ask than development resources. So if you are a tool that requires someone to implement something via an API or requires some type of integration in some way, or even putting like a code or snippet of code on someone's website, that is typically going to take more time and cost more to try and get implement from your effort perspective than it is going to be to get budget. So it's really important to ask as well, like how do you typically allocate resources for development? How often are your sprints? How do you guys typically prioritize what goes into your sprint? The next thing around this is the next area is authority. And again, you can pepper these questions into your buying the earlier portion of the conversation once you're comfortable doing it. But it's usually more comfortable for founders in the early days to ask them later. Authority. Is there anyone else who would need to see a product or be involved in the decision making process? Notice I'm not asking if they're a decision maker, what's their role and what do they care about? The reason I'm asking is is there anyone else involved that's telling me who else needs to be in the meeting? Once you've progressed through a number of sales conversations, you're gonna know who those people should actually be within the organization. And so you can actually tell them typically. So a lot of the times they'll ask for a demo on the first call. They're just say, we actually do custom demos for everyone when we present to them. So this conversation is to understand what we're going to need to design into the demo. And I can give you clear use case on that conversation. You know, is there anyone else who would need to see the product? Because I would ask that they be in the room because we again, we put a lot of work into customizing every demo that we give and I.

Know, sorry, I just cut you off. I know you mentioned a bit of that in the introduction part as well. But in terms of, you know, if you're halfway through or three quarters way through this whole process of the call and you find out crap, this person's actually not qualified, they don't have the buying power, how do you kind of backtrack or recover from that?

Yeah, so that's where I would gatekeep the demo. And this is where this question specifically is very helpful. You're still going to need to build a champion in the organization. So if the person you're talking to, usually there's layers of pain. Right. So if you're an analytics tool or if you're an analytics or strategic tool, you're probably going to be dealing with more senior decision makers. If you're more of a tactical tool that's kind of a bottoms up model, you're probably going to be dealing with more junior decision makers. And even if you have a junior decision maker, you need to understand how to quantify that pain point from a strategic level because that's how you get the higher level decision makers involved in the sales process and they need to understand. So you have to speak to the level that you're talking to and you need to know that's why that the responsibilities piece at the beginning for Introductions is really important because it helps you speak to the level that person is and the pain that that person has on where you address it in the organization. Ideally you have something that addresses all the way through, but the way you get that next group, group involved is to ask that question, is there anyone else who would need to see the product be involved in the decision making process? Because the person who it actually impacts will say that they're the decision maker. Because in reality whether they buy the product or not is probably determined by them, but in reality of whether the money spent or not is probably determined by someone else. And so that's the, is anyone, anyone else who needs to see the product or be involved? That involved piece is someone higher up.

And I'm not sure if now's the right time to ask that question, but kind of, I think a lot, I think it sounds like a very big important part of this is making sure you were talking to the right person. So do you have any kind of general tips and tricks for how you're qualifying? You know, there's, there's eight people in the company, there's four heads of product, heads of marketing, heads of whatever. Like we joked about the beginning. Like what, what are some kind of simple things that we can do to make sure that we're talking to someone who's 50% chance the right person versus 8% chance?

Well, the responsibilities will be number one. That's why I do that really early in the conversation. So like what falls under your realm of responsibilities as the head of innovation for Telco? Whatever. Right, so that's a really good question. That'll tell you one, two, when you talk through the qualifying questions and you do the open ended talk me through the current process for X, that's going to help you understand where that person sits within the organization. If they are more tactical, they are not going to be able to speak to the higher, the higher level strategic issues that your product may solve. So if you're an analytics tool and the person can talk about like the tactical pieces of actually collecting that information, they are probably a lower level person or the company doesn't have a lot of senior people. If they're a senior level person, they probably don't know the tactical pieces of actually collecting all that information. And so those questions they'll talk me through or walk me through are going to be very, very helpful in understanding where someone sits based on how they answer that question.

Gotcha.

Does that answer the question for the person who had it?

Yep, I think so.

Okay, cool. Needs you should have already established and understood from the earlier portion of the conversation then timeline. So what I'm looking for in this is what is their process for buying a product and what are the steps and the people that need to be involved and how they make decisions around it. So that's kind of like the overall view and I'm mapping this out in my head. So timeline. Have you ever purchased a tool like this before? What was the process like? So you may use a tool like Built with, which is a chrome extension that allows you to see tech stack on someone's website, which by the way, if they're using another startups tool or company under 5 years old that tells you they're usually sit on more of the early adopter spectrum of like technology adoption. And you could say like hey, I see you use like Marketo on your website. Can you guys talk me, can you talk me through like Marketo is not obviously a new product, but like I see use Marketo. Can you talk me through what the buying process for that looked like or what was the last piece of technology that I purchased? Can you talk me through what the buying process for that looked like? Because that's going to help you understand the steps that are required to do that and who is involved. And ideally it fits within, wherever you sit within their department. Right. So if it's a marketing tool, you're looking at like a marketing tool. If it's a developer tool, talking through a developer tool like talk me through that process and what the decision making process was like for you guys. Legal is really helpful because if they have an internal deadline and legal typically takes two weeks and they want to get it implemented in the next four, they need to have a decision and things signed off on from a budget perspective within two weeks. And so you can drive that decision maker, that decision making process a lot faster when you can understand and map that out. Because the map is going to tell you where you can cut timelines down and how you can drive potential timelines if you have that qualifying event, which is why we start that much earlier in the conversation trying to identify that. And then after you fully understand what the buying process looks like, repeat it back to the customer. It's the same thing in like nonviolent communication. When you're trying to resolve a conflict, what you do is repeat back what you hear to make sure you fully understand and that shows the custom, the person that you're listening and builds trust. That's the same kind of thing. So you're going to Say so if I understand correctly, these are the people that would need to be involved in the next conversation. We're going to have that in about two weeks. You guys have about a two to three week legal process. We need to get this rolled out within the next eight. And here like this is these are the people and how the budget process works. Do I understand that correctly? And that's going to help you map that out.

Gotcha.

And then were there any questions? I saw a little red.

Yeah, there's. There's a couple questions. So first one is what's the reason for gatekeeping the demo versus showing it, however briefly early? Just to build excitement with something concrete. Where would you kind of balance that?

Yeah, so the best salespeople I know never actually have to show the product. I myself have sold a 300k product, 300k contract with never even showing a product. So I'm just gonna put that out there. I know people have sold million dollar contracts without ever having to show a product. So putting that number one. Number two, the reason I especially encourage founders to not show the product is people use decks and products as crutches instead of learning how to actually talk through the product with the customer. Ideally the customer is talking about 80% of the time and you're talking about 20, and your 20 is you asking questions or validating what the customer says with information or empathy. So I know I'm doing a lot of the talking right now, but usually when you give this, the most talking you're doing is either answering the customer's questions or when they go through, which you'll get after your ROI story. They'll usually ask two types of questions. They'll either go into objections, which are value oriented questions or process oriented questions, which are all oriented around implementation. But the. Excuse me, the. Where was it going with that? Can you repeat the question? Sorry, I lost my thought.

It was asking about the showing the demos and you were mixing the demo. It was a crutch.

Yeah. So it's using it as a crutch. The other thing is, if you are dealing with someone lower level within the organization, if you show them the demo, they'll think they'll be able to convey the value of the product to the decision makers. And if you keep the demo to yourself, you can gatekeep it to get the decision makers in the room.

Gotcha. And it's a little bit like counseling. At the end of the day, we walk in thinking that we're gonna be doing all the talking, but it's the Other side that does the talking.

Exactly. And it should be because you're counseling them through a problem within their company.

Gotcha. Another question I have is this one's a little bit more specific. Maybe, maybe we can go through it and then I'll come back to it at the end. Just because they're more specific to their specific companies. One's a SaaS and one's an enterprise.

Yeah, of course. So the final thing I do in this is I close with next steps. So again, I repeated back what's going to happen when we get off the call. When I confirmed exactly what I heard from them. There's usually things that that person couldn't answer for you or they need to schedule something or get someone else involved. That's their homework. Then you have your homework, which is usually sending them a send deck. Your send deck is not your entire deck. It is five slides that give a high level overview of your product. Do not send your entire sales deck if you're going through a sales deck with people. Because what will end up happening is they'll send out the deck beforehand and people will think they know the product and you never got to talk to them. So again, it's controlling information. And I do have a sample send deck that I can, I can give people that's like what's in a send deck, but. And then I confirm next steps. And the other thing I want to do is I want to send a calendar reminder reminder with like agenda for the next meeting. And anything I sent, if someone says like circle back with me in two weeks, no problem. What I'm actually going to do, instead of having to go back and forth via email to try and schedule the next time. Is this day and time usually good for you? Great. I'm going to actually send a calendar invite for this time for a quick 15 minute check in to get this done. So we're not going back and forth by email to try and schedule something because I know both of our schedules are really busy and save both our inboxes and just make it much easier for us. And if you need to reschedule, I'll check in with you a couple days beforehand.

Just to jump in real quick, what's your kind of quick thoughts on automating that process? Because I do know and I mean we're all in the tech business so we all get kind of inundated with spam check ins of, you know, five days after our first call or seven days after a first call. And that's kind of automated. Do you have any quick thoughts on that?

So in sales processes as an early stage company, I don't recommend automating things actually. The reason being everything needs to feel personal. And because these are all every customer is early stage go to market is a hub and spoke model because Paul Graham has a saying that it takes 10 customers to get to 100. It's because each individual customer has different benefits they're going to receive from your product in the early days and there are 10 other customers who are going to have the same use case because they're similar in some way. And so that hub and spoke model is really important to establish early on. And so you need to make sure you get every single customer through if they're a great fit for the problem that your product solves. Right now you don't want to leave that to a piece of automation because you're busy bring in. If you're worried about tactical follow up items, bring in an sdr, a sales development representative or a BDR business development representative to basically serve as your sales assistant. They're cheap, they're easy, especially up in Canada. They're much cheaper than they are in the Bay Area. They're really cheap, very easy to hire and you basically have a manage you and sit in your inbox with you and make sure that all the tactical items that need to be follow up on are followed up on. It's much better to bring in an assistant than lose track of something or automate something and not have the personal touch. Once you've scaled up sales, it's a different ball game. Like totally recommend doing that, but in this stage of the game, kind of what we're talking about, your initial 10, 20 customers, which honestly this process is probably going to align for quite a while because you're going to give a use case, you're probably going to give the founding story for a long time. Like those things actually don't really change just some of the context of the conversation. The use cases are going to be more developed and you're going to have more threads kind of the decision tree you can go down of how the sales conversation goes, but you're not going to want to automate too much too early because if you try and automate things too early like you end up losing the personal touch. The customer and the sales experience is experience they expect for customer service down the line. So if you're giving them an automated experience in the early days, post a conversation, pre conversation, maybe you can automate some things and after they're A customer, you can automate some things, but during the sales process, this is the time that they expect the same customer service that you're giving them during the sales process once they're a customer. And if you give them a shitty experience during sales, they're not going to want as a customer.

Mm, perfect.

Cool. And that's all, folks. That wrapped up. Very nice. Bottom I do post some content. We just hired someone to do content. So I'll be posting a lot more moving forward. But that's also my email. Please add me on LinkedIn if you like the talk. Please put a quote up there because I'm trying to do more talks these days through the ecosystem.

Awesome. So I do have a few questions up here, so I'll kind of just run through them two actually from different vantage points. So this first one here is from. Sorry if I apologize if I said your name wrong. Hugh Humira. And so I think it's he or she is working, dealing with Enterprise and B2B. So they said we're working with some large corps that typically share. They give you this reason that, oh, the resources are taking too long. So it's not necessarily you don't want it, but they need to attach the right resources to actually make this process work. So they're trying to understand who's going to management. They said they're a matching platform for women in the workplace to connect with each other. And so they always, even though, you know, they started on a smaller scale, they're always thinking about who in the company can help them scale. So they're kind of, kind of going through this train the trainer model. So what's, how do you, how do you respond to that? When they say it's not that it's too expensive, it's not, it's not all that. It's not that it's unimportant. We just need, we don't have the resources or we need more resources right now.

I totally. So the way I would respond to that is I totally understand. That's usually. So that's an objection. And that's something that you can build into a customer case study when you go through the demo. That's why I say don't give the product demo. Go through a customer experience. And if you know that's something that happens with larger enterprises, you can build that into your case study. And you can even say like, one thing we actually always hear from, and I would do this during the case study is like, one thing we hear from companies a lot is specifically around having resources allocated to spread this product throughout the organization. And what we found is it has so much stickiness and so much value internally within the organization that all we need is a couple key influencers within the organization, which I can guarantee you and I could sit down for five minutes and identify who those are. We onboard them, get them really sticky in the product and from there we give them the opportunity to invite five people and they do a train. They actually will train them on how to use the product. So it actually minimizes the lift if we just identify the key players within the organization who can push the product out.

Gotcha. And then kind of just follow up on that. If it's in their case, it's a very new tool. They haven't used it before, so obviously they haven't purchased it before. How do they follow up on that? And I think it's really a matter of assessing is the pain point actually a pain point versus you know, they're just not clear. They have the pain but they're not clear on what it is.

So that's in the education piece at the beginning of the conversation. So I'm actually going to go back to the overview piece and it'll give me some context for you guys. So the that'll be good to go through in the founding story because what you're doing in the founding story is educating the buyer around context of the problem. So you're teeing up how this problem actually is impacting the organization in ways they might not understand by talking about the trends that are happening in the industry that they may not be aware of. So say for example, if it's women with organization, what's happening is retention or leadership development. And when you have 50% of your organization that's not getting the mentorship they need, it's actually causes an increase in 60% churn for women. People talk about 30% churn on average for most companies these days. We actually see higher rates when they're not is a women focused development program. I'm pulling these numbers out of my ass. So I'm so I apologize. You'll probably have more specifics and I guarantee there's information out there on this especially now. But when you don't have a woman specifically mentorship program that helps develop women women helping women, you actually see a 50% higher churn rate across the group of the younger women within the organization. And those are usually across the highest potential people within the org. So I would educate them on that in our founding story and saying like As a founder, one of the things this is a problem I have within the organization, when I dug in deeper, what I actually found is those stats and how this is how it plays out and is actually impacting the organization from a retention perspective. And so that's how I talk about the value pop. I put that earlier in the conversation.

Gotcha. And then on the kind of very flip side of that, that was like a very new product for people. Jing is asking if you're asking for them to switch to a new SaaS offer. So I think more to your Marketo example. For example, if you're a Marketo replacement or a competitor and they're already using Marketo, you know that right off the bat it's going to be extra work for them to switch off of Marketo and join your platform. So what are your tips from that perspective on convincing a client to actually migrate to this new company? This your solution?

Yeah. So when I'm going through my demo, so my use case here, when I'm going through the demo and a customer's experience, I would again build this into my story because it's an objection you know, is going to come up for any customer that has the solution in place. And if it's a marketing automation tool or it's a tool that's public on the publicly facing site, you can see their tech stack, that's all publicly available information. So I can see their code and I can see what's plugged in. And that's going to tell me that they're using a competitor. Well, I can go and say, you know, one of the biggest, you know, in the use case, you know, one of the biggest things that we hear a lot is people switching from one system to the next. Like people use HubSpot and HubSpot discounts their product 90% in their first year, specifically because it's so hard to switch over. We actually have a really great tool that can take all your content and suck it out. So it's part of your customer demo story and what you're talking about. It's not just what your product does, it's the ease of implementing the product. And you need to have a solution for that if you know it's one of the big objections that you receive.

And then just kind of on that same context, Carolyn asks, what sort of CRM CTA type tools do you recommend, especially at the startup stage? Is it HubSpot or something else?

Oh God, that could be a webinar on its own. Yeah, it definitely could be. I'M actually writing this up for, for one of our corporate clients who's spinning out a startup. So for marketing automation, we like HubSpot. I personally just like HubSpot. We also, they offer such a significant discount for startups. It's really helpful. Don't build out your database, send them too quickly. Keep that in mailchimp because it's a lot cheaper but so I would usually recommend two tools. One of them is for your more awareness based marketing and one of them is for your more customer based marketing because you when HubSpot charges based on size of database. So if you have a huge database of customers you're marketing to say for example you have some social component of your product or you have a bottoms up model of your product where there's a freemium tool for to expand within an organization. You don't want to have a marketing tool that's maintaining all of that information. You want to have an email platform and then you want to have a marketing automation tool that's more for customer nurturing or people later in the funnel because you don't want to be paying that larger price point a year from now. Use a mailchimp or you know, any of those. There's tons of mail tools and I want to play around with the different mail tools by the way because each of them have different send rates and you're probably going to want to set up a different domain for those tools as well that they send from and then have another tool that's more of your later stage funnel. It's a marketing automation tool like a HubSpot.

So what I'm hearing is keep, keep your address book in Mailchimp as opposed to one of the other, you know, CRMs whether Zoho or otherwise. They source whatever because to keep that cost low.

Yeah, Salesforce they do not. They're charging per seat. So you could keep Salesforce as large as you want. Your mailing list is going to go into a mailing platform. Your marketing platform is going to have your, your later stage customers that you're nurturing. So people that like you're nurturing down the funnel, not necessarily your newsletter and top of the funnel and then your salesforce is going to have probably everything because you're looking at how the customers charge and you want to keep those costs down. And I do like there's Pipedrive and things like that. Pipe drive is decent and HubSpot CRM is decent. Most people are going to switch over to Salesforce at some point in time so you can Just get set up in Salesforce if you're familiar with it and it's what you've used before, you can also use HubSpot. HubSpot's UI is a little bit better, especially if you're using HubSpot as your marketing automation tool.

Cool. And then I think finally Larry asks. Well, first he mentioned that it's very comprehensive. So I think it's kudos to you. And I think this is a two part question. First part from him. Next part for me is do you use the same template at the senior level? And I think what I was going to ask is how do you see what I guess you're effectively calling the sales method relate in terms of if you're B2C or B2B or Enterprise like, what would you tweak?

Yeah. So if you're enterprise like you're gonna go through all this shit in detail like schedule an hour long call and dig into each of these pieces in depth because it's gonna help you map the sales process. Because there's a lot more people involved in an enterprise deal. If you're B2C, you're gonna use this conversation for partnerships because you're still gonna need a 1 to many sales for a B2C company to help you with distribution and brand awareness. And so this is your B2B side of your B2C model. Everyone has a B2B side of their business. Everyone. So this is going to be your partnerships conversation for distribution. And then if you're mid market or SMB, so SMB, it's going to be a one to two sale. So you're probably going to have just a qualifying conversation and your demo is going to be in this. And ideally you're asking for the contract right after that conversation. That's gonna be anything under, you know, 6k price point. If you're anywhere from, you know, 6 to 60k or more mid market or even 120k, you can be even a mid market there. You're usually gonna have anywhere from, you know, three to five, six, seven buyers in the sales process. You're still gonna have the same conversation. It's not going to be as extensive. If you're an enterprise, you're going to have about 20 buyers on average who's involved in, who are involved in or touching the sales process in some way. The big thing in the enterprise is when you're asked, you need to make sure the meeting is moving forward in some way. Each conversation you're having so meaning they're getting more people involved or you're getting more information about the buying process and each conversation. And as quickly as you can get all of the decision makers in the room because again it comes back to that point if you're missing a decision maker, you have to. You're basically starting from scratch each time. It's better to get everyone in the room together because people will not align on what the goals of the product are. And if you add a new person in and they're a potential blocker or they're a potential sign off or their security review or something like that and they don't even legal. Honestly, if you're dealing with any type of pii, getting the legal people in and the security people in that stakeholder meeting is critically important because it's going to take them a lot less time to review everything if they understand it. And it'll save you guys a ton of time because literally this, the security sign off and legal sign off is like a quarter of what it'll take otherwise because they understand the context of it. So in those conversations before they send things along for security or illegal, I try and get them in a conversation and ideally they're in that decision making that like initial conversation with all the stakeholders when you get they're making a decision around the product.

Gotcha. And then I think one last thing is just commenting more on tools is fresh sales, fresh marketer. Have you used either of those? No. No. Sweet.

One thing I was going to mention as well is we are accepting applications for Accel Apprise right now. We haven't fully announced them but they are on our site. So if there is anyone here who has their product in market with some early traction, we would love to talk to you. If you're B2B SaaS.

Is there any geographic or industry restrictions on that at all?

Nope.

Sounds good. That actually took away my last question. So you're doing my job for me is just how can how and what should people conn with you with?

Yeah, so I give a lot of talks so I highly encourage you guys. If I'm giving something it will be different content. A lot of the times if, especially if I'm in person, I do a lot of whiteboard on go to market strategies like how do you get all this information to figure out what to say. That's kind of the first chunk of this. And then I have some later stage stuff on how you close deals and negotiate deals. But definitely engage with me on Twitter, add me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. It's probably more active there on Twitter. But please add me on Twitter because I am starting to share more content. And then we have a newsletter for Acceleraprise. We share a lot of our content around our blog, our personal blogs that we write. We write a lot of stuff on fundraising, we write a lot of stuff on working with corporates, negotiations advisors. Like you think it in the startup, think of it in the startup ecosystem. You have a lot of how to guides on how to do things and then again we're accepting applications. So if you're in SaaS and you have a reoccurring revenue model or early traction that you're trying to develop a revenue model for even just an active user base like we'd love to see your company.

Awesome. Do you have a deadline or due dates or anything like that for this?

The applications are due by mid, I think it's mid May is when they're. The deadline is. But I would encourage you to get it in sooner rather than later because we do rolling applications and once the spots are full, the spots are full and we only take 10 companies per cohort. We very, very hands on model. We do one on one coaching with every single company as they're going through the program. We'll bring in customer mentors, we do customer introductions, we'll do advisor introductions, things like that. Depending on what your company needs. It's a very different model than a traditional accelerator.

Sounds good. So I think all of you guys have had a. Well I definitely learned a ton from this webinar and I think we appreciate all your time spent here and looking forward to connecting more. So like Whitney said, if you do want to connect with her, her emails here WhitneyCellerprise VC and she's active on Twitter as well. So I think you can lead future questions there. So we're just over, we're just over 4 o'. Clock. So just I guess 4 o' clock if you're listening from the Pacific. So we're gonna kind of end things off here. But thank you so much for your time, Whitney.

Thank you. Really appreciate it.

All right, take care everyone. Bye.

Only one person and they might not have decision making power within that organization and you may need someone more senior to actually get the decision through. It's also going to help you as you start to map your ideal customer profile. Your ICP help you understand how to develop your leads and how to actually focus and identify who's a good fit for you really early on. So it's really important context to have in the conversation. And then third, I like to confirm how much time I have. I may have scheduled an hour of time and they may actually only have 30 minutes. And if someone ends up giving you more time, it's super helpful to know that if they're telling you they're gonna give you a half an hour and they give you a full hour because that means that they're really interested. So there's good information signaling you can get from setting up the context around the introduction. The other thing I have down here is I have little tips tips down at the bottom. But I like to take notes on each person's name, title and responsibilities. Especially if I have multiple people in the room. The reason being how people ask questions is actually a really good indicator of how people make decisions across the organization. So for example, if I have a senior person who's driving a lot of that conversation, what that's going to indicate to me is that it's a top down decision making org or department. If I have more junior people driving the conversation, what that's going to indicate to me is I'm going to have to build consensus across the org. Or if I may have one person driving all the conversation, it might tell me that that one person is responsible for a lot of this and I need to make sure they are fully bought in on it. So it's a really helpful information. The other thing that's really helpful for is if you had noticed that someone, if you're in person and you notice someone is checking out in the room, it's going to tell you like you can use that person's name when you cover a piece of information that's going to be relevant to them like hey John, I noticed that, you know, this is an area that I think will be really applicable to you. You take care of this right? And it'll get them re engaged. So it's a really good way to kind of manage and control that conversation and attention as well as get information about how the organization works. The next area I go into in context is the agenda. So this I use pull a little bit from the Sandler method in this which you guys can I highly recommend reading up on. It's a great method. There's a lot of different strategies that are actually peppered throughout this presentation. I kind of pull different pieces that I like. But the way I structure the conversation I have a script down here at the bottom which I'm actually going to read because it has all these pieces in it. But the way I open it with the agenda. And the reason I set an agenda is it helps me control the conversation and structure how I want to have the conversation as opposed to if I have a really senior person in the room who might jump in or try and control the conversation over me. This allows me to actually set the context for me controlling it and sales. A lot of sales is about control. It's control of information and control of the conversation and control of how things are relayed. So this allows me to have a little bit more of that and that's why I do an agenda. But just going through this quickly. So I want to go over a quick agenda for the meeting today, my goals for the call, get a good understanding of how you guys currently do X and then discuss how we can potentially help you with that if there's a fantastic. From there we can go over next steps. Sound like a plan? Great. Is there anything in particular you'd like to cover? One thing I want to do is ask that you make this a discussion versus a pitch. But I love to hear the sound of my own voice. Your questions are much more enjoyable for me. So if you have any questions, please feel free to interrupt me. Just to touch on a couple things and how I structure this, the goals of the call, the reason I structure it this way is I'm getting alignment and agreement around the fact I'm going to start with with questions as opposed to start by telling them about the product, even though I am going to tell them about the product and my founding story. The reason I want to do this is a lot of the times people get defensive when you ask them a bunch of questions and in this case you're getting them to sign up for you asking those questions before you give them answers. The second piece in here is around questions. Different cultures ask questions in different ways. Some people don't want to interrupt if they have a question. And depending ADD is a real thing these days. And if you're on a presentation like this, there's a good chance people are checking out if they have a question or they're trying to remember the question that they have if they're not able to ask it. And so if you don't give them permission to interrupt or you don't tell them how to ask the question, they won't be paying attention to anything else you say afterwards. So it's a really good way to make sure your customers stay engaged. And then the final thing is ask them if they have any items they want to discuss so you can make sure they the items they want to discuss will give you context around where they're particularly interested and why they're talking to you in the first place, and then also give you some buying signals that they've done some research ahead of time. I'm going to pause there. Are there any questions right now?

Yeah, I don't see any questions out right now. Feel free. If you guys have them, please type them in. So, like, a lot of this, I think, from what I'm hearing, is about building the foundation of things.