SaaStr Annual: How to Sign Your First 10 F500 logos and Big Name Customers with Sequoia India

Just pull the chairs. This feels so good. Can you guys hear us at the back? Great. I'd almost forgotten this ritual of micing up, but so good to be back in person. This is my first in person conference after three years, so I'm super glad and thrilled to be here. Welcome to our session, how to sign your first 10 Fortune 500 or large customers. By the way, we had a second speaker as well, Yamini, who's one of our founders in our portfolio company. She couldn't make it because her passport is stuck at some French embassy or something. So apologies for that, but you guys are in good hands with Kadim and we'll try and make it up for you. My name is Jasvi Sharma. I'm pretty sure none of you will remember my name after this session, so I go by TJ as well. And I'm a general partner at Sequoia in India and I spend all my time investing and working with SaaS companies. SaaS companies out of our region in India. I work with what Fix. Of course, other companies that you may have heard of include Chargebee, SaaS Labs, Atlan Data, Hypodata and so on. Khadim, why don't you introduce yourself and then we'll jump right in.

Pleasure to be here. Thanks TJ. So I'm Khadim, co founder and CEO at WhatFix. So we are two co founders, myself and Kumar. We both are from engineering background. I think I wanted to set the context in terms of. Because we are talking about sales. Right. What Fix is a digital adoption platform. Basically it helps improve the adoption or engagement of any software you can visualize like a GPS on top of any application. So we provide contextual guidance, step by step guidance so that anybody can complete any task, any activity without needing any external support. Right. That's about what fix. So we are 600 customers globally. 65 of them are Fortune 500, majority of them being in the States, some of them in Europe.

Right.

So that's a primary market. We have 150 of global thousand as our customers. Right. We are agnostic. We are having customers across different sectors, be it insurance, banking, oil and gas, universities, airports, government across. We have raised 140 million so far. Apart from Sequoia, we have SoftBank, Eight Roads, Fidelity Investment, Cisco Investment and several other investors as well. I think that should be a good context to.

Yeah, no, let's jump right in. So maybe why are we even talking about this? Why is this topic relevant? That may be a question in your minds and especially in the World of plg, product led growth, where you would build a product and it finds traction on its own. Why do we even care about Fortune 500 or large customers, so to speak? And the reason is that they got the moolah, they got the big bucks, they signed the big check. Historically, Fortune 500 or Global 2000, they have been pretty big buyers of software. There are 35, by the way, there are 35 SaaS, companies that are publicly listed and have a billion dollars of revenue. All but four sell to enterprises. So that's how selling to enterprises, that's how important it is to sell to enterprises. And even companies that started with plg, they cannot avoid the eventuality of selling to large customers. So that is a muscle that you have to inevitably build if you want to build a very large business. And that's why we're talking about this topic. So Kathy, let me begin by asking a very simple question. What is an enterprise? Because I've seen people define enterprise on the vector of ACV and on the vector of the size of employees or the size of revenues for that prospective customer. How do you guys define an enterprise customer?

So what fix, basically, as I was mentioning, helps on adoption of any underlying software, right? The more the number of users on a software, the better fitment for us. So we started defining customer, different customer segment based on employee customer or the user count. So for our case, anything more than 5,000 employees we started defining as an enterprise and more than 20,000 is strategic accounts.

So more than 5,000 employees is what, what you define as enterprises. Let me ask you an honest question. Why did you even, you know, try and sell to enterprises in the first place? You're a small company. Selling to other small company would have been, you know, the path of least resistance. That is probably an easier thing to do. But why the heck would you try and sell to a very large Fortune 500 customer?

You mentioned this. They have money, right? Anyway, so we are a new category actually. So it's an undefined, like there's no line, budgeted line item in most of the companies. For us the category was evolving. We also like many of the companies, started going behind small businesses. But very quickly we realized like what fix was kind of nice to have for small businesses five to six years back. So the only option for us to actually go upmarket get to larger companies where we would have a very strong fitment. So that was one of the key reason to start very early, maybe four or five months of our inception to start going behind enterprise market. So it was like if we don't crack enterprise, we are dead.

That's not a good place to be. So it was about finding that compelling broad market fit in the enterprise category versus the SME or mid market category.

That's right.

That makes a lot of sense. And how do you go about finding your first set of customers? Like you can go to ZoomInfo or Slintel or Six Sense and you can try and scan the world and they're populated list that have G2K customer list. How do you find those first five, 10 people or companies that you go after?

So we'll talk about enterprise only. So if it's a small, I can do a lot of outbound in other ways. But for enterprise instead of scanning the list, what approach we took was getting a warm introduction. So just to give you a couple of examples, the first account which we went behind was largest e commerce company in India because that's the region we started from. We got very warm introduction with the product management team. We studied the problem statement they were struggling with onboarding the affiliate partners. We went and pitched them how we can solve that problem and we got that particular deal. Similarly, for a month or so we went behind one of the largest private bank and how we got there, one of our angel investor connected us to innovation department of the bank.

Right.

So they were excited. We brainstormed with them and figured out where we could actually add a lot more value. We were connected to commercial corporate banking division of that bank. We did a quick pilot and we were able to get them on board as well. There was one more tech company we got after a few more days. They were like 5,000 people around 5 billion dollar kind of a company. So they were there also. We got an introduction and we cracked them. So the idea here was to get those first two or three customers where we can quickly get an audience, show them the value and get them as a customer. We didn't obsess in terms of what should be the price, but we did obsess in terms of getting that logo approved because that would pave the path in terms of building confidence for the new customers to come in.

Got it. So it's about finding the warm connects. It's not a very structured scientific process of identifying those potential customers. But it's about finding that warm connect and then getting the approval so that.

You can have lower approvals because you want to demonstrate and build that trust subsequently.

Makes sense. And how do you. Let's say I found two people that I know here who got a connect At, I don't know, pick a bank in the U.S. jP Morgan. How do I pitch to them? Like what do you tell them in the pitch? What is that? What are the some of the do's and don'ts? What are they expecting from that first pitch?

Of course, no need to do a feature demonstration. So most important is to understand the problem we are trying to solve. Right. So once we understand the problem and we get the right Persona, who is responsible for getting that resolved? I think we should go and present and demonstrate how we can actually help them. Right. Again, if you go for a larger problem to get solved, it's going to take a lot of time, a lot of buying. So try to reduce. What we tried was reduce the scope so that we can quickly pilot with them, demonstrate the value and get landed very quickly. That's the approach with narrow and to make it. Another aspect which we were looking maybe that I had read online at the point while doing this demonstration or when we are talking to the customers. When is that aha moment? When is that wow moment?

Right.

If you start figuring out one or two wow moments during your presentation, during your pitch, you can start repeating them subsequent customers as well.

Makes sense. But isn't that intimidating like you're sitting with, I don't know, the CIO of General Mills. Isn't that intimidating for you as a scrappy young company that has just scrambled to put together a product like how's that meeting? How does it feel in that sitting in that meeting?

I think I'm more comfortable in one to one more intimidating year actually.

Okay, so you made that pitch and you know, there's this question about when should founders pitch? When should you have, you know, team led pitches and sales? So at what point, and I know the conventional wisdom in the SaaS ecosystem is that the first 5, 10 pitches, the founder themselves should do it. At what point do you make that transition from making the pitch yourself versus having a team that does that for you? Yeah.

So first nine to 10 customers, it was completely founder led sales. Right. Both the founders were actually traveling and meeting as many customers as possible. That helped us to define and refine the pitch. What is resonating As I was mentioning that aha moments. What kind of common objections we get? Once we were confident that okay, now this is ready to scale and we can build a motion out of it, we hired our first ae. Again, after getting the first ae, instead of throwing the person into the field, we asked the AE to shadow us for next two or three deals. Right. So we can Learn on the job. In fact, that was more scary moment for me because it was a professional AE and I was an engineer trying to sell. Right. But once the once couple of days, the AE shadowed me. Then he was leading the deal and I actually was shadowing him.

Oh, right, role reversal. You started shadowing the.

And I used to act more as a technical consultant or a sales engineer there and he was leading the conversations. We did that for a few more deals and then added gradually three or four more sales guys and then we hired our VP of sales. Now we know what kind of sales motion it is. At that point, actually I was started playing a role of sales engineer, my co founder colleague who started playing a role of a success customer, success manager. Right. So you change the role and at some point we got a sales engineer on board. I had to pick up another role. So that's how gradually transition from founder led to sales led.

So you helped evolve and sharpen that playbook of getting that logo before you handed it over to the team so that they could replicate and scale that playbook.

We need to have a repeatable pitch or motion actually before we hand it over to anyone. And founders are in the best position to iterate very quickly. They can be agile, they can actually iterate or refine the pitch during the meeting itself.

Makes sense. Changing gears a little bit. You know, if I were a small company trying to convince a very large company, hundreds of thousands of times bigger than me to buy a product, there's fundamentally a mismatch. There's a fundamental mismatch in resources and capabilities. So how do you really convince that CIO or whoever your buyer was at a big company that you are a match for their scope, their capabilities, their standards in terms of, you know, security, compliance and, you know, yada yada, how do you do that?

See, the first thing we need to understand, all those Fortune 500 companies are the leaders in the category, right? So they don't want to work with a vendor, they want to work with a partner who can help them maintain that leadership position.

Right.

So you need to sell them the vision, you need to sell them the direction of the product or direction of the solution, which is going to evolve. And we need to make them believe that I'll be helping you in this particular problem statement to be the leader in your space. So building that faith and the trust and showing them direction is, is very, very crucial.

Right.

Second, I think they don't want to like we have once we had also had a comment from one of the CXOs you're a three, four people company. What if you guys get into the bus, under the bus, right? Like there's nobody to support because they want to partner with someone who is, who will support and work with them for long term, right? So you need to also demonstrate like okay, we have a sales capability, we have a technical consulting capability. So you also somehow demonstrate that capabilities as well. So demonstrate that you are a long term partner, you can keep them in the forefront of a technology. Some of this will help you to actually win that confidence. And if you are in a situation where there's a larger competitor, maybe you can also show how nimble you can be, how fast you can turn around.

So it's about establishing your credibility, selling them on your vision and not really that product or the solution and showing a long term path because they're looking for durability of that partnership. Any interesting design choices that you made in terms of how you architected your team and organization or how you went about building the product that made it a little bit easier for you to go and sell to these large customers?

Two points here actually, right? One, like when you are very early, like two people or five people company, and when you're talking working with a large enterprise, one of the common objection you would hear is security and compliance. Do you have ISO, do you have soc, do you have hipaa?

Right.

So what we made, our design choice at that point was okay, we will continue on cloud, but we don't have those compliances. But we created a quick hook that you can create a content using what fix on the cloud, but you can download them and host in your environment and it'll be a kind of a sandbox compliance. So we did that initially for seven to eight customers. Once we have the eight DYN logos and when we started presenting the subsequent ones, the number of questions went down drastically on the security and compliance. And meanwhile, like Once we had 10 customers, we also had built sufficient muscle or some muscle to get some compliance. Like we went for ISO and soc. So that was one of the design or the product choices we had. The second, when you work with a large enterprise, a lot of them want specific requirements to be implemented. So we need to be very careful that you don't want to become a service shop for them. You want to be very focused on a platform or a product, what you want to build, which can cater to multiple companies rather than focusing on becoming a service shop for one. So that was another very cautious choice you need to make there.

But how do you balance that because in that situation, if I imagine you in that situation, there's a guy or girl who's going to write a hundred k, 200k check, maybe 500k check and what if they want you to do something which is not scalable or more servicey in nature? Like where do you draw the line?

Because so it's a choice you have to make as I was mentioning. So we did have one potential customer pushing us to create a branch in our source code and say I'll pay you a million dollars but you need to maintain specific requirements for us. Now we realized that might be good immediate short term, but it might not be good for long term. We denied that. So one of the things which we had a philosophy like unless we find this requirement is not applicable to four or five of our customers which we are talking to, we will not take those.

How big were they? Were you at that time when you.

Declined a billion dollar check, three or four hundred thousand dollars?

Oh wow. That takes a lot of guts and courage to decline a million dollar check. Moving on. You know, pricing, I think pricing is, is something people talk about and I feel like when you think about pricing in the context of large companies, the knee jerk reaction that you have is that hey, why don't we just underprice or under ball the product on pricing and just try and get that win. So what has been your experience with. But at the same time it's a double edged sword because at the same time underpricing a product also undermines the credibility of the product because it's that cheap. So how do you balance these two things?

So there's an assumption here, there's a competition who is giving a different kind of a pricing and you're trying to underprice.

Right.

So when you do start competing in a large enterprise based on the pricing. First of all though, I think it's not a big differentiator for large enterprises. As I mentioned, they're looking for a partner who is long term. Right. And when you start competing on a price, actually you are working on a narrative of a competition.

Yeah.

So we need to take the narrative away. Right. So start working on the value, start working on the solution, what you can provide the long term vision of which we were talking about the roadmap and all. I'll give you one example actually, which is a negative example for us. We were working with one of the largest private bank in the US itself, multiple teams. We demonstrated we really loved the product. We gave the quotation it was for some 25,000 Salesforce users. Now there was the largest deal which we could have at the and we didn't want to lose that deal. We were so desperate to get that. We debated a lot and we gave them $75,000 quotation for 35,000 users. Okay. They cannot repeat. We don't want to have any competition or we don't want to lose that particular thing. We never heard back from that team. They were so positive during initial discussions. And then after a year we had a VP sales joining and when he was going through the CRM he said why did we lose this Dean, I know the VP there. And he called him up and asked like okay, what happened? Why didn't go for what fix? He said I don't want to work with a team which doesn't even know how much a support cost would be. We are spending like $25 million on a Salesforce. I want to work with a team which will not sustain for next six months down the line. Right. So pricing, undercutting pricing with the competition or even based on the value, I think it doesn't work.

Did you get that client eventually?

Yes. A good point actually. Fingers crossed. I think hopefully we should get in next couple of weeks. After six years we're getting back.

And how much, how much did you quote this time around?

From 75k again it's a new land. So I think we should be getting at a quarter million.

Quarter million.

Wow.

So 3x not bad. I take that. So pricing has, is sort of a virtue signaling especially when you are selling to such large clients who care about your longevity and your sustainability as a customer, as a vendor. Let's talk about, you know. So so far you have told us how do you find those early customers? How do you pitch to them, how do you price the product? Let's talk about expansion because the whole idea of landing into these large customers is that you can expand multiple folds from where you land and hopefully they could be million dollar accounts for you over time. So how do you go about the expansion? Like when do you, when do you, how do you decide that this is the right time for you to make a move and propose a 2x or 3x more expansion on the contract value.

So I think the answer would also depend on the stage which you are. When we were in very early, what we did was we wanted to first demonstrate the roi, the value, what we can deliver, post that, try to build a champion and then use the champion for navigating or getting the referral internally. So it used to take us six to eight months to build that relationship, show the value and all fast forward today. As soon as we have sold the solution within 45, 60 days, we start knocking other doors. Because we have enough credibility, we have enough trust already built outside. We have so many case studies so early stage. I would say wait for till you show the roi, build that relationship with the champion, get the referrals. But subsequently I think it can be done much faster.

Faster.

You don't even have to wait for a go live.

So it is about the maturity of that expansion motion. Do you wait for the maturity of the expansion motion or do you wait for the maturity of the product so that you can go to the customer?

I would say maturity of your actually company. Right now we have 100 customers which are already using you for several use cases. You don't have to wait for that customer's department one to realize the value. You can always start knocking the department because many other companies have already realized the value can demonstrate that.

So just for context, what fix has a department wise? Sales. So say they go to sales department first and they go and sell to sales, then they go to marketing, then they go to HR and so on and so forth. Eventually of course the idea is to have an ELA type of contract that spans all departments and the entire organization. And how do you, how do you organize your team around this? Is it the same salesperson who's selling, who's landing and expanding? Because we hear, you know, you hear both the schools of thought which is to have the same person land and expand and the other is to have different teams for land and expand. How do you think about that?

Again I would say it's a very contextual. So we are a new category. As I was mentioning earlier, there's no clear budget defined for this category. So even if I have a fortune company, then nobody's going to write me a couple of million dollar check to write. Start away right. So we have to land small. So when you start a small land, your team which starts building that expertise becomes a lot more transactional. And when you want to start expanding, you need to understand what's the organization map, who are the decision makers, what are the spend they have. So that becomes a lot more relational. So we tried initially with the same salesperson going to success, but what eventually evolved was having a separate LAN team and a separate expansion team. So each expansion farmer, what we call, would own six to eight logos where we have landed. They would build that relationship and then start farming them.

And typically, I don't know if you can share this. But what is the land ACV for you and then what is the expand ACV for you?

So a land ACV for the cohort which I was mentioning, enterprise is typically around $75,000 and expansion can go to few millions as well.

Oh wow. So it's a different ball game like the person who is.

So that's why you need relation building there.

That makes a lot of sense. And then you know, in an organization, especially when you're talking about Cisco, you know, ge, these are massive. These are behemoths. Right. How do you, how do you build relationship? How do you build champions? How do you navigate yourself around us? Sometimes, you know, bureaucracy and red tape.

See, Building Champion 1 is definitely showing them the value, showing them the value be there for them when they are actually looking for help. So we had that customer first culture built so solid that we used to respond any customer in 10 minutes. And that culture carried on from founders. So that helps actually to build the trust later on. Actually you need to do a lot more internal marketing inside the organization. Doing a lot of workshop, including our customer champion with the other departments doing internal newsletters, internal setting up kiosks. There's so many ways actually to actually map those organization. Use your initial referrals and use your champions to actually start navigating and increase your footprints.

And does it work all the time or there are cases where you just not be able to crack the code despite all these efforts?

Yeah, it works in good amount of.

Times, not all that's good enough. And then how do you price these expansions? So you get into an account $75, $75,000 is the first check. You want to take this to a half a million or a million. So how do you price the second product or the second contract? Like is it a discount to the first one or how does it work?

We typically go with the number of users for an application as I was whether they're using a CRM or erp. So that's our initial price pricing model. But once you start expanding in an organization to seven, eight different applications, then they need less variables. I don't want 7 to 10 different licenses priced differently. So one of the variables has to go off. So we just say, okay, you have 2,000 employees in a department. This is a department wide license, you can use an unlimited application. Right. So pricing evolves gradually as you also increase the scope in an organization.

Very interesting. Okay, we have come to the end of the session and we're finishing bang on time. So good job to both of us. Why don't you ask through the key, you know, we discussed backstage that will. Hopefully we'll end the session with three key actionable takeaways that people can walk away with so that you can go back to your businesses and try. Try some of this. I don't know what happened. Okay, so what are the key takeaways, Kadim?

Yeah, so assuming a lot of companies are early stage here, I think as I mentioned, to get that first three or four logos is very key. Get a warm intros, don't try to land big. Get a quick on the pilot, show them the value and land and get that logo. That's very, very, very crucial. And so that you can reuse that later on. Build a champion, right. Like by showing, providing that customer success, customer service. Like we all are in SaaS, right. Most of the time we just focus on software, but we forget the service. Software as a service.

Right.

So it's very crucial in early stage when you have four people, five people, we forget that service part. I think we don't. We should not forget. And the third one, show them the. As soon as you show the value, price on the value rather than competition another way. So these are the three, four things I would say are very, very crucial in early days.

Great. Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for coming to our session. And he'll be hanging around here so you can catch us after the session as well. Thank you.

Catch us in booth 2127. Thank you.

Thank you.