The Physics of Enterprise Sales

Hey Rob, welcome back. Good to see you, man.

You too. You're, you're famous.

Yeah. I got a shout out in one of your books reviews. So to whoever the user is, who's, I think their username is literally a period, you know, email me. I'd love to, love to hear from you. No, but thanks for that. Rob Howard, you know, what's new? How's the business going? Yeah. What's, what's going on?

I'm drowning is the short answer. So Uh, yeah, public apology. If you have reached out for access to AI Rob, if you have reached out for something from me to work with me or anything like that, uh, we have a big thing happening next week where I have had to change around a lot of my schedule. My calendar is terrible. So I will get back to you. I promise. It's just, uh, uh, it's going to be a couple of days and I cannot, I don't know if I can say what the thing is next week publicly. So. We, this is super cryptic, I don't know, but, but very exciting thing related to the book and going and giving a talk somewhere. So that is, that is all we can say. But the, the other interesting part is that my podcast with Newt freaking Gingrich came out, which is, was not on my bingo card of people to be interested in talking about the book, I told the publisher, I was like, I'm happy to talk with anybody. And they're like, anybody? Like, yeah, sure. And they're like, well, how about Newt Gingrich? It's like, that's an oddly specific person to mention. Why? And so that's how that happened.

Yeah. And for those that may not be familiar with like 1990s, early 2000s American politics, he was the Speaker of the House, I think a prominent leader in the Republican Party. Eventually a presidential candidate. And y'all were talking about applying pull to like the politics in the United States, I guess, like it's, yeah, which I find interesting. It's like, I do think there are very broad applications of pull and Newt being kind of a, yeah, just like a thinker, a trader in ideas interested in, okay, this is an emerging idea from startup world. What are the implications for, you know, in his case, the political arena?

Yeah, I like, I am, I'm explicitly like not interested in politics at all. And so I, right, like a lot of people that I told, they're like, you know, they're on another side of the political spectrum. Like, why would you talk to that? I'm happy to talk to anybody. I like brushed up on my old political theory on like Locke and Hobbes and all that kind of stuff. We spent zero time on it and I've just explained, I spent like 5 minutes trying to explain to the former Speaker of the House of the United States what LARPing is. And I had like an out-of-body experience in that. So that was a lot of fun.

But, well, I love it. Well, let's not— maybe on that, if anybody has recommendations for podcasts that Rob Snyder should be on, we'd love, you know, we'd love it. Leave it in the comments or send me an email, rc@reframeb2b.com. And yeah, if you have connections with podcasts, if anybody's listening to this and you have a program that you wanna have Rob on, yeah, would love the tip. Rob, this week, if there's nothing else, let's jump into the topic, which is the physics of enterprise sales, big deals, big problems. And I think this one's super interesting. You make a really bold claim early in, early in the post, which is that it's less complicated. Like it's really, it's not as complicated, it's not as scary as what everybody, you know, kind of builds up enterprise sales to be. Rob Snyder, before we jump into like what are the physics, why don't you tell us why is this on your mind and who is this one most relevant for?

This is one of the most common questions I get, which is like, okay, but Does this apply to consumer or does this apply to enterprise sales? And so I, um, originally was just like, yeah, no, this doesn't apply to enterprise sales. This doesn't apply to consumer because I don't know those spaces. Since then I've had quite a few startups that I've helped in with enterprise sales and it's like, oh wait, that's how it works. Okay, cool. Basically the same thing. And so, um, yeah, some nuances, but not that many. And so like one, one really fun example when I was like, okay, I think like, I, I think this is pretty tractable. Was there are two college dropouts who had no real product, no real product idea. They just started doing outbound. They were part of an accelerator. They started doing outbound to like executives and whatever in big enterprise, like Fortune, I don't know, probably Fortune 100 company. Got back to them and this executive, well, basically they like sold pre-product, pre-idea to an executive in a massive media company that everybody knows. Again, before they had a product or had a product idea and they closed it in like 2 months from again, cold outbound, which was just insane. But I've seen that kind of pattern play out quite a bit, whether it's selling into big pharmaceutical companies, whether it's selling into big media companies or just like enterprise in general. And so I feel like the typical thing that I, I felt and that I know a lot of founders feel is that. There's something different because the company is, is way bigger and because the deal sizes are way bigger. And so it must be different. You're now selling to a committee, you're now selling to a group, you're now selling something other, uh, something different. And, and because there's all these different requirements and da da da da, there's something different about the visits there. And, uh, I'm here to say there's not.

Yeah. And, uh, let's, let's get into that. Um, What did you talk in this, in this blog, you wrote about this in the book. We don't need to rehash all the details of it, 'cause I think we've even hit it on the podcast about one of your early experiences with your first startup and a sales call that went so horribly wrong that they take your deck, they give it to one of your competitors and they ask them to build the product that you were trying to sell them. What, we don't need to get into the specifics of that meeting, but what was the philosophy that was like, going into it, uh, that, you know, listener might, might have or might play with or isn't sure what to do with?

Yeah. So I had, I, my head of sales and I had, and this was at like multimillion ARR. So we weren't incompetent at this stage. Um, but our, we had read, we were like, we got this like demo request from a massive, massive customer. Again, Fortune 100 customer. And we were like, okay, we can't use the same pitch we've been using to sell to individual restaurants or individual, like, look, small businesses. We have to totally change this. We need to learn how the big boys do sales. And so we read The Challenger Sale, great book about sales. But what we, again, I might have misinterpreted it. We've almost certainly did, but the, The thing we took away from that was that we had to challenge them to think differently. In the word challenger, right? Like there's this, and so, and so our theory, I guess if we didn't explicitly have this theory, but we designed the sales call to challenge them that they weren't thinking about their business right. And that actually, if they thought about it differently, our product was inevitable and was exactly what they needed. And like, that's really offensive to, to Matt, turns out. Uh, and, uh, and yeah, obviously we did it wrong and we almost certainly applied that wrong way, but I think there's like a fundamental misunderstanding of the underlying physics of like why would anybody buy anything and where would potentially challenging people fit into that. We had none of that nuance. We just came in hot and absolutely blew what could have been a $10+ million, like, customer.

Yeah. And I think that one's interesting because there was pull. There was enough pull that they asked somebody else to build your product. Yeah. And like, in that case, it's like, okay, the method actually got in the way. You know, you talk about shooting yourself in the foot. Um, and that's like maybe the strongest example of there, you found it like, yeah, congratulations. Like you walked into a room where there was demand for the product and then, uh, yeah, it took a, uh, took a magnum to your, uh, to your, the top of your foot. Um, what would you say, uh, uh, Rob Snyder, why don't we jump into like, what are the actual physics of enterprise sales? Like just outline it for us. What's going on?

Yeah. So the mistake that a lot of people make is that there's something different about enterprise sales at the physics level. At the small business, medium business level, there's always one person, whether it's the CEO, VP, whatever, or whoever, that person has a project on their to-do list that they can't do with their existing options. And they're trying to do something, they're stuck from doing it. The tension between those two creates the force that they use to pull the product out of your hands. That's what we've always said. That's how it works. The enterprise level, that is still the case. It's always a person who is the driving force. There is no such thing as like Microsoft buying your product because Microsoft is an entity on paper. It is made up of people. The, the paper entity of Microsoft can't do anything. A lawyer at Microsoft can, or a, right, like a product leader at Microsoft can. Do something and they, they, they will pull you in. The nuance is like, okay, cool. After that person has pull, the process for purchasing something in an org, in an organization of that scale is often complicated.

Yeah.

And that's where some of the nuance comes in, but it's not that much of a, like, it's not that different.

Let's, let's hit some of the basics here. So you say it's a person. Um, uh, you've, you've alluded to this in the past. Is it procurement? Like, is it supply chain? Is that the— no, how do you—

well, so, so TBD. Uh, like if you're selling a procurement product, it might, the buyer might be in procurement. I help procurement and supply chain products. They sell to the person, the VP of supply chain or the VP of procurement. Right? But most of the time, if you're not selling that kind of product, you're selling to like the head of engineering, the head of product, that, that person, that person is going to exert the force internally to buy the product, to pull you in, which means they're going to go to procurement and figure out how the procurement process works. When procurement is slow, they're going to run procurement over. And convince them like, hey, you need to get your stuff together. Like, let's, let's go. Procurement is not your customer. You are not convincing procurement of to, to buy. That's just part of after the person has decided, yes, you're a fit for what we need. I want to bring you in. They have to go through steps of which procurement, legal, da da da da da, is one.

Yeah. And you, you've, you've said, um, we're gonna get into a process here in a little bit, which I found super insightful, which I, having sold into a big public university, I wish I would've had this process because it would've cut 5 months, I think, of lead time and back and forth, like out of things. But anyways, you write early, before we get to that, you write that, or, and you just said that pull does exist. Describe the, you also write that pull is almost more important in an enterprise context than if you're selling into, you know, small to medium business. Why is pull important? And then maybe after that, well, let's hit like, what does it look like when you, when you find it in an enterprise?

Yeah, so it's more important in an enterprise because in a small, medium-sized business, you talk to the CEO, the VP of whatever, and they're like, cool, yeah, sounds good. Send me the docu— like, send me the DocuSign, send me the whatever contract. Send me the Stripe link. Let's go. That is the process after they've decided. It is, it is like 2 clicks and, and a credit card or, or whatever it is, but it's simple and relatively straightforward. That's not always the case in an enterprise. It's often that you have to genuflect in front of 20 different committees and have pull in all these people and align these stakeholders and do all these kinds of things, go through the 17-step procurement process, which means Right? Like that person has to be really motivated to get their project done because they have to exert so much more force to make it happen, to make the deal happen once they've decided. So we, again, think of this in terms of forces. The amount of force they need to exert to do literally anything, to bring in a vendor, is so much higher that it just pulls even more important. There. And what it looks like, it's the same thing as it looks like everywhere else. Every time I've seen it, it looks basically the same, which is person leans in, says, okay, this is what we need. How exactly do we make this happen? Like, how— I have some questions. I need, I need to confirm this is a fit. And then, and then they say, cool. All right, great. We want to bring this into our organization. Help me figure out how to do that.

Yeah. Uh, let's talk about, uh, the choice of person real, real fast, which, uh, you know, I've seen some back and forth in the, in the founder community on this. I think it's a probably a question you get a lot. It's like, how do I know I'm going at the right level in the organization? And what if the person with pull is not the buyer themself? So, or doesn't have, sorry, doesn't have the spend authority or the authority to like pull the, to sign the paper to make the purchase.

The person you're selling to needs to have the ability to exert force productively in the organization. By which I mean, if you sell to a, let's say you try to sell to an SDR at Salesforce, right? Guess what's going to happen? That person is going to have no ability to get something purchased internally. That's of any meaningful size. That's not on their personal credit card. And like, even then they probably can't do. And so, um, and so it can't be that level of person. What you'll notice is like, if the person has no idea how to bring you in or who to go to or any of that kind of stuff, and they're not new in their job as a new VP or a new kind of like C-level person, they're too junior. And so I've seen this in a lot of, like, you talk to a supply chain, I don't know why I'm on supply chain, supply chain analyst or a supply chain manager, or in some cases, like a director of something. And they're just like, they, one, they may just have nothing they need to do in a lot of these roles. Let's think, I'm going to get myself in trouble here. Let's think HR, right? Like your typical HR manager is generally in equilibrium. They don't have any things that they're like urgently trying to do right now. And versus somebody in sales or, or whatever, who has a number they have to hit and something's blocking them from hitting their number. And so they're going to move heaven and earth. To hit that number. And that's a forcing function that's like constantly there. So anyway, the, the per— like, they're often too juniors. They don't have any real forcing function. They're not actually trying to do anything. They're just kind of like happy in their job day to day. That's fine. There's nothing they really need to change. Pain points, problems they can complain about, but not really do anything about. And then you want to go as high as possible that you can get in touch with because the higher you go, in an organization, like, yeah, you might need to, you might not be able to talk about the specific supply chain workflow, but that per— you're gonna have to talk at a different level of abstraction because their project is going to be a little bit different. But that's going to be a person who, one, is going to want things to change. It's going to be pushing for change internally. And two, can make stuff happen internally. I often see people focus way too low in the organization to people who it would be weird if they wanted to change, if they could make change happen.

Yeah. And it feels like early on, especially with outbound, you're trying to find that spot. It's like, where does the person have pull, responds to me, but then also has the ability to make the change in the organization or be an effective— is champion the right word for this? Champion. Like, how do you think? Yeah.

Yeah. So, think of, you hear the term champion, you hear decision maker, you hear all these different words. We care about the person who's going to exert force internally to make the deal happen. That person is called a champion.

Yeah. Yeah. Let's, let's hit the process, um, real quick. Uh, I'm gonna outline it here, Rob. I'll just read through this and then let's hit the key parts that you wanna dive into. Um, call 1 is a 1-on-1 call, ideally with the person that you believe has pull. And you're exploring, do they have pull? Does our product fit? What else do they need to know to decide whether they want to bring this into their organization— excuse me— into their organization right now? And then call 2 is a one-on-one call with the same person from call 1, which is answer the third question, which is what else did they need to know? Wherever you left— sorry, I got a frog in my throat— wherever you left off in the last one as open questions, answer those. And then confirm they want to bring this into their organization. And then you write, plan out how they will bring this into the organization using their timeline for getting their priority done as a forcing function to drive urgent action. And then you execute the plan. I want to, I want to dive into that, that third point of using their timeline. But before we do that, anything, anything else you would add on top of like this call one, call two, and execute the plan?

Common thing that you will see is that, um, in enterprise, for some reason, everyone's like, we should do a group demo or something like that. Right? Like, and it's like, cool. That comes later. You can get that on the calendar. But if you do a group demo with like 17 people in the call as your first call, and you're trying to do discovery in that context, like it's just, That is, that is so hard and it's so unnecessary to do. Your job is to figure out who is the person internally who actually has pull, and you're never going to figure that out in a massive group setting. Like, that is a very much, like, if that happens, you get that on the calendar, and then the person who scheduled the group demo, you want to schedule, schedule a call one with them before the group demo, like days before, so that you can prep for the group demo.

Yeah. Interesting. And let's get into, I think that's related to using their timeline. Actually, that's related to execute the plan. Are there key, before we get into the timeline, what does a plan look like? How do you, let's say that you're starting to sell enterprise and you need to develop a plan. Like, how do you come up with that? Do they know the plan? Do you know the plan? Like, what do you, what are you doing there?

Yeah. So the first thing to say is that these 3 steps, are the same steps for any deal. Literally any deal, enterprise or not. If you look at the— I designed them so that they are identical. You may be able to compress all of these into one call, but these are the, the actual steps that need to happen, which are thing one is person has pulled, believes your product fits, and has all of their questions answered such that they've decided they want to bring it into the organization. That's step 1, largely. Step 2 is, cool, how do we make that happen to bring it into the organization? So, and so that second part, which is the kind of project plan, the, sometimes it's called a mutual action plan. Think of it as literally like a Asana project with all of the steps that need to happen. Now, early on, you won't know what all of those steps are for your first customer, your first to customers and you can just say, hey, let's figure this out together. How can we bring this into your organization? How have you brought other software into your organization before, other products into your organization before? And you come up with a list of things that are needed to, that you need to do. Eventually you say, okay, cool. Here's what it's typically been for our other customers. And you come with a template of like, they've typically needed XYZ. Now, this part here, the project plan to purchase, is where deals go from taking 1 month or 2 months or 3 months to taking 12 to 18 months, depending on what you put in here. And so, um, you don't want to proactively put, say, I, I get a lot of questions. We got a question in the Slack about like, uh, hey, uh, it's 3 months for the B2B standard. Like, that seems really, really fast, especially in Europe or whatever. It's like, Yeah, it's often this part here, which is we will put things into the project plan that don't need to be there, and then we will shape them so they take forever. The most common example, which we talked about before, is the pilot or the POC, right? Where it's like, okay, let's do a, what if we do a pilot first? And they're like, cool, let's assess some random irrelevant stuff. And you're like, great, let's, how about 6, how about 3 months for that? And they're like, I think 6 months. Great. Okay, cool. So we just extended the path to a contract by 6 months, right? And so that's the kind of way that, that, that, that's where the, the project plan can extend. And that's why some of these deals take so long.

Yeah. Yeah. With, with mine, you know, 2 of my sales, one was into a big university, another was into a national nonprofit. And the big university, I did that. I made that mistake, which was usually the way we start this is we produce with you and, and that's like got a 4-month lead time, which if there was any off-ramp, if her pool, the buyer's pool, would not have been like massive and strong and we wouldn't have been like by far the best option. There was every chance for, you know, it to, it to fail something, something to go wrong. Um, with the national nonprofit, it was actually like, we, we were also producing with PBS. And so in that case it was like, well, we start producing in a month if you want to get involved, like welcome. And the champion was just like, all right, I got this. And then did everything behind the scenes. To make it happen. And like we started producing together, we'll sign the contract later. She's like, I'll bring legal along for, you know, for at the point that they need to be in there. So it's, you know, there's, there's, but just like seeing those two examples for me of how one happened and I think it was like 3 and a half weeks and the other one took 9 months literally. Like it's just like there's, there's way more flexibility in there than I otherwise would've been conscious of. Why don't we, why don't we hit this second part? Using their timeline for getting their priority done as a forcing function to drive urgent action. What are you talking about specifically there, Rob?

Yeah, this is, this is a kind of hard concept. So what I'll just say is like a lot of the questions I get, especially around enterprise sales, are like, okay, it takes forever. How do we drive urgency? And that's generally the wrong way to think about it. In your case, you were able to drive urgency because it was like, The train is literally leaving the station on this in a month. And so you're either onboard or offboard.

Cool.

That's a forcing function that you imposed, which is fine. That's great. Like, but most, like, for, for me selling software, it's like, you can either buy it in June or you can buy it in July or you can buy it next year. Right? Like it's not, there's not an actual literal forcing function. And so the forcing function, and you can, people are always like, well, but if you, you can include a discount or you can include all this kind of stuff. And yet those things sometimes can work, but they often are irrelevant to the potential customer unless the discount is super interesting to them. If they're like, right, unless that is something they actively need, um, then it's not really going to drive the action. I'll be like, okay, cool. I bet if I wait another month, you'll still give me the discount because you still need my business. And so the better way to think about driving urgency is by focusing on, again, it's back to their pull, this person's pull. When do they need to get this project done by? When do they need to start showing results on this? Okay, great. That is a like hard deadline that we want to put in, in the sand and say, okay, so you want to, so you need to be showing results on this by Q3. Great. Given that, let's work backwards from Q3 to now and say, and scope the purchasing process to only do what is absolutely necessary so that we can hit that deadline because we have to work backwards from Q3 to, well, if we need to be live in Q— showing results in Q3, we probably need to start getting implemented within September, right? We probably need to start doing that in September. Looking back, wow, it's late. It's almost August now. So really we have less than a month to get through all this other stuff. So what needs to happen there? And that way we are using their timeline of their, the time they need to show results on their project or get their project done to work backwards to be the thing that drives urgency.

Yeah, that's actually how the university deal in my case worked out. It was like we needed, they needed the materials to roll out before the following school year. And it kind of like the deal sort of like just petered along until it was like, look, if we don't start now, we're not going to hit that. And then like, boom, it was like, all right, here we go. And it, you know, it was like, all right, let's get started. Why don't we hit some of the common things that you write about where people are fighting against these physics in enterprise? You write trying to sell to groups of people. You've touched a little bit on that. Doing group demos too early, touched on that too, making your champion look bad because you try to take the ball and run with it, which is a little— you're referring to the tush push, which we haven't— I don't know why we haven't said that in the episode yet today. And then the final one is adding unnecessary steps that we've talked about. Anything you would add maybe on that, maybe on that third one, making your champion look bad? What do you see people do wrong in the process? Why? And why do they do that? No, they're not trying to do that, I imagine. Like, why does that happen? Yeah.

So this is a super common thing. So we can talk about the push push here because once you find the person who has pull, that the, it turns and they say, yeah, I'm going to bring this into our organization. I think this fits, right? Sales, as you think about sales is done and it is just project management at that point. Again, we're building the project plan. We're helping them execute it. But the way to think about this in your mind is again, in football there is a play called the tush push where the quarterback gets the ball to try to get a touchdown or get a first down. Quarterback gets the ball and is pushed from behind by the halfback or the running back or somebody. And so the way to think about this is that if you don't have the ball, you are pushing the champion across the line. You are not the one with the ball. Which means that the steps after they say, I have pull, want to bring this into my organization, are you helping them sell internally. It's them selling it internally. It's them doing, doing the work internally and you pushing them from behind. Versus what often happens is we don't accept the fact that they are like, yeah, I want to bring this into my— into the org. We think we need to keep selling to each new group of people because they have to get approval from this committee. They have to go to this other place, right? And when you approach it as, okay, cool, now my job is to sell here, you almost always make your champion look bad and they just go and curl up in a ball and die somewhere. And it's terrible for them. When instead the entire rest of the sales process needs to be looked at as push, push. You are helping that person make the case internally. You're helping them convince their peers, and that's gonna change how you approach group demos and everything else.

Yeah, I, I think that's a, that's a great one to leave as our like last big, uh, point. Rob Snyder, anything you'd recommend that a founder, a founder do, um, having listened to this, or if they're, you know, prepping for an enterprise, uh, sales call or anything?

I think they've already had like 4 existential crises throughout this thing. So we'll leave them there.

Awesome. All right. We'll catch— if you want a quick reminder, as always, if you haven't bought the book, highly recommend The Power of Pull and leave a review if you've read the book and you liked it. And if you want to work with Rob Snyder, as he mentioned at the start, there's quite a bit of lead time. So like, go ahead and reach out to try to make sure that we've got space. Place to work you in. Um, and otherwise, we'll just leave it there. We'll see everybody next week.