Selling to the Enterprise with Microsoft for Startups Managing Director Lauren Perkins

Attendees and then we'll go into an introduction.

Okay. Paulina, do you want to be the one to field questions just so that I don't have to worry about whether it's going to work or not?

Yeah, I can do that.

Amelia, you're here. If you want to be the one to like, rally the troops, I mean.

Yeah, yeah, I'm more than happy to. I rather the troops on an earlier session.

All right, I'm going to go ahead and start admitting attendees.

Okay.

We are live.

Hello.

All right, welcome wherever you may be. Good afternoon. Good evening to Zasta Annual. This is a roundtable session with Lauren Perkins, serial entrepreneur and startup CMO managing director for Microsoft for startups. I will like to go into some housekeeping items and then hand it over to Lauren to kick us off for the day.

All right, There we go.

All right, there we go. Thank you, Lauren. Again, this is an interactive session. 30 minutes. It flies by really quickly, so it'll be action packed with a lot of content. You join the session and your video popped up. That is for a reason. We'd love for you to engage, ask questions, share some ideas as well. You have two ways of doing so. You can either raise your hand as a zoom icon below at the bottom of your screen, or you can drop those into chat below that. We will field those questions and ideas as well. Again, these slides will be available and the session is recorded after the fact. I know this is a packed session. Would love to hand it back over to Lauren to kick us off.

All right, fabulous. Thank you for the introduction, Tammy. So we're talking about selling into the enterprise. I've had sort of opportunity of being an entrepreneur and now at Microsoft for startups as a managing director. So I've gotten to go from the founder role into the corporate seed and helping founders that were in my shoes not that long ago, selling into and through the enterprise, getting the opportunity to sort of take advantage of all of the resources that are available and also just like understanding how to navigate the very complex world that is the enterprise. So I've just prepared a couple little thought starters for us and then I really do want to make this a really interactive dialogue. And I'm really excited all of you are here. So my first sort of thought, and this is, you know, I'm just finishing like my first year at Microsoft. I was a founder, so did a go to market with enterprise for my last startup and so now sort of being in the shoes of helping other founders do the same thing. One of the most interesting things is I see founders trying to pitch, you know, Microsoft, Microsoft clients and other people in our ecosystem is like the first thing of like just owning the win, like what is it going to take in order to sell through the enterprise and taking accountability for understanding all of the players and what they need and what it's going to take to get it over the line. So the biggest thing that I've seen, and I'm sort of giving as advice as I'm working with our portfolio of startups, is when you come prepared with where and how you can make the business case for whatever decision makers that, that you're working with. It's really about creating and delivering value for that individual customer. And if you're selling into someplace like Microsoft, you might have 12 different decision makers that have 12 different use cases and 12 different business cases with different kinds of metrics and whatnot. And that can be a very dizzying place to start, but really important to kind of get an understanding and lay of that land. I see that we already have comments. Oh, it's, we've got a little bit of Amelia sort of shepherding here. Okay, so let me get out of that. So three conversation starters and if you guys have any other questions that you want to discuss, I'm happy to sort of field questions. So get ready to ask what, what you really want to know about selling into and through the enterprise. Maybe what you're working through right now. But one of the first things I see is how is it that you find that right decision maker that can really help you get over the line? And if it's not the decision maker, how can you help cultivate a relationship with champions within the company in order to help you find the right people and make those connections. So I'm curious what people's questions are around like, you know, breaking into those decision makers. Second thought starter I wanted to kind of bring up and see what people's questions were was how do you actually bridge the culture, the community, communication and the work style gap? Because one of the biggest things that's been a shock for me over the course of the last year is just how different it is. I've done a ton of corporate innovation. I've had corporate clients before, but once you get inside and you see all the decision making and how different the culture and the pace is, the way that they communicate and the different work styles, trying to help a lot of the founders in our portfolio navigate that and some of what I call like English to English translation, which is when an enterprise says something, what do they mean when a startup saying something, what do they mean to the enterprise and how do we sort of bridge those conversations? And the third thing being how do you make a compelling case to make it super, super easy for enterprise decision makers to say yes? So these are three sort of thought starters for our conversation today. If you guys have others would love to hear them. Otherwise, let's upvote the questions and where you want to start and let's dig into.

All right, feel free to chat to Lauren here. Which of the three you want to start with. I know Lauren, we just had a virtual event not too long ago here at Sastra that was all about enterprise. So that we're doing one more session here to help carry it over. I think one of the top themes we had definitely goes to your point too here on how you bridge culture, comms and the work style gap, especially in 2020, you know, lots of people are remote. I think the number one question our founders had was, you know, when they're breaking into enterprise, the number one question they get is what other enterprise companies are you already serving? Right. As a customer? So what's your sort of recommendation advice if they don't have an enterprise customer necessarily, but they're trying to go up market?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean that's one of the, that's what getting your very first enterprise customer is probably like the hardest one to win and it's, you know, the second and the third are almost as hard. You know, I think there's two different answers to that question and I think the that one of them that I've seen for a number of especially SaaS founders, which I think is extremely relevant for this community, is that sometimes finding a medium sized company that you know is a little bit more nimble, that's a great kind of target customer that is still sort of aspirational and that the bigger players know. So. So I've seen plenty of emerging startups where they have a lot of the big sort of golden child startups as their customers. That certainly works as a. They know how to work with slightly larger companies or even mid size scaling to large and it's still relatable to that corporate. So you've got sort of the referenceable customer and I would 1000% agree with that. One of the biggest hurdles in enterprises is most enterprise don't want to be the first. They want somebody else to be the one that goes first. They want somebody else to be the one that does that validation. Which almost comes back to the first thing that I Brought up in terms of how do you find the right decision maker, how do you find the right champion? Sometimes that's through accelerator programs that have corporates and a number of other players that are there to sort of be champions. And that's kind of part of the structure. Some of that is just trying to figure out what who are executives that have like minded ambitions. So recently I had a founder who had been within the Microsoft ecosystem for several years and hadn't really found that champion. And they were working on something that was for competitive athletes. And he found a healthcare CTO as a health tech SaaS startup and he found a healthcare CTO within the organization whose kids were all competitive skiers. Right. Super relevant for concussion. She was personally really interested and she's been able to sort of be a champion for them. So even though she's not the customer giving them money, they found somebody who essentially from doing their due diligence, having conversations, doing that research in advance, okay, how do I find the relatable in or someplace where they're really interested and excited and because it's happened to be a cto, somebody who still understood enough of, of what we were trying to do so they could make introductions to Microsoft customers, Microsoft executives, et cetera. And it's been extremely sort of successful because essentially now this startup has me as a champion, has a healthcare CTO as a champion and we're making introductions across the organization as well as within our customer base. So that's just like an example. And a lot of times I think we forget that decision makers are still people and like they still are very human and make human decisions. So figuring out what they're interested in, whether that's from their Instagram, if they are on Instagram, whether they're on Twitter or LinkedIn or whatever and just seeing what are some of the things that they're interested in. A lot of those early sort of conversations, those icebreakers, are because you went to the same school, you play the same sport, you know, some of the same, same people, you've got a secondary connection with somebody you know, there's, there's, there's got to be some connective tissue. And I think that especially when you're talking about the enterprise, oftentimes these executives are, have zero accountability to help startups. It's not part of their mandate. And I'll be honest, even if you're in a shoe like shoes like mine, where like startups is actually like in my job description, if I don't think a startup fits the profile or if I don't see an immediate connection, and I've got hundreds of other startups that are asking for help, it makes it really hard for me, even as somebody who's startup oriented, who's been in the founder shoes, to help that person if they can't come to the table with whether it's their value proposition, whether it's clarity, whether it's what is the most valuable business case, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that that sort of, from a culture standpoint, one of the biggest things that creates dissonance is, and I see this all the time, and I think as founders, we call it like the shiny object syndrome, right? Where it's like, there's always something to chase and there's always something exc. Interesting to go after. But when you're talking to an enterprise, unless you happen to get one of the like, you know, 0.001% of executives that has innovation in their background or, you know, used to be a founder, and you have like some overlap, it's too much for them. They don't want to know about all of your possibilities and your 15 patents, except for the fact that like you've got, you know, that credibility to bring to the table. They want you to make it really easy for them to either make a five minute favor, which is like an introduction or something, or to actually know exactly what it is that they can do to help you. Whether it's a connection to a resource, whether they're the actual decision maker with the problem. And then it's about figuring out, okay, how do you see the problem? Do we have a value proposition that brings enough value and creates enough value? And I think that that's one of those biggest sort of, you know, it kind of ties between all three of these thought starters, which is like, how do you make it so easy for an executive to say yes or to make an introduction to somebody which essentially is a foot in the door, it's still yes. So there's a couple, couple of things that I kind of see over and over and over again. And it's, it's that pattern recognition, but it's also, as a founder, I have PTSD sometimes when I see how founders are trying to navigate and how frustrated they can get trying to navigate the enterprise, because I used to be on the other side of the fence and it's been a really unique perspective. Now being here and being like, they don't care about all of my ideas. They want one really easy, concise idea that I can Deliver now.

Yep, exactly. Like adding value. Yeah. We were just on a session earlier with David Sacks and he was talking about, you know, his experience being a founder. And he said a lot of what you were saying, echoing it as well. Right. Of like when he wants founders to call pitch him. He like, it's like, keep it simple. Tell me your ARR. Tell me how you can help me. And like, keep it simple. I don't want the 10 things you can do. I want the one thing that you can do to help me today.

Yep, absolutely. I think that's. I think as founders, once you get the conversation with like a big enterprise and you see like all of the possibilities or that like you want to work with them longer term, the startup constraints and focus is sometimes is really sort of challenging. So I'm curious to hear some questions from folks that are, that are on the line in terms of things, either specific questions or, you know, how to break in, how to, you know, questions that you guys are looking to get clarity on.

Yeah, it looks like, Sanjay, you have your hand raised if you want to ask your question for Lauren. Yeah.

Hi, Lauren. Let me ask a question about a question first. Is that, is it okay to ask questions specifically about the Microsoft for Startup program or do you want to keep it more at general level?

Well, I'm here to provide value for you, so I'm not here to pitch you, but if you want specific information, I can certainly clarify.

Okay, great. So we actually were approved for the Microsoft for Startups program.

Okay, great.

And so I guess what I'm trying to get clarity on is that to what extent can Microsoft's program be useful for targeting SMBs versus Enterprise. That's one question. The other question is that so far the indication we have received from your program has been a bit vague in the sense that the indication we got is that we should start using Azure because we get free credits for Azure as well. If you see that we're beginning to use Azure more and more, then you would be more willing to help us penetrate, help us use your sales machine to basically reach your customers. So maybe just give some clarity on both of those points.

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm going to answer the second one first because it kind of bridges to the second one anyway. And I don't want to leave your pressing question unanswered. So the easy question is that most of our enterprise clients that we can introduce startups to, one of the reasons that the program that we've built over the last two years and we generated a billion dollar in startup pipeline opportunity, much of which is converted. The rest that's sort of in BD flight is because the enterprise wants that, security wants that plugin. With Azure we do require that you at least have a multi cloud solution. You don't have to move your entire solution to Azure, but in order to prepare yourself for Marketplace, which is like a B2B SaaS marketplace, where our larger customers as well as the larger market abroad and can get access, exposure and directly buy your service depending on how you set up your offers or at least put in a request to have a conversation. So it's essentially like a lead gen machine. You do have to be on Azure because all of it is from a technical standpoint built to sort of platform. That way, again, you don't have to move your whole product, but you at least need to move to multi cloud, which I think is different than some of our competitors. It's like it's one, you're either on board or you're not. Microsoft is trying to be very sort of friendly in the ecosystem and we do the same with our enterprise clients. So that's sort of the first step. The second thing is is that marketplace getting a listing and what we call like a transactable offer, which is basically what it means is, is that you can do a deal on Microsoft paper using our marketplace and that can be any sort of offer that you want. So if you've got like a SaaS solution that has like three offerings, you can put all three different offerings or you can have one offering with, you know, different pricing structures. There's sort of a lot of flexibility in how you put it forward. So if you've got specific products for different sort of categories, let's say that you have one in Fintech and one in Health, like you could put two different offers up for different markets. Those are all possibilities. Marketplace essentially gives you a platform to reach all these customers. And a lot of our startups actually get leads that they never would have gotten because of that exposure. So that's sort of like one of the many sort of channels of exposure. It does also give some exposure to SMBs. The next kind of component is that like the highest sort of tier programs in the Microsoft for startups ecosystem is what we call co sell and there's a couple different flavors of it, but essentially means that we incentivize our salesforce at Microsoft to sell startup solutions the same way that they sell our enterprise solutions. Now a lot of startups want in on this co sell motion to sell with and through our channels in order to reach the much larger enterprise clients because it's much harder to do that. And depending on your size and stage, from a startup standpoint, being able to do a deal on Microsoft paper saves you all the taxes, all the procurement, which can just be a lot of headaches that it saves you. And for some deals, if you're trying to work With a Fortune 100, you may not actually qualify based on your age, your size, your revenue. So it also can often not only get you approved through the procurement process, but can also shorten your cycle as well as help deal with some of the headaches that kind of come with working with enterprise. And I'm very upfront that working with enterprise is not always the easiest thing, but it does sort of give you more Runway, gives you more stability. And if one of the things that, like the reason I joined was if I can help founders raise their valuations and delay their fundraising by actually winning customers instead of as part of their sort of funding and capital mix, not just relying on venture capital like that would be really successful. So we do have SMB teams, but I would definitely recommend that you explore, you know, looking at Marketplace as a place to list your solution as well as getting into co sell, you can certainly go after SMB. There's great SMB contacts within Microsoft. We have 75 million customers around the world. Which is one of the reasons why when we decided to reinvent the startup program and build Microsoft for startups, it's like, what is the thing that we're super uniquely qualified for that nobody else can do? We really thought about it the same way that I like to advise startups when I'm looking at their growth strategy, which is what are you really uniquely qualified to do and why would XYZ Enterprise or XYZ Customer, you know, only want to work with you and how do you hook them and how do you keep them? So it's a little bit of a longer answer. It gives it a little context. Sanjay, does that answer your question or do you have a follow up for that? Because I think there's a number of startups that are enterprise startups and this is a great sort of potential like door opening for them to get access into the enterprise.

Yeah, that was very useful. Thank you.

You're very welcome.

Our next question, Lauren's from Phil. Phil, I've unmuted you if you want to ask your question around creating champions.

Yay. I love, I love the whole idea of champions and I'm a big community builder. So for Me, it's like, I think rule number one at Microsoft is, is that nobody even Satya does anything by himself. I thought I could get things done by myself. It is not a true statement at a big company.

Yeah, I guess.

Oh, there we go. Phil.

Sorry, I was, I was waiting. I have kids screaming and cleanup songs.

In the background, so I apologize for that.

Anyways, my question is, what kinds of things do you see as successful approaches to support the champion when you don't have access to the key decision maker? So I guess in my experience I've just found that, like, it's sometimes easy to talk to an IT team or a marketing person or whatever, but then things just tend to fall flat because you can't get in the right space and you sort of don't know necessarily what it is that that person you're talking to needs to be successful themselves, either because they don't know or they don't know how to ask for it. Curious what your thoughts are there?

Yeah, absolutely. So this has actually been. This has sort of been really a unique experience for me in the last year in my journey at Microsoft and like helping other founders, like, navigate all of it. I think that there's a couple different things when it comes to supporting champions, and it's a fantastic question because they are one of your best ways in and trying to figure out what it is that they know versus don't know. So one of the first questions as a founder that I would recommend asking is have they actually been successful in helping a startup be successful at whatever it is that you're trying to do? So let's say that you're talking about the healthcare CTO who ended up being a wonderful champion for this health tech startup. She had never gotten a startup through the whole process before, so she ended up relying on me to fill some of those gaps. So in an instance where she can't come, then find a person in the startup division to say, I've got this high potential startup. I think that they'd be really successful here. But I don't know what to do would be for you to ask, does she know people that are doing innovation, that are doing digital transformation, that are doing startup work within the organization? That's one easy question to ask. If they have done it before and they don't know anybody who has been successful in helping a startup into the enterprise before, then what I would sort of want to try and understand from this champion is one you always want to have to know what's in it for them because Sometimes they just want to be able to say that they're doing something really cool, right? And that's like one of the, that's like one of the top reasons why, you know, somebody in enterprise will like help a startup. They're like, it's a fun thing for them to talk about that they're like helping this startup across the organization. It could be that they want to write about it, they want to, they have a thought leadership requirement as part of their job where they need to show that they're doing, you know, innovative stuff. It could be that they actually see an opportunity to use you as a way to get into higher up decision makers and then they get to sort of take some credit for, you know, finding you. I mean you probably found them, but anyway. But like sometimes you have to let them take credit for finding you and being the ones to like shepherd you through. So if that's something you're open to and kind of putting that ego aside to be like, you know what, where can I give credit to the people that can help me and how can I help them? I think those are a couple of the places to start. Beyond that, because this is a great question, Phil, thank you for asking it. I would want to try and figure out what they are held accountable for. So one of my previous startups was doing just CMO as a service, helping startup founders navigate a lot of this because I had just, I never meant for it to really be a long term business but I ended up doing it quite a bit. And so one of the big things that I learned from sort of like doing that for 12 years was always starting with how do they get measured? What impact is important to them? Because it may not be that they get measured, but they may have some like passions or other things that are important within the organization or personally. And then really trying to understand what their focuses and goals are because it helps you kind of navigate, you know, what they're working through because there's, there's certainly quite a bit of it. Or do you have a follow up question? Because I think champions are one of the most important things to navigating the enterprise. And I can just tell you whether, you know, right now obviously with COVID Health Next, which is part of our Microsoft Research division, like they've had their hands really full, but they've also been great champions. I love the little kids popping in behind.

Yeah, they're home now, they're home now.

It's the reality of work from home. It's actually really fun. Maybe not as much for you trying to build a company. But maybe just give me some insight. Is that enough on champions or what else do you guys want to know? Because I think the champions are a fantastic tool to helping you navigate to get to a decision maker. We actually just did something recently with hololens where actually having a champion made all the difference in getting that startup's technology requirements into the next release of the HoloLens software. Sometimes it's people that aren't even super high up. In this case, we had three different quasi champions. One that did Azure modeling, one who was technical, and one on the business side. Really building some of those relationships takes a lot of energy, but it makes a huge difference when you get the FaceTime and the founder and his leadership team got that FaceTime with like the Hollow, the HoloLens leadership team to be able to say here's what we need from a technical standpoint, here's the business opportunity. And honestly a lot of us coach them on what that business opportunity was and how to navigate it and some of what we know about the insight. But then asking those questions like what is it going to take to make this happen? How do you make your business case to your bosses and your peers to validate that this is a good use of time, money, energy, resources, et cetera, et cetera. Because sometimes you're not asking for money, right? Sometimes you're asking for technical support, sometimes you are asking for them to come on board as a customer.

Lauren, you've got about five minutes left.

And I want to make sure we.

Get to this question from Jolynn on channel distribution.

Yeah, absolutely. Hi Lauren. This is great.

My question is around how to best approach channel distribution partnerships.

We're a background wise, we're like a salesforce for worker risk management and so we're a plugin for existing HR systems. So that's something that's crucial to kind.

Of expedite growth instead of the one off demos. So I love some advice on that.

Oh, it's such a meaty topic, especially with five minutes left. Let me see if I can do the 60 second channel partner strategy. And there are people at Microsoft who are like 10 times better at channel partner strategy than I am, which my first recommendation would be to go look up who those people are that that is like actually like their job because they're the ones that have a lot of the intel. And this is where those champions come into play. They may not actually end up being your decision maker, but asking people for advice on how they would do something or, you know, what the need is, what the problems are, you start to get a lot of insight. So by the time you get to a decision maker, you sort of have used, you know, learning and trying to be helpful as a way of like getting through the process. But I mean, in many ways, I think when you're talking about looking at it from a channel partner standpoint, are you talking about trying to put like an offering that you have in some place like Marketplace, and then letting the Marketplace kind of do the work for you? Because in many, many cases, like our actual, like Marketplace at Microsoft is an example of you put an offer up and it actually is giving you access to multiple channels of sales, multiple customers that are already coming.

That's a good approach as well.

I would think the other would be to actually be almost like if There.

Was a WordPress plugin and we would be that plugin.

Mm. Okay.

So I think that you also have a really interesting sort of opportunity with technical enablement, if I think about it. So, like, regardless of who the enterprise is, and I just gave the Marketplace as an example, it's trying to figure out who are the actual technical people that you could go to or who are the business people responsible for that marketplace like environment. Again, doesn't have to be Microsoft's Marketplace, but, you know, you're looking for essentially the decision makers so that you can get yourself plugged into that marketplace with an offer that people ideally can buy. And to be honest, the partnership is a huge way that we do business. I always thought that from a startup standpoint, I was really good at partnerships. And Microsoft just takes that to a whole new level because I'm a huge believer that you can't build everything yourself. And so if you can find shortcuts and ways to get further along, I think you absolutely should. Now there's another sort of easy ish answer to what you're doing, which is finding some of those HR people that if you're building this, I'm sure somebody on your team or you already know and figuring out where do they actually. What technologies are they using and what. Just as an information gathering, not first as a sales process, but more of a discovery process to figure out where are they buying, how are they buying, who makes the decisions, you know, how are they solving these problems currently? And is anyone looking at changing that current buying process and just mapping that customer journey and the technical journey, which may not always be the same, and then using that to then build your sort of strategy and roadmap and different companies have this set up very differently when they have channels for, you know, partner sales. But that would be how I would start the process without knowing, you know, all of the details of what you're working on.

Thank you. Awesome. Well, I'm glad we got your one last question, Joe. Unfortunately, we're out of time. But as always, Lauren, thanks for joining us at Saastr. How can folks get in touch with you if they have any follow ups?

Yeah, absolutely. People can tweet at me. I'm Auren perkins. Or on LinkedIn. I'm Lauren Perkins, CMO and happy to field more questions. Thank you very much. Thank you. Bye, guys.